"Knout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man, nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his presence—possibly expecting a repetition of the mot: "My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all." Manet good-naturedly took a browbeating, but the Academic set ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... own knowledge that they have been grossly misrepresented by the press of this country. Who are these much-maligned revolutionists of Russia? For years they had been the victims of a brutal Czar. They and their antecedents were sent to Siberia, lashed with a knout, if they even dreamed of freedom. At last the hour struck for a great change. The revolution came. The Czar was overthrown and his infamous regime ended. What followed? The common people of Russia came into power, the peasants, the toilers, the soldiers, and they proceeded as ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... shattered to the marrow of his bones, sinks into death before his time. Instances have occurred where he has expired the day after the punishment. No wonder that the Englishman, Dr. Granville—himself once a surgeon in the Navy—declares, in his work on Russia, that the barbarian "knout" itself is not a greater torture to ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... court jester to her aid, and spoke Russian with her. This poor creature was a Princess Gallizin, who had been obliged to undertake this sorry office to save her life, as she had been mixed up in a conspiracy against the Czar, and had twice been flogged with the knout! ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... ministers hastened to dismiss these officers, but this did not satisfy the savage soldiery, who insisted on their being delivered into their hands. This done, the unfortunate officers were sentenced to be scourged, some of them by that fearful Russian whip called the knout. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... ears. He fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim galleries of which men and women with evil faces crept like animals. And towering above them, unreal in size, his scornful face an epitome of sin, the knout which he wielded symbolical and ghastly, driving his motley flock with the leer of the evil shepherd, was the man from whom he had already learnt to recoil with horror. The picture came and went in a flash. Francis found himself accepting ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the language that consigned them to the cruel infliction, "consisted of from ten to twenty lashes, well laid on with a raw-hide," a murderous whip, which draws blood after the first few strokes, and is as torturing, I should imagine, as the Russian knout, certainly proving in many instances as fatal as that odious instrument. The crowning severity of the enactments I have referred to, remains, however, to be told. So heinous in a negro, is the crime of lifting his hand in opposition to a white man in South ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... the same with the Russian soldier, and in fact with everybody. Honour stands for nothing, but with the knout and brandy one can get anything from them ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the first eunuch never doubted but that Zadig had stolen the king's horse and the queen's spaniel. They therefore had him conducted before the assembly of the grand desterham, who condemned him to the knout, and to spend the rest of his days in Siberia. Hardly was the sentence passed when the horse and the spaniel were both found. The judges were reduced to the disagreeable necessity of reversing their sentence; but they condemned Zadig to pay four hundred ounces of gold for having said that he had ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the Menshevik Skobeloff to Paris to influence the allied imperialists. But no sane man attached any importance to this scheme. Korniloff gave up Riga to the Germans in order to terrorize public opinion, and having brought about this condition, to establish the discipline of the knout in the army. Danger threatened Petrograd. And the bourgeois elements greeted this peril with unconcealed malicious joy. The former President of the Duma, Rodzyanko, openly said again and again that the surrender of debauched Petrograd to the Germans would not be a great ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... character. It is true that the Jews were not the only unfortunates whom the fanatic autocrat wished to Russify, that is, compel to see the pure light of Greek Orthodoxy. But they, of course, suffered the most. The slightest laws were enforced by the chinovniks (officials) with the knout and the leaden lash. When the Judeo-Polish gaberdine, the long side-curls (peot), and the wig or turban (knup) fell into disfavor with the Government, the miserable offender caught by an officer seldom saved himself with the mere sacrifice of knup, coat, peot, and beard. And when ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity, were still ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... place, it would appear, on the platform where the trial had been held, and in the eyes of all. The victim was stripped and stretched against a pillar, or bent over a low post, his hands being tied, so that he had no means of defending himself. The instrument of torture was a sort of knout or cat-o'-nine-tails, with bits of iron or bone attached to the ends of the thongs. Not only did the blows cut the skin and draw blood, but not infrequently the victim died in the midst of the operation. Some have supposed that Pilate, out of consideration ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... Catherine was little moved by desire for real reform or by pity for the peasants. She had the heavy whip—the knout—applied to the bared backs of earnest reformers. Her court was scandalously immoral, and she violated the conventions of matrimony without a qualm. For some excuse or another, the promised constitution was never written, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... stupid in all the elements of tragedy! This unhappy woman, spurred to all kinds of desperate deeds by the awful fear of the knout, had been overcome by that fatal power which has wrecked ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... could see how I cow my peasants with a knout, and grind them to starvation. It would be an interesting picture for her to take back ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... could not discover the cause of the girl's disappearance; and as all Russian criminal proceedings are conducted with great secrecy, he only ascertained by a mere accident that the girl had been sentenced, by a superior court, to receive a certain number of lashes by the knout, and to be sent to Siberia. The crime of which they accused her was that of attempting to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various |
