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Savageness

noun
1.
The property of being untamed and ferocious.  Synonym: savagery.  "A craving for barbaric splendor, for savagery and color and the throb of drums"






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"Savageness" Quotes from Famous Books



... all that to-morrow. God grant that the Professor's report may be a favourable one," said Manutoli, thinking little of the savageness of his wish as regarded the poor artist. But, to the mind of the Baron, it was a question between one who was a fellow-creature of his own, and one who could hardly be considered such. How was it possible to put in comparison for a moment the consideration of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... to life; not the remorse of the soul,—that still slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,—but the gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney, coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, and unsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into the vilest cowardice. With ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Babe). Some powerful Spirit instruct the Kites and Ravens To be thy Nurses. Wolves and Bears, they say (Casting their savageness aside), have done ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... trunk, or bored to death by the teeth of the river horse. In regard to the latter animal, the danger which they incurred, was more imminent than with the elephants, but this did not arise from the greater ferocity or savageness of the animal, for the river horse moves in general in a sluggish and harmless manner; but in the shallow places of the river, the horses were seen walking at the bottom, and the space between them and the boat so small, that the keel often came into collision with ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... the kind. Her mind was one that dwelt on the present, not on the past. She was unhappy about her furniture, unhappy about the frocks of those four younger children, unhappy that the loaves of bread went faster and faster every day, very unhappy now at the savageness with which her husband prosecuted his anger against Lady Mason. But it did not occur to her to be unhappy because she had ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... rushed into the Tribune. I had seen him before, on the fearful night which prepared the attack on the palace; but he was then in the haste and affected savageness of the rabble. He now played the part of leader of a political sect; and the commencement of his address adopted something of the decorum of public council. In this there was an artifice; for, resistless as the club was, it still retained a jealousy of the superior legislative rank ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... province fully to attest to the earnestness, the savageness and the brutality with which these Indians commenced this contest. I was then stationed in their country and came very near being one of their first victims. The circumstances of this narrow escape happened as follows. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... the door just as it opened, and Mary darted into the room with Griggs following. "What do you want here?" he demanded, with peremptory savageness in his voice, which was a tone he had never ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... which should have inhabited all the year in those countries, whose valiant minds were much to be commended, that neither fear of force, nor the cruel nipping storms of the raging winter, neither the intemperature of so unhealthful a country, neither the savageness of the people, neither the sight and show of such and so many strange meteors, neither the desire to return to their native soil, neither regard of friends, neither care of possessions and inheritances, finally, not the love of life (a thing of all other ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt

... certainly deserves praise for liveliness of description and justness of observation. Before the Tatler and Spectator, if the writers for the theatre are excepted, England had no masters of common life. No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the savageness of neglect, or the impertinence of civility; to show when to speak, or to be silent; how to refuse, or how to comply. We had many books to teach us our more important duties, and to settle opinions ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson

... of a company of idiots, Lunatics, notwithstanding the incoherency of their words and thoughts, at least speak, know each other, and seek each other; but among idiots there reigns a stupid indifference, an isolated savageness. Never do they pronounce an articulate word. Sometimes is heard among them savage laughter, or groans and cries which resemble nothing human. Scarcely can a few among them recognize their keepers; and yet, let us repeat it with admiration, with reverence to the Creator, these ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... the necessity of observing, that this learned and judicious writer has not accurately distinguished the deficiencies and demands of the different conditions of human life, which, from a degree of savageness and independence, in which all laws are vain, passes, or may pass, by innumerable gradations, to a state of reciprocal benignity, in which laws shall be no longer necessary. Men are first wild and unsocial, living each man to himself, taking from the weak, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... of God's orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being torn to pieces, and partly ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... man before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the serenity of form tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self- seeking without being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule. At this period, the world is to him only destiny, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... this new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this collection of the school,—left to show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends us ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... memory. "Labitur et labetur;" it forms and breaks again, like the billows of the sea, and is but a mockery of unity. When I speak of barbarian states, I mean such as consist of members not simply barbarous, but just so far removed from the extreme of savageness that they admit of having certain principles in common, and are able to submit themselves individually to the system which rises out of those principles; that they do recognize the ideas of government, property, and law, however imperfectly; though they still differ from ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... to make another reflection in passing to the rest of the history. Humane, beautiful, and cheering as the religion of the patriarchs appears, yet traits of savageness and cruelty run through it, out of which man may emerge, or into which he may again ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... looked over the roaring side. Long and loose and lean, she was lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he was singing, but with a puzzling savageness of tone: ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly

... had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands, and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those ditches with water brought from ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... not uncommonly a savageness of self-assertion about Americans which arises from a too great anxiety to be admitted to fellowship with Britons. She had felt this, and conscious of reputation already made by herself in the social life of New York, she had half trusted that she would be well received ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... blazing up of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty Doctor Grim, what has ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... command of men try to bring them to order and discipline by the mildest and fairest means, and not treat them worse than gardeners do those wild plants, which, with care and attention, lose gradually the savageness of their nature, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... is that savageness begets savageness, and gentleness begets gentleness. Children who are unsympathetically treated become unsympathetic; whereas treating them with due fellow-feeling is a means of cultivating their fellow-feeling. With family governments as ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... Corn-Law Rhymer we may say here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he delights"—may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man—"in cursing;" he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and he can be most sweet) by giving some sudden sickening ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... marriage; while his own kindred stood by him and bravely fought his hopeless battle to the last,—employing as his advocate the celebrated John Breckenridge, who was then almost without a rival at the Kentucky bar. But, on the other hand, his wife's family pursued their unfortunate relative with a savageness of hatred hardly to be paralleled. Having hunted him to the very foot of the scaffold, their persevering malice seemed unsated even by the sight of their victim suspended as a felon before their very eyes; for it was reported, at the time, that two of the murdered woman's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... Ward as Ward himself had dealt trenchantly with the reformers and all others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than to the whole range of Christian ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... abused and often massacred" (Curr, I., 108). "A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off; otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands" (80). "Whenever they can, blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished, and often slain afterward if they ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... movement he could make. He could move only his head. He held that up, his eyes wild, showing the whites, his foaming mouth wide open, his teeth gleaming. A sound like a scream rent the air. Terrible fear and hate were expressed in that piercing neigh. And shaggy, wet, dusty red, with all of brute savageness in the look and action of his head, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... their clothes, the door of their chamber was violently thrown open, and six commissioners entered to announce to the queen that the Convention had ordered the removal of her boy, that he might he committed to the care of a tutor—the tutor named being the cobbler, Simon, whose savageness of disposition was sufficiently attested by the fact of his having been chosen on the recommendation of Marat. At this unexpected blow, Marie Antoinette's fortitude and resignation at last gave way. She wept, she remonstrated, she humbled herself to entreat mercy. She threw her arms around ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... unfortunate men to that brutal instinct of self-preservation which constitutes the sole understanding of ferocious animals, and which is ready to sacrifice everything to itself; nature, wild and barbarous around them, seemed to have communicated to them all its savageness. The strongest despoiled the weakest; they rushed about the dying, and frequently waited not for their last breath. When a horse fell, you might have fancied you saw a famished pack of hounds: they surrounded him, they tore him to pieces, and quarrelled ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... and the warriors sit in groups around the red blaze, recounting their adventures, and laughing and chattering incessantly. The paint glitters upon their naked bodies in the glare of the fires; it is a wild and savage scene, and yet grotesque in its very savageness. For two hours we remain about the fires, some cooking and eating, others smoking, others freshening the hideous devices of the war paint with which all are besmeared. Then the horse-guard is detailed, and marches off to the caballada, and the Indians, one after another, spread their ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... frowned upon by the impatient, and smiled down by the good-natured in a manner that brought sudden blushes of exasperation to his face, and often made him ashamed to find himself going over these sham battles again in much savageness of spirit, when alone with his books; or, in moments of weakness, casting about for such unworthy weapons as irony and satire. In the present debate, he had just provoked a sneer that made his blood leap and his friends ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... war against this enemy by whose most foul cruelty all the savageness of barbarous nations is surpassed. Why need I speak of the massacre of Roman citizens? of the plunder of temples? Who is there who can possibly deplore such circumstances as their atrocity deserves? And now he ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavor of these wild fruits. If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian does well to ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... at infants presented before their eyes, with a mind so savage, that, if they could, they would have murdered them; but on its being hinted to them, though without truth, that they were their own infants, their rage and savageness instantly subsided, and they loved them to excess. This love and hatred prevail together with those who in the world had been inwardly deceitful, and had set their minds ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... and myself do know That from this wrong shall rouse an Anteros, Fierce as an Ate, with a hot right hand, That shall afflict thee with the touch of fire, Till, scorpion-like, thou turn and sting thyself. What dost thou think—that I shall perish here, Gnawed by the tooth of hungry savageness? Think what thou list, and go what way thou wilt. I, that have truth and heaven on my side, Though but a weak and solitary woman, Forecast no fear of any violence— But thou, false hound! thou would'st not dare ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... have you here in our Florida cottage, in the wholly new, wild, woodland life. Though resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance of nature,—the plants, the birds, the animals, all different. The green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and rugged savageness of beauty. Every tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet here, in the great sandy plains back of our house, there is a constant ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... Britain that shakes the earth to its center and its poles! The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs with a nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language neither makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of manners, and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England is always in dread of France,—terrified at the apprehension of an invasion, suspicious ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... elder, with concentrated savageness which did credit to his powers of command. What you choose has nothing to do with it, and that you'll please to understand. At half-past nine to-morrow morning you're ready for me in this room; hear that? I'll have an end to this kind of ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... with their large discourse of reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it with hopefulness and joy. I do not intend to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... manner of courtier accomplishments, so that he met general approbation. On one occasion the vizir was detailing some instances of his proficiency and talents in the royal presence, and saying: "The instruction of the wise has made an impression upon him, and his former savageness is obliterated from his mind." The king smiled at this speech, and replied:—"The whelp of a wolf must prove a wolf at last, notwithstanding he may be ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... his usual savageness and activity. It whirled round his adversary's head with frightful rapidity. Now it carried away a feather of his plume; now it shore off a leaf of his coronet. The flail of the thrasher does not fall more swiftly upon the corn. For many ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... guided by an imaginative power of which he could not altogether deprive himself. He has done nothing which others have not done better, or which it would not have been better not to have done; in nature, he mistakes distortion for energy, and savageness for sublimity; in man, mendicity for sanctity, and conspiracy ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth with maledictions if he broke his commands, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... would they accost me or otherwise disturb me while I was writing or reading; yet at other times they could be positively impertinent, especially if excited. The islander is very nervous; when he is quiet, he is shy and reticent, but once he is aroused, all his bad instincts run riot, and incredible savageness and cruelty appear. The secret of successful treatment of the natives seems to be to keep them very quiet, and never to let any excitement arise, a point in which ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... of the Stampede included the exhibition of these people and their old-time life as well as it could be reproduced. Horses noted for their viciousness, Mexican bulls especially selected for their savageness, and the untamed range cayuse, were to exhibit the prowess of the horsemen. With these, the Indians and their families were to copy the life of the woods in the tepee and the movements ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler

... Down he went with a crash. I wound the reel like a madman, but I never even half got up the slack line. The swordfish had run straight toward the boat. He leaped again, in a place I did not expect, and going down, instantly came up in another direction. His speed, his savageness, stunned me. I could not judge of his strength, for I never felt his weight. The next leap I saw him sling the hook. It was a great performance. Then that swordfish, finding himself free, leaped for the open sea, and every few yards he came out in a clean jump. I watched ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... civilization," said the cardinal; "the highest: it is a reclamation of man from savageness by the Almighty. What the world calls civilization, as distinguished from religion, is a retrograde movement, and will ultimately lead us back to the barbarism from which we have escaped. For instance, you talk of progress: what is the chief ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... the voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave. The loathly alligators, lounging in the slime, lifted their horny eyelids lazily, and leered upon him as he passed with stupid savageness. Lines of tall herons stood dimly in the growing gloom, like white fantastic ghosts, watching the passage of the doomed boat. All was foul, sullen, weird as witches' dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons glide down the stream behind him, with Satan standing at the helm, he would have ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... du Paraguay',* thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word 'guaranai', i.e., numerous. Barco de la Centenera** ('Argentina', book i., canto i.) says the word means 'hornet', and was applied on account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the Guaranis did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the word to themselves, except when talking Spanish or to a foreigner. The word 'aba', Indian or man, is how they speak of their people, and to the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... him, with 'improvements,' in 1750. Then came Hawkins's edition in 1760. Johnson said of Hawkins, 'Why, ma'am, I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang

... company—and he happened to be in the same house with me—was a man of twenty-eight years of age, the son of a French father and American mother, and whose mother's grandfather had been an Indian warrior of some renown in the early history of our province. In him were united the savageness of the red man, the gaiety of the Frenchman, and the shrewdness of the Yankee. He was a large, handsome, and immensely muscular man, with dark complexion, small straight features, quick black eyes, and long raven-coloured beard and hair that hung down to his shoulders. Utterly ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston

... I know; and I quite understand that you wanted Marchmont to marry May," Dick retorted in an alien savageness ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... face underwent was almost terrible. A look of perfectly animal savageness distorted for a brief moment his handsome features; his eyes flashed, and his brow ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... foxes tried to do the same as their mother, and when at length the eldest for the first time in his life caught game, he quivered with excitement and ground his pearly little milk-teeth into the mouse with a rush of inborn savageness that must have surprised ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards than the fierce and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... and a half, which ought to separate it from its leader. Even the corporal in the centre allowed his horse to graze the haunches of mine, "Tourne-Toujours," my gallant charger, the fiery thoroughbred which had so often maddened me at the riding schools of the regiment and at manoeuvres, by his savageness and the shaking he gave me. "Tourne-Toujours" gave evident signs of excitement. By his pawing the ground every now and then he, an officer's horse, seemed to resent the close proximity of mere troop horses. And certainly, under ordinary circumstances, I should ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont

... with a very ill grace that he complied, on that condition; and at parting he kissed my hand with such a savageness, that a redness remains ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful Romans—and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep in the forest. The ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... more sweet " [Collins]; " like the faint exquisite music of a dream " [Moore]; " music arose with its voluptuous swell " [Byron]; " music is the universal language of mankind " [Longfellow]; " music's golden tongue " [Keats]; " the speech of angels " [Carlyle]; " will sing the savageness out of a bear " [Othello]; music hath charms to soothe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... it, the tendency of the animal being to crouch and hide until the strange-looking two-legged beast has passed. The narrowest escape I ever had is an instance. I had hunted a large tiger, well known for the savageness of his disposition, on foot from ravine to ravine on the banks of the Pench, one hot day in June, and, giving him no rest, made sure of getting him about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had been seen to slip into a large nullah, bordered on one side by open country, a small water-course ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... disposition to triumph over the fallen has never been one of the besetting sins of Englishmen: but the hatred of which Jeffreys was the object was without a parallel in our history, and partook but too largely of the savageness of his own nature. The people, where he was concerned, were as cruel as himself, and exulted in his misery as he had been accustomed to exult in the misery of convicts listening to the sentence of death, and of families clad in mourning. The rabble congregated before his deserted mansion ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... was the night, the black bodies were visible against the white snow, and the archers shot several arrows forth, each stretching a wolf dead on the ground. Those killed were at once pounced upon by their comrades, and torn to pieces; and this mark of savageness added to the horror which those within felt of the ferocious animals. Suddenly there was a pause in the howling around the hut, and then Cnut, looking forth from the loophole, declared that the whole body had gone off at full speed along the path by which ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... Sophy! dear partner of my Friend! to your kind interposition. I know you will manage my cause, as a concern on which my happiness entirely depends; and I hope everything from your compassion and beneficence, while I fear everything from her rigour and barbarity. Yes! I call it barbarity, a savageness of delicacy altogether inconsistent with the tenderness of human nature; and may the most abject contempt be my portion, if I live under its scourge! But I begin to rave. I conjure you by your own humanity and sweetness of disposition, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... cover her with the shreds of her torn dress, and the double sensation of the cloth and the nude body are as keen as a sword and as inconceivable as madness. And now he cries for help, now he presses the sweet and supple body to his breast. His unconscious abandonment unchains the savageness of his passion. He whispers in a low voice, 'I love you, I love you.' And throwing himself violently upon her lips, he feels his ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman savageness of his fiery eyes, she saw his tall body rise up before her, and his hand raised to strike, and she ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... there, Of immense spiritual results future years far West, each side of the Anahuacs, Of these songs, well understood there, (being made for that area,) Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there, (O it lurks in me night and day—what is gain after all to savageness ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... been the end of one of us. As it was he saw me coming heedlessly and, being peaceably inclined, had stopped me with his sharp Hoowuff! before I should get too near. There was no snarl or growl, no savageness in his expression; only intense wonder and questioning in the look which fastened upon my face and seemed to bore its way through, to find out just what ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long

... indifference to the result of your atrocities, combined with the delight with which you have wallowed in human gore; your contempt for all the dictates of honesty, truth, pity, and good faith; your greed, ingratitude, treachery, savageness, meanness, and cannibalism; all these things stamp you as the most atrocious, unmitigated and loathsome scoundrel, savage, monster, and vampire that ever wallowed in the foul and fathomless quagmire ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... does not at all. Think of it. Struggling against the savageness of man and nature must have roughened our manners a little, just as working on the ground roughens one's hands. It is healthy exercise; but, then, it tells, and we must expect that." She looked at her husband with such serenity as she ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various

... to her husband. Trevelyan, acknowledging to himself that he had done no good by his former interference, feeling that he had put himself in the wrong on that occasion, and that his wife had got the better of him, had borne with all this, with soreness and a moody savageness of general conduct, but still without further words of anger with reference to the man himself. But now, on this Sunday, when his wife had been closeted with Colonel Osborne in the back drawing-room, leaving him with his ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does the process of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... license and barbarity natural to the victories of the oppressed. A conflict between the negroes and the planters in modern times may not be unanalogous to that of the helots and Spartans; and it is often a fatal necessity to extirpate the very men we have maddened, by our own cruelties, to the savageness of beasts. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers of the seas of the most daring type, worthy brethren of the Kidds, the Blackbeards, and the Teaches, terrors of the merchantman and the well-disposed emigrant. But in spite of the sternness of the law-abiding, and the savageness of the lawless portions of the English settlements, they contrasted favorably in every way with the settlements which were nominally French and the centres of colonization which hoisted the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... would have been soothed could he have been present at the first interview of this pair. He would have seen Severne treated with a hauteur and a sort of savageness he himself was safe from, safe in her ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... fires, and two (of them) were cooking their victuals, and roasting several animals, and fish of many kinds: where we saw that they were roasting a certain animal which seemed to be a serpent, save that it had no wings, and was in its appearance so loathsome that we marveled much at its savageness: ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various

... recalled the fact that they had been named mud diggers, and it made their situation thrice bitter. They were breathlessly intent upon keeping the ground and thrusting away the rejoicing body of the enemy. They fought swiftly and with a despairing savageness denoted in ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... automatons. The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors. The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families. The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude. In ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... one accord, editor and assembly made the signal of mercy—the officers of the arena approached—they took off the helmet of the vanquished. He still breathed; his eyes rolled fiercely on his foe; the savageness he had acquired in his calling glared from his gaze, and lowered upon the brow darkened already with the shades of death; then, with a convulsive groan, with a half start, he lifted his eyes above. They rested not on the face of the editor nor on the pitying brows of his relenting ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... spleen against an anonymous opponent, that is a nobody, and some definite person must be pitched upon as an adversary to bear your rage expressly, no one else seemed to you more opportune than I as an object of calumny, whether because you heard that I had many enemies, though (what proves their savageness) without any cause, who would hold up both thumbs in applause of your jocosities, or because you knew that, by the arts of a Juno, I was involved in a lawsuit, more troublesome in reality than dangerous, and you did not believe that I should be, as I have been, the winner ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... most 'orrible sight I ever saw, for wild savageness, so I drew my sword and gave the hox a prog that sent 'im 'ead over 'eels down the kloof w'ere 'e broke 'is back. Just at that werry moment—would you mind takin' your toe out o' my neck, Junkie? it ain't comfortable: thank you.—Well, as I was sayin', at that very moment I spied a black ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne

... the court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except some rude cult ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... all their savageness they have, however, some glimmering perception of the laws of nations, is evident from the use to which they put the calumet, the rights of which are kept inviolate, thro' especially the whole northern continent of America. It answers nearest the idea of the olive-branch ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard

... the painted face and the bones; for from the shadow of a hut at the back of the fire came another, who rushed into the light and swayed wildly to the barbarous music. The newcomer was naked as a babe new born; wild as a beast of the field; lithe as a serpent; and crazy to savageness with ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... Bianca, who was in station lower, in beauty and speech inferior far, to Desdemona and he began in spite of himself to praise his wife to the villain before him. He praised her skill with the needle, her voice that could "sing the savageness out of a bear," her wit, her sweetness, the fairness of her skin. Every time he praised her Iago said something that made him remember his anger and utter it foully, and yet he must needs praise her, and say, "The pity of it, Iago! O Iago, ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit

... There were stuffed animals and creatures of various sorts: a huge crocodile, from the Nile; a vulture, with expanded wings, and talons tearing its prey, at which its bloodshot eyes looked down with an expression of life-like savageness. On one side there was a human skeleton of gigantic proportions, with a club in its hand, in the attitude of striking. Toads and lizards abounded. There were mummy cases, with their lids off, exposing the dried remnants of mortality within. In huge bottles were children, some with two heads, or ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston

... interrupt a duel; that was the last enormity. And if he did interrupt it, it would be but for a few minutes; it would take place all the same. As the sense of his helplessness filled him, two or three great tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He dashed them away with a most unangelic savageness; then, conscious only of a devouring desire to be near his father in his perilous hour, he drove on the machine ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... mosquitoes—which swarmed all along the river borders and pestered us with their bites— and an exceedingly small fish that seemed to be in myriads in parts of the stream, and to make up in absolute ferocity for their want of size. This savageness of nature was of course but their natural instinctive desire for food, but it was dangerous in the extreme, as I knew later on. Our experience ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... look that was savageness itself. Apparently he was on the verge of giving way to a burst of temper. But he seemed to think better of it, and turning, he jumped into his buggy ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer

... himself, what compositions with his conscience, what degradation of his own thought, may not a courtier be involved! Ah, De Thou, my dear De Thou! I am not made for the court; I feel it, though I have seen it but for a moment. There is in my temperament a certain savageness, which education has polished only on the surface. At a distance, I thought myself adapted to live in this all-powerful world; I even desired it, led by a cherished hope of my heart. But I shuddered at the first step; I shuddered at the mere sight of the Cardinal. The recollection of the last ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... other discovered that I was in flight. I heard the rapid patter of his shoes behind me. In another twenty feet I heard his voice. It was not loud and it was cautious, but it reached my ears with a suggestion of extraordinary savageness. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... his search; though it was not patience but the savageness of desperation that animated him. He would not go back empty-handed, if he ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... too. There remained nothing to me but one poor wounded babe, and it seemed at present worse than death that it was in such a pitiful condition, bespeaking compassion, and I had no refreshing for it, nor suitable things to revive it. Little do many think what is the savageness and brutishness of this barbarous enemy, Ay, even those that seem to profess more than others among them, when the English ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson



Words linked to "Savageness" :   fury, wildness, ferocity, savage, furiousness, vehemence, fierceness, violence



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