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Revolting   /rivˈoʊltɪŋ/   Listen
Revolting

adjective
1.
Highly offensive; arousing aversion or disgust.  Synonyms: disgustful, disgusting, distasteful, foul, loathly, loathsome, repellant, repellent, repelling, skanky, wicked, yucky.  "Distasteful language" , "A loathsome disease" , "The idea of eating meat is repellent to me" , "Revolting food" , "A wicked stench"






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"Revolting" Quotes from Famous Books



... propriety have been portrayed as a frail seduced woman—she must appear with the features of that heroic age, so rich in bloody catastrophes, in which all passions were violent, and men, both in good and evil, surpassed the ordinary standard of later and more degenerated ages. What is more revolting—what proves a deeper degeneracy of human nature, than horrid crimes conceived in the bosom of cowardly effeminacy? If such crimes are to be portrayed by the poet, he must neither seek to palliate them, nor to mitigate ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... retain the cynicism which has coloured such revolting features. When at length the doctor finds a woman as all women ought to be, he opens a new string of misfortunes which must attend her husband. He dreads one of the probable consequences of matrimony—progeny, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... which I would scruple to do—nothing—if by so doing I advanced the glorious cause of our Fatherland." The man's small eyes gleamed with the fire of a fanatic; revolting though he was, yet was there an element of grandeur about him. Even the Kid, watching silently from the bed, felt conscious of the power which seemed to spring from him as he stood there, squat and repulsive, with the lovely French girl ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... materials can that heart be composed, which can melt when insulted, and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod? Is it unfair to infer, that her virtue is built on narrow views and selfishness, who can caress a man, with true feminine softness, the very moment when he treats her tyrannically? ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... number, only seventeen were marked with the g which signified that their friendship was trusted. We cannot disassociate Swift from his own time, nor can we attribute simply to a melancholy life or to mental aberration the revolting conceptions which his works contain. The coarseness and corruption which marked the private and public life of Swift's day had their share in the production of such poems as The "Lady's Dressing-Room," and such degrading ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... others whom it would be tedious to mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... the bedside when one is near death, had religious conversation, prayer, singing, parting with friends; though, in this case, we had no extreme feebleness caused by disease to meet, but rather crime, in one of its most revolting forms, to recognize in bringing gospel appliances, concerning which crime we endeavored ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby

... talk like that again, Crystal," said her father, with a severity and vigor he seldom showed outside of board meetings. "It's only your ignorance of life that saves you from being actually revolting. I'm an old man and not sentimental, you'll grant, but, take my word for it, love is the only hope of pulling off marriage successfully, and even then it's not easy. As for Eugenia, I think she's made a fool of herself and is going to be unhappy, but ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller

... LIFE!" From what part of the epistle could the expositor have evolved a thought so soothing to tyrants—so revolting to every man who loves his own nature? From this? "For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldst receive him for ever." Receive him how? As a servant, exclaims our commentator. But what wrote the apostle? "NOT now as a servant, but above a servant, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... possession of one of the rifles. He knew that a snapping twig would probably mean his destruction. He had heard of captives, who, in such straits as his, had slain their captors while they slept. The thought was revolting to him. Cautiously creeping away into the outer darkness, it seemed hours before he dared press forward without fear of ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... the ea banana that takes long to ripen," is the quick reply. Compare also the derisive chants with which Kuapakaa drives home the chiefs of the six districts of Hawaii who have got his father out of favor, and Lono's taunts against the revolting ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous

... have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without the form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living? Even your contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the revolting aspects of their society, seem to have had an idea that this was not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for pity's sake that they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them that it was robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for themselves the whole product ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... me," he said very softly, "that human society has been always that, and perhaps will be always that: organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... buildings, forming a rude quadrangle pierced by one tall archway, stood beside a tarn that winked like polished steel. He sighed as his glance rested upon them. For many generations they had sheltered the Thurstons of Crosbie; but, unless he could stoop to soil his hands in a fashion revolting to his pride, a strange master would own them before many months had gone. An angry glitter came into his eyes, and his face grew set, as, placing a lighted candle in his hat, he moved forward into ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... I am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down Fleet St. Why not? When one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... nervously. He wished to hear the sound of his own voice, as a timid person whistles and talks on a lonely road at night. Only the year before he had killed a man in that cavern, under circumstances that were, I believe, revolting even to the honour of these bandits. He sat there between the shadow of his murder and the reality of the vengeance. I asked myself what could be the outcome of a struggle with him. He was armed; ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... bundle of faked Naval Notes. They had gone! So the Spy-Burglar had come, and, carefully shepherded by Dawson's sleuth-hounds, had found the primrose path easy for his crime. To Cary, the simple, honest gentleman, the whole plot seemed to be utterly revolting—justified, of course, by the country's needs in time of war, but none the less revolting. There is nothing of glamour in the Secret Service, nothing of romance, little even of excitement. It is a cold-blooded exercise of wits against wits, of spies against spies. The amateur plays ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone

... of "neutrality," as between enemies—taken while the "hostilities" had extended only to the single incident of Fort Sumter, gave surprise and some offense to the North. It was a recognition of belligerency; that is to say, while not in any other respect recognizing the revolting States as an independent power, it accorded to them the rights of a belligerent. The magnitude very quickly reached by the struggle would have made this step necessary and proper, so that, if England had only gone a trifle more slowly, she would soon have reached the same point without ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... and "virtuous" life ("it must, it must be virtuous") he dreamed feverishly at every moment. He thirsted for that reformation and renewal. The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... find, at the end of the year, that he was not what he used to be ere he took to spinning. I think, then, that I am right in concluding that the mountaineers of Bohemia would be like the mountaineers of Scotland, were they similarly employed; and I am quite sure that a more revolting spectacle is not to be seen anywhere than that which a mountain district presents, of which the inhabitants ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... when a frenzied mother roasted her own child, and in the mockery of desperateness reserved the half of the horrible meal for those murderers who daily broke in upon her to rob her of what scanty food had been left her; nor yet other of those incidents, too revolting for needless repetition, which the historian of the last siege of Jerusalem chronicles. But how often, these many centuries, must Israel's women have felt that terrible longing for childlessness, and how often must the prayer of despair for the quick death of falling mountains and burying hills ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... one evening, and sat smoking lazily with a dreamy look on his face. He had lately been studying the subject of Asiatic cholera, but he did not seem to be thinking of that. He had just been through what he called a "revolting experience," but it is doubtful if he was thinking of that. Whatever his thoughts were, they put a very different look on his face than that which it used to wear while ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... her, and she must have been only too glad to see an opportunity of shaking off the Egyptian yoke. Accordingly, no sooner did the Phoenicians of the mainland conclude the arrangement by which they became part and parcel of the Persian Empire than the Cyprians followed their example, and, revolting from Egypt, offered themselves of their own free will to Persia.[14260] Cambyses, it is needless to say, readily accepted ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... farce, and the Jewish actors in it had a sorry time. The people about the palace, taking their lead from the emperor, treated them as clowns, and hissed and mocked them, and even beat them. The scene is somewhat revolting when one conjures up the picture of the aged Jewish philosopher being roughly handled by the set of ruffians and impudent slaves who surrounded a Roman emperor. Happily Gaius jeered once too often in his mad life. One Chaerea, a Roman of position, nursed ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... can never be caused save among the ranks of those who have secret reason to be terrorised! There is nothing terrifying in Truth to those who are true! If I distract and alarm unworthy societies, revolting hypocrism, established shams and miserable conventions, I am only the wielder of the broom that sweeps out the cobwebs and the dust from a dirty house. My one desire is to make the habitation of Christian souls clean! Terror and confusion there will be,—there must ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... friendship. How I lost it, I have already told you. When, remains to tell you. I lost it when any fruits which my youth may have promised had appeared; lost it all at once, under circumstances scarcely more annoying to my feelings than revolting to my sense of what was right ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... Their bodies are not very muscular. They rarely eat meat once a week, and never oftener, and then only the hard dry charqui. Although with a knowledge that the labour was voluntary, it was nevertheless quite revolting to see the state in which they reached the mouth of the mine; their bodies bent forward, leaning with their arms on the steps, their legs bowed, their muscles quivering, the perspiration streaming from their faces over their breasts, their nostrils distended, the corners ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... struggle, however, brought a new problem. Many thousands of exiles from the revolting colonies, willing to sacrifice everything in order to retain their British citizenship, poured over the borders into the Canadian lands. They settled for the first time the rich province of Ontario, greatly increased the population of Nova ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... an air of satisfaction. But this joy was far from being complete, for her heart was still troubled by many things, and, above all, by the presentiment of the regency. The more she leaned forward to show herself, the more she beheld the revolting scenes which the increasing light revealed. Terror took possession of her soul as it became necessary to appear calm and confiding; and her heart was saddened at the very gayety of her words and countenance. Exposed to all eyes, she felt herself a mere woman, and shuddered ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... which he immediately transmitted to me, and, probably, to Congress also) that, if I mistake not, the effect of it will be quite of another kind. It will be seen to be subversive of the very principles upon which it is pretended to be established, and so revolting in its nature, that it is utterly impossible the United States could ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various

... if you did profess it. What would you do if you professed yourselves enemies to God? Could you possibly vent your enmity any other way than this, in withdrawing from the yoke of his obedience, in revolting from that allegiance you owe to him? You could wrong him no further than by setting your hearts and ways contrary to his heart and ways in loving what he hates and hating what he loves. For his own blessed being you could not impair it. Now, consider if that be not ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... read over this wretched and revolting letter, I detected immediately how the new plot had been framed to keep me still deceived; to heap wrong after wrong on me with the same impunity. She was not aware that I had followed her into the house, and had heard all from her voice and Mannion's—she believed that I was still ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... have shown," says he, "and on authorities from which none can lightly differ, not only the cruelty and immorality which this system necessarily involves, but its most revolting feature, its gross partiality, he has wholly suppressed this, the most important part of my argument; as even the bare notice of it would have instantly exposed the sophistry to which he has had recourse. If, however, he would fairly meet ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... that revolting youth?" said Mrs. Fielding. "He's half-witted as well as deformed. His brother!" with a nod towards her chauffeur's back. "He's a great trial to Jack, I believe. My husband has offered a hundred times ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... to get fees of. The State 'll starve you, old Hardscrabble 'll make a few dollars out of your feed-but what of that? We don't want you here." There was something so sullen and mysterious in the coarse features of this stalwart man-something so revolting in his profession, though it was esteemed necessary to the elevation of men seeking political popularity-something so at variance with common sense in the punishment meted out to him who followed it, as to create a deep interest in his history, notwithstanding his coldness towards ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... these facts, to talk of his "having come to New York a stranger some years ago, and finding the state in possession of two rich families," &c. What absurdity! But, shrinking from these disgusting and revolting exposures, the reader, it is believed, will cheerfully turn to the perusal of those letters which again presents to his view Colonel Burr in the domestic and social scenes ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... deeply touched by them. The husband, the child, the home, the social circle, the church, these things were infinitely more interesting and important to them than diplomas, rights to work, rights to property, rights to vote. All the sentiments in the revolting women's program seemed trivial, cold, profitless beside the realities of life as they dreamed them and struggled to ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... under the title of Un Grido. This work begins with an address to the reader, in which the poet laments the prevailing tendency of public opinion, and protests against what he considers a determined war on all old and honored beliefs and feelings, and a substitution therefor of a vague and revolting materialism. Then come five sonnets to Pietro Aretino, the witty poet and scoffer of the Renaissance era. Aretino is invited to reappear among men, for the world, says Rizzi, has again become worthy of such a man's presence. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... disposed to believe in the many revolting stories so generally circulated, stating that the rebels had actually, in many instances, boiled the bodies of the Federal dead, for the purpose of obtaining the bones as relics. So frequently, however, has the story been repeated, and from so many trustworthy ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... you." The revolting little man always began his discourse now with this exasperating phrase. "Mrs. Barrington would like very much to obtain the divorce. She wishes very much to have her name inscribed on family register of Fujinami house. ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... that can obtain supremacy only by trampling upon human individuality and personal sovereignty, and you will thereby pronounce sentence of death upon it. Show me the government which can be maintained only by destroying the rights of a portion of the people; and you will indicate the duty of openly revolting against it. Show me the religion which sanctions the ownership of one man by another, and you will demonstrate it to be purely infernal in its ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison

... But the views of this young lady are represented as having been so far in advance of her age that she seems hardly possible as an historical personage, and withdraws into the myth-mists. To that region certainly belongs the ancient chronicle in which we read how the Irish Nemedians, revolting against the intolerable deal of cream and butter and wheaten meal exacted from them by their oppressors, the Fomorians, those ferocious African pirates, emigrated to Hellas, in hope of better things, but were at last driven back home to escape the heavier yoke of the Athenians, who compelled ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... April I had fallen ill, and it was now actually the 2d of June. Oh! sickening calculation! revolting register of hours! for in that same moment which brought back this one recollection, perhaps by steadying my brain, rushed back in a torrent all the other dreadful remembrances of the period, and now the more so, because, though the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... document from Gen. Eppes, the officer in command, to be found in the Richmond Enquirer for Sept. 6, 1831. It is an indignant denunciation of precisely these outrages; and though he refuses to give details, he supplies their place by epithets: "revolting,"—"inhuman and not to be justified,"—"acts of barbarity and cruelty,"—"acts of atrocity,"—"this course of proceeding dignifies the rebel and the assassin with the sanctity of martyrdom." And he ends by threatening martial law upon all ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... to me she was right deere: And this is certaine; vnto him that could The place where she abides to me vnfold For ever I would vow my selfe his friend, Never revolting till my life did end. And there fore, sir (as well I know your skill) If you will give me physicke for this ill And shewe me if Eurymine do live, It were a recompence for all my paine, And I should thinke ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... one of comparative inactivity for Jones. He enjoyed for a time the praise of all friends of the revolting colonies. He was the lion of Paris. Then came the investigation into the action of Landais at the time of the great battle. Though his course at that time was one of open treachery, inspired by his wish ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... enough to be worn in Madrid". At Tuguey and some other villages the natives resist the entrance of the Spaniards, but are terrified at the sound of firearms, and quickly yield submission. Retracing their route, the Spaniards find that the villages which they had left in peace are now revolting; they seize the chief who has most disturbed the people, and send him to Manila. The governor feasts him there, and sends him back to his own village, apparently well pleased with the Spaniards. Miranda searches for gold-mines, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various

... always been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty and reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to her, which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless incessant misery. We are told that she indignantly bestowed a hearty buffet on the cheek of a tailor who approached her too closely when it was intended to furnish her with female dress; but she was helpless ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... and in both cases one is bound to admit that there is much justification, for they are the result of the harm that unbridled power in Church and in State alike have wrought to the people, who are now revolting against both. But the revolt is only a passing thing. Humanity does not really change; only passing manifestations of it change; and though the passing manifestations be counted by centuries, what is that in the length of a day counted by myriads ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... of the more revolting features of chattel slavery has always been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust of their masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? We read in our histories ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... glum and gloomy people, veritable children of sorrow, and the remark of the former speaker caused me to recollect that all the beds were in a very bad condition and the bedchambers presented nothing to the eyes of the married couple but what was hideous and revolting. Ah! gentlemen, how is it possible that our minds should be in an ideal state, when instead of the music of angels flying here and there in the bosom of that heaven to which we have attained, our ears are assailed by the most detestable, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... student of human nature, for he sees all sides of life in the great gay capital, especially the darker sides. He knows the sins of his fellow men and women, their follies and hypocrisies, he receives incredible confessions, he is constantly summoned to the scenes of revolting crime. Nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises him, and he has no illusions, yet he usually manages to keep a store of grim pity for erring humanity. M. Pougeot was one of the most distinguished and intelligent members of this interesting body. ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... it! Vast sheets of paper were published daily in which all crimes were recorded in detail. The more revolting the deed, the more minute the description. Horrors were their chief delight. Scandals were drunk in with thirstful eyes. These chronicles of crime and filth were issued by hundreds of thousands. There was hardly a family in ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell

... him. She says she loathed him with an unspeakable horror from the first moment that her eyes met his revolting form. She says she saw a hideous toad once in a nasty pond, and she says that rather would she take that noisome reptile and clasp its slimy bosom to her own than tolerate one instant's touch ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome

... Czarism. They continued to serve the government when the authority passed over into the hands of the bourgeois imperialists. They were inherited with all their knowledge and technical skill, by the coalition government in the next period of the revolution. But when the revolting workingmen, soldiers and peasants flung the parties of the exploiting classes away from the rudder of State and tried to take the management of affairs into their own hands, then the bureaucrats and clerks flew into a passion and absolutely refused to support the new government in any way. More ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky

... on the moneys of this part of the world. There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... And yet, revolting as the custom now appears, it held its place as a recognized method for the settlement of personal controversies among "gentlemen," to a time within the memories of men still living. The code, a heritage from barbaric times, lingered till it had caused more than one bloody chapter to ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... I hear my readers exclaim,—"Parents deliberately sacrificing their own innocent child to save the life of another man's." But this child was a conscious and willing victim: it is a story of vicarious death—as significant as, and not more revolting than, the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac. In both cases it was obedience to the call of duty, utter submission to the command of a higher voice, whether given by a visible or an invisible angel, or heard by an outward or an inward ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... are tedious and revolting to most of us and especially to children. After a few minutes their attention flags, they cease to listen to your everlasting questions and reply at random. This way of testing them is pedantic and useless; a chance word will often show their sense and intelligence better than much talking, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... General Prescott's administration, one McLane, who was said to be not quite mentally responsible for his acts, was convicted at Quebec for complicity in the designs of French agents, and was executed near St. John's gate with all the revolting incidents of a traitor's death in those relentless times. His illiterate accomplice, Frechette, was sentenced to imprisonment for life, but was soon released on the grounds of his ignorance of the serious crime he was committing. No doubt in these days some restlessness existed in ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... taken from the prose of Davila. Yet the plot, though capable of an application so favourable for the royal party, contained circumstances of offence to it. If the parallel between Guise and Monmouth was on the one hand felicitous, as pointing out the nature of the Duke's designs, the moral was revolting, as seeming to recommend the assassination of Charles's favourite son. The king also loved Monmouth to the very last; and was slow and reluctant in permitting his character to be placed in a criminal or odious point of view.[34] The play, therefore, though ready for exhibition before midsummer ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... on me atrocities before which those of the Germans pale into insignificance. During the first month he described to me in detail the achievements and diseases from birth upwards of all his children—a revolting record. He next proceeded to deal exhaustively with the construction and working of his gramophone, his bathroom geyser, his patent knife-machine and his vacuum carpet-cleaner; also with his methods of drying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various

... attributes a wrathful justice to the Father and a tender mercy to CHRIST, and then represents the Son as dying to soothe the anger and satisfy the relentless demands of the Father. Such unholy and revolting ideas are the leaven of heathenism, not the unleavened bread ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis

... small head seemed composed entirely of a cavernous mouth armed with row upon row of carnivorous teeth. Dorothy gasped with terror and both girls shrank closer to the two men, who maintained a baffled silence as the huge beast passed his revolting head along the hull of ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... the great open square, was the throne of infamy upon which an Austrian nobleman was about to bid adieu to name, honor, family, and the associations which had surrounded his boyhood, and to be thrust into the revolting companionship of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... length, to have dawned for the long benighted empire of Japan. That empire was as a sealed book to all Christian nations. As is well known, no traveller or merchant from any Christian land could set foot on its territory without first performing the revolting ceremony of trampling on the chief emblem of the Christian faith. At one time, nevertheless, there were many Christians in Japan, and, as will be seen, heathen prejudice and persecution had not been able to extinguish the Divine light. It may be ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... can devote all my time to unravelling the mystery. It is for this reason that I have acquainted myself with the element of London with which, as you have noticed, I am very familiar. The life these criminals are leading is quite as revolting to me as it is to you, and the scenes you and I have witnessed together are no more unpleasant to you than they are to me; but what can I do? The man lives and must be run down. He is in England, ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... hearing the commotion in the yard, the hideous catamaran and the ugly boogaboo came out of the castle and regarded Wilhelm with ferocious countenances. Never before had Wilhelm seen such revolting monsters! ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field

... civilisation borne us? It has passed over a land unprepared for it—it has left nakedness behind it; we have lost our forests, but our marauders remain; we have destroyed all that is picturesque, while we have retained everything that is revolting in barbarism. Through the midst of this woodland there runs a deep gully or glen, where the stillness of the scene is broken in upon by the brawling of a mountain-stream, which, however, in the winter season, swells into a rapid and ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... dropping of a pail outside the door, the clink of a coal shovel, the banging of a door, the sound of voices. So many houses cheek by jowl, so many squirming lives, so many back yards, back doors giving on to the night. It was revolting. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... was certainly very old. A dreadful mustiness pervaded the atmosphere. The dirt, too, the heavy deposit of guano upon the floor, made it almost revolting. There was no furniture of any sort, while yet it conveyed the suggestion that, at some remote period, it had ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... more revolting to our modern notions of decency than the inhuman custom of punishing criminals in the open streets. From the earliest days of the colonies the greatest publicity was given to the crime, to its punishment, and to the criminal. Anna shows, in her acquaintance with ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... question was brief. It announced the recapture of one of the prisoners recently escaped from Edinburgh Castle; gave his name, Clausel, and added that he had entered into the particulars of the recent revolting murder in the Castle, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Mrs. Fishley's taking my poor deformed sister by the arm, and shaking her, was too revolting, and even horrible, to be endured. If I could bear everything else, I could not bear that. At the present time, I have this pleasant consciousness, that I did not strike the woman; I only grasped ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic

... as hard as whipcord, and legs like anchor-cables; all these were fostered and made able by brown St. Francis' merry sons. Fra Palamone, dear unknown, Fra Palamone, ever your servant! And now—"here, with another revolting change, he turned his lips back to show his tooth—"And now," said he, "you fish-eyed, jelly-gutted, staring, misbegotten bottle of bile, who in the deuce's name lent you the impudence to listen to ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... Abeokuta were half wild with exultation and joy, and their gratitude to their white allies was unbounded. Mr. Goodenough begged them not to lose an hour in burying their slain enemies, and the entire population were engaged for the two following days upon this necessary but revolting duty. The dead were counted as they were placed in the great pits dug for their reception, and it was found that no fewer than three thousand ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty

... outline, indicating the cartoon they wished Kittrell to draw. The idea was so coarse, so brutal, so revolting, that Kittrell stood aghast, and, as he stood, he was aware of Salton's little eyes fixed on him. Benson waited; ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... slender resources. Most of all she tempts cities, for they are contending for the greatest prizes, liberty or domination. It is absolutely childish then to imagine that when human nature is bent on performing a thing it will be deterred by law or any other force. If revolting cities are quite sure that no mercy will be shown, they will fight to the last, bequeathing the victors only smoking ruins. It would be more expedient to be merciful and thus save the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance; habit, which makes everything easy, and cast the difficulties upon the deviation from a wonted course." Thus, make sobriety a habit and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will become revolting to every principle of conduct which regulates the life of the individual. Hence the necessity for the greatest care and watchfulness against the inroad of any evil habit; for the character is always weakest at that point at which it has once given way; and it is long before a ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... world, who having an inclination towards me has not gratified it, and has not known me in my degradation!' She almost loving him.—Suppose, too, this touch in her could not be believed in by his mother or mistress: by some handsome and proudly virtuous woman, always revolting from her." A more agreeable sketch than either follows, though it would not please M. Taine so well. "The little baby-like married woman—so strange in her new dignity, and talking with tears in her eyes, of her sisters 'and all of them' at home. Never from home before, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... Jim, I wouldn't wonder if that's the very one for you," said J.C., puffing leisurely at his cigar, and still keeping his eyes fixed upon the figure in white, as if to one of his fastidious taste there was nothing very revolting in seeing Maude Remington wash the supper dishes, even though her hands were brown and her arms a ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes

... to me; I could no longer endure his revolting aspect; it was too much, I could hold out no longer. I shut my eyes, and I then felt that he dared to put his hands on my hat, took it slowly off my head, and left it naked! I was seized with giddiness—my breathing was suspended—a ringing came in my ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... However imperfectly discharged, one function even of the pagan priest (it is supposed) must have been—to guide, to counsel, to exhort, as a teacher of morals. And, had that been so, the practical precepts, and the moral commentary coming after even the grossest forms of worship, or the most revolting mythological legends, might have operated to neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them into better meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, has attempted something of that sort in his 'Wisdom of the Ancients.' But ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... of many of their officers, the loss of the baggage on the other side of the river, the example of such a number of runaways, and the much more revolting sight of the wounded abandoned on both sides of the river, and left weltering in despair on the snow, which was dyed with their blood: everything, in short, contributed to discourage them; and they were now confounded with the mass of disbanded men who ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... Congress,—a law which not only gave the slaveholder of the South the right to seek out and bring back into slavery any colored person whom he claimed as a slave, but commanded the people of the free States to assist in this revolting business. The most frequent theme of conversation while Mrs. Stowe was in Boston was this proposed law, and when she arrived in Brunswick her soul was all on fire with indignation at this new indignity and wrong about to be inflicted by the slave-power ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... matter what it may cost your amour propre. You should have remembered you were engaged. You forgot that, too, I suppose. And then you go and forget your quarrel. It's the most revolting exhibition of ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad

... deliberately to instruct his countrymen in political and social issues; to attack the abuses of the Assembly, of the Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting" sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers and men of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, and these the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus in his own person. And ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... with Dr. Southwood Smith," she says. "On visiting him, we saw an object which I have often heard celebrated, and had thought would be revolting, but found, on the contrary, an agreeable sight; this is the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham. It was at Bentham's request, that the skeleton, dressed in the same dress he habitually wore, stuffed out to an exact resemblance of life, and with a portrait-mask in wax,—the best I ever saw,—sits ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... the West End, these pilgrimages to the shrine of the outcast and the homeless were by way of being a mental debauch. He arose from them in the morning as a man may arise to the remembrance of unjustified excess, which leaves the mind inert and the body weary. His daily task presented itself in a revolting attitude. Why had he been destined to this slavery? Why must he set out to his work at an hour of the chilly morning when the West End was still shuttered and asleep and the very footmen still yawned in their beds? If he had any consolation, it was that the others ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... of Antigua, but a very few years previous to emancipation, is represented to have been truly revolting. It has already been stated that the Sabbath was the market day up to 1832, and this is evidence enough that the Lord's day was utterly desecrated by the mass of the population. Now there are few parts of our own country, equal in population, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... by education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is not the case—even where the religious man is taking a new departure, revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his society—I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due to unobserved and unanalysed ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... grey psychological histories of typical young persons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deep and inherent sense, false to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... only ones sane enough to subordinate sexual love to reverence for motherhood. Alexander Weill makes a Jewish mother say: 'Is it proper for a good Jewish mother to concern herself about love? Love is revolting idolatry. A Jewess may love only God, her husband, and her children.' Granny (Alt-Babele) in one of Kompert's tales says: 'God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.' In Jewish novels, maternal love is made the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... pleasure can be both emotional and sensational. Pleasure, like pain, can be a thing of bodily sensation alone; in which case it tends to become a thing of degrading and humiliating reality. A human entity entirely obsessed by physical pleasure is a revolting and obscene spectacle. Even with animals it is only when their sensation of pleasure is in some degree emotionalized that we can endure to contemplate it ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... that the Vicar of the Prince of Peace should possess one spot of territory which would be held inviolable, so that all nations and peoples could at all times, in war, as well as in peace, freely correspond with him. Nothing can be more revolting to our feelings than that the spiritual government of the Church should be constantly hampered by the hostile aggressions of ambitious rulers, an eventuality always likely to occur so long as the Pope remains the subject of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... is wrong indubitably. It is contrary to good government that a sacerdotal class, by means of confession and direction, should be placed in a position of deciding upon conduct. It is revolting to human dignity that this same class, without national allegiance, and without domestic ties, should have the opportunity of infecting young minds by unhealthy questionings and dishonorable suggestions. But this wrong, which is inherent ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... intuition was supposed to transcend the sagacity of professional statesmen. And yet the Holy Alliance was the supreme outcome of his endeavors, as the League of Nations was that of Mr. Wilson's. In lieu of universal peace all eastern Europe was still warring and revolting in September and the general outlook was disquieting. The disheartening effect of the contrast between the promise and the achievement of the American statesman was felt throughout the world. But Mr. Wilson has the solace to know that people hardly ever ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... till their very name stank in the nostrils of the common people. Their blood lust had been so great that when they had no Russian peasant to torture they fell back on the poor unfortunate Czech soldiers who had fallen into their hands as prisoners of war. Many authentic cases of this kind are so revolting in character that it is better to keep them in the dark rather than advertise how fiendishly cruel men can be to one another. I knew that the Czechs had threatened to retaliate. The incident of the white flag previously ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... new, even if it be a new territory—the most strange is the metallic coffin: the grave is no protection against their mania for novelty. In the windows of a shop in Broadway, this strange, and to my mind revolting, article may be seen, shaped like a mummy, fitting hermetically tight, and with a plate of glass to reveal the features of the inanimate inmate. I have certainly read of the disconsolate lover who, on the death of her who ungratefully ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... woman reproached him for not loving her as much as she loved him. She was tired of dissimulating; her husband was an object of horror to her, and she had to tell him untruths and submit to his caresses which were revolting to her. Serge calmed her with a kiss, and bade ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... of nature, which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study, out of empty heads, till it hardly betters the blocks on which dresses and hair are tried in barbers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be revolting to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, outreaching all efforts ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... chaplain of the Poughkeepsie. This divine prayed with the dying man; but even he, in the last moments of the sufferer, was little more than a passive but shocked witness of remorse, suspended over the abyss of eternity in hopeless dread. We shall not enter into the details of the revolting scene, but simply add that curses, blasphemy, tremulous cries for mercy, agonized entreaties to be advised, and sullen defiance, were all strangely and fearfully blended. In the midst of one of these revolting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... the sexton stated, careering towards a revolting object at some little distance on the right hand. It was a gibbet, with its grisly burden. He rode swiftly towards it, and, reining in his horse, took off his hat, bowing profoundly to the carcase that swung in the morning breeze. Just at that moment ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... Duncan! When even the men of the flagship showed signs of revolting, he drew them around him, and in a voice which seemed almost choked with rising tears addressed them in words that were at once simple and touching. His concluding ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables

... peripheral districts beyond the Euphrates, Danube, and Rhine, as also in the rapid Teutonization of eastern Gaul, which here prepared the way for the assertion of independence. The border satraps of the ancient Persian Empire were constantly revolting, as the history of Asia Minor shows. Aragon, Old Castile, and Portugal were the first kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula to throw off Saracen dominion. Mountain ranges and weary stretches of desert roads enabled the rebellions in Chinese Turkestan and ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... him dead. I ordered the room to be cleared as soon as the melancholy truth was fairly established, and remained several minutes alone with the body. The countenance was set in death. The eyes, still open, had that revolting glare of frenzied delight with which the spirit had departed, and the whole face presented the dread picture of a hopeless end. I knelt and, though a Protestant, prayed fervently for the soul of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... the colored man, and the knowledge of his total deprivation of civil abilities perpetuates the existing prejudice against him, so does the dress of the Frank clothe him with all that is distasteful and revolting in the eyes of the native of the East, with his prejudices dating back to the earlier days of the prophets. To pass over the external appearances of the reformed Eastern, let us examine the results of the civilization of Europe with which his costume has clothed him. Tight ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... there was a positive emulation in evil. In that respect, many of our allies surpassed the French. We were their teachers in every thing; but in copying our qualities, they caricatured our defects. Their gross and brutal plunder was perfectly revolting. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... the Lazy A, though he had been very careful to hide the fact that he had heard it. Jean's glance, following that of her director, was a revealing one. She bit her lip; and in a moment she went on, with her chin held a shade higher and her pride revolting against subterfuge. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... consonant with the dignity of the legitimate spouse, glad and proud in an assured happiness. "But Society is a hideous affair!" said de Gery to himself, dismayed and with cold hands. The smiles around him had upon him the effect of hypocritical grimaces. He felt shame and disgust. Then suddenly revolting: "Come, it is not possible." And, as though in reply to this exclamation, behind him the scandalous tongue resumed in an easy tone: "After all, you know, I cannot vouch for its truth. I am only repeating what I have heard. But look! Baroness ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... Suetonian roll-call of his peccadilloes in this way. One only we shall cite, to illustrate the amorous delight with which he pursued any murder which happened to be seasoned highly to his taste by enormous atrocity, and by almost unconquerable difficulty. It would really be pleasant, were it not for the revolting consideration of the persons concerned, and their relation to each other, to watch the tortuous pursuit of the hunter, and the doubles of the game, in this obstinate chase. For certain reasons of state, as Nero ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey



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