"Inhuman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with rules and regulations. Beside those passed by individual masters for their own plantations there were many city and state laws. Severe punishment, such as whipping on the bare skin, was the exception rather than the rule, though some slaves have told of treatment that was actually inhuman. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... which, fresh from their long neglect, seemed to have a certain pathos. My guide, too, appeared to take on an added seriousness as he read it, and I fancied that I could detect beneath his whimsical manner something of manliness, almost of dignity. But while I looked at him his former aspect, so subtly inhuman, so tantalizingly familiar, crept back into his big eyes, repellant and attractive. I resolved to make an end of the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... quay. For one tense instant, all nature held her breath, and then came the splash and clatter of debris falling into the water and on the docks, the rattle of broken glass from the houses along the quay; and finally, quivering through the air, rose the shrill, inhuman cry of men ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... they marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be pursued in the world, though it ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a very trying one. He did not believe—he could not and would not believe—that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched and guilty at a suspicion ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... village after the war was something like going through a life-sized toy-village with all the mechanical figures wound up and clicking. Only instead of the figures being new, and gay, and pretty, they were battered and grotesque and inhuman. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... short—short and terrible. The valiant Chinaman sought the ashen throat of his antagonist, but his wiry, sinewy muscles were as reeds beneath the force of that inhuman power that opposed them. Holding the girl at arm's length in one hand, Number One tore the battling Chinaman from him with the other, and lifting him bodily above his head, hurled him stunned and bleeding against the bole of a giant buttress tree. Then lifting Virginia in his ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you—I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman occupation. You can't do ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... be so many INHUMAN presences about tonight. Even my own dear house was full of them. They fairly elbowed me out. So I fled over here for companionship of ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... evil spirits; and a formula must avert the omen. Soma-husks are liable to turn into snakes; a formula must avert this catastrophe. Everything done at the sacrifice is godly; ergo, everything human is to be done in an inhuman manner, and, since in human practice one cuts his left finger-nails first and combs the left side of the beard first, at the sacrifice he must cut nails and beard first on the other side, for "whatever is human at a sacrifice is useless" (vy[r.]ddhain v[a]i tad yajnasya yad m[a]nu[s.]am). ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... He's a rare bird, Gryce. If he stops to think, he must see that he stands in a more or less ticklish position. But he does not betray by look or action any doubt of our entire belief in the truth of all his statements. His only trouble seems to be that he has lost, by these inhuman means, the girl upon whom he had set his heart. To-morrow we will confront him with Mrs. Taylor. She should be able to say whether he did or did not stand out in the open gallery at the ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... and the absence of Edward—of our arrival in Scotland—of our unexpected Meeting with our Grand-father and our cousins—of our visit to Macdonald-Hall—of the singular service we there performed towards Janetta—of her Fathers ingratitude for it.. of his inhuman Behaviour, unaccountable suspicions, and barbarous treatment of us, in obliging us to leave the House.. of our lamentations on the loss of Edward and Augustus and finally of the melancholy ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... son! For seven years they had not met. Their indifference seemed so inhuman! Still, she fancied that the son dared not make any approach, however much he may have longed to. A woman! They had quarrelled over a woman! Something reached down from the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... be said for and against this rule on both sides. A broader method to the lawyer seems shockingly loose and slipshod. The rules of evidence to the bystander seem an inhuman farce. The first allows an atmosphere to be created from which the whole truth may be reached. Would not an ordinary person, if he wanted to find out about the accident, read the newspapers, find out the police ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... coming, they ran out with jugs of water, chocolate, and cigarettes, but our escort met them and refused to allow them to give us anything. They were very plucky, and some of them dashed in past the guards, and these inhuman beasts known as Prussian Guards levelled their lances and made at the girls. Sometimes they missed; a water jug carried by one of the girls saved her, but I saw three women run through the body by these devils, and all because they wished to do an act of kindness to men who were wounded. ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... smoke; in fine, the thousand accidents that make creation so rich, so various, so poetical, and beyond which we evermore catch glimpses of that grand, mysterious something, eternal, immense, benignant, and never inhuman or cruel, as some would have us believe, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... opportunity of revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors, or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern; faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... killing their peaceful inhabitants, if one of them had so much as fired a shot, in all quietness the great societies for the care of the wounded were doing their work. And in this Switzerland especially bore the palm. There were two currents then, one inhuman and one humane, and of the two, the latter will one day prove itself the stronger. Under Louis XIV. war was still synonymous with unlimited plundering, murder, rape, thievery and robbery. Under Napoleon I. there were still no such things as ambulances. The wounded were carted away ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... asked Senora de Moche, seeming to mock us, as though the safe itself were an inhuman ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... over the fate of the inhuman princess is well conceived. That she should die a sharp death has been foretold; but how Bata should slay the divine creation—his wife—his mother—is a matter that the scribe reserves in silence; we only read that "he judged ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... own sake I ne'er desired it from thee. Who to the gods ascribe a thirst for blood Do misconceive their nature, and impute To them their own inhuman dark desires. Did not Diana snatch me from the priest, Holding my service dearer than ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... For thy sure approach perceiving, In my constancy and pain I new life should win again, Thinking that I am not living. So to me, unconscious lying, All unknown thy coming be, Lest the sweet delight of dying Bring life back again to me. Unto him who finds thee hateful, Death, thou art inhuman pain; But to me, who dying gain, Life is but a task ungrateful. Come, then, with my wish complying, All unheard thy coming be, Lest the sweet delight of dying Bring life back ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... amazement. By my side knelt the Woman of the Songs. Leaning over, she wooed my mouth with kisses. I cannot describe to you the sense of horror and of loathing with which the contact of her lips oppressed me. There was about her something so unnatural, so inhuman, that I believe even then I could have destroyed her with as little sense of moral turpitude as if she had been ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... addressed to the government by the Czech deputies Binovec, Filipinsk and Stejskal (Socialists) regarding the outrageous and inhuman treatment of the Czech political prisoners. They mentioned a vast number of appalling instances of deliberate torturing and starving of the prisoners. All rights of the prisoners were suspended and they depended entirely on the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... there no protection against this? You're a most inhuman-blaguard to try to deprive me of my honest bread ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... savage struggle for employment even at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American laborer would regard as inhuman. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... were terrified at the sight of this inhuman rabble, which had commanded their admiration on the outward march. And the commander, with his staff, crept out of the city at night, abandoning ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... for different occasions; neat and glossy piles of shirts, both dress and plain; black silk hose mountain high, and neckties as numerous as the sea sands. Noting the rapt attention that McGuntrie in particular gave to these disclosures, I felt that to deserve so inhuman a punishment my crime must have been black indeed. Shoes on their trees; articles of silk underwear; brushes, combs, gloves, cards, boxes of cigarettes, an extra flask; some light literature. And so on and so on, ad nauseam, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... government which adequately protected life and property, or gave to their people peace, happiness or justice, but on the contrary inaugurated a veritable reign of terror under which murder became a governmental institution, while rape, inhuman torture, burying alive and other ghastly crimes were of common occurrence, and usually went unpunished. The data which I use in establishing these contentions are for the most part taken directly from the Insurgent records, in referring ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... that when employed to board Guineamen to impress sailors, although he had examined near twenty vessels, he never was able to get more than two men, who were fit for service; and these turned out such inhuman fellows, although good seamen, that he was obliged to dismiss ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... it," she said. "It is cruel and inhuman, and nothing you can say will make it any better. But the fact is that I find myself in a very—Well, I do not know what to say about it. You are the school-teacher at ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... to Fabrici, who seemed to her less inhuman than Rizzo, for she had noticed the slight weakening in his attitude. "Pardon me, your Grace," she said in a tone of quiet deference; "hath the learned body of the Queen's Council no knowledge ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... in this life. The guilt of foul calumny, of the most black and odious kind, attaches to every sentence uttered by your lying tongue. Guilt, the offspring of fiend-like malice, shamefully false, deeply corrupt, and badly matured: perfidy, dishonesty, and rank poison—hot incense of murder, theft, inhuman spoliation, and deep, dark forebodings of damnation have been rooted and grounded in your heart, for lo! these many years! Dark despair, endless death, inexpressible misery, manifold, and worse than death, follow in the ghastly train of your ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... good!" cried he; "to deserve you is not possible, but to afflict you is inhuman!" "Why so?" cried she, more chearfully; "must I not share the common lot? or expect the whole world to be new modelled, lest I should meet in ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... distant from Scotland, where the seat of this King was, there dwelt an ogre, the most inhuman and savage that had ever been in Ogreland, who, being persecuted by the King, had fortified himself in a lonesome wood on the top of a mountain, where no bird ever flew, and was so thick and tangled that one could never see the sun there. This ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... movements those of general cataclysm. I should find no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's hands against the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in the welter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of blind and inhuman powers. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... But now again, knowing that the request was coming, feeling once more confident of the constancy of his love, she was urgent with herself as to that heavy duty. She would be unwomanly, dead to all shame, almost inhuman, were she to allow herself again to indulge in love after all the havoc she had made. She had been little more than a bride when that husband, for whom she had so often been forced to blush, had been driven ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism. But this will soon pass away. When the intellectual muscle and moral nerve of the critics has been developed in the struggle with modern problem plays, the pettish luxuriousness of the clever ones, and the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... ship's pump and surrounded with burning combustibles; or, fastened to the deck, surrounded with gunpowder, which they ignited; or his limbs were severed from his body and his flesh prodded with the points of the cutlass, the fiendish pirates forming a circle around him for this inhuman "sport." ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... be born with any decency. It seemed to participate horribly in Violet's agony, to throb with her tortures and recoils, to fill itself shuddering with her cries, such cries as Ransome had never heard or conceived, that he would have believed impossible. They were savage, inhuman; the cries and groans of some outraged animal; there was menace in them and rebellion, terror, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... was his duty—his, Hector de Langevy—the owner of a great name and a very small fortune, to marry the said cousin—or if not, he must stand the consequences. Hector, at the first intimation, had revolted indignantly against the inhuman proposal, and made many inaudible vows of undying constancy to his innocent and trusting Daphne; but by degrees, there is no denying that—without thinking of the fortune—he found various attractions in his cousin. She was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so lavishly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... it as in duty bound, and Andrew said fiercely that hanging was too good for Monsieur H——. What did he mean by such inhuman conduct, he should like to know; and however were Jim and himself to maintain life ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... called themselves "Christians" could have joined in these festivities in honor of a heathen temple, and that the Governor should have made a speech of congratulation, with no rebuke of these scenes of inhuman torture of women and child slaves, when the procession paused at his door. These parades continued two or three days, always accompanied by the great paper dragons, whether in the daytime or at night, by the noise of deafening tom-toms, ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... coasts;—it will enable us to put into practice an amelioration long contemplated by Mr. Barrow, in the choice of our settlements on those coasts;—it will place the greatest and most important vent of the barbarous and inhuman traffic of negroes in our possession; and it will enable us to diffuse the benefits of superior intelligence among an ignorant and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... strong that it swept aside like straw the torment of those cords, and the deeper hurt that I lay at his feet. I suppose my face altered, and mirrored that blessed glow about my heart, for into his own came a white fury, changing its beauty into something inhuman and terrifying. He looked a devil baffled. For a minute he stood there rigid, with hands clenched. "Embrace her heart, if thou canst," he said, in a voice so low that it came like a whisper from the realm he might have left. "I shall press my face ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... resolved to defend themselves to the last extremity. "They were in the right."[160] They might have held out for several days, and perhaps obtained better terms; but the governor persisted in surrendering to the clemency of King George, promised by his inhuman and dishonourable son. Assurances of intercession were given by the Duke of Cumberland, and the garrison of three hundred men surrendered. On the Duke's return to London, it was decided by the British ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman perfection of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed. It brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Excessively difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service, achieved under ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... affection to your child, since you might have some hopes to see it thus better provided for than was in the power of yourself, or its wicked father, to provide for it. I should indeed have been highly offended with you had you exposed the little wretch in the manner of some inhuman mothers, who seem no less to have abandoned their humanity, than to have parted with their chastity. It is the other part of your offence, therefore, upon which I intend to admonish you, I mean the violation of your chastity;—a ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... other. In this manner, a civil war can be brought to a speedy conclusion; and then the cruelty of the victorious government knows no bounds. 'The treatment of political prisoners,' says our author, 'is really so shocking as to be incredible, if one had not been an eye-witness of these inhuman deeds.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... speeches! Therefore we must conquer him by other means; and for this reason I look with hope to the appearance of the angel, who will teach us, perhaps, how to remove the spell from my illustrious race, which Sidonia's inhuman malice has laid on them, making them to perish childless off the face of the earth. If even you succeeded in seizing her, how would this help? She would revenge herself by standing there deaf and mute as a corpse, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... its domain. This man was the German reincarnation of Javert, the police inspector who hung so relentlessly upon the flanks of Jean Valjean. In his stolid silence I read an iron determination to "get" me, and in that flickering smile I saw an inhuman delight in putting the worst construction upon my case as he wrote it down. Hereafter he shall be ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... atrocities the moving evidence of which we have gathered can only be, on the one hand, the desire to terrorize and demoralize the people in accordance with the inhuman theories of German military writers, and, on the other hand, the desire for plunder. A shot fired, no one knows where, or by whom, or against whom, by a drunken soldier, or an excited sentry, is ...
— 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
... slaves who wrought at the oars when wind failed, were wretched creatures who had been captured among the various islands, and many of them were in the last stage of exhaustion, having been worked almost to death by their inhuman captors, though a good many were still robust ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... renders her, of course, a most dangerous person to meddle with politics; but great allowances must be made for her feelings, which must naturally be embittered by the recollection of so much suffering during the Revolution and of the barbarous and inhuman treatment experienced ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... justify the most cruel punishments inflicted on helpless children. The word translated 'a rod,' is derived from the Hebrew verb 'to govern,' and, as a noun, signifies a sceptre, a pen, or a staff, the emblems of government. Brutal punishments, as practised in our army, navy, and schools, are not only inhuman and indecent, but have one direct tendency, that of hardening the mind and instilling a vindictive ferocious disposition. After bringing up a very large family, who are a blessing to their parents, I have ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... by all means, my dear one. I dare say I am inhuman, and supercilious, and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family; but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belonged to a different species from the people who are working in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... cries, were answered by jeers. Her piteous appeal that they would leave the room until she clothed herself, was refused with curses. She was compelled to dress in their presence, underneath the blazing glare of every light in the room, and before the eyes of those inhuman wretches whose gloating, bloodshot gaze befouled her sweet purity, as a drop of filth will befoul ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... knife from his shaking hand and started up with a cry that died away in a gurgle, an inhuman, nightmare croak. He looked about wildly, like a rat in a trap, then backed towards the wall. The men about the table got up, then cleared away in a circle, leaving the fat man. It was all like a dream to the college boy, who had never seen a thing of the kind before and could not ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... son's anger. So when he appears in the Miller house he makes himself as odious as possible. Diplomacy and finesse are weapons not found in his armory, though he is a courtier and a successful politician. He is simply a cynical brute in high office. In truth his conduct is so very inhuman as to convey an impression of burlesque. He seems copied from some ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... himself for personal life (she felt again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other activities. It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad, inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's life, she reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village insignificance ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... mistake this time. By chance I'm on the righter side, the better side. When it comes to the women in industry, there's no question. It is killing the future to work them this way—it is intolerable, inhuman, insane. We must stop it—and as we don't vote right, we must strike. A strike is justified these days—will be, until there's some other way of getting justice. Anyway, this time," he said, fiercely, "I'm right. But I'm wondering about the ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... eend I've come to Arter cipherin' plaguy smart, An' it makes a handy sum, tu, Any gump could larn by heart; Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame, Ev'y thin' thet 's done inhuman Injers all on 'em ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... that this meeting being convinced that slavery is the cause of the tremendous struggle now going on in the American States, and that the object of the leaders of the rebellion is the perpetuation of the unchristian and inhuman system of chattel slavery, earnestly prays that the rebellion may be crushed, and its wicked object defeated, and that the Federal Government may be strengthened to pursue its emancipation policy till not a slave be ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... it said, that we never received from them the slightest injury nor even a mocking word. They all regarded us with pity, and some of the women, who gave us food and drink, wept! So much good feeling was displayed by a people, that we enlightened Europeans consider rude and inhuman! The leader of our escort, however, was far less obliging and polite to us than the Japanese officers had formerly been. Although there was no lack of horses in the neighborhood, we were obliged to walk, and were no longer carried over streams of water, but ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken then to the story of ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... Phelps as an inhuman order, though he obeyed it and placed the slaves just outside of his camp lines. Here the solders, having drank in the spirit of their commander, cared for the fugitives from slavery. But they continued to come, according to divine appointment, and ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... her tears, went resolutely up to Mademoiselle Bourienne, and evidently unconscious of what she was doing began shouting in angry haste at the Frenchwoman, her voice breaking: "It's horrible, vile, inhuman, to take advantage of the weakness..." She did not finish. "Leave my room," she ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... still must keep Fond memories of this Maytime, calm as sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on this May morning are we wreathing A flowery band, to bind us round the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of patriot natures, Mammen-ridden days, And Toil's unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways Made for our mending: yes, in spite of all This Mayday Vision moves away the pall From our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... mutineers to account for the fury which filled the breasts of their avenging countrymen, and seemed to lend them supernatural strength and courage, and, alas! in some instances, to merge that courage in ferocity. Delhi had been deeply guilty, when the mutineers seized it, in respect of inhuman outrage on the helpless non-combatants; but the story of Cawnpore is darker yet, and is still after all these years fresh in our memories. A peculiar blackness of iniquity clings about it. That show of amity with which the Nana Sahib responded to the summons of Sir Hugh Wheeler, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could. The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... us; we should not give ourselves over, as is often rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers—winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fire. The God we should believe in would not be a passionless, utterly inhuman power." "Nature, in the sense in which we are now using the word, includes humanity, and therefore, so far from being pitiless, includes all the pity that belongs to the whole human race, and all the pity that they have accumulated, and, as it were, capitalised in institutions political, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Augusta and Amelia came to me after church, very much grieved at the inhuman decrees just passed in the Convention, including as emigrants, with those who have taken arms against their country, all who have quitted it since last July; and adjudging their estates to confiscation, and their persons to death ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... listened as to their Cicero, when he twanged out his apostrophes of Pauvre Peuple, Peuple vertueux! and hastened to execute whatever came recommended by such honied phrases, though devised by the worst of men for the worst and most inhuman of purposes. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... of a pleasing rage Let's banish ever hence, By a blind vapour rais'd, and vain pretence, Those loud seditious clamours that engage Only inhuman, brutish souls, By barb'rous Scythians only understood, Who cruelly their flowing bowls At banquets intermix with streams of blood. Dreadful, preposterous, merriment! Our hands all gayly innocent, Ought ne'er in such confusion bear a part, Polluted ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... schemed and had my hopes raised and dashed to the ground ... time after time. To see the person that you love best in the world, a part of your own body, living without a soul: a thief, a liar—that's the plain truth—inhuman and cruel ... But you know as well as ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that somewhere far away there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradation and sufferings on them, or for three months incessantly to look on while men were inflicting these humiliations and sufferings on other men is a very different thing. And Nekhludoff felt it. More than once during these three months he asked himself, "Am I mad because I see what others ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... a small boy who was one beam over finding a tin horn: "Oh well, take the horn if you want to, but you can't haul your little red waggon while you're blowing the horn." There seemed something peculiarly inhuman about taking the waggon just when he had found the horn. Now if the waggon were broken, then to take away the horn would leave the luxury of grief. But let not ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... that, in obtaining this almost inhuman reaction, all independent qualities are obliterated. For, though a man's mind is adjusted to carrying out, without questioning, any task that is demanded of him, yet in the execution of this duty he is allowed the full scope of his invention ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of its outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man's whole periphery, accelerated the functions of the mind. It set thoughts whirling, as it whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up in flights, as it stirred up the dust in chambers. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... talk about anything and nothing. She showed fretful dread of a pause; when she spoke she did not look me in the face. I could not avoid the idea that she did not want me, and would gladly see me take my leave. But such a feeling was, as it seemed to me, inhuman—a falseness to our true selves, born of some convention, or of a scruple overstrained, or of ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... said Kemp; "inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking.... He has wounded men. He will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic. Nothing ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... "Dead!" muttered the inhuman wretch, as he stood upon the spot late occupied by his victim, looking down over the cliff. "Dead he must be; unless a man can fall two hundred feet and still live; which isn't likely. That clears the way, I take it; and unless I have the ill luck to meet some one coming ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... and inhuman brain was spread before them, DuQuesne and Loring read not only the language, customs, and culture of the Fenachrone, but all their plans for the future, as well as the events of the past. Plainly in his mind they perceived how he had been cast adrift in the emptiness ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... surrender to an enemy so highly incensed, and that they could not hope to keep themselves in safety by means of their walls or their arms, resolved to execute upon themselves and those belonging to them a horrid and inhuman deed. They fixed upon a place in their forum, in which they collected the most valuable of their property, and having directed their wives and children to seat themselves upon this heap, they raised a pile of wood ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... Something inhuman and yet troublingly personal lay in the performance; it invaded the onlookers with a sense of disquietude. There was primeval ecstasy in those strains and gestures. Giant moths, meanwhile, fluttered ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the look of a man demented, to the fire that had devoured his child. There, indeed, if he escaped the madness with which the poignancy of his grief was threatening him, was a tool that might turn its edge against this inhuman monster, this devil, this bloody carnifex ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... well as dark, to the Indian character; and in considering their cruelties and inhuman practices, we must remember that the white man has not always been just to him or set a good example to his uncivilized brother, or been careful not to provoke him to deeds of resentment and wrong. An Indian rarely ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... were burned, and the regular troops were defeated by the mob in the Place Vendome; on July fourteenth the Bastille, in itself a harmless anachronism, but considered by the masses to typify all the tyrannical shifts and inhuman oppressions known to despotism, was razed to the ground. As if to crown their baseness, the extreme conservatives among the nobles, the very men who had brought the King to such straits, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... order filled the whole army with horror. Yet none dared interfere, and the unnatural mandate was obeyed, in full view of an army whose late exultation was turned to deepest woe and indignation. The youngest soldiers never forgave the consul for his inhuman act, but regarded him with abhorrence to the end of his life. But their hatred was mingled with fear and respect, and the stern lesson taught was doubtless felt for years in the discipline of ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear the wounds; thus only shall we hold our own. The man who has once become involved in such a strife as this must play the part that he has undertaken; to show mercy would be fatal. Do you suppose that any man was ever so brutal, so inhuman, as to rejoice in torture and groans and bloodshed for their own sake, when there was no occasion for punishment? Many is the time that I have wept while others suffered beneath the lash, and groaned in spirit over the hard fate that subjected me to a torment more fierce and more ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... Faye, the principal of the college, a good man, by whom I was tenderly beloved. The porter, prevailed upon by some small pieces of money which I put in his hand, admitted me; and my friend carried me to his apartment, where two inhuman priests whom I heard mention 'Sicilian Vespers,' wanted to force me from him, that they might cut me in pieces, saying the order was, not to spare even infants at the breast. All the good man could do was to conduct me privately to a distant chamber, where he locked me up. Here ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... yet it was all a confused medley, in which I bore active part while scarcely realizing its significance. I saw men reel stumbling back, some falling heavily; I heard shouts, oaths, cries of pain, the piercing shrieks of stricken animals; there was the crunch of blows, a wild, inhuman cheer, a gruff order yelled above the uproar, the rush of bodies hardly distinguishable. The thin line of Hessians were flung aside as though they were paper men; eager hands gripped the astounded Rangers, and dragged them from their saddles. ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... answered the man, smiling with a bitterness which showed he felt an inhuman joy, at that fierce moment, in making others as miserable as himself. "Yes, Mrs. Henry Halfacre—yes, Miss Eudosia Halfacre, you are both beggars—I hope that, at least, will ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... is a barbarous and inhuman system of protecting the German advance. When the Belgian soldiers fired on the enemy they killed their own people. Again and again innocent civilians of both sexes were sacrificed to protect the invading army during attacks. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mistake should be rectified, the false made true. That had seemed to him logical and just. She was supposed to be in the coffin; she should really be in the coffin; she should be forced and jammed into it. And his lunatic and inhuman fancy had added even to that conception. She should be drugged and carried to the vault, and drugged again, and then immured, unconscious, but alive; and if by chance she awoke from the chloroform sleep ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... equally for the feet of Mrs Higden coming out, and the feet of Mrs Boffin and John Rokesmith going in, greatly increased the difficulty of the situation: to which the cries of the orphan imparted a lugubrious and inhuman character. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... positively inhuman!" declared Maryllia—"And absolutely unnatural! You are, really! Every two-legged creature on earth wants to find out all the ins and cuts of every other two- legged creature,—for if this were not the case wars would be at an end, and the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest. So ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... who was three years older than myself, behaved in a very different manner. I used to think the difference between us was merely that of sex; that every boy was boisterous, ungrateful, imperious, and inhuman, as every girl was soft, pliant, affectionate. Time has cured me of that mistake, and, as it has shown me females unfeeling and perverse, so it has introduced me to men full of gentleness and sensibility. My brother's ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... saw, in a vision, the family pew, the somnolent cushions, the Bibles, the psalm-books, Maria with her smelling-salts, his father sitting spectacled and critical; and at once he was struck with indignation, not unjustly. It was inhuman to go off to church, and leave a sinner in suspense, unpunished, unforgiven. And at the very touch of criticism, the paternal sanctity was lessened; yet the paternal terror only grew; and the two strands of feeling pushed him ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... transmitted by their worthy brother, Mr. Samuel King. It is an unspeakable consolation to the inhabitants of this devoted Town, that amidst the distress designed to have been brought upon them by an inhuman, as well as arbitrary Ministers, there are many whose hearts and hands are open for their relief. You, gentlemen, are among the happy number of those, of whom it is said, the blessing of him that is ready to perish hath come upon us, and ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... dropped from his arm even when he fell, and, entangled by his dress, it still clung around him. It was a sight that recalled to Cola all the gentleness, the kind heart, and winning graces of his only brother—his only friend! It was a sight that seemed to make yet more inhuman the untimely and unmerited fate of that innocent boy. "My brother! my brother!" groaned the survivor; "how shall I meet our mother?—how shall I meet even night and solitude again?—so young, so harmless! See ye, sirs, he was but ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... offensively, and his honest eyes insulted over me. No one come to nigh twenty years had a right to such faith in his fellow-creatures. He could not backbite, nor envy, nor prevaricate, nor jump at mean motives for generous acts. He had not a single base story about women. It all seemed inhuman. ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... I have seen, have not had material counterparts. They have invariably proved themselves to be superphysical danger signals, the sure indicators of the presence of those grey, inscrutable, inhuman cerebrums to which I have alluded; of phantasms of the dead and of elementals of all kinds. There is an indescribable something about them, that at once distinguishes them from ordinary shadows, and puts me on my guard. I have seen them in houses ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... of other violence about it. It looked as though it had been suddenly snatched up and killed; and as I stared at the little furry body came the difficulty of how the thing had been done. The vague dread that had been in my mind since I had seen the inhuman face of the man at the stream grew distincter as I stood there. I began to realise the hardihood of my expedition among these unknown people. The thicket about me became altered to my imagination. Every shadow ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... when natural modesty would most lead her to conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance. And our women themselves have grown so blunted by use to the hatefulness of the ordeal that many of them face it now with inhuman effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has almost killed out in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... lower passions; and, further, both on humanitarian and economic grounds, to arouse in the youth of to-day an appreciation of the importance of a peaceful settlement of international disputes, and to inculcate a spirit antagonistic to the inhuman waste of life and the reckless waste ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... in Grellmann's day, would resort to the most wicked and inhuman practices. Before taking one of their horses to the fair they would make an incision in some secret part of the skin, through which they would blow the creature up till his flesh looked fat and plump, and then they would apply a strong sticking ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... recalled that underneath his bright and stagelike behavior there had ever been a certain constant attention, a sweeping glance, a quiet scrutiny of persons unaware of his observance, a memory of details and words and dates in some degree inhuman, and in the first hand-clasp she recognized the power she had not had the vision to ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another hurteth ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... not told without miraculous embellishment, including the singular story that Altan who suffered from the gout used to put his feet every month into the ripped up body of a man or horse and bathe them in the warm blood. Avalokita appeared to him when engaged in this inhuman cure and bade him desist and atone for ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... attempted to repay in kind the attentions of his royal cousins, or of their ministers, this can hardly be reckoned inhuman. If he was fluttering the Courts, they—Prussia, Russia, France, Poland—were leading him the life of a tracked beast. They were determined to drive him into the Papal domains; even in Venice he was harried by spies. {63} On May 30, to retrace our steps, Mann, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang |
