"Brutal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and utterly repellent form of labour, for a miserable pittance; no ray of light, no redeeming rest or enjoyment to sweeten life until that life should end. In them, cowering, writhing, beneath the driver's brutal lash, he saw himself, ever lashed and stung by the torturing consciousness of what might have been, by the recollection of what had been. Or did they fall exhausted, fainting, to die, or to undergo decapitation to insure that such exhaustion should not ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... consideration for the weaker sex, all that was momentarily cast to the winds and like the savage beast, unaccustomed to control his appetites, he stopped at nothing in a wild, passionate madness to gratify his brutal desires. ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... conduct which Adams received from the Moors, says, "I can easily believe Adams' statement of the brutal treatment he experienced at Wadinoon. It is consistent with the accounts I have always heard of the people of that country, who I believe to be more bigoted and cruel than even the remoter inhabitants of the desert. In the frequent instances which have come under my observation, the general ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to see only their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils, glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... attempts to interrupt him, with his disgusting exhibitions, which it would be disgraceful even to describe. 'Ye doan't mind, do ye, gal?' he added, chucking her under the chin in a rude, familiar way, and giving a brutal laugh. Phyllis shrank away from him, but made no reply. She had evidently braced her mind to the ordeal, and was prepared to bear anything rather than offend him. I determined to stop any further proceeding, and said ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... through it all, I do not recall consciousness of physical torture. I seemed to be mentally numbed, my brain a blank. It was a realization of my father's guilt more than my own danger which affected me—that and his death. They were not unkind nor brutal. Indeed I do not clearly recall that I was even spoken to, except when some necessary order was given. One night I heard them discuss what should be done with me; that I was to be hidden away in Black Kettle's camp. Generally ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... Rainey thought. At first he had considered Lund's character as comparatively simple—and brutal—but he had qualified this, without seeming consciousness, and he felt that Lund would never deliberately insult a woman—any sort of woman. He was beginning to feel something more than an admiration for Lund's strength; a ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... and epithets like well-greaved Greeks, horse-breaking Trojans; the tedious enumeration of details of dresses, arms, and chariots; such absurdities as giving the genealogy of a horse while in the midst of a battle; and the appeals to savage and brutal passions, having soon made the poem intolerable to him (vol. i, page 300). Turner's paintings he finds untrue, in that the earth-region is habitually as bright in tone as the air-region. Moreover, Turner scatters ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... away; but taking him by his little, thin shoulders I lifted him into the dim light of a swinging lanthorn, and looked into a small, pallid face swollen and disfigured by cuts and bruises wrought by some brutal hand. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... insufficiency of civil actions, the peace and justice of the city were imperfectly maintained by the private jurisdiction of the citizens. The malefactors who replenish our jails are the outcasts of society, and the crimes for which they suffer may be commonly ascribed to ignorance, poverty, and brutal appetite. For the perpetration of similar enormities, a vile plebeian might claim and abuse the sacred character of a member of the republic; but on the proof or suspicion of guilt, the slave or the stranger was nailed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... gloom lies beside it, and contrast reveals its fire. Thus Gerard and Margaret, though they started at every leaf that rustled louder than its fellows, glowed all over with joy and thankfulness as they glided among the friendly trees in safety and deep tranquil silence, baying dogs and brutal voices yet ringing ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... entirely in the power of these five men, whose brutal conduct the civil and military authorities would not or could not repress, when word came that Marshal Brune, who was at Luc in command of six thousand troops, had been summoned to Paris to give an account of his ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wake and move? We'll waive that question: there's eternity To answer that in. How like a marble-carven nun she lies Who prays with folded palms upon her tomb, Until the resurrection! Fair and holy! O happy Lewis! Had I been a knight— A man at all—What's this? I must be brutal, Or I shall love her: and yet that's no safeguard; I have marked it oft: ay—with that devilish triumph Which eyes its victim's writhings, still will mingle A ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... Mandy's frightened face and imploring eyes and the brutal murderous face of the man who claimed her as his own, he said between ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... people at the North mean by speaking of the negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except in some insensibility to animal pain, I never knew of an act in my regiment which I should call brutal. In reading Kay's "Condition of the English Peasantry" I was constantly struck with the unlikeness of my men to those therein described. This could not proceed ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... people? Had he not, perhaps, misunderstood the spirit that moved them? He had come to Corinth from his school with the thought fixed in his mind that the church was all right. Had he not, by the unexpected and brutal directness of his experience, been swung to the other extreme, conceiving ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... without any sense of immediate and personal concern. Moreover, the popular conception of the Indian has for a long time been wildly inaccurate. We have known him in various capacities, as the innocent victim of corrupt agents and traders, and as the brutal robber and murderer with the vices and force of the Western frontiersman, but without any of the latter's redeeming virtues. Last and most important of all, we have known him as the rare hero and the conventional villain of romance, ranging from the admirable stories of Cooper to the ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... only one thing: don't marry. You have a most serious blemish. It is as if you owed a debt. Perhaps no one will ever come to claim it; on the other hand, perhaps a pitiless creditor will come all at once, presenting a brutal demand for immediate payment. Come now—you are a business man. Marriage is a contract; to marry without saying anything—that means to enter into a bargain by means of passive dissimulation. That's the term, is it not? It is dishonesty, and ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... the reader. This, of course, is mere vanity. The author, sitting in his comfortable chair with something short within easy reach, recks nothing of the misery he is inflicting on hundreds of people who have done him no harm at all. He turns over the pages of his book of Familiar Quotations with brutal callousness, and for every tricky passage in the work which he is editing, finds and makes a note of three or four even trickier ones from other works. Who has not in his time been brought face to face with a word which defies translation? There are two ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... a little surprised: said her mother wished to do the same, but that her only brother was with the colors; that he had confided his young wife and two babies to her, and that the Germans were so brutal to children that she did ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... me very uncomfortable, for many and many reasons, the chief and foremost being of course my anxiety about Lorna. If the attack succeeded, what was to become of her? Who would rescue her from the brutal soldiers, even supposing that she escaped from the hands of her own people, during the danger and ferocity? And in smaller ways, I was much put out; for instance, who would ensure our corn-ricks, sheep, and cattle, ay, and even our fat pigs, now coming on for bacon, against the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... biding his time. And I wished him well in the issue. "Ecod!" thought I, with heat. "I hopes he gets a good grip o' the throat!" Whether or not, at the last, it was the throat, I do not know; but I do know the brutal tragedy of that man's end, for, soon, he came rough-shod into our quiet life, and there came a time when I was hot on his trail, and rejoiced, deep in the wilderness, to see the snow all trampled and gory. But the telling of that is for a ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... very favourable to us and to our Allies. Through the brutal but clumsy blundering of Prussian diplomats, Europe has been long awaiting the conflagration; every move in the game has been brought out long ago. Besides, Germany undoubtedly counted on our domestic troubles ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the long white presence of Death. Whence comes it, how comes it—Death? Sudden reverse of all that goes before; blind setting forth on a path that leads to where? Dark quenching of the fire! The heavy, brutal crushing—out that all men must go through, keeping their eyes clear and brave unto the end! Small and of no import, insects though they are! And across old Jolyon's face there flitted a gleam, for Soames, murmuring to the Inspector, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... there's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the native foremen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate. You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturally brutal race." ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... M. Bourget, and has shown how difficult it is in the musky atmosphere of fashionable Paris for two hearts to recover the Mayday freshness of their impulses, the spontaneous flow of their illusions; he displays himself here in a new light, less brutal than of old, more delicate and analytical. With regard to Pierre et Jean, it would be difficult to find words wherewith to describe it and its relation to the best English fiction more just or ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... knew it. But, in the queer loyalty of her class, he was the only man she had cared for. She cared now. She took him for that moment, felt his hot kisses on her mouth, her throat, submitted while his rather brutal hands bruised her arms in fierce caresses. Then she put him from ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of his black mask, and gloating over his success, that it was one of the trapped and disappointed train wreckers who now had him in his power, and he shivered a little at the thought of what his fate might be. A man who had planned such a fiendish crime was not likely to be anything but brutal in his treatment of one of those who had helped to foil him, and Jack understood that perfectly well. If he had needed anything more to make him realize his position it was supplied in ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... and a spirit of revenge in the mind of Achilles. He gave up his quarrel with Agamemnon and returned to the combat. He did not remit his exertions till he had slain Hector, and then he expressed his brutal exultation, and satisfied his revenge, by dragging the dead body at the wheels of his chariot around the walls of the city. He then sold the body to the ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... really taken part in the life of his people, and had come into direct contact with things very diverse and contradictory, representing the popular will. He had talked with street urchins, and visionaries, had rubbed shoulders with men of brutal habit and vile character,—with knaves, cowards, fools; he had been shut up with drunkards and pickpockets, policemen's thumbs had left bruises upon his arms, and all his mind was one great bruise from the bureaucratic police system which had ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... of its late results. The pathological changes are widespread throughout the brain but may at the onset be confined mostly to the frontal lobes. The very first change may be—and usually is—a change in character! The man hitherto kind and gentle becomes irritable, perhaps even brutal. One whose sex morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband, suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... have now come down to his plane, and desire above all things to finish up the anti-slavery work and have the negro man out of the way, and so give the Sixteenth Amendment the go-by, claiming manhood suffrage because it is the order of nature that man, however ignorant, debased and brutal he may be, shall always be first, because he always has been, yielding the whole argument to physical force, leaving the negro woman wholly out of the question, giving her over to the tyranny of the husband, which is nearly, if not quite, equal to that of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... awful scene seemed to inspire the tones of the speaker—they thrilled through the coarse, brutal nature ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... extent by the gentleman conducting the examination, related the story of the crime, dwelling with special earnestness upon the dastardly, brutal manner in which Smilk forced him, at the point of a revolver to bind and gag and otherwise maltreat the woman who had befriended him and whose jewels he was preparing to make off with when the police arrived. He carefully avoided ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... of a senatorian family in Anazarbus, and a minister of the gospel. In the persecution of Dioclesian he fell into the hands of a judge, who, by his brutal behavior, resembled more a wild beast than a man. The president, seeing his constancy proof against the sharpest torments, hoped to overcome him by the long continuance of his martyrdom. He caused him to be brought before his tribunal everyday; sometimes he caressed him, at other times threatened ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... surprise. It was brutal of me. But somehow the old reckless spirit had come back. I was speaking as a soldier should to a fair woman, bold and free. That's what a woman likes. She hates a man who stutters love. And while I did not own to myself the least passion for the ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... and arresting, if, to the unmodern eye, somewhat formless. But they are part of a record that all Englishmen can study with quickened sympathy and a great pride in the courage and resource of our race under conditions needlessly brutal at their worst, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... resistance of this slight, rose-leaf creature he could crush with one blow of his hand roused suddenly all the primitive joy of the chase, the excitement of pursuit. Only, where with some natures it would have been brutal and rapid, the end and triumph assured, the prize the body; here it would be gentle and dexterous, the end dependent on another, the prize the soul—the soul, the will, the most difficult quarry to capture, ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... puzzled. How he was to comply he did not know. It would be simply brutal to tell her. He would feel like a hangman. And she believed so in Harry, she wouldn't listen; even if she did, he thought bitterly, she would hate him for destroying her ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... in the one huddle of sheep which they corralled and counted so carefully; and then the common herders, fighting Chihuahuanos, with big round heads and staring eyes, low-browed Sonorans, slow and brutal in their ways, men of all bloods and no blood, lumped together in that careless, all-embracing ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt, before her husband, higher aspirations than those after mere animal pleasure. To be as gods, knowing good and evil, is a vain and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself thereby—though at an awful cost—a woman, and not an animal. And indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her more vivid emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special source ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... and plenty be secured to their hands. He had many times been known to listen to the advice of his confidential slaves, and even to yield to their caprices. And, too, he had been known to decry the ill-treatment of slaves by brutal and inconsiderate masters; but he never thinks it worth while to go beyond expressing a sort of rain-water sympathy for the maltreated. With those traits most prominent in his character, Annette and Nicholas were to him mere merchandise; and whatever ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant, often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, with very little sense of romance, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced. History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... flushed scarlet, and my own cheeks burned, as I looked daggers at the school-master, for what seemed a brutal insensibility to the lame boy's feelings. He did not condescend, however, to meet my eyes. His own were still fixed steadily on Charlie's, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... married; he betrayed her and then left the village, and no one could trace his whereabouts. When her condition became apparent, her father alone failed to realize her true state until he received a note from his master to have her removed from his estate, and with brutal severity the squire insisted that she should never be allowed to stain the purity of his grounds by her presence again, nor could he permit any intercourse whatever between her and any of his servants either male ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... possible and, failing that, to destroy the boys' canoes. That the aeroplane would also have been put out of commission there is little doubt, if Diego or Wiseman could have found an opportunity. The brutal Arab could then have disposed of the expedition at his leisure. But the Golden Eagle II was too closely guarded for the two spies to be able to ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... been made rector of a larger parish, than Varina let him know that she had changed her mind, and was ready to marry him; but by this time Swift had lost all interest in her. He wrote an answer which even his truest admirers have called brutal. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... he had been violent, brutal, unscrupulous. Judging from Ellenby's story, it was difficult to accept him as a product of modern civilisation. Rather he would seem to have been a throwback to some savage, buccaneering ancestor. To expect him to work, while he could live ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... bound up in rags. But he was a very important Angus, withal, for had he not crossed the Delaware with Washington; had he not left bloody footprints on the snowy road to Trenton; had he not charged down King Street, swept by the northeast gale and British lead, and driven the brutal Hessians as chaff is swept before the wind? He was, to the village folk, the returned conqueror, and much they made of him, the Allisons with the others. He no longer envied Rodney mounted on Nat riding over the country with all the importance of a special messenger, and it is to be hoped that ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... How brutal war is, and what a perfect exponent of the art the Captain proves himself to be! To me a life is a life, a particle of the thing divine; to him a life is a unit, and a half-maimed and probably dying seaman is ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... your case, Thyra," Adherbal said, "it would make no difference, because you know you would have chosen me anyhow; but most girls would make a nice business of it. How are they to know what men really are? They might be gamesters, drunkards, brutal and cruel by nature, idle and spendthrift. What can maidens know of a man's disposition? Of course they only see him at his best. Wise parents can make careful inquiries, and have means of knowing what a man's disposition ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... been ordered to Ireland during the campaign that followed the battle of Boyne Water. He had suddenly returned from thence, cashiered: by his own story, the victim of the enmity of the Dutch General Ginkel; according to another version, on account of brutal excesses towards the natives and insolence to his commanding officer. Courts-martial had only just been introduced, and Sir Philip could believe in a Whig invention doing injustice to a member of a loyal family, so that his doors were open to his nephew, and Sedley haunted them whenever he ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a very stupid and brutal people. They rub their bodies all over with rancid grease, which gives them a very bad smell, so that you may nose them at a considerable distance. Their children are all born perfectly white; but being constantly rubbed with grease, and exposed to the sun, they grow ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... the world with an equal admiration and pity of his splendid qualities and great misfortunes. William was of a character very different. His views were short, his designs few, his genius narrow, and his manners brutal; full of craft, rapacious, without faith, without religion; but circumspect, steady, and courageous for his ends, not for glory. These qualities secured to him that fortune which the virtues of Robert deserved. Of Henry we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Would you not accuse such a father of caprice, cruelty, folly, and a want of reason, if he visited with his anger the children whom he had himself excluded from his presence? Would you not impute to him an injustice of which none but the most brutal of our species could be guilty if he actually punished them for not having executed orders which he was never pleased ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... deg., to STATEN RIVER. From this place, what more of the land could be discerned, seemed to stretch westward:" the Pera then returned to Amboina. "In this discovery were found, every where, shallow water and barren coasts; islands altogether thinly peopled by divers cruel, poor, and brutal nations; and of very little use to the (Dutch ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... One is that he has nowhere else to go where he will have half as good a time as he will here and another is that if he goes anywhere else I won't have half as good a time as if he comes here. Pray excuse my brutal candor, but I am only a woman; brutal candor and womanly weakness always have gone about encouraging one another, you know. I cannot see any good reason for Mr. Denham's not coming except that he declines my invitation. It is very silly in him, and I regard it as no reason at ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... to a mysterious underworld, are common in all countries. A story is told of Friar Conrad, the Confessor of S. Elizabeth of Thuringia, a barbarous, brutal man, who was sent into Germany by Gregory IX. to burn and butcher heretics. The Pope called him his "dilectus filius." In 1231 he was engaged in controversy with a heretical teacher, who, beaten in argument, according to Conrad's account, offered to show him Christ and the Blessed ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... to their piracies on the high seas, scoured the coast in all directions, and committed the greatest atrocities, attended with some of the most cruel murders. One sample will be sufficient to show their brutal character:—A detachment of three of their boats, having obtained information that a poor Dyak family, belonging to a tribe in Mr. Brooke's territory, had come down from their mountain to cultivate a small portion of land nearer the coast, and, for their better security, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... story of Arnold's expedition to Virginia, with the brutal incidents which history relates concerning it. It will suffice to say that Champe formed part of it, all his efforts to desert proving fruitless. It may safely be said that no bullet from his musket reached the American ranks, but he was forced ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... three days a second fatal rencontre succeeded this deadly contest; and another brother, Captain Alexander Schaw, fell a victim to the vindictive and brutal notions at that period considered in the army to ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... keepsake, with the frank good-will of an accomplished gentleman. The only exhibition of his hot Italian blood which I remember did his humanity credit. While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box to thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy. He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerous quarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to the mercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the poet patriot of my people. But these English! They care only to make money and to stuff it down the throats of gorging reverends. My scholarship, my poetry, my divine dreams—what are these to a besotted, brutal congregation of Men-of-the-Earth? I sent Buckledorf, the rich banker, a copy of my little book, with a special dedication written in my own autograph in German, so that he might understand it. And what ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... cloudy understanding of the state of affairs when he was endeavoring to blackmail Mrs. Horn, and making stupid charges against her husband. He knew that the three negroes he had met in Paris in the service of Mrs. Horn had once been his own slaves, held not by any right of law, but by brutal force, and he knew that the people with whom they were then travelling must have been in some way connected with his old comrades, the Rackbirds. He had made bold attempts to turn this scanty knowledge to his own benefit, but had ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,—a foretaste of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him, his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about him, and tore it ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... an' shudder when some scene comes back to me, Which shows me big an' brutal in some act o' tyranny, When some triflin' thing upset me an' I let my temper fly, An' was sorry for it after—but it's vain to sit an' sigh. So I'd be a whole sight happier now my sun begins to set, If it wasn't for the meanness which I've done ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... of Americans than Horseshoe Robinson, and this because it is the only story which depicts with fidelity to the facts the heroic efforts of the colonists in South Carolina to defend their homes against the brutal oppression of the British under such ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... was interrupted by a heavy thump, repeated several times. It ceased, as if the golden string had been torn asunder by a brutal hand. The choir disappeared from the platform, and in their place stood one man, whose dark, piercing eyes looked more baneful than ever. In his hands he held a heavy book, with which he struck the table as a sign for silence. Throughout the building everything was quiet, ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... school, and left to himself in the holidays, began his adventurous career by running away. He got employment (under an assumed name) as a ship's boy. At the outset, he did well; learning his work, and being liked by the Captain and the crew. But the chief mate was a brutal man, and the young runaway's quick temper resented the disgraceful infliction of blows. He made up his mind to try his luck on shore, and attached himself to a company of strolling players. Being a handsome lad, with a ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... surgeon's nerves. The smashed fingers alone were painful to see, but there were other accidents much worse. Every man in the fleet had been compelled to fight desperately for life, and you cannot go through such a battle without risks. There were no malingerers; the bald, brutal facts of crushed bones, or flayed scalp, or broken leg, or poisoned hand were there in evidence, and the men used no extra words after they had modestly described the time and circumstances under which they met with their trouble. Ferrier worked as long as he could, and then joined the others ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... obliged to pay for the added value which his own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal husband breaks or drives away—the most sensitive and therefore the most pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose to write little. Not his words but the overtones vibrating ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... America leapt up as one soul and declared for war. In so doing the people of the United States forewent the freedom from fear that they had gained by their journey across the Atlantic; they turned back in their tracks to smite again with renewed strength and redoubled hate the old brutal Fee-Fo-Fum of despotism, from whose clutches they thought ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... round self-rowl'd, His head the midst, well stor'd with suttle wiles: Not yet in horrid Shade or dismal Den, Not nocent yet, but on the grassie Herbe Fearless unfeard he slept: in at his Mouth The Devil enterd, and his brutal sense, In heart or head, possessing soon inspir'd With act intelligential; but his sleep 190 Disturbd not, waiting close th' approach of Morn. Now whenas sacred Light began to dawne In Eden on the humid Flours, that breathd Thir morning Incense, when all things that breath, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... closed with a vicious snap. Then I heard the crunch of sabots on the gravelled court, and the next instant caught a glimpse of the stout, brutal figure of the peasant Le Gros, the big dealer in cattle, as he passed the narrow window of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... enlistment in the latter, although the life in other respects is one of less hardship; but in Nelson's day the feeling had been intensified by the practice of impressment, and by the severe, almost brutal discipline that obtained on board some ships of war, through the arbitrary use of their powers by captains, then insufficiently controlled by law. In this cruise he seems to have spent a little over a year; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... hotly. "Can't you see, Mr. Denton, that your father is sorely distressed? How dare you trample upon his feelings in such a brutal manner?" ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... Government had craftily filled the place with minions; even the pensioner was not improbably a hireling in disguise; and our emissary, without other aid or protection than the simple apparatus in his bag, found himself confronted by force; brutal force; that strong hand which was a character of the ages of oppression. Should he venture to deposit the machine, it was almost certain that he would be observed and arrested; a cry would arise; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... French interest, establish a firm peace, and induce them to exert their influence in persuading the Twightwees to accede to this treaty. Those Indians, though possessed of few ideas, circumscribed in their mental faculties, stupid, brutal, and ferocious, conducting themselves nevertheless, in matters of importance to the community, by the general maxims of reason and justice; and their treaties are always founded upon good sense, conveyed in a very ridiculous manner. Their language is guttural, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... is valueless in his eyes, torn from him by violence, basely exchanged for gold, like beasts at the shambles, bent down under unpitied sorrows, their persons polluted, and their pure hearts corrupted—hopeless and unpitied slaves, to the rude caprice and brutal passions of those we blush to call men. Let him turn from these spectacles, and look abroad on the heritage where his lot has been cast, glad and smiling under the profuse blessings which heaven has poured on it, let him look back on the even ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... days of joy and days of grief: sunshine follows the storm. The whole history of European peoples is one of alternate victories and defeats. It is the business of civilization to create such conditions as will render victory less brutal and defeat ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... under the name of Jansen, which the smuggler had adopted after the death of Kennedy; and he remembered also, that this Jansen, and his mate Brown, the same who was shot at Woodbourne, had been the brutal tyrants of his infancy. Bertram knew further, from piercing his own imperfect recollections with the narratives of Mannering and Pleydell, that this man was the prime agent in the act of violence which tore him from his family and country, and had exposed him to ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... a premature old age: while yet boys, they suddenly become old, without any interval of manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust." The jealous Roman husband's furious desire to prevent the consequences of his wife's incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their maids and ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the lyric muse! For when mankind ran wild in groves, Came holy Orpheus with his songs And turned men's hearts from bestial loves, From brutal force and savage wrongs; Came Amphion, too, and on his lyre Made such sweet music all the day That rocks, instinct with warm desire, Pursued him in ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... behind his general disapproval of a custom which was recognized by his professional brethren and had been countenanced by himself. It is true that he would have shown a higher courage by braving an ignorant and brutal public opinion, but it would be unjust to censure him for not showing a degree of courage which no man of his day displayed. He and Burr are to be measured by their own standard, not by ours; and tried by that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Marriott, setting her back against the door. Her terror and embarrassment instantly recalled all the jealous suspicions of Lord Delacour. "Woman!" cried he, "I will see whom you have in this room!—You have some one concealed there, and I will go in." Then with brutal oaths he dragged Marriott from the door, and snatched the key from her ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... volcano. The original natives of the island are pagans; but the Moors who came there first as merchants, have possessed themselves of the island as lords ever since the year 1400. Among the inland tribes is one called Batas, who are of most brutal manners, and even feed on human flesh. The Moors who dwell on the coast, use several languages, but chiefly the Malay. Their weapons are poisoned arrows like the natives of Java from whom they are descended, but they likewise use fire-arms. This ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... on, deeply grieved by the death of his brother-Augustine and friend Henry Moller of Zutphen, who, after having been forced to fly from the Netherlands, had begun a blessed work at Bremen, and was now murdered in the most brutal manner on December 11, 1524, by a mob instigated by monks, near Meldorf, whither he had gone in response to an invitation from some of his companions in the faith. Luther informed his Christian brethren in a circular of the end of this 'blessed brother' and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... an ape in Paris, To which was given a wife: Like many a one that marries, This ape, in brutal strife, Soon beat her out of life. Their infant cries,—perhaps not fed,— But cries, I ween, in vain; The father laughs: his wife is dead, And he has other loves again, Which he will also beat, I think,— Return'd ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... the wren her little fellows' supper, with a better zest than an old grunter does her corn, and Wm. Gildersten in spending money and laboring to prevent any more scenes of brutal violence in his State, by punishing the one past, gratifies his own loves and longings quite as much as Judge Grier in grunting out his wrath against ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort of wretches. This system of manners in itself is at war with all orderly and moral society, and is in its neighborhood unsafe. If great bodies of that kind were anywhere established ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... friend,' thought I sadly, 'and all forsooth because I will not stand by and see a helpless man's throat cut. Another friend is dead on the field. A third, the oldest and dearest of all, lies wounded at Bridgewater, at the mercy of a brutal soldiery. If I return to my home I do but bring trouble and danger to those whom I love. Whither shall I turn?' For some minutes I stood irresolute beside the prostrate guardsmen, while Covenant strolled slowly along cropping the scanty ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of natives, "whose souls may God in His mercy receive in the Habitation of the Saints." The Moors carried off the boat and broke it up for the sake of its nails, and Azurara was told by some that the bodies of the dead were eaten by their brutal conquerors. 'T is certain at least, he adds, that their custom is to eat the livers of their victims and to drink their blood, when they are avenging the death of parents or brothers or children, as they do it ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... intentionally or not, this brutal act of violence in the ecclesiastical strife, drew on himself the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... your dead!" The midnight street Heard and gave back the hoarse, low call; Harsh fell the tread of hasty feet, Glanced through the dark the coarse white sheet, Her coffin and her pall. "What—only one!" the brutal hack-man said, As, with an oath, he spurned ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... could never have anything but distressing and disagreeable impressions from that picture. Six months afterward I was in Antwerp again: I could not see the Descent often enough, and spent my last hour in the place before it. Yet he is a brutal painter withal, and such subjects, however magnificently treated by him, could never give me the same unmixed enjoyment as in the hands of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... very substantial services to his party, Douglas had sooner or later to face his constituents with an answer to the crucial question, "What have you done for us?" It is a hard, brutal question, which has blighted many a promising career in American politics. The interest which Douglas exhibited in the Western Harbors bill was due, in part at least, to his desire to propitiate those by virtue of whose suffrages he was a member of the House of Representatives. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... his young wife was modest and obedient; yet she easily lost her temper. She could not approve her husband's conduct. But Sia would not do her the favor to give up his brutal habit. So she scolded him because of it and ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... energetic and thinking mind. (1) The speeches are seldom suited to characters—the characters are truly diversified and distinctly conceived—but we learn them from the actions and from the descriptions given by other characters, or from particular speeches. The brutal Illo repeatedly talks language which belongs to the Countess, &c. (2) Astrology (an undramatic superstition because it inspires no terror, and its foundation of imagination is overbuilt and concealed by its scientific superstructure, with other cause from the imagery, is thus unpopular or swallowed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with my back to the wall, I called to the ruffian to stand off, as he valued his life. He halted within a few feet, evidently a little disconcerted at my sudden determination to make battle. His face was the most brutal I had over seen; a filthy mass of beard nearly covered it; two piercing white eyes glistened beneath the leaf of his greasy cap; a coarse blouse, gathered around the waist by a leather belt, and boots that reached nearly to his hips, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Italy the brutal destruction of its cities and people by the Visigoths, III. ii. 11, 12; invaded by Gizeric, III. ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of innocent men condemned to life-long exile in Siberia, simply because they have aroused the suspicion or incurred the ill-will of those in authority. Force in its most brutal form ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... life from a painful and inconvenient defect, which his proud and sensitive spirit had magnified into a deformity. He had been stung to the quick by his mother's taunts and his sweetheart's ridicule, by the jeers of the base and thoughtless, by slanderous and brutal paragraphs in newspapers. He could not forget that he was lame. If his enemies had but possessed the wit, they might have given him "the sobriquet of Le Diable Boiteux" (letter to Moore, April 2, 1823, Letters, 1901, vi. 179). It was no wonder that so poignant, so persistent a calamity ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... called on to bear from the earliest days to the present time, and urging them to keep in view that crown of glory which He had prepared for all who hold fast to the truth. So much had his faithful and gentle character won the love of all except the most brutal, that many even among those who had been perverted regarded him with affection, while the priests, hearing him so highly spoken of, were afraid for the present to persecute him further. They were, however, very active among his congregation, whom they endeavoured by soft words and plausible ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... count—"no, I will do no such thing! It shall not be said that I voluntarily submitted to treason and brutal violence!" ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... God above us, I know, and I believe there is a just Duke in the Breton land. Mighty ruler, make war upon the Frank, defend our country, and give us vengeance—vengeance for Karo my son, Karo, slain, decapitated by the Frankish barbarians, his beauteous head made into a balance-weight for their brutal sport." ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... on to the facts of this case; which, if all its incidents could now be recovered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever yet has tried the spirit of fortitude and patience in a child. But its moral interest depends upon this—that, simply out of one brutal chastisement, arose naturally the entire series of events which so very nearly made shipwreck of all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the tranquility of a whole ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... and muskets were all ready loaded. A sign from me would have spread dismay and death around us; and had we stayed longer among this brutal race, we must inevitably have made them feel ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... But I love her, Arthur. We are childless, and I have no one else to love, no one else to love me. Perhaps if God had sent us children she might have been kinder to me. But God has given us a lonely house. And she has cut my heart in two. Don't let us talk of it. I was brutal to her this evening. But I suppose when sinners talk to saints they are brutal always. I said to her things that were hideously true, on my side, from my stand-point, from the standpoint of men. But don't let ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... from early morning had seen brutal crowds, slaying and robbing, looked with more attention on the faces around him, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... in convincing any reasonable man that this Austrian ultimatum to Servia was brutal in its tone and unreasonable in its demands. It would be difficult to find in history a more offensive document, and its iniquity was enhanced by the short shriving time which it gave either Servia or Europe. Servia had ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Disdaining all cant, he clearly perceives that the system, in its practical working, must conform to the principles on which it is based. He accordingly believes in the lash and the fear of the lash. If he is cruel and brutal, it may as often be from policy as from disposition, for brutality and cruelty are the means by which weaker races are best kept "subordinated" to stronger races; and the influence of his brutality and cruelty is felt as restraint and terror ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... with it as he did the Christianisme dvoil. Buzonniere, Rochfort and Fangouse are milder and more naive in their demonstrations and their works are of no weight or interest. L'Impie dmasqu is a brutal work which qualifies Holbach as a "vile apostle of vice and crime," and the Systme de la Nature as the most impudent treatise on atheism that has yet dishonored the globe—one which covers the century with shame and will be ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... side. She could feel how animal youth in him released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down the lawn he halted and laid his hand ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... necessary to protect at the price of our blood the heritage of our ancient freedom. Go, then, sons of the workers, and register your names as recruits. We will rather die for the idea of progress and solidarity of humanity than live under a regime whose brutal force and savage violence have ...
— 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
... Russian army in World War I led to widespread rioting in the major cities of the Russian Empire and to the overthrow in 1917 of the imperial household. The Communists under Vladimir LENIN seized power soon after and formed the USSR. The brutal rule of Iosif STALIN (1928-53) strengthened Communist rule and Russian dominance of the Soviet Union at a cost of tens of millions of lives. The Soviet economy and society stagnated in the following decades until General Secretary Mikhail GORBACHEV (1985-91) introduced glasnost (openness) and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the "smart" and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It is a passage of arms neither gentle nor joyous ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... on leaving England, had unwisely given away his property to his children, thinking that he could rely upon them to be kind to him. But he had not trained them in the ways of kindness. He had been hot, brutal, and tyrannical to them when he had the power. When they got it they were equally brutal to him. At last his daughter determined to bear the old man's ill-temper—ill-temper, apparently, approaching to madness—no longer. He was told by Miss Landor that if he could not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Portsmouth (Louise de Querouaille), and later was the school of Dr. Elphinstone, referred to in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and supposed, on the very slightest grounds, to have been the original of one of Smollett's brutal schoolmasters in "Roderick Random"; though the driest of pedagogues, Elphinstone was the reverse of brutal. The house was subsequently a Roman Catholic seminary, and then a boarding-house, where Mrs. Inchbald lodged, and in which she ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... if she had, it might not have occurred to her that there was any connection between that and his desire to get rid of Sabina. His ways were complicated, when they were not unpleasantly direct, not to say brutal. ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... wreck as they could see, for the station smelt to Heaven of oil, and the engine skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... such a barbarian? Who was ever so savage? so brutal? He would not listen to them; he gave them no answer; and he not only despised and showed that he considered of no importance those men who were with him, but still more us, by whom these men had been sent. And afterwards what wickedness, or what crime ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Mary's voice he rushed into the barn, and demanded in a loud voice what was the matter? when, to his horror, he beheld William upon the barn floor, and Mary struggling but in vain to rise. William, instead of desisting from his brutal purpose, with a dreadful oath ordered Dan to clear out; but the sight of the outrage on her whom, I now firmly believe he loved better than his own soul, made poor Dan completely forget himself—and made him forget too, in that fatal moment what he afterwards wished he ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... the term "Sceptic," and in relation to religion the term "Atheist" was ready to hand. The latter term certainly covered all that Huxley meant by Agnosticism as applied to the god-idea. The plain, and perhaps brutal truth, is that Huxley was just illustrating the fatal tendency of English public men to seek for a label that will mark them off from an unfashionable heresy even more clearly than it separates them from a crumbling orthodoxy. It is certainly suggestive to find, in this ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... period of traditional history, when war and the clashing of shields and sword or spear were the main delights and occupations of man. It is strange to note what difference must have existed between these hero-warriors in regard to their ideas of manliness; some were brutal and fiendish, whilst others were magnanimous. McPherson, the historiographer of early Britain, cannot help but contrast the superior manliness of the heroes of Ossian in his graphic description of the ancient Caledonians, when compared to the brutality of Homer's Greek heroes. The traditions upon ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... hatred of human law; that hatred which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... enlisted two years ago. Before that he had been professional murderer and provider of human flesh to the great chief. Now he was a useful and quiet foreman on the plantation, always cheerful, very intelligent, strong, brutal, with small, shrewd eyes and a big mouth, apparently quite happy in civilization, and devoted to George. He was one of the few natives who openly admitted his liking for human flesh, and rapturously ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... for one thing—that the remark complained about, with its brutal reference to her old age, should not be repeated, and least of all discussed,—here ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... defect, in a great measure, arose from an absurd notion, that laws necessary to prevent those acts of cruelty, violence, and rapine, would be incompatible with the liberty of British subjects; a notion that confounds all distinctions between liberty and brutal licentiousness, as if that freedom was desirable, in the enjoyment of which people find no security for their lives or effects. The peculiar depravity of the times was visible even in the conduct of those who preyed upon the commonwealth. Thieves and robbers were now ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... compressed, but, unlike Christian women, they do not need their feet to give broom drills or skirt dances for the "benefit of their church." The child-wives of India need to be rescued and protected, but no more than many adult wives in Bible lands need protection from drunken and brutal husbands. The heathen wife seeks death on her husband's funeral pyre, but the Christian wife is often sent to death by a bullet in her brain, or a ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
