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Savagery   /sˈævɪdʒˌɛri/   Listen
Savagery

noun
1.
The property of being untamed and ferocious.  Synonym: savageness.  "A craving for barbaric splendor, for savagery and color and the throb of drums"
2.
The trait of extreme cruelty.  Synonyms: brutality, ferociousness, viciousness.
3.
A brutal barbarous savage act.  Synonyms: barbarism, barbarity, brutality.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books



... too, for his nurses had suddenly grown implacable. They pursued him with a savagery which he could not distinguish from hatred, and they swished him well whenever they ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... more accurately speaking, of savagery which characterized these as a whole necessarily varied to a great extent in the case of each particular tribe. Nevertheless, from the comparatively high culture of the Incas down to the most intellectually submerged people of the forests and swamps, there were certain characteristics ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... it is obviously, and on the whole rightly, descriptive. For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality. In savagery, thought, sentiment, religion and social organization may be exceedingly complicated, full of the most subtle and strange relationships; but they exist as complete and determined wholes, each part absolutely bound up with the rest. Analysis has never come near them. ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie

... rude philosophy of tribal thought. Such philosophy or opinion finds its expression not only in the mythic tales, but in the organization of the people into society, in their daily life and in their habits and customs. There is a realm of anthropology in this lower state of mankind which we call savagery, that is hard to understand from the standpoint of modern civilization, where science, theology, religion, medicine and the esthetic arts are developed as more or less discrete subjects. In savagery these great subjects ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... of thinking to being, of the relation of the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. The question of the relation of thought to existence, a question ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... The intense savagery of his tone made the girl shrink away from him and turn pale. He managed to cover his break so quickly with a forced laugh and an effort to assist Gladwin to his feet that her ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... the Spaniards began to learn what real savagery meant. Only women and children appeared to inhabit the island, and these fled inland at the strangers' approach. This afforded an excellent opportunity for the visitors to look into the native huts and see how these wild people lived. Hammocks ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley

... Black obscurity had gathered beneath the dark masses of moonlit foliage. The tiny birch-bark teepees of the now deserted Indian village glowed palely. Above, the stars looked calmly down at the accusing finger of the tower pointing upward, as if in reproach at their indifference to the savagery that reigned over the ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster

... live, skulking in obscurity, my only inspiration the hope of an honorable death or an opportunity for vengeance. Mine was the life of the ranks in the desert, associating with the lowest scum, in constant contact with savagery. I could not speak to a decent woman, or be a man among men. There was nothing left me but to brood over wrongs, and plot revenge. I became morose, savage, a mere creature of discipline, food for powder. It was no more ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... that our own civilisation will continue to develop, slowly indeed, but surely; and also to the belief that, compared to what it will be in the future, our present stage of civilisation is merely savagery. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... white man's game," Dick laughed. "She's not afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in its ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... Once, when Ben went to the school where a dozen or so other happy-faced little girls were being taught and prepared for the Eastern school, Miss F—— was obliged to tell him Mary was sick. For a while his savagery was apparently renewed. He became wild again. His visits increased in frequency, and all the time the teacher was in mental torture, for he seemed to feel that the white woman was in some manner connected with his child's going away and ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... Level Kholghoor Sector belonged to what was known as Indus-Ganges-Irriwady Basic Sector-Grouping—probability of civilization having developed late on the Indian subcontinent, with the rest of the world, including Europe, in Stone Age savagery or early Bronze Age barbarism. The Kharandas, the people among whom she had once done field-research work, had developed a pre-mechanical, animal-power, handcraft, edge-weapon culture. She could imagine the roads jammed with fugitives ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper

... race, in its march from savagery to civilization, may be considered as one man, showing, first, animation; next, manifesting his objects of attraction; third, displaying his purposes; and finally putting forth his wisdom in obedience to the true, the beautiful, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... in the indicated direction and then sat up, wide awake. She had never seen such cunning savagery as was in the head of this horse, its ears going back and forth as it tested the strength of the restraining ropes. Now and then it crouched and shuddered under the detested burden of the saddle. It was a stout-legged piebald with ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... forestalled. Knowing that from a race such as ours we shall not get anything else we learn to take it philosophically. If I hurl my assegai at another, another hurls his assegai at me, and in a measure we are quits. Even if, trying to rise above my inborn savagery, I withhold my assegai, it is no sign that another will withhold his, and I may be wounded even in the effort to do my best. Very well; that, too, is to be expected and must be ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... much savagery—of a kind—right in the heart of civilization," said the Porto Rican. "The slums of a great city are little less dangerous than a Philippine jungle, and you will do ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... but be concerned with manners, refinement, good breeding, and in a more minute sense, with the forms of etiquette. It is these things that distinguish civilization from savagery, and so unmistakably lift the cultured person above the one who does not see fit to ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman

... forms of the family, corresponding in general to the three main stages of human development. For savagery group marriage, for barbarism the pairing family, for civilization, monogamy supplemented by ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias

... feet, had kept me there. So long as she loved me I was content to be her captive, knowing she was mine. But a change in her attitude toward me might rouse the master. In my nature there was a certain brutality, a savagery, which I had never wholly slain, although Margot had softened me wonderfully by her softness, had brought me to gentleness by her tenderness. The boy of years ago had developed toward better things, but he was not dead in me. I felt that ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... out of the common! The journalist had seen many strange happenings in his adventurous career, but never had he come across such an amazing situation. For now he had no doubt of the guilt of the King. What, however, could have been the motive of such odious savagery? Was it possible he had taken seriously the innocent flirtation between Susy and himself? Had the King taken vengeance upon his mistress in a moment of ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre

... full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack of boys. They were gathered in close formation about some object which they were teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and otherwise abusing with the savagery of their years. Fanny, the fiery, stopped short. She pushed into the ring. The object of their efforts was a weak-kneed and hollow-chested little boy who could not fight because he was cowardly as well as weak, and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence—Clarence ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... the colonel. "The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit of laughter. The sound was harsh even to savagery. "Go your ways, Saunderson," he said. "I've tried the bars of the cage; they're too strong. Stop on your morning round, and I'll give account ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... Celtic ideas, it clearly takes us back to practices very remote, to use Mr. Elton's forcible words, from the reverence for the parents' authority which might have perhaps been expected from descendants of "the Aryan household."[107] These practices lead us back to a period of savagery, of which we have to speak in terms of race distinction if we would get at its root.[108] The importance of such a conclusion cannot be overrated, for it leads directly to the issue which must be raised whenever an investigation of tradition leaves us with materials, which ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... track athletics. A few years ago I asked that good friend of the Indian, Gen. R. H. Pratt, why he did not introduce football in his school. "Why," said he, "if I did that, half the press of the country would attack me for developing the original war instincts and savagery of the Indian! The public would be afraid to come ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... while assuming such excessive superiority over, his former equals. No one also is more hopeless about the civilisation of Africa than the semi-civilised African returning to the 'home of his fathers.' He feels how hard has been his struggle to emerge from savagery; he acknowledges, in his own case, a selection of species; and he foresees no end to the centuries before there can be a nation equal even to himself. Yet in England and in books he will cry up the majesty of African kings,—see, for a specimen, Bishop Crowther's 'Niger Diary.' He will give ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... conversation, discussion, debate, correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and, according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his understanding for you to think that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for you are in ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... it, nor was it ever known what became of him. Very differently did the Roman general Nero behave eleven years later on the banks of the Metaurus, when Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal, seeing that the day was lost, rode straight into the ranks of the enemy. When he fell, Nero, with savagery worthy of his namesake the emperor, cut off the head of the Carthaginian and threw it ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... Its powerful, heavy-clawed feet were black. Its short muzzle and massive jaw, and its broad face up to just above the eyes, where the fur came down thickly, were black also. The eyes themselves, peering out beneath overhanging brows, gleamed with a mixture of sullen intelligence and implacable savagery. In its slow, forbidding strength, and in its tameless reserve, which yet held the capacity for outbursts of ungovernable rage, this strange beast seemed to incarnate the very spirit of the bitter and indomitable North. Its name was various, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... the cost of incalculable suffering, will take little or no interest in the question of vivisections; nor is complicity with other phases of torment and cruelty alone responsible for the indifference which so generally exists. In every age, from the twilight of earliest savagery down to the present time, the vast majority of human beings have been inclined, not to doubt, but to believe, and especially to believe those who claimed superior knowledge in matters of Life and Death. This tendency to unquestioning faith has been the support of every phase ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... War Department, wrote: "They [the Negroes] have, besides, the homes they value, the families they love, and the masters they respect and depend on to defend and protect against the savagery and devastation of the enemy."—Official Rebellion Records, Series IV, Vol. Ill, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... fillets of hide for head covering; men whose beards were strong and large, whose limbs, wrapped loose in hides, were strong and large; women, strong and large, who bore burdens on their backs. Yet in the faces of all these there shone, not savagery alone, but intelligence and resolution. With them were flocks and herds and beasts of burden and carts of rude build; and beside these traveled children. There were young and old men and women, and some were gaunt and weary, but most were bold ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... publication of the Bryce Report, with its relentless array of witnesses, its particulars of countless acts of cruelty and arrogant unreason and uncleanness in Belgium and the occupied territory of France. Came also the gasping torture of "gas," the use of flame jets, and a new exacerbation of the savagery of the actual fighting. For a time it seemed as though the taking of prisoners along the western front would cease. Tales of torture and mutilation, tales of the kind that arise nowhere and out of nothing, and poison men's minds ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and warfare. But the contrast is as sharp between the savagery of the ancient reiver and the polished performance of Captain Hind as between the daub of the pavement ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... immortal, but that fire and water would sometime prevail. Sacrifices were never made, Strabo says, without the intervention of the Druids. Pomponius Mela says that in his time (c. 44 A.D.), though the ancient savagery was no more, and the Gauls abstained from human sacrifices, some traces of their former practices still remained, notably in their habit of cutting a portion of the flesh of those condemned to death after bringing them to the altars. The Gauls, he says, in spite of their traces ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl

... at Fort Apache, some thirty miles from my camp. These people, having such an evil reputation, are worthy of a few more notes. Such tales of cruelty and savagery were told of them as to be almost incredible. They were the terror of Arizona and New Mexico, yet they were not entirely to blame. Government ill-treatment of Cochise, the great chief of the Chiricaua Apaches, had set the whole tribe on the war-path for ten years. A military company, called ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... from the mark than to say that Will tried to take advantage of Maga's youth and savagery. Fred and I had shared a dozen lively adventures with him without more than beginning yet to plumb the depths of his respect for Woman. Only an American in all the world knows how to meet Young Woman eye to eye with totally unpatronizing frankness, and he was without ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... the sixteenth century: the ferocities, cruelties, and savagery of those wars: depopulated and ruined this rich and flourishing country: the Inquisition drove thousands of Flemings, an industrious and orderly folk, to England, where they established silk manufactures: and the carrying trade which had been wholly in ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... from the soil is an industry so old that its first introduction is lost in the mist of ages. As before stated, gold is one of the most widely disseminated of the metals, and man, so soon as he had risen from the lowest forms of savagery, began to be attracted by the kingly metal, which he found to be easily fashioned into articles of ornament and use, and to ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... appreciate his efforts to Christianise their slaves. The slaves did not appreciate them either, inasmuch as, saint though he might be, he quite lacked the sympathetic insight which would enable him to understand that a native with thousands of generations of savagery behind him is a different being from a highly educated Christian, and one who should be judged by another law. Their sins, amongst which he included all their most cherished inherited customs, appalled him, as he continually proclaimed from the housetops. Moreover, when occasionally ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... thousand miles there was the broken wilderness of mountains gashed with gorges, crowned with peaks, painted with sunlight and distance, glinting white here, veiled in purple there. She gasped at the bigness of it; it spoke of the vastness of the world and of the world's primitive savagery. And yet it did not repel; it fascinated and its message had the seeming of an old, oft-told, and half-forgotten tale. It threatened with its spires as cruel as bared fangs, and yet it beckoned and invited with its blue distances. Always, since the first man fashioned the first club and made him ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... hideous lips in anticipation of the feast to come, and vied with one another in the savagery and loathsomeness of the cruel indignities with which they tortured ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... left his men behind, to look after and secure the boat. It was comparatively cool in the shade, and he began thinking about the two young men he had left, and contrasting their civilised life with his. The savagery and barbarism by which he was surrounded disgusted him; and knowing well as he did, how the sultan and the various rajahs of the little states lived by oppressing and grinding down the wretched people ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... destroy him. Of course, she could not help being offended, if not angry, at Paul Stepaside's demeanour and at his almost savage attack. She reflected that he was guilty of the conduct of a clown, and attributed it not only to his own savagery, but to the instincts of his class. And yet she was impressed by his strength. She almost admired him, as he savagely proclaimed the fact that he would yet be Member for Brunford. She felt his strength, too, and saw how he ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... the most refined habits and methods the most barbarous and disgusting acts are found. A refined and humane spirit of culture seems, by some method, or at some time, to have been grafted on to a spirit of primitive savagery, and each to have retained its character and practices. But their social system was not an unhappy one for their people. It was an epoch of handiwork, where all were employed and all were fed; and if there were few comforts and enlightenments ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... terraced here and there on the rich burnt- amber walls, the limestone ridges above and around taking the form of a long line of rampart or lofty fortress, built and fashioned by human hands. In contrast to this savagery, we have ever and anon before our eyes the sweet little river, no sooner lost to sight amid willow- bordered banks ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... century and did not live to complete. For this his principal source was the French trouvre, Thomas of Brittany, who composed his Tristan in England about 1180. Of this French poem only a few fragments are extant. The original Tristan-saga contained elements of revolting savagery, but in Gottfried's poem, as in the fragments of Thomas, it is transformed into a courtly romance of love—an illicit love that defies conscience and the world and remains faithful unto death. The selections are from the translation by W. Hertz, 4th ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... the old story the Devil appears promptly at the end of the twenty-four years, puts his victim to death, and takes possession of his soul. Goethe's Mephistopheles is a gentleman of culture for whom such savagery would be impossible. He will wait until his comrade dies a natural death and then put in his claim in the Devil's fashion; and it will be for the Lord in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a holiday in the garb of peace, we had across Channel a host of dreadful military officers flashing swords at us for some critical observations of ours upon their sovereign, threatening Afric's fires and savagery. The case occurred in old days now and again, sometimes, upon imagined provocation, more furiously than at others. We were unarmed, and the spectacle was distressing. We had done nothing except to speak our minds according to the habit of the free, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... in a general sort of way was at once evident, for the expression of mingled fear and savagery on Mokalua's features at once vanished, giving place to a smile; he nodded his head, pointed to Murdock, himself, and Vati, waved his hand toward the woods, said a few quick words to his companion, and at ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... at any rate her language, if not her feelings. Two expressions of face were natural to him; one eloquent of good humour, in which the reader of countenances would find some promise of coming frolic;—and the other, replete with anger, sometimes to the extent almost of savagery. All those who were dependent on him were wont to watch his face with care and sometimes with fear. When he was angry it would almost seem that he was about to use personal violence on the object of his wrath. At the present moment he was rather grieved than enraged; but ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... stunned him. Even in his unconsciousness, lying on his side and quivering, he made rapid, spasmodic movements of his legs as if running for'ard to Skipper. The boys looked on and laughed, and when he no longer quivered and churned his legs they continued to laugh. Born in savagery, having lived in savagery all their lives and known naught else, their sense of humour was correspondingly savage. To them, the sight of a stunned and possibly dead puppy was a side-splitting, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... standing on a table in my room. It was evidently a very slim canoe with a balance beam and sails. Then my gaze encountered other unfamiliar objects scattered about: necklaces of shells strung on human hair, head-dresses of feathers, ornaments appertaining to a dark and primitive savagery; it was as if distant Polynesia had come to me during my sleep. My brother, it seems had already begun to open his cases, and while I slept he had slipped noiselessly into my room and grouped around me these ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... his chair dazed and bewildered. He had seen his brother's passion wither up many a rascal in the past; but he himself had never suffered until now, and the savagery of this language hurled against his own pure motives staggered him. He, of course, knew nothing about Will Blanchard's enterprise, and his blundering and ill-judged effort to restrain his brother from marrying Phoebe was absolutely disinterested. It had been a tremendous ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... of the hut, was a strange scene of rejoicing. Asensio, recovered now from his burst of savagery, was tearful, compassionate; his comrades laughed and chattered and bragged about their prodigious deeds of valor. Over and over they recounted their versions of the encounter, each more fanciful than the other, until it seemed that they must have left ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... savagery in which the Fates Had given him birth and dwelling-place— And so, descending through estates Of gentle vassalage, his race Had come to those of ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland

... comprehending her. It was from intelligent perception and not merely from the feminine instinct for making excuses, that she said to herself that John was worn out with the strain of burdens long and uncomplainingly borne; and she was, it might be added, near enough to the primitive savagery of the rustic New Englanders of the last generation, to find it perfectly a matter of course that a man should make of his womenfolk a sort of scapegoat upon whom to visit his wrath against the sins alike of fate ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of the plains—Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... stove. Then, pulling on his thick cowhide "larrigans," coat and woollen mittens, he went out to fodder the cattle. With that joyous roar of fresh flame in the stove the cabin was already warming up, but outside the door, which Dave closed quickly behind him, the cold had a kind of still savagery, edged and instant like a knife. To a strong man, however, it was a tonic, an honest challenging to resistance. In spite of his sad preoccupation, Dave responded to the cold air instinctively, pausing outside the door to fill ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... are the innermost known to my negro informants, and their sheep and goats have found their way to the Gaboon: they are doughty elephant-hunters, and they attack the Njina, although they have no fire-arms. The Mpangwe deride the savagery of these races, who have never heard of a man riding a horse or an ass, which the Mpongwes call Cavala and Buro burro). The names of these three races, which are described as brave, warlike, and hospitable to strangers, will not be found on any map; indeed the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... about neck and breast, graceful as a swan in form and motion, while not larger than a swallow, light as the lightest feather on the water, turning its curving neck and dainty head to look,—it seemed more like an embodied fancy than a creature inured to the chill of Arctic seas and the savagery of Arctic storms. What goose first gave it the name "sea-goose" passes conjecture. "Sea-fairy" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... resounded for generations through the meeting houses of New England. It was a most solemn and impressive spectacle, in the heart of the Indian country, to see a Christian church filled with devout worshippers all in the costume of savagery, and to listen to the oft-told story of the Saviour who died that man might live. Such a scene carries with it a much more convincing proof of the universality of the Christian religion than a church full ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a slaver met ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... line of defence. Well, maybe so, but then all the armies were alike. Somebody told Jimmie the saying of a famous general, that war was hell; and Jimmie took to this—it was exactly what he wanted to believe! War was a return to savagery, and the worse it became, the better Jimmie's argument went. He was not interested in men's efforts to improve war, by agreeing that they would kill in this way but not in that way, they would kill this kind of people ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I wrote on the "Vestiges" while ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... WARLIKE KNIGHT, Sir Satyrane, in whom are united rude untaught chivalry and woodland savagery. He represents natural heroism and instinctive love ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... or thou wilt never hence nor I: For in the racing toward this golden goal He turns not right or left, but tramples flat Whatever thwarts him; hast thou never heard His savagery at Alencon,—the town Hung out raw hides along their walls, and cried 'Work for ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... only) amid the mountains at night, every third year, about the time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to express the excess of grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the god, were wild even to savagery, and the women who performed them were hence known by the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades. They wandered through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with ivy or snakes, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... power-house with the screeching of the red hot bearings and the glare of the crackling blue flames that meant the final and complete destruction of the plant. Over and over the grimy, grease-soaked floor of the power-house they rolled and fought. Brutally, in utter savagery, Bruce ground Smaltz's face into the rough planks littered with nails and sharp-copper filings, whenever he could—dragging him, shoving him, working him each second a little closer to the machinery with the frenzy of haste. He had not yet recovered from his run ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims. Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... to wring your neck for that!" he said. At the swift ruthless savagery in his tone the girl shrank back. Nicanor saw and laughed. "Since I may not, I'll take payment otherhow. As for the old man, let him squeal as best likes him. If they break him on the wheel, I shall go ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... the intervening centuries had given them, to scheme for victory. A thousand years hence the Frankenstein might be buried and man's brain gigantic. Then and then only would civilization be perfected, and the savagery and asininity of war a blot on the history of his race to which no man cared to refer. But that was a long way off. When a man's country was in danger there was nothing to do but fight. Noblesse oblige. And fight without growling and whining. Clavering had ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the vision, his pulses beating with a mad longing so fierce as to be utterly beyond his own control. It was as though he had drunk strong wine and had somehow slipped the leash of ordinary convention. The savagery of the night, the tropical intensity of it, had got into him. Half-naked, wholly primitive, he lay and ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... through all the coyote refrains of the night; half-grown coyotes answer their mother's voice but are silent when another calls. All that wild outburst in which men read only an uproar of meaningless savagery is in reality the intelligent conversation of the ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... added a sprinkle of spice to the hashes of the above-named school. This is most commonly thrown in, by giving to the stock-villain a dash of humour or sarcasm, so as to bring out his savagery in bolder relief. He is also invested with an unaccountable influence over the hero, who can on no account be made to see his bare and open treachery till about the middle of the fifth act, when the dupe's eyes must be opened in time for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... I knew he was not a whit less dangerous because the veneer of suave mockery masked the savagery of the Slav. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... iconoclastic zeal was that of the Civil War and the Cromwellian period. At Rochester the soldiers profaned the cathedral by using it as a stable and a tippling place, while saw-pits were made in the sacred building and carpenters plied their trade. At Chichester the pikes of the Puritans and their wild savagery reduced the interior to a ruinous desolation. The usual scenes of mad iconoclasm were enacted—stained glass windows broken, altars thrown down, lead stripped from the roof, brasses and effigies defaced and broken. A creature named "Blue Dick" was the wild leader of this savage crew of ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... that the civilised individual retains in his nature the instincts of his remote ancestors, and that these assert themselves at stages of his growth corresponding with ancestral periods of culture or savagery: so that if we delight to climb trees, throw stones, and hunt, it is because our forefathers once lived in trees, had no missiles but stones, and depended for a livelihood upon killing something. To some of us, again, this seems an explanation; to others ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... sat upon a log in the woods, and the foreman signed the bills of indictment, which I had prepared, upon his knee; there was not a petit juror that had shoes on; all wore moccasins, and were belted around the waist, and carried side-knives used by the hunters." Yet amidst all this apparent savagery we see justice was done, and the law vindicated even against the bitterest prejudices of these ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad bargain when ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis

... would be natural to suppose that man would first imitate the things which surround him, but the most cursory acquaintance with primitive art shows that he is much more apt to crudely geometrize. Now it is not necessary to assume that we are to revert to the conditions of savagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound aesthetic we must begin where art has always begun—with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified in holding in regard to quite obvious aspects of American life, in the light of which that ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... our neighbours live in very comfortable houses; and by visiting them we are kept from becoming reformed into the uttermost savagery altogether. Other people had more capital than we, or spent what they possessed in a different manner. There are those who have laid themselves out to render their homes more in accordance with the taste that ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... baffles the modern Attilas, and the recent invasion of the barbarians, under the form of red republicans, socialists, communists, all different phases which describe the relapse of the once converted races into their primitive condition of savagery. Austria would long ago have dissolved but for the Semitic principle, and if the north of Germany has never succeeded in attaining that imperial position which seemed its natural destiny, it is that the north of Germany has never at any time been thoroughly ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... and I have done it! The writs have been executed. Boys, you are dismissed." It will be doing Senator David R. Atchison, Ex-Vice-President of the United States, a kindness to conclude simply that he was drunk, otherwise he displayed utter savagery and barbarism. He inculcated gallantry to ladies, but said: "If you find any woman with arms in her hands, tread her under foot as you would a snake." The Caucassian white woman of Lawrence had no more rights of ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... third watch, and I was making my round of the entire city, going from door to door with scrupulous vigilance, when suddenly I beheld this bloodthirsty young man, sword in hand, spreading carnage around him; already, no less than three victims of his savagery lay writhing at his feet, gasping forth their breath in a pool of blood. Stricken, as well he might be, with the guilt of so great a crime, the fellow fled, and, slipping into one of the houses under cover of the darkness, lay hidden the rest of the night. But, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... back to the half-track alone. He turned once and there was evil in his gaze as he looked at Jon. "You will lose your job for this impertinence," he said with quiet savagery, and added, enigmatically, "not that there will be a ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns

... as they are restrained at all, they are restrained by the general disciplinary powers of the Church. Theoretically those who indulge in them are liable to the statutory penalties imposed by the Act of Elizabeth. Practically these cannot be enforced; their savagery makes it impossible. They stand as they were enacted in 1549, and again ten years later; they are now intolerable. I am told that no attempt has been made to enforce them since the year 1796, nor is there any chance of their being revived. The Acts of Uniformity, ...
— The Acts of Uniformity - Their Scope and Effect • T.A. Lacey

... with a grim laugh and a leer of savagery that made his gaunt face look positively hideous—"you would have given out after three days, friend de Batz, would you not? And I warned you, didn't I? I told you if you tampered with the brat I would make you cry in mercy to me ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... between that which is mere life and that which is pitiless hell, and could feel naught that was human. A poor wild beast at bay, pressed on all sides by dogs, by huntsmen, by resistless weapons, by Nature's pitiless self—glaring with bloodshot eyes, panting, with fangs bared in the savagery of its unfriended agony—might feel thus. 'Tis but a hunted beast; but 'tis alone, and faces so the terror and ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the age of the criminal law which hanged men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave trade was iniquitous hardly any one suspected; even men who deemed themselves religious took part in it without scruple. But a change was at hand, and a still mightier change was in prospect. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... gout in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of inhuman savagery. When it was dead it would ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... meaning of man's mastery of electricity, we shall have light upon his earlier steps as a fire-kindler, and as a graver of pictures and symbols on bone and rock. As we thus recede from civilization to primeval savagery, the process of the making of man may become so clear that the arguments of Darwin shall be received with conviction, and not ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... spite of his savagery, his face softened in the next moment. "If it could only be in the right way! Look at me, look at you. You're so very beautiful, I'm so strong. There is only one right way ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... great cavalry depot, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval period, it is difficult to say. Yet the impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... the floor, rebounded with a dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single candle was out. He on the other side of the door naturally heard the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: "Aha! I've managed to wake you up," the very savagery of which had a laughable effect. I felt the weight of Dona Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the door. But he didn't even ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... means, he had some five years before given up a good living in England in order to obey what he considered to be his "call." Being sent to this outlying post, he found it in a condition of the most complete savagery, and worked as few have done. He built the church with native labour, furnishing it beautifully inside, mostly at his own expense. He learned the local languages, he started a school, he ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... soon as the first novelty of her had worn off, had been unspeakable. The band that she wore round her neck was to hide where, in a fit of savagery, because she had refused to earn money for him on the streets, he had tried to cut her throat. Now that she had got back to England she intended to leave him. If he followed and killed her ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome

... something of his work and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed, to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life which ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather

... without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it. Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that had raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick." But more than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and he would come to a recollection of himself, startled and ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... the rapid growth of foreign power in the country, began to whisper among the people that the Christian missionaries were only spies working in the interest of Spain and Portugal. A violent persecution broke out against the Christians in 1587, and lasted for several years. Notwithstanding the savagery of the Pagans and the punishments decreed against the missionaries the Jesuits weathered the storm, and fresh labourers arrived to support them in the persons of the Dominicans, the Franciscans, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... Palace, but he had also satiated his barbarian soul in carnage and loaded his shoulders with buccaneering loot. And though he wondered at his own moderation, a court martial followed. However, Louis Napoleon gave him back his medals, and sent him to Mexico to stamp out savagery by counter savagery. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... kitchen poker, and that the proportions of her watch exceeded those of her frying-pan. Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides. The Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of these delights was again ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... institutions and creeds." He declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this Protestant book, that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." He laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration of ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... and drew her little grey cloak more closely around her shoulders; not from cold, though a bleak wind was blowing across the marshes. She was warmed by walking; but the aspect of the scene before her almost frightened the Venetian girl by the savagery of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... have been imported into the colorless literature of the empire. "Atala" is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European—that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... over in an instant. It could not be said that there was an actual encounter. The side step of the young Highlander was soft as that of a panther, as quick, and yet as full of savagery. The whipping over of his wrist, the gliding, twining, clinging of his blade against that of his enemy was so swift that eye could scarce have followed it. The eye of Beau Wilson was too slow to catch it or to guard. He never stopped ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... provide themselves with ammunition. The war has done much to destroy the prestige that allows a white man to dominate thousands of the natives. For to the indigenous inhabitants of the country, the white man's ways are inexplicable; they cannot conceive a war conducted with such alternate savagery and chivalry. To those who look upon the women of the vanquished as the victors' special prize, the immunity from outrage that German women enjoy is beyond their comprehension. For that reason we shall welcome the day when ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... an essay from an igloo, describing the awful privations of the writer and the primitive savagery of his surroundings on the Murman coast. It was to have wrung the sympathetic heart of the public and at the same time to have enthralled the student of barbaric life with its wealth of exotic detail. While embodying all the best-known newspaper cliches appropriated to these latitudes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various

... courage and pugnacity, are all due in chief part to inheritance from his half-human male ancestors. These characters would, however, have been preserved or even augmented during the long ages of man's savagery, by the success of the strongest and boldest men, both in the general struggle for life and in their contests for wives; a success which would have ensured their leaving a more numerous progeny than their less favoured brethren. It is not probable that the greater strength of man was primarily ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... science and art, and almost the equals of their Christian foes in the attributes of chivalry. Wars with them were a constant crusade, consecrated in the minds of the Spaniards as being in the cause of religion, and yet in some degree freed from savagery and cruelty by the respect exacted by the honorable character of the enemy, and by the fact that the civilization and learning of the Christian kingdoms were far more derived from the Moors than from ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... watched its growth with alarm. They foresaw that it heralded the return of the hated domination of the priests, associated in their minds with practical slavery, and they decided on the tragedy, which was carried out with all the savagery of ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... doubt had reached its peak of civilization, paused at the summit and now was in decadence, reverting to savagery. Perhaps in Europe the civilized peak lasted longer. This was a backward space during the ascent; perhaps now it was reverting ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... forces up along the ridges; a whole army corps. This movement threatened to become a serious obstacle to the Serbian plan of separating the Austrians in Shabatz from those farther south. But the situation was saved by one of those incidents which sometimes stand out above the savagery of warfare and give to it a ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... world, in which man had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery and ignorance had swept away the established order of things. There was need of something more positive and more definite. This ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... Her father was an Englishman, and her mother a Gaika Kafir; she had passed her childhood in a native hut, and when, five years previously, she was sent to the mission, she was in a condition of absolute savagery. In the mission school her Aryan blood told; she kept easily ahead of the other girls, and ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully

... to his savagery, I think no one on Earth would disagree. But they are not the same thing. What I do mean is that the Nipe is undoubtedly the most superstitious and bigoted being on the face of ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... a straggling group gathered around the strangers. They stared dully and without intelligence, and yet like animals in whom savagery is ever ready to burst restraints. The stronger men among them glowered at the intruders, turning against a strange face with the snarl they dared not show to one grown familiar. Beyond the mines, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... of Indians, dodging from tree to tree, from rock to rock, but always advancing. When the Germans sent up two of their scouting aeroplanes to report the number of the enemy's forces, the enemy picked off the German pilots before the machines were over the tree tops. Here was a mixture of native savagery and efficiency, plus the lynching spirit, plus the pre-revolutionary American spirit and against which, with unequal numbers and complete surprise, no mathematically trained European ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett

... Janizaries,—which the Sultan had long meditated, and concealed in his own bosom with the craft which formed one of the peculiarities of this cruel yet able sovereign, but which he finally executed with characteristic savagery. Concerning this Russian war ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... was sent by Philip to suppress them, and for six years (1567-1573) his savagery and that of his brutal Spanish soldiers made the Netherlands a theatre of horror—and of heroism. The revolt in the southern provinces, now Belgium, was finally put down. The inhabitants there were mostly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... might give so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity—nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth—such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... were, Buffalo Bill will go down to history as one of America's strange heroes who has loved the trackless wilds, rolling plains and mountain solitudes of our land, far more than the bustle and turmoil, the busy life and joys of our cities, and who has stood as a barrier between civilization and savagery, risking his own life to save ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham

... among us; but the truth is that we are uncultured, barbaric and cruel. Although this may not be willingly acknowledged, the fact is that we are committing acts of savagery of which there is no counterpart in any other ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis

... once there, she would quietly lock the door. She canvassed in her mind all the rooms in her little box of a home. There was one, convenient, appropriate, and secure—the store-room. No sooner said than done. To see this fierce-looking Kickapoo clad in robes of savagery, and gleaming in all the paint of the war-path, seated on Miss Slopham's refrigerator, and looking about on either side with barbaric curiosity at her array of shelves of jars and bottles, while he ate raspberry jam out of a rare and elegant saucer with an ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the amenities of civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again. In vain he pleaded his job, the valuable copy he would send to his paper. I proved to him it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he could not understand why we should be startled by the announcement that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to lose himself for a couple of years ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... Tiger Elliston overthrew barbarism and established in its place an island empire of civilization, so would she supersede savagery with culture. But, her empire of the North should be an empire founded not upon blood, but ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... middle of the nineteenth century, like his predecessor, was in many respects a cruel animal. To appearance he was void of every human feeling, and yet behind all the rugged savagery there was a big and generous heart. The fact is, this apparent or real callousness was the result of a system, pernicious in its influence, that caused the successive generations of seafaring men to swell with vanity if they could but acquire the reputation of being desperadoes; and this ambition ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... vindicate its rank as a classic. But its true grandeur is in the scope of the conception, which exhibits a masque of the Lords of Earth, 'great conquerors, and other troublers of the world,' rioting in their wantonness and savagery, as if Heaven cared not or dared not interpose, yet made to pay in the end to the last farthing of righteous vengeance. They are paraded paying it often in their own persons, wrecked, ruined, humiliated; and always ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... I left the combatants to follow the bent of native savagery, and then came such warm and inartistic work as patrons of the human ring would decry as barbarous and out-of-date. They bit venomously, below the belt, they grabbed at and hung on to any part of the body that came handy; they rolled over and over, intertwined ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond the pale ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... substituting ridicule for repression in order to kill a movement distasteful to him. For, torn from its context and read by itself His Excellency's discourse on non-co-operation is unexceptionable. It is a symptom of translation from savagery to civilization. Pouring ridicule on one's opponent is an approved method in civilised politics. And if the method is consistently continued, it will mark an important improvement upon the official barbarity of the Punjab. His interpretation of ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... strong enough to deny him, the rank of Field Marshal when that military distinction was conferred on Moltke. He was at his worst in many respects. He had, or affected, a truculence which was simply brutal, its savagery intensified rather than mitigated by a bluff, boisterous bonhomie. Jules Favre complained to him that the German cannon in front of Paris fired upon the sick and blind in the Blind Institute, Bismarck in those days of swaggering prosperity had a fine turn of badinage. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes



Words linked to "Savagery" :   violence, vehemence, wildness, inhumanity, fierceness, furiousness, cruelness, harshness, ferocity, fury, savage, cruelty, savageness, atrocity



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