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Tyrannous

adjective
1.
Marked by unjust severity or arbitrary behavior.  Synonyms: oppressive, tyrannical.  "Oppressive laws" , "A tyrannical parent" , "Tyrannous disregard of human rights"






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"Tyrannous" Quotes from Famous Books



... selfe, my seruant, and I feare me you: Vnder your hard construction must I sit, To force that on you in a shamefull cunning Which you knew none of yours. What might you think? Haue you not set mine Honor at the stake, And baited it with all th' vnmuzled thoughts That tyrannous heart can think? To one of your receiuing Enough is shewne, a Cipresse, not a bosome, Hides my heart: so let me ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... people. Cheops was one of them. My father has been telling me that he ground down the people to build this wonderful tomb for himself. But he had his reward, for at his funeral he had to be judged by the public voice, and the public condemned him as a bad and tyrannous king. Therefore he was not allowed to be buried in the great tomb that he had built for himself. I know not where his remains rest, but this huge pyramid stands as an eternal monument of the failure of human ambition—the greatest ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... enough heard the popular sayings about her singing, but had never imagined that that exquisite artiste was living in the place, held a captive in the bonds of this eccentric Krespel like the victim of a tyrannous sorcerer. Naturally enough I heard in my dreams on the following night Antonia's marvellous voice, and as she besought me in the most touching manner in a glorious adagio movement (very ridiculously it seemed to me, as if I had composed it myself) to save her, I soon resolved, like a second Astolpho,[2] ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

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

... Nicholas being chief Leader)," "Gold-legs," and the like obscure terms (for there was still a considerable course of counter-fighting ahead, and especially of counter-nicknaming), I take to have meant in Norse prefigurement seven centuries ago, "bloated Aristocracy," "tyrannous-Bourgeoisie,"—till, in the next century, these ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle

... nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates excess. Human law, in this matter, imitates at a great distance her provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law. Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for our neighbours—lex armata—armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The judge, though in a way an admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or the priest. Above all the doctor—the doctor and the purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure air—from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

... which had elicited it. He did not even dimly surmise that his allusion to the finances of the government could be construed as a justification of the whiskey tax, generally esteemed in the mountains a measure of tyrannous oppression; that from his supposititious advocacy of it he had laid himself liable to the suspicion of being himself of the revenue force,—his mission here to spy out moonshiners; that his companion's mind was even now dwelling anew, and with a rueful difference, on that ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

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

... anywhere. Yet it is from their houses that the reigning dynasties which have shared between them the waters of the earth are sprung. All the weather of the world is based upon the contest of the Polar and Equatorial strains of that tyrannous race. The West Wind is the greatest king. The East rules between the Tropics. They have shared each ocean between them. Each has his genius of supreme rule. The King of the West never intrudes upon the recognised dominion of his ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... Mary and the Virgin Saints. It was so. He had been seethed in wicked doings from his boyhood—I give him you no better than he was: wild work in Poictou, the scour of hot blood; devil's work in Touraine, riotous work in Paris, tyrannous in Aquitaine. He had been blown upon by every ill report; hatred against blood, blasphemy against God's appointment, violence, clamour, scandal against charitable dealing: all these were laid to his name. He had behind him a file of dead ancestors, cut-throats and worse. He had faced unnameable ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... and everywhere, like any common mariner, and filling them with a spirit of self-respect, fellow-feeling, and personal daring, which the discipline of the Spaniards, more perfect mechanically, but cold and tyrannous, and crushing spiritually, never could bestow. The black-plumed senor was obeyed; but the golden locked Amyas was followed; and would have been followed to the end ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... when young Gentlemen, desirous of Improvement, flock'd from all Parts to the Schools and Academies of our Francogallia, as to the publick Marts of good Literature. Now they dread them as Men do Seas infested with Pyrates, and detest their Tyrannous Barbarity. The Remembrance of this wounds me to the very Soul; when I consider my unfortunate miserable Country has been for almost twelve Years, burning in the Flames of Civil War. But much more am I griev'd, when I reflect ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman

... Give him that parting kiss, which I had set Betwixt two charming words, comes in my father And like the tyrannous breathing of the north Shakes all our buds from growing. Cymbeline, Act ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... North was in arms. Northumbria had revolted as one man, from the tyrannous cruelty of Tostig; the insurgents had marched upon York; Tostig had fled in dismay, none as yet knew whither. The sons of Algar had sallied forth from their Mercian fortresses, and were now in the ranks of the Northumbrians, who it was rumoured had selected Morcar (the elder) ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... this liberal, high-toned father's mode of influencing his son with the tyrannous control of the haughty count, and contrasted Ronald's untrammeled position with his own state of dependent nonentity, he felt that unstruggling submission to the cruel decree which doomed him to waste those fresh, strong, aspiring years of his life in hopeless idleness was ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... Under your hard construction must I sit, To force that on you, in a shameful cunning, Which you knew none of yours; what might you think? Have you not set mine honour at the stake, And baited it with all th' unmuzzled thoughts That tyrannous heart can think? To one of your receiving Enough is shown. A cypress, not a bosom, Hides my heart. So, let ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]

... the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. {30} That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... satisfied? Alas! the dire sway of Necessity Oft makes the darkest, most repugnant things Familiar to us; links us to the feet Of all we feared, or hated, or despised; And, mingling poison with our daily food, Yet asks the willing heart and smiling cheek: Yea! to our subtlest and most tyrannous foes, May we be driven for shelter, and in such May our sole refuge lie, when all the joys, That, iris-like, wantoned around our paths Of prosperous fortune, one by one have died; When day shuts in upon our hopes, and night Ushers blank ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

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

... like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself—it only requires opportunity. You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition. And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own. A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... lesson which is quickly learn'd, A signal this which all can see! Thus nothing here provokes the strong To tyrannous cruelty. ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

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

... 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 sowing ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... men have brought fine things. Take courage, my lad. Maybe we can entreat the duke to dissuade Pacifica's father from this tyrannous disposal of her hand." ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee

... Then shall you most resemble Venus' nun, When Venus' sweet rites are perform'd and done. Flint breasted Pallas joys in single life; But Pallas and your mistress are at strife. Love, Hero, then, and be not tyrannous; But heal the heart that thou hast wounded thus; Nor stain thy youthful years with avarice: Fair fools delight to be accounted nice. The richest corn dies, if it be not reapt; Beauty alone is lost, too warily ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman

... Roman of the city affected a country house of this character, to which he would flee during the tyrannous reign of the Dogstar or the Lion—-in other words, during that hot season of the year which requires no description for those who have been so ill-advised as to sojourn in Rome in July, August, and early September. Many of his town ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

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

... of hardihood; a lover's Plea for charity, dear my friend, reject not: What if Nemesis haply claim repayment? 20 She is tyrannous. O ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... turned again to God, he would dispatch me altogether. Thus, even thus (good gentlemen and dear friends) was I inthralled in that fanatical bond, all good desires drowned, all piety vanished, all purposes of amendment truly exiled, by the tyrannous oppression ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... was I beginning to think so, but I had already begun to act upon the thought—and what was the result? No answering spark of kindness, no awakening penitence, but an unappeasable ill-humour, and a spirit of tyrannous exaction that increased with indulgence, and a lurking gleam of self-complacent triumph at every detection of relenting softness in my manner, that congealed me to marble again as often as it recurred; and this morning he finished the business:—I think the petrifaction is so ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

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

... tyrannous exactions mingle The vices of Kings Stork and Log; One day I give the palm to PRINGLE, The next I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various

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

... sister, it was a heavy blow to Bute Crawley to receive but five; out of which sum, when he had paid his own debts and those of Jim, his son at college, a very small fragment remained to portion off his four plain daughters. Mrs. Bute never knew, or at least never acknowledged, how far her own tyrannous behaviour had tended to ruin her husband. All that woman could do, she vowed and protested she had done. Was it her fault if she did not possess those sycophantic arts which her hypocritical nephew, Pitt Crawley, practised? She wished ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... against the Government, so much as against the illegal and tyrannous cruelty practised by many of its officials, that a certain section of the "Revolutionists" raise a remonstrance. It is astonishing how conservative some of these terrible "Revolutionists" appear to be. Many of them still look to the Tzar with a pathetic conviction ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

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

... strong enough nor united enough to endure. But for his resolute counsels and good-humoured resistance we might have had German despots attempting a Hanoverian regimen over us: we should have had revolt, commotion, want, and tyrannous misrule, in place of a quarter of a century of peace, freedom, and material prosperity, such as the country never enjoyed, until that corrupter of Parliaments, that dissolute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of peace and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and statesman governed it. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its sons bound to ...
— Progress and History • Various

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

... think it right to relate to you, briefly, a specimen of the many splendid deeds of this man, in which he is known to have gone, with no little vigour, through fire and water.[1071] A tyrannous race laid claim to the metropolitan see of Patrick, the great apostle of the Irish, creating archbishops in regular succession, and possessing the sanctuary of God by hereditary right.[1072] Our Malachy was therefore asked by the faithful to combat such great evils; and putting his life ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

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

... more determined, the President showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... it that some Force, too wise, too strong, Even for yourselves to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth, and heaven, and men, and gods along, Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile? And the great powers we serve, themselves may be Slaves of a tyrannous necessity? ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

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

... an affair of the individual and of his own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice, and is a proof that the European mind was still alive. It is true that this showed itself in many different ways. While the mystical and ascetical sects of the North lost no time in creating new outward ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

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

... with a faithful and true heart, till he raised them into a great and strong nation. So both sides of the true kingly character, the masculine and the feminine, are brought out in David. For the greedy and tyrannous, he has indignant defiance: for the weak ...
— David • Charles Kingsley

... 1653, Cromwell went down to the House with a body of troops, and expelled the Parliament, who were in the act of passing a bill for their own dissolution, and a new representation. He thus proved himself as tyrannous and despotic as any sovereign could have been. A new Parliament was summoned, but instead of its members being elected in accordance with the customs of England, they were selected and nominated by Cromwell himself. ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... Year defaced with horrid blackness: black ashes of Chateaus, black bodies of gibetted Men! Industry has ceased in it; not sounds of the hammer and saw, but of the tocsin and alarm-drum. The sceptre has departed, whither one knows not;—breaking itself in pieces: here impotent, there tyrannous. National Guards are unskilful, and of doubtful purpose; Soldiers are inclined to mutiny: there is danger that they two may quarrel, danger that they may agree. Strasburg has seen riots: a Townhall torn to shreds, its archives scattered white on the winds; drunk soldiers embracing ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

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

... to the verge of starvation. The Governor Mendoza went off to seek help from the other colonies up the river, deputing his authority to one Captain Ruiz, who, according to all accounts, displayed an excessively tyrannous and truculent disposition while in power. The people were finally reduced to a ration of sis ounces of flour per day for each person; but as the flour was putrid and only made them ill, they were forced to live on any small animals ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... hard flesh could lend itself to the roughest exigences of a sporting outdoor life. Her broad face shone like a ripe apple, and her sharp eyes, her tight lips, the cheerful creases of her face, expressed an observant and rather tyrannous good-temper. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... latter upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames, very eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts which Shakspeare has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its material presence, unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The clerk informed me that interments no longer take place in any part of the church. And it is better so; for methinks a person of delicate individuality, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

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

... wakened from amidst the stone-hedged close, Where they slept in the heart of the mountains, and had come adown to dwell In the cave whence the Dwarfs were departed, and they said: It is aught but well To come anigh to his house-door, or wander wide in his woods? For a tyrannous lord he is, and a lover of ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

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

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

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

... counsel—nay, beneath The temple-roofs that we have reared to Thee, And 'mid their rising incense—God of Peace! The curse of war is on us. Greed and hate Hungering for gold and blood; Ambition, bred Of passionate vanity and sordid lusts, Mad with the base desire of tyrannous sway Over men's souls and thoughts, have set their price On human hecatombs, and sell and buy Their sons and brothers for the shambles. Priests, With white, anointed, supplicating hands, From Sabbath unto Sabbath clasped to Thee, Burn, in their tingling pulses, to fling down Thy ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... into rhetorical verse; but then there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then ceases ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt

... for the Liberty of England? I appeal to the Lord, that the desires and endeavours we have had—nay, the things will speak for themselves,—the liberty of England, the liberty of the people, the avoiding of tyrannous impositions either upon men as men, or Christians as Christians,—is made so safe by this act of settlement, that it will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... slumbers, Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow, Thou comest mysterious, In beauty imperious, Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know. Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken, Helplessly shaken and tossed, And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken, My lips, unsatisfied, thirst; Mine eyes are accurst With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken; And mine ears, in listening lost, Yearn, yearn for the note of a ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... to escape the tyrannous fancy by thinking of other things and by making light of it. "The starved, bloodless brain," I said, "has strange thoughts." I fell to studying the dark, thick, blunt body in my hands; I noticed that the livid, rudely blotched, scaly surface showed in some lights a lovely play of prismatic ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

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

... suppliant head, murmuring "Accept our hearts;"— But the same beauty which had conquered WOLE Angered the jealous Queen; she could not brook The glistening of those unbound locks of gold; A pain, before unknown, stung her proud heart; While the fierce consciousness of absolute power Urged her to tyrannous deeds. She waved her hand, And while her maidens shrank as if in dread, The finny sprites blew the shrill note of war, At which an hundred warriors gathered round. OLIVE they seized and shut her in a cell— The very temple she had so admired— ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown

... him for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been, he knew, more quarrelsome ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... their not yet humanised song, which seems to come direct from the heart of nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold. What till then had been a serenely shining "star of the deep," has been transformed into a means by which to win authority. The programme of the greedy and tyrannous never varies; Alberich proclaims it; "The whole world will I win," and it is his daemonic will to depreciate love and set up power as the only value, so that nobody shall doubt his greatness and unique genius. "As I renounce love, so all shall renounce ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... upon corporations as such nor upon unions as such; for some of the most far-reaching beneficent work for our people has been accomplished through both corporations and unions. Each must refrain from arbitrary or tyrannous interference with the rights of others. Organized capital and organized labor alike should remember that in the long run the interest of each must be brought into harmony with the interest of the general public; and the conduct of each must conform ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... the organized government does not prove its grant, the liberty of the individual citizen is sacred and inviolable. Elsewhere there are governments called republics; universal suffrage constitutes the state; but, once constituted, the state is tyrannous and arbitrary, invades at will private rights, and curtails at will individual liberty. One ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... who scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Under the tyrannous repression incident to usurped and unrighteous domination by the Roman church, civilization was retarded and for centuries was practically halted in its course. The period of retrogression is known in history as the Dark Ages. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... That alone controls the planets. This it is I wish to test, Having brought him to this palace, Where he'll learn he is my son, And display his natural talents. If he nobly hath subdued him, He will reign; but if his manners Show him tyrannous and cruel, Then his chains once more shall clasp him. But for this experiment, Now you probably will ask me Of what moment was't to bring him Thus asleep and in this manner? And I wish to satisfy you, Giving all your doubts an answer. If to-day he learns that he Is my son, and some hours ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... hotel that looked over the harbor, left to the tyrannous company of his own thoughts, he made a desperate effort to understand her, to accept her point of view, to be, as she was, comprehensive ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... not dare to speak, for she knew well this girl's tyrannous and capricious nature. But she was nearly faint with emotion and reached sideways for the chair at the table; there she sat and gazed at the girl beneath the dais, her lips parted, ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... the storied ages we, Of perils dared and crosses borne, Of heroes bound by no decree Of laws defiled or faiths outworn, Of poets who have held in scorn All mean and tyrannous things that be; We prophesy with lips that sped The songs of the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... Culvera, playing in luck, won largely from his chief, who accepted his run of ill fortune grouchily. Pasquale had been a peon in his youth, an outlaw for twenty years, and a czar for three. He was as much the subject of his own unbridled passions as is a spoiled and tyrannous child. Yeager, studying him, was careful to lose money with a laugh to the old despot and equally careful to see that the chips came back to him from Ochampa's side ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... officially called "glorious"; and other Revolutions not yet called glorious; and somewhat has been gained for poor Mankind. Men's ears are not now slit-off by rash Officiality; Officiality will, for long henceforth, be more cautious about men's ears. The tyrannous Star-chambers, branding-irons, chimerical Kings and Surplices at All-hallowtide, they are gone, or with immense velocity going. Oliver's works do follow him!—The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it. Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork. Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo, Merely a marvellous mass of broken ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough

... But in general, life and property appear to have been less safe beyond the French border than within it. A small despotism, when it is bad, is more searching and interfering than a large one. The lords of France were tyrannous enough at times, but there were always courts of law and a royal court above them, and appeals for justice, although doubtful, might yet be attempted with ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... leanings. Holland was now entirely under patriot control; and the democrats in other districts were eagerly looking to the forces which Holland could bring into the field to protect the patriot cause from tyrannous acts of oppression by the stadholder's troops. In the summer of 1787 the forces on both sides were being mustered on the borders of the province of Utrecht, and frequent collisions had already taken place. Nothing but the prince's indecision had prevented the actual outbreak ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... Green Road. The pitiless wind swept the streets—swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... monsieur Brisk, be not so tyrannous to confine all wits within the compass of your own; not find the sparks of a gentleman in him, if he be ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

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

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

... it. He said: "If we had gone to war"—which he was prepared to do—"we should have gone to war for freedom; we should have gone to war for public right; we should have gone to war to save human happiness from being invaded by tyrannous and lawless power." That is what I call a good cause, though I detest war, and there are no epithets too strong if you will supply me with them that I will not endeavor ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... transgression, find, in partaking of the Christ whose sacrifice is their pardon, the communication of a new power, which sets them free from a worse than Egyptian bondage, and enables them to shake from their emancipated limbs the fetters of the grimmest of the Pharaohs that have wielded a tyrannous dominion over them. Pardon and freedom, the creation of a nation subject only to the law of Jehovah Himself— these were the facts that the Passover festival and the Passover lamb signified, and these are the facts which, in nobler fashion, are brought to us by Jesus Christ. So, I beseech you, let ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... right attitude is one of unconcern and the absence of uneasy scheming as to the details of life. There is no reason why people should not form habits, because method is the primary condition of work; but the moment that habit becomes tyrannous and elaborate, then the spirit is at once in bondage to anxiety. The real victory over these little cares is not for ever to have them on one's mind; or one becomes like the bread-and-butter fly ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Individual Freedom suffers scath On all sides. Can you plead Necessity's fiat? For me you boast your love, proclaim your faith, But, battered by the missiles you let fly at Each other, I with ROLAND, cry in shame, What tyrannous things ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various

... her chariot; even now, if fate permit, the goddess strives to nurture it for queen of the nations. Nevertheless she had heard a race was issuing of the blood of [20-53]Troy, which sometime should overthrow her Tyrian citadel; from it should come a people, lord of lands and tyrannous in war, the destroyer of Libya: so rolled the destinies. Fearful of that, the daughter of Saturn, the old war in her remembrance that she fought at Troy for her beloved Argos long ago,—nor had the springs of her anger nor the bitterness of her vexation yet ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... not venture on any definite hope, or definite balance of hope and fear, but adopt the Mayor of Grunberg's course, and study to be passive and silent. The Jesuit-Priest kind are clear in their minds for Austria; but think, Perhaps Prussia itself will not prove very tyrannous? At all events, be silent; it is unsafe to stir. We notice generally, it is only in the Southern or Mountain regions of Silesia, where the Catholics are in majority, that the population is not ardently on the Prussian ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Escaped from the tyrannous yoke of society, I understood then the charms of that independence of nature which far surpasses all the pleasures of which civilized man can form any idea. I understood why not one savage has become a European, and why ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... occasions these nightly precautions; and, for the first time since my residence in this free country, the curfew (now obsolete in mine, except in some remote districts, where the ringing of an old church-bell at sunset is all that remains of the tyrannous custom) recalled the associations of early feudal times, and the oppressive insecurity of our Norman conquerors. But truly it seemed rather anomalous hereabouts, and nowadays; though, of course, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

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

... by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge, and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation, all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men from the heat ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant a day's journey from the capital. The spot was probably Aphaca, at the source of the river ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... of Tasso's life and character differs in some points from the prevalent conceptions of the poet. There is a legendary Tasso, the victim of malevolent persecution by pedants, the mysterious lover condemned to misery in prison by a tyrannous duke. There is also a Tasso formed by men of learning upon ingeniously constructed systems; Rosini's Tasso, condemned to feign madness in punishment for courting Leonora d'Este with lascivious verses; Capponi's Tasso, punished for seeking to exchange the service ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... the strange accusation had been made against Raleigh that he desired to favour Spain. This was calculated to vex him to the quick, and we find him protesting (March 29, 1586): 'I have consumed the best part of my fortune, hating the tyrannous prosperity of that State, and it were now strange and monstrous that I should become an enemy to my country and conscience.' Two months later he was threatened with the loss of his post as Vice-Admiral if he did not withdraw a fleet he had fitted out to harass the Spaniards in the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... have always suspected every one, and think that every word and every glance is intended as a reflection on their previous state, and so they seek to assert their dignity by making themselves imperious and tyrannous. Believe me, dear sister! There is something in springing from good stock. But here comes the boy; we had better ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg

... letter, which seemed now impregnated with fresh meaning, and the anger which had mingled with his first sensation of relief detached itself and grew in force. In that letter there was something tyrannous, a denial of his right to have a separate point of view. It was like a finger pointed at him as an unsound person. In marrying her he would be marrying not only her, but her class—his class. She would be there always to make him look on her and on himself, and all ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy



Words linked to "Tyrannous" :   domineering, tyrant



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