"Rapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reputation for beastliness. My surmises never ventured to the hazardous period of infancy, or risked the doubtful thought that kith or kin could have loved him; but I have often wondered if there ever was a time when his rapacity found employment in the robbing of a hen's nest, or his grasping ambition culminated in the swop of a jack-knife. I wondered if in all the grotesque concomitants that congregated to make up the hideous whole, there existed a redeeming trait. Yes, there was ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... a hundred and thirty years have passed since the victims of Cunningham's cruelty and rapacity were starved to death in churches consecrated to the praise and worship of a God of love. It is a tardy recognition that we are giving them, and one that is most imperfect, yet it is all that we can now do. The ditches where they were interred have long ago been filled ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... contracts through the courts; the introduction of cash coinage as the basis of all transactions; and the grant of proprietary and transferable rights in land, appear to have at the same time enhanced the Bania's prosperity and increased the harshness and rapacity of his dealings. When the moneylender lived in the village he had an interest in the solvency of the tenants who constituted his clientele and was also amenable to public opinion, even though not of his own caste. For it would clearly be an impossibly unpleasant position for ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the rapids. With these precautions they all passed unmolested. The only accident that happened was the upsetting of one of the canoes, by which some of the goods sunk, and others floated down the stream. The alertness and rapacity of the hordes which infest these rapids, were immediately apparent. They pounced upon the floating merchandise with the keenness of regular wreckers. A bale of goods which landed upon one of the islands was immediately ripped open, one half of its contents divided among the captors, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... them quite easy to walk upon. They presently quiet down, and the brigand begins to notice her surroundings. The antennae point forward, seeking information; the hinder legs are drawn up with a slight trembling, as of greed and rapacity, in the thighs; the head turns to the right and the left, and follows the evolutions of the bees against the glass. The posture of the scoundrelly insect is strikingly expressive; one reads in it the brutal desires of a creature in ambush, the cunning patience that postpones attack. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... both remembered well the hut of a lonely woodman that lay hidden in the very depths of the wood near this spot. It had occurred to Edward as likely that old Ralph would be better acquainted with the habits of the robbers than any other person could be. He was too poor to be made a mark for their rapacity, yet from his solitary life in the forest he might likely enough come across their tracks, and be able to point out their hiding places. Therefore the Prince's plan was that he and the picked companions he should choose should slip away from the main body of the huntsmen, and make their way to this ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... plates or tiles, from the interior of the temples or palaces which did not take up much space. The great temple of the Sun at Cuzco had a heavy outside cornice, or moulding, of pure gold. It was stripped of this dazzling ornament to satisfy the rapacity of the conquerors. There was also a vast quantity of silver which was stored in other chambers. Silver hardly counted in view of the deluge of the more ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... so, Madame," rejoined her son, who was becoming weary of the rapacity of his loyal subjects and faithful friends. "Gentlemen, your services shall not be ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... subtraction, withdrawal &c 38; abstraction, ademption^; adrolepsy^. dispossession; deprivation, deprivement^; bereavement; divestment; disherison^; distraint, distress; sequestration, confiscation; eviction &c 297. rapacity, rapaciousness, extortion, vampirism; theft &c 791. resumption; reprise, reprisal; recovery &c 775. clutch, swoop, wrench; grip &c (retention) 781; haul, take, catch; scramble. taker, captor. [Descent of one of the earth's crustal ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... are concealed the strangest contrasts, for whilst around the shore human wolves disguised as civilized men are devouring souls, or (with due observance of the law) are usurping and stealing their neighbour's property and products, (the cleverest and most respected being he who best dissembles his rapacity or who knows how best to substitute unscrupulous shrewdness for industrial activity) not far off towards the centre of these scattered lands other men, in primitive ignorance of the law, are devouring their neighbours' ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... scattered throughout Europe—these people, whose manner of life is so mysterious and whose origin is more mysterious still—seem to be closely allied both to the Moors and to the Hindoos, not only in appearance but in their phlegm, fanaticism and rapacity. Such of our readers as have travelled in Southern Europe must have frequently encountered these Bohemians, who come from no one knows where only to disappear again like the swallows at the ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... standing, Sir Stadtholder, so long as God and the Elector please," said Burgsdorf slowly. "Many an one falls, and under the table, too, although he may not be drunk with wine, but with pride and ambition, avarice and rapacity." ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... confidence, would have no chance of finding obedience from the numerous inferior Pangerans and their followers. This, with much more, was the theme of my conversation; to which was replied, imprimis, That their customs and religion must not be infringed. That with regard to the violence and rapacity of the higher classes, and the uncertainty of taxation, which led to so much oppression, they were by no means any part of the Ondong Ondong, i. e., the written law of Borneo, but gross abuses which had arisen out of lax government. That it was ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of the blue-coats of France. They rushed to arms. The city of Pavia defied the attack of a French column until cannon battered in its gates. Then the republicans rushed in, massacred all the armed men for some hours, and glutted their lust and rapacity. By order of Bonaparte, the members of the municipal council were condemned to execution; but a delay occurred before this ferocious order was carried out, and it was subsequently mitigated. Two ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... People Cruelties of the Soldiers in the West; Kirke Jeffreys sets out on the Western Circuit Trial of Alice Lisle The Bloody Assizes Abraham Holmes Christopher Battiseombe; The Hewlings Punishment of Tutchin Rebels Transported Confiscation and Extortion Rapacity of the Queen and her Ladies Grey; Cochrane; Storey Wade, Goodenough, and Ferguson Jeffreys made Lord Chancellor Trial and Execution of Cornish Trials and Executions of Fernley and Elizabeth Gaunt Trial and Execution of Bateman Persecution of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a stranger led to hopes, and reports were whispered about the town that I was the bearer of the news of the disgrace of the tyrant. But his vengeance speedily fell on the principal inhabitants, for such as had hitherto escaped his rapacity were seized and stripped of their property, on the plea that they had spread reports detrimental ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... mightily, night and day, to reduce the Negro laborer to wage slavery, to fix him in an industrial position where he shall have no rights which the white employer class is bound to respect. Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or protection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as its share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. The employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I am speaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than a bare ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... was suddenly ordered into the Meer's presence. "Friend," said this benign ruler, "stay here a little longer; it is not right that, having made a sum of money in my country, you should spend it in your own." Since then, he added, he had been ill-treated and robbed several times to satisfy the rapacity of this wicked monster; and then, as if frightened at his own expressions, he peered cautiously round the tent, apparently fancying the Meer himself would start from behind the screen to punish him for his audacity. I returned him his 250 rupees, but told him ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... at the second custom-house, though the officers eyed our ornaments with a confiscating rapacity. For my part I took my revenge, by showing off the only ornament I had to the utmost. A—— had made me a present of a sapphire-ring, and this I flourished in all sorts of ways, as it might be in open defiance. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... hear. Tom Teeter was standing down there between the rows of cabbages, talking to Mr. Gordon upon the "Conscienceless greed and onmitigated rapacity" of certain emissaries of the opposing political party. To all of which his neighbor was responding with: "Well, well. Deary ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... a footing as this it is always ill with the community at large. The Hurons were among the most despicable of the Indians in their manners. They were hideous gluttons, gorging themselves when occasion offered with the rapacity of vultures. Gambling and theft flourished among them. Except, indeed, for the tradition of courage in fight and of endurance under pain we can find scarcely ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... for the "customs of the race," determined to chastise that tribe as he had the Raritans, and called upon the people to shoulder their muskets for the fray; but they, seeing the danger to which the rashness of the governor was leading them, refused. They had been witnesses of his rapacity and greed, and they now charged him with seeking war that he might "make a wrong reckoning with the colony," and reproached ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... their blows. The "Beagle" was at the Falklands only during the summer, but the officers of the "Adventure," who were there in the winter, mention many extraordinary instances of the boldness and rapacity of these birds. They actually pounced on a dog that was lying fast asleep close by one of the party; and the sportsmen had difficulty in preventing the wounded geese from being seized before their eyes. It is said that several together (in this respect resembling ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... sake, as well as for her niece's, she was resolute to defend herself against injustice. Alfred could scarcely bring himself to believe that Buckhurst Falconer had acted in the manner represented, with a rapacity, harshness, and cruelty, so opposite to his natural disposition. Faults, Alfred well knew that Buckhurst had; but they were all, he thought, of quite a different sort from those of which he now stood accused. What was to be done? Alfred was extremely averse ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers. Cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys. According to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed. It was a mistake. Murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida, and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves their rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppas would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida's conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... corrupted. We were pained the other day when our municipal councillors refused, by a majority, to make the production of invoices obligatory at the Custom-house. Yet who shall blame them, when the Chief Justice, with a smallness of rapacity at which all men wondered, refused to pay, and I believe, still withholds the duties on his imports? He was above the law, being the head of it; and this was how he preached by example. He refused to pay his customs; the white councillors, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whole established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness, rapacity, and love of power, which up till then had not only to be honoured from the point of view of general utility—under other names, of course, than those here given—but had to be fostered and cultivated (because they were perpetually required in the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... undergone many changes. The image of war has, indeed, passed away, and we no longer see troops crossing the country in every direction; villages either ruined or hastily fortified; inhabitants sheltered in the woods and caves to escape the rapacity of the soldiers—all this has passed away. The inns are much amended. There is no occasion for that rascally practice of making a bargain—or combien-ing your landlady, before you unharness your horses, which ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... not be informed that the violence and rapacity of a tyrannic ministry have forced the citizens of America, your brother colonist, into arms. We equally detest and lament the prevalence of those counsels, which have led to the effusion of so much human blood, and left us no alternative but a civil war, or a base submission. The wise ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... seeing that wealth excited the rapacity of the encomenderos and soldiers, abandoned the working of the mines, and the religious historians assert that they counseled them to a similar action in order to free them from annoyances. Nevertheless, according to Colin (who was ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... for his services the earldom of Carlisle, and a large estate, which he soon after forfeited with his life, for a treasonable correspondence with the king of Scotland. But the greater part of those vast escheats were seized by young Spenser, whose rapacity was insatiable. Many of the barons of the king's party were disgusted with this partial division of the spoils: the envy against Spenser rose higher than ever: the usual insolence of his temper, inflamed by success, impelled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... inclination to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty, too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... capital which is far preferable to all the title-deeds deposited in the coffers of the future father-in-law, which are rapidly squandered by children tainted with bad physical or mental heredity. In this way ignorance of the laws of heredity and the rapacity of pecuniary interests perpetually tend toward the antisocial procreation of ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... His rapacity was beyond credence. There was an immense treasure in the hold, yet he could not leave the pockets of the two poor wretches on deck alone. I did not envy him his task. The frozen figures would bear a deal of hammering; and besides he had to work in the cold. Ah, thought I ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... came the renting system which during the Reconstruction period was general in the cotton districts. This system threw the tenant on his own responsibility and frequently made him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity of the white man. As exorbitant prices were charged for rent, usually six to ten dollars an acre for land worth fifteen to thirty dollars an acre, the Negro tenant not only did not accumulate anything but had reason to rejoice at the end of ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... the war of 1870 will remember that no charges resembling those proved by these depositions were then established. The excesses recently committed in Belgium were, moreover too widespread and too uniform in their character to be mere sporadic outbursts of passion or rapacity. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... which outnumbered them a hundredfold. And men said that the Saint had heard the call, and had himself, in arms, on a gray war-horse, led the onset before which the worshippers of false gods had given way. After the battle, every excess of rapacity or cruelty was sufficiently vindicated by the plea that the sufferers were unbaptized. Avarice stimulated zeal. Zeal consecrated avarice. Proselytes and gold mines were sought with equal ardor. In the very year in which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... deserves praise for having taken so little. He accepted twenty lacs of rupees. It would have cost him only a word to make the twenty forty. It was a very easy exercise of virtue to declaim in England against Clive's rapacity; but not one in a hundred of his accusers would have shown so much self- command in the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not but smile at this argument. I well knew that my brother's rapacity was not to be satisfied with millions. To sit down and say, "I have enough," was utterly incompatible with his character. I dropped the conversation for ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... We know that, when you inherited the money in your turn, she was ready with her plot to rob you. We know how she carried that plot through to the end; and we know that nothing but your death is wanted, at this moment, to crown her rapacity and her deception with success. We are sure of these things. We are sure that she is young, bold, and clever—that she has neither doubts, scruples, nor pity—and that she possesses the personal ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... painful manner, the effects of the hostile and unexpected attack of Great Britain, and that they feel them still every day." That, in the mean time, this stagnation of commerce, absolutely abandoned to the rapacity of an enemy greedy of pillage, and destitute of all protection whatever, hath appeared to the petitioners, as well as to all the other commercial inhabitants; yes! even to all true Citizens, so much the more hard and afflicting, as they ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb to the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... been convinced of the worth of the medicine by the Pole's rapacity. Surely nothing less than the greatest of medicines could enable a man in the shadow of death to stand up and ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... time effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was discredited and virtually driven from his functions. But this enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity and to continue his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... dare not contradict me, that the Nabob of Arcot and his creditors are not adversaries, but collusive parties, and that the whole transaction is under a false color and false names. The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches. No: it is between him and them combining and confederating, on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other. These are the real plaintiffs and the real defendants in the suit. Refusing a shilling ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whose mean rapacity had been the cause of the detention, acted as examiner. He pulled one article after another out of the trunk, and at length—horror of horrors!—held up the missing watch with a look of ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... it can be secured. Can we be equally confident that much has been done by the Government to carry out the advice that has been given by this Committee? The Treasury is frequently blamed for its inability to check the rapacity and extravagance of the spending Departments. It is very likely that the Treasury might have done more if it had not been led by its own desire for a short-sighted economy into economising on its own staff, the activity and ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... to look over Woodruff's legislative program in advance, I was amazed at the rapacity of my clients, rapacious though I knew them to be. I had been thinking that the independent newspapers—there were a few such, but of small circulation and influence—were malignant in their attacks upon my "friends." In fact, as I soon saw, they had told only a small part of the truth. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... withdraw it to your side, and keep it in the station where nature and comfort alike tell you it ought to be? Do you think your breeches' pocket the most proper place to push your daddle into? Do you put it there to guard the solitary half-crown from the rapacity of your friend; or do you put it across your breast in case of an unexpected winder from your apparently peaceable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... eloquent picture of the court of the then King Otho, a German colony in the midst of the Greek people, living upon its blood, and wantoning with its treasure; and of this same Greek people, driven at length into fury by the rapacity of the hated Tudesca, who filled every position of authority and grasped at every office of emolument, and hunting them like a routed army out of the land. Still there was a depth of paternal affection in the words upon the monument, which impressed us with respect, as the miniature ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... the property of the lower class is secured against the rapacity and despotism of the great chiefs, I cannot say, but it should seem that it is sufficiently protected against private theft, or mutual depredation; for not only their plantations, which are spread over the whole country, but also their houses, their hogs, and their cloth, were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... rapacity on the part of successive Cape administrations appears on page 30 of the Minute by Sir William Beaumont, Chairman of the Lands Commission. Sir William shows how loyal black taxpayers in Griqualand West had been systematically robbed of Queen Victoria's gifts and driven from ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Rome, stretching its arms over the whole earth. On it was written, "The Cross of God's wrath." But from Jerusalem rose a golden cross, inscribed, "The Cross of God's compassion." Discontent was growing in Florence. The insolence and the rapacity of Pietro de' Medici increased. In the autumn of that year Savonarola delivered a famous course of sermons on Noah's Ark, warning all to take refuge from the coming flood in the mystical Ark of mercy. The flood came indeed, for suddenly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... mouth effectually, my father ordered some cold meat; to which James Wilkinson, for the honour of the house, was about to add the brandy bottle, which remained on the sideboard, but, at a wink from my father, supplied its place with small beer. Peter charged the provisions with the rapacity of a famished lion; and so well did the diversion engage him, that though, while my father stated the case, he looked at him repeatedly, as if he meant to interrupt his statement, yet he always found more agreeable employment for his mouth, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... punishment, and lays the burden on the backs of all ungodly nations, irresistibly forcing them down—down—down the road to ruin. The vain imagination that refuses to glorify God as God, leads to darkness of heart, thence to Atheism, thence to gross idolatry, onward to selfish gratification, violent rapacity, lust of conquest, and luxury, licentiousness, and effeminacy begotten of its spoils; then military tyranny, civil war, servile revolt, anarchy, famine and pestilence, and the sword of less debauched neighbors, Christ's iron scepter, hurl them down ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... possession of the place as an appanage of the Church, razed the houses of the Baglioni to the ground, and built upon their site the Rocca Paolina. This fortress bore an inscription: 'Ad coercendam Perusinorum audaciam.' The city was given over to the rapacity of the abominable Pier Luigi Farnese, and so bad was this tyranny of priests and bastards, that, strange to say, the Perugians regretted the troublous times of the Baglioni. Malatesta in dying had exclaimed, 'Help me, if you can; since after me you will be set to draw the cart like oxen.' Frollieri, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... age less corrupt and venal than that under consideration, such a career could not have long continued without check. But in the time of James the First, from the neediness of the monarch himself, and the rapacity of his minions and courtiers and their satellites,—each striving to enrich himself, no matter how—a thousand abuses, both of right and justice, were tolerated or connived at, crime stalking abroad unpunished. The Star-Chamber itself served ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... enemy of all continental nations, and that the European continent could not pursue any other policy but to combine in resisting that great pirate. The magnificent plan of Napoleon was the alliance of France with Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Russia, in order to combat the rapacity of England. And he would, in all probability, have carried his scheme through had it not been that considerations of domestic policy determined the Tsar Alexander I., in spite of his admiration for Napoleon's ability, to run counter to the latter's intentions. The consequences of Napoleon's ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... would often interfere with the happiness and peace of some small yet well-conducted community, which had migrated and settled on these fertile regions. These communities had no appeal against personal violence, no protection from rapacity and injustice. They were not yet within the pale of the Union; indeed there are many even now in this precise situation (that of the Mississippi for instance,) who have been necessitated to make laws of government for themselves, and who acting ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... fight valiantly under one condition, namely: when his party were numerically stronger than the opposing force. I think they have a just appreciation of the Falstaffian method of conducting warfare, and are firmly convinced that "he who fights and runs away," has better opportunities for glory, rapacity and booty, ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... them, and he has to help himself by other means. Why are both cases to be interpreted in malam partem? Why is the Parliament's granting to be always a proof of its servility?—its refusing always a proof of Henry's tyranny and rapacity? Both views are mere praejudicia, reasonable perhaps, and possible: but why is not a praejudicium of the opposite kind as rational and as possible? Why has not a historian a right to start, as Mr. Froude does, by taking for granted that both parties may have been on the whole ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... how shameful it is that, having the possibility of so much, we should have the actuality of so little. There is an old story about one of our generals in India long ago, who, when he came home, was accused of rapacity because he had brought away so much treasure from the Rajahs whom he had conquered, and his answer to the charge was, 'I was surprised at my own moderation.' Ah! there are a great many Christian people who ought to be ashamed of their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... entitled to the yearly sum of fifteen purses from this district. The Emir Djahdjah resides at Baalbec, and keeps there about 200 Metaweli horsemen, whom he equips and feeds out of his own purse. He is well remembered by several Europeans, especially English travellers, for his rapacity, and inhospitable behaviour. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... in Deut.) enumerates nine daughters of covetousness; which are "lying, fraud, theft, perjury, greed of filthy lucre, false witnessing, violence, inhumanity, rapacity." Therefore the former reckoning ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the world, whether engaged in open resistance to German rapacity, or as onlookers, do well to see, as indeed they have seen since its beginning, that modern civilization is at stake. On every continent, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and both the Americas, recognition of this great fact was instinctive. It was obvious ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... If any one concealed his letter, it was Burnet, Archbishop of Glasgow. Dalziel now sent Ballantyne to supersede Turner and to exceed him in ferocity; and Bellenden and Tweeddale wrote to Lauderdale deprecating the cruelties and rapacity of the reaction, and avowing contempt of Sharp. He was "snibbed," confined to his diocese, and "cast down, yea, lower than the dust," wrote Rothes to Lauderdale. He was held to have exaggerated in his reports the forces of the spirit of revolt; but Tweeddale, Sir Robert Murray, and Kincardine found ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Germany would assimilate and absorb the Prussian State. Alas! it was the Hohenzollern State which was to annex and subject the German Empire. Little did the Germans know Prussian tenacity. Little did they know the rapacity of the Black Eagle. Still less did they know the black magic ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... delightful little creature, and accompanies his mistress everywhere. While on the subject of the theatre, we are glad to learn that the cages now being erected behind the stage at Galy's Theatre will soon be ready, when there should be no further cause for complaint about the rapacity of some of the larger carnivora owned by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... 'therefore, you know, we won't suppose so.' And I cannot help avowing that this was the first occasion on which I really did justice to the clear head, and the plain, patient, practical good sense, of my old schoolfellow. 'Then,' said Traddles, 'you must prepare to disgorge all that your rapacity has become possessed of, and to make restoration to the last farthing. All the partnership books and papers must remain in our possession; all your books and papers; all money accounts and securities, of both kinds. In ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... find a German countess with more patient ears and sounder form than the Marchioness, and till then I cannot conceive that her influence is on the decline, particularly as no quarrel or coldness is likely to have taken place by letter. Her folly and rapacity will sooner or ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... them too small game to be taken seriously; I have seen him play for an hour with a mouse, and then let him go with a royal condescension. In this whole matter of "getting a living," Calvin was a great contrast to the rapacity of the age ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... of Saint-Claire-sur-Epte, Rouen, and its environs presented nothing but a scene of carnage, fire, and, slaughter. Strangers devouring the country; the villages deserted; the population massacred; the towns half destroyed, every where discord, hatred, avarice, and rapacity; all excesses united: such is the picture of the country at that period. At last Rollo, is created duke of Normandy; the proud Norwegian, becomes the benefactor of the country, to which he had so long proved a scourge. The population reappears; an active police is established, ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of Hamlet than as the first edition of the play. And this first Hamlet, on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper complexities of the subject are merely ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cherished a certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among the violences and the darkness of the race. It was reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke's breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes of Hastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... relief to the miserable. Of all the ingenious modes of torture that have ever been invented, that of solitary confinement is probably the most cruel—the mind feeding on itself with the rapacity of a cormorant, when the conscience quickens its activity and feeds its longings. Happily for Adrienne, she had too many positive cares, to be enabled to waste many minutes either in retrospection, or in endeavors to conjecture the future. Far—far more happily ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... supposed, and begged a repeal of the act. It was repealed. In 1850, you clamored for further legislation in favor of your property in human beings, and the fugitive slave law was placed on the nation's statute book. You continually cried, "Give, give!" and we gave. But nothing would satisfy your rapacity; you had resolved to quarrel with us. Do you remind me that we did not return your escaped slaves? This is only half the truth. Whenever you came after your chattel, with legal proofs of ownership, we caught and caged him, and sent him back to you, often at our own ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... to make one correct survey when given an opportunity practically to demonstrate their abilities under very favourable conditions. He had also incurred the dislike of influential caciques by defending the occupants of small holdings on friar estates from the rapacity of their rich neighbours, and by protecting free-patent applicants and homesteaders when large landowners opposed their applications in order to prevent their securing land, so that they might the more easily be ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... "I earnestly pray that may be so," Mr. Marrapit said. "I doubt. Rapacity and greed stalk the land. Mrs. Major had five-and-twenty pounds per annum. I will not go ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... their women—some for Portugal, where they bought the right to exist for a large head-tax, and where they saw their sons and daughters dragged away to baptism before their eyes. Others were sold as slaves, or had to satisfy the rapacity of their persecutors with the bodies of their children. Many flung themselves into the wells, and sought to bury despair in suicide. The Mediterranean was covered with famine-stricken and plague-breeding fleets of exiles. Putting into the Port of Genoa, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Socrates, which always seemed to have a strange attraction for its owner. He had once described to a fellow-writer the impression produced on him by that plaster face, so capaciously ugly, as though comprehending the whole of human life, sharing all man's gluttony and lust, his violence and rapacity, but sharing also his strivings toward ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gantelet gagne le gorgerin le mange"—"What the gauntlet gets, the gorget consumes." That reflecting soldier well calculated the profits of a military life, which consumes, in the pomp and waste which are necessary for its maintenance, the slender pay it receives, and even what its rapacity sometimes acquires. The favourite proverb of Erasmus was Festina lente!—"Hasten slowly!"[38] He wished it be inscribed wherever it could meet our eyes, on public buildings, and on our rings ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Magazine—he has not stopped here, he has descended much lower—& defrauded the old Veteran Soldiers who have bled for their Country in many a well fought field—for more than five Campaigns among others an old Sergeant of mine has felt his rapacity by the Industry of this man's wife they had accumulated something handsome to support them in their advanced age—which coming to the knowledge of this cruel Spoiler—he borrowed 4500 dollars from the poor Credulous Woman & left her ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... removed, and the card-tables placed, the ladies all rose, and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon joined by him, when all her views were overthrown by seeing him fall a victim to her mother's rapacity for whist players, and in a few moments after seated with the rest of the party. She now lost every expectation of pleasure. They were confined for the evening at different tables, and she had nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side of the room, as to make ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... you as a future provision, and as affording you the means of passing the remainder of your days in ease and tranquillity. What would become of you in case of the worst? Your numerous creditors would besiege you with a rapacity, still further excited by the support they would receive from court. You look at me with surprise because I speak the language of truth; be a reasonable creature I implore of you once in your life, and do not thus ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... other considerations in the problem. The people of to-day are less disposed to controversy, and avoid employing lawyers to settle disputes and differences in court, and others often hesitate to employ a lawyer for fear of being made a victim of the rapacity of some who have brought the profession into disrepute. Again, there is less confusion in the laws. They are being collected, condensed, arranged, and simplified, and people are coming to understand the codes. Likewise, the courts are adopting simpler rules and codes of civil procedure, which give ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... lightning they bore with them in their guns— were everywhere victorious, and the riches of the temples were seized; gloriously wrought vessels were hastily molten down into ingots, along with plate, shield, and wonderfully-worked flowers; rapacity was triumphant, and upon one occasion the value of the treasure collected and melted down into bars was computed at three millions and a half pounds sterling of ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... and formidable, but had been small indeed when compared with that which they now usurped. Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate, and freed from the control of Parliament, they displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age. The government was able through their instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without restraint. A separate council which sat at York, under the presidency of Wentworth, was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... doing home-lessons. He certainly had his books spread out before him, but the contents of his pockets were strewn upon his open books, and he was examining them and grumbling now and again at the rapacity of certain school-mates who had caused him to lose certain treasures, or accept less valuable ones, on the school system of "I'll give ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... poor fisherman of Naples, was for a week in July, 1647, absolute king of his native city. At that time Naples was subject to the crown of Spain. The people, provoked by the exasperating rapacity and extortion of the Viceroy of the King of Spain, rose in rebellion, choosing Masaniello as ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks—and bad manners, I am sorry to say—can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... sell this, and go beyond the Mississippi. To a reflecting mind, the scene was touching beyond description. Here was the sad remnant of a great nation, who having been forced back from the original country of their fathers, by successive acts of rapacity, are now compelled to enter into a compact which obliges them, half civilized as they are, to return to the forest. The case is this,—the white people, or rather Jackson and the southerns, say, that the Indians "retard improvement"—precisely ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... addressed more directly, there it is we shall find proofs of the view and purpose of the author; such traits are the key with the leather strap that verified the judgment of Sancho's kinsmen. To what purpose should a Frenchman, writing in the time of Louis XIV., censure the rapacity of innkeepers, and the wretchedness of their extorted accommodation, when France, from the time of Chaucer to the present hour, has been famous for the civility of the one and the convenience of the other? To what purpose, if the French government were to be criticised, enumerate the danger of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... consists, and which a free government is always most careful to protect. It denies the habeas corpus and the trial by jury. Personal freedom, property, and life, if assailed by the passion, the prejudice, or the rapacity of the ruler, have no security whatever. It has the effect of a bill of attainder or bill of pains and penalties, not upon a few individuals, but upon whole masses, including the millions who inhabit the subject States, and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... His wealth excited the rapacity of the viceroy Count Lemos, who, to obtain possession of it, accused him of exciting the natives to rebellion, and cast him into prison. In vain Salcedo entreated that he might appeal to the mercy of the king, and promised to give the viceroy ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... within a few years after the conquest of Mexico, Yucatan and Central America were overrun by military adventurers whose rapacity and violence drove the harmless and timid Village Indians from their pueblos into the forests; thus destroying in a few years a higher culture than the Spaniards were able to substitute in its place. Nothing can be ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... of the highest modern civilization, progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious—and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood. Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mountains, near the Killeries, I heard many particulars of the eagle's habit and history from a grey-haired peasant who had passed a long life in these wilds. The scarcity of hares, which here were once abundant, he attributed to the rapacity of those birds; and he affirmed, that when in pursuit of these animals, the eagle evinced a degree of intelligence that appeared extraordinary. They coursed the hares, he said, with great judgment and certain success; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... single vessel, commanded by Captain Rodrigo de Carvajal direct for Panama, with letters from Gonzalo to some of the principal inhabitants of that city urging them to favour his designs. In these letters, he pretended that he was exceedingly displeased on hearing of the violence and rapacity with which Bachicao had conducted himself towards the inhabitants of Panama, in direct contradiction to his orders, which were to land the Doctor Texada without doing injury to any one. He informed them that Hinojosa was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... pretend to be very influential with you. Not, however, that the object of this discourse is to make you over-harsh or suspicious towards your staff. For if any of them in the course of the last two years has never fallen under suspicion of rapacity, as I am told about Caesius and Chaerippus and Labeo—and think it true, because I know them—there is no authority, I think, which may not be intrusted to them, and no confidence which may not be placed in them with the utmost propriety, and in anyone else like them. But if there is anyone ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... dark and sad From proofs of hate displayed, From envy and rapacity, And kindness ill-repaid; The baseness of humanity Hath spoiled a cherished dream; Dear Heart, how different is the lake ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... persons as chose to submit to the extortionate demands of the keeper: from twenty to five hundred pounds premium, according to the rank and means of the applicant, in addition to a high weekly rent, being required for accommodation in this quarter. Some excuse for this rapacity may perhaps be found in the fact, that five thousand pounds was paid for the purchase of the Press Yard by Mr. Pitt, the then governor of Newgate. This gentleman, tried for high treason, in 1716, on suspicion of aiding Mr. Forster, the rebel general's escape, but acquitted, reaped ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... things have been noticed before. We do not shed a sympathetic tear over the two dollars which he once had to disgorge in New York, in payment for a ride of two miles; nor do we mourn for the numerous other dollars with which he reluctantly parted to satisfy the rapacity of hack-drivers all over the Union. We do not thrill with indignation, when we learn that he was, on a certain occasion, swept by crinolines into the middle of Broadway. Neither are we in any way stirred ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... rapacity of the old Scandinavian race Still visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organization displayed by them from the beginning in the seizure, survey, and distribution of land—in the building of cities and castles—in the wise speculations of an extensive commerce—may ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... animals they took them away; no attention was paid to the feeling of the poor peasants and nothing was considered as being too harsh for them; in most instances the latter had run away for fear of maltreatment. Nothing is so afflicting as to see the rapacity of pillaging soldiers, stealing and destroying everything coming under their hands. They took to excess vodka found in the magazines which the enemy had not destroyed, or in the castles off the main route. In consequence of this abuse of ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... moss waving from its sombre branches, looks melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone—that some splendid specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest, that on the more ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... brook that turns the mill; to the south the dense pine woods, peopled in our imaginations, with fairy elves, owls, and hobgoblins—now, alas, owing to the rapacity of the sawmills, naught but a howling wilderness ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... real representatives of the English power. Cressingham was a pompous ecclesiastic, who appropriated to his own uses the money set aside for the fortification of Berwick, and was odious to the Scots for his rapacity and incompetence. Ormesby was a pedantic lawyer, rigid in carrying out the king's orders but stiff and unsympathetic in dealing with the Scots. Under such rulers Scotland was neither subdued nor conciliated. No real effort was made to track to their hiding-places in the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... ship-masters. The crags which rose between the beach and the mainland, to the height of two or three hundred feet, afforded in their crevices shelter for unnumbered sea-fowl, in situations seemingly secured by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man. Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct which sends them to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is trying now: that is, to combine the devoted silence ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... eatable nut itself, for he collects the fibre in surprising quantities to line his burrow, and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas, however, for the helplessness of crabs, and the rapacity and cunning of all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the sake of the fibre it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has laid it all up, while he melts down the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... have they been addressed with such intelligence and tact. The few who have not approached them with sordid rapacity, but from love to them, as men, and souls to be redeemed, have most frequently been persons intellectually too narrow, too straightly bound in sects or opinions, to throw themselves into the character ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... birds' nests. In the Northern Sahara a bird's nest was not to be seen, but here the trees are all covered with them. Amongst the various smaller ones, we came upon a huge vulture's nest on a very small tholukh, which seemed to bend and look unhappy beneath the weight of this den of rapacity and violence. There are hereabouts no rocks for the eagles to build upon. We halted amidst abundance of herbage and small trees, which afforded a little shelter from ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... even of their best friends and companions, which forbids us to go farther in their praise. It is as unnecessary, as it would be painful, to enter on an enumeration of the instances of wanton cruelty, violence, and rapacity, which have sullied the fame of their most brilliant deeds in arms. It will be long before the French name will recover the disgrace which the remembrance of such scenes as Moscow, or Saragossa, or Tarragona, has attached to it, in ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... have been ever prone to sensuality and selfishness, in disobedience to the more refined and liberal principles of their nature; that in all ages and countries, in public and in private life, innumerable instances have been afforded of oppression, of rapacity, of cruelty, of fraud, of envy, and of malice. They own that it is too often in vain that you inform the understanding, and convince the judgment. They admit that you do not thereby reform the hearts of men. Though they know their duty, they will not practice ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... wisdom. He dwelt mainly on the truth of Christianity, the folly of idolatry, the unity and providence of God, the coming of Christ, and the judgment. At times he would severely rebuke the avarice and rapacity of his courtiers, who would loudly applaud him with their mouths and belie his exhortations by their works. One of these productions is still extant, in which he recommends Christianity in a characteristic strain, and in proof of its divine ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the same mysterious application of this fund that has been practised by his predecessors. In this case it may be converted into a fruitful source of peculation and plunder, and be at last in a great measure diverted from the public objects for which it was instituted to the satiation of private rapacity, and the colonists become gradually burdened with an overbearing load of taxation, merely for the purpose of enriching their governors. Be this, however, as it may, the illegality of levying money by the authority of any individual, ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... cut his throat,' and then believe ourselves bound to commit the murder which we have vowed? . . . 'The Saxons,' he says, 'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman, the Huns shameless. But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours? Is the Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a Christian's? If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder? He is utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood. But what of the Christian who does the same? The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better men than ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... and his army, at the very time when they might be supposed to reckon upon an undisputed retreat. This surprise would certainly have taken place, and it is not easy to say what might have been the consequence, had not the unexpected appearance of the train of waggons awakened the unbridled rapacity of the Arabs, in spite of their commander's prudence, and attempts to restrain them. In this manner the proposed ambuscade ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... blockade the Tagus. Junot's first measure was, on entering Lisbon, to disarm the inhabitants: and this done he commenced the levy of contributions. In every respect he treated the country as a conquest of France, and his Spanish auxiliaries followed the example of his rapacity. The Portuguese, indeed, were so oppressed by the French and Spanish, that they everywhere cherished the intention of rising upon the invaders, and they looked to England, whose flag was never out of sight of their coasts, for aid ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... much for them at once, and he must have time. He has done all he can; he has made Errol Master of the Horse, Sidney a Guelph and Equerry, George Fitzclarence the same and Adjutant-General, and doubtless they will all have their turn. Of course the stories told about the rapacity of the Conynghams have been innumerable. The King's will excited much astonishment, but as yet nothing is for certain known about the money, or what became of it, or what he gave away, and to whom, in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... nations came to rest, like birds taking shelter from the storm. Now what refuge is there? The island has been covered by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled from the Seven Hills.—The Alps only are left for them. There, amid the rapacity of Europe, stands (for how long?) the little island of twenty-four cantons. In truth it has not the poetic radiance and glamor of the Eternal City: history has not filled its air with the breath of gods and heroes; but a mighty music rises from the naked Earth; there is ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... brutes—the schieks being the very worst of the brutes—who have these monuments in their hands. Their numbers, the filthiness of their dress—or one might almost say no dress—their stench, their obscene indecency, their clattering noise, their rapacity, exercised without a moment's intercession; their abuse, as in this wise: "Very bad English-man; dam bad; dam, dam, dam! Him want to take all him money to the grave; but no, no, no! Devil hab him, and money too!" This, be it remembered, from a ferocious, almost blackened ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... detection from sea or land. The busy skiffs are hurried to and fro incessantly till the cargo is entirely ashore, when the secured gang, led by the captain, and escorted by armed sailors, is rapidly marched to the nearest plantation. There it is safe from the rapacity of local magistrates, who, if they have a chance, imitate their superiors by ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... as scouts and skirmishers was of the last importance to an army so weak in the arts of woodcraft, and efforts were made to engage the services of the friendly Cherokees and Catawbas, many of whom came to the camp, where their caprice, insolence, and rapacity tried to the utmost the patience of the commanders. That of Sir John Sinclair had already been overcome by his dealings with the provincial authorities; and he wrote in good French, at the tail of a letter to the Swiss colonel: "Adieu, my dear Bouquet. The greatest curse that ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... that from many they are become few; from being innumerable, only numerous." To make her story more probable, she caused some wool to be inserted between the intestines of two stags which had been embowelled; and her husband, thus artfully deceived, sacrificed his deer to the rapacity of his dogs. ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... determine with their lives. Unfortunately, the state was not materially benefited by these economical arrangements, since the greater part of what was thus saved was drawn off to supply the waste and cupidity of the Flemish court, who dealt with Spain with all the merciless rapacity that could be shown to a conquered ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.[127] Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: "We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... how poor Dick was scarcely sure he could call an article of dress his own, whenever Joe had been the first to go out into the town. The innumerable straits to which he reduced that unlucky chum, who had actually to deposit a dinner-suit at an hotel to save it from Atlee's rapacity, had amused Walpole; but then these things were all done in the spirit of the honest familiarity that prevailed between them—the tie of true camaraderie that neither suggested a thought of obligation on one side nor of painful inferiority on the other. Here ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... hostility, in a position so commanding, emboldened every Shimei to curse. In Ardishai, two or three unprincipled drunkards, with their dissolute bishop (Mar Gabriel), saved themselves from Mohammedan rapacity by taking part against the converts. These last were made examples of, to deter others from attending preaching or sending their children to the schools.' One poor widow, with four children,—a most consistent Christian,—was driven from her house by her father-in-law, because she ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... having been collecting edible birds' nests for a Celebes trader. Rajah Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, and thought ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... tribes from their own territories and dwellings to a region beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas, bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope that they will find a permanent abode, a final resting-place from your never-ending rapacity and persecution. There you have undertaken to lead the willing, and drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force, by treaty or by the sword and the rifle—all the remnants of the Seminoles, the Creeks, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... amusing collection. Luckily, the first was also the worst. The pasha whom he found installed at Mosul was, in appearance and temper, more like an ogre than a man. He was the terror of the country. His cruelty and rapacity knew no bounds. When he sent his tax-collectors on their dreaded round, he used to dismiss them with this short and pithy instruction: "Go, destroy, eat!" (i.e. "plunder"), and for his own profit had revived several kinds of contributions which had been suffered ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... their desertion must be imputed to their landlords, may be reasonably concluded, because some Lairds of more prudence and less rapacity have kept their vassals undiminished. From Raasa only one man had been seduced, and at Col there was no wish ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson |
