"Rapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the animals, fictitiously introduced, are marked. While they are made to depict the motives and passions of men, they retain, in an eminent degree, their own special features of craft or counsel, of cowardice or courage, of generosity or rapacity. ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... the legislature authorized it," the committee went on. "It is proper to remark that the people are quite as much indebted to the venality of the men elected to represent them in the Legislature as to the rapacity of the railroad managers for this state of affairs." ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... felt herself succumb to the superior force of the enemy, and cast herself a suppliant before the most powerful thrones of Europe, begging them to accept a dominion which she herself could no longer protect. At last, but with difficulty—so despised at first was this state, that even the rapacity of foreign monarchs spurned her opening bloom—a stranger deigned to accept their importunate offer of a dangerous crown. New hopes began to revive her sinking courage; but in this new father of his country destiny gave her a traitor, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... of the rapids. With these precautions they all passed unmolested. The only accident that happened was the upsetting of one of the canoes, by which some of the goods sunk, and others floated down the stream. The alertness and rapacity of the hordes which infest these rapids, were immediately apparent. They pounced upon the floating merchandise with the keenness of regular wreckers. A bale of goods which landed upon one of the islands was immediately ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... nations came to rest, like birds taking shelter from the storm. Now what refuge is there? The island has been covered by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled from the Seven Hills.—The Alps only are left for them. There, amid the rapacity of Europe, stands (for how long?) the little island of twenty-four cantons. In truth it has not the poetic radiance and glamor of the Eternal City: history has not filled its air with the breath of gods and heroes; but ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... himself a miserable sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France. But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... attention of other alligators, who seemed to be projected upward from the ooze of the river, and assailed their unfortunate comrade with remorseless ferocity. In a twinkling he was torn piecemeal by the cannibals, whose taste of blood set aflame their rapacity. Had they known enough they might have smashed the boat with their tails or rolled it over with their snouts; but, unaware of their own strength, they kept up their wild darting to and fro and were soon ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... among them cannot touch the property or the life of the lowest in rank. All this seems to me excellent; but then, on the other hand, my blood boils in my veins at the contempt in which they hold us; at their greed, their rapacity, their brutality, their denial to us of all rights. In their eyes we are but savages, but wild men, who may be useful for tilling the ground for them, but who, if troublesome, should be hunted down and slain like ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... it is this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness, rapacity, and love of power, which up till then had not only to be honoured from the point of view of general utility—under other names, of course, than those here given—but had to be fostered and cultivated (because they ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... cacique, exasperated by the rapacity of the corregidor of Tuita, who had laid three repartimientos on the Indians in a single year, seized the tyrannical wretch and strangled him with his own hands. Then, taking the name of his ancestor, Tupac-Amaru, he proclaimed himself the chief of all those who were in ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... immemorial; of strangers who had lived but a brief time in the county; and of a few disreputable persons who, bent on construing liberty entirely on their own side, interposed against palpable rights and sacred family feelings their gossiping facts, their grasping rapacity, and their ruthless disposition to destroy whatever they could not control. "There is but one legal public," he defiantly concluded his first letter, "and that acts under the obligation of precise oaths, through prescribed forms, and on constitutional ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... so," replied the other, coldly. "When all the civilization of a planet has been given to destruction by the unreasoning stupidity and insatiable rapacity of its royalty, allegiance to such royalty is at an end. SIT DOWN!" he thundered as Fenor sprang to his feet. "You are no longer in your throne-room, surrounded by servile guards and by automatic rays. You are in MY laboratory, and by a movement ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... without being a thief. No one concerned with Herr Vossner had supposed him to be an honest man. But then as a thief he had been so comfortable that his absence was regretted with a tenderness almost amounting to love even by those who had suffered most severely from his rapacity. Dolly Longestaffe had been robbed more outrageously than any other member of the club, and yet Dolly Longestaffe had said since the departure of the purveyor that London was not worth living in now that Herr Vossner was gone. In a week the Beargarden collapsed,—as ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Senard, one of the richest jewellers of the Palais Royal, having gone to pay a visit to his friend the Cure of Livry, found him in one of those perplexities which are generally caused by the approach of our good friends the enemy. He was anxious to secrete from the rapacity of the cossacks first the consecrated vessels, and then his own little treasures. After much hesitation, although in his situation he must have been used to interments, Monsieur le Cure decided on burying the objects which he was anxious to save, and M. Senard, who, like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... once described to a fellow-writer the impression produced on him by that plaster face, so capaciously ugly, as though comprehending the whole of human life, sharing all man's gluttony and lust, his violence and rapacity, but sharing also his strivings toward love and reason ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is trying now: that is, to combine ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... described—set free in the desert and murdered by the way. I wish you to publish these facts, it is no secret to any but to those Europeans whose interests keep their eyes tightly shut, and they will soon have them opened. The blind rapacity of the present ruler will make him astonish the Franks some ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... in the spirit of benevolence and of peace, and have brought in their hands the precious treasure of the Gospel of Christ. But their number is so small as to be almost lost among the multitude. For one who has taught righteousness, purity, truth and mercy, thousands have taught, by their example, rapacity, drunkenness, lewdness and cruelty. For one who has led us in the path of life, thousands have led us in the paths of destruction. For one who has brought the Bible, thousands have brought rum. For one whose example has been salutary, ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... shark (GALEOCERDO TIGRINUS) in my experience generally keeps to deep water and hunts singly; but a recent event sets at naught other local observations and at the same time provides graphic proof of the rapacity and hardihood of the species. About a hundred yards out from the beach, as we started on a strictly sordid beachcombing expedition to the scene of the squashed wreck of a Chinese sampan, a shark betrayed itself by the dorsal fin quartering the glassy surface of the sea. Equipment for ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... will against roguery and cheating, rail as they may at the rapacity and rascality one meets with, I declare and protest, after a good deal of experience, that the world is a very poor world to him who is not the mark of some roguery! When you are too poor to be cheated, you are too insignificant to be cherished; and the man that ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... when we were about to depart, we offered her a present of twenty ducats, as a return for her hospitality, which at first she pretended to refuse; but we soon discovered her treachery, as she insisted on our paying two ducats as a ransom for each of our horses. We expressed our astonishment at this rapacity, and endeavoured to represent our inability to comply with such exorbitant demands, but all to no purpose, and we were forced to comply, being afraid that she might even have plundered us of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... others, to procure pleasures or to satisfy different passions. Avarice it continues to be, whatever the motive. Not even prodigality, the lavish spending of riches, is a token of the absence of cupidity. Rapacity may stand behind extravagance to keep ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Panama, with letters from Gonzalo to some of the principal inhabitants of that city urging them to favour his designs. In these letters, he pretended that he was exceedingly displeased on hearing of the violence and rapacity with which Bachicao had conducted himself towards the inhabitants of Panama, in direct contradiction to his orders, which were to land the Doctor Texada without doing injury to any one. He informed them ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Senate, chiefly by the argument that when he learned that it was the purpose of the United States to expel Spain from the Philippine Islands, he concluded it was our duty to remain there for the protection of the people against foreign rapacity and against domestic anarchy. He claimed that he had been influenced in coming to this conclusion very considerably by the fact that I was reported to have said that under no circumstances would we give back the Philippine people to Spain. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... name, some sort of truth can be found—if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human delicacy can be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; and the comical, appalling truth of human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the monstrous world created by Balzac. The pursuit of happiness by means lawful and unlawful, through resignation or revolt, by the clever manipulation ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of government to fix the rate of wages; and had shown how the poor-laws defeated their own objects. This was the really offensive ground to the political Radicals. They had been in the habit of tracing all evils to the selfishness and rapacity of the rulers; pensions, sinecures, public debts, huge armies, profligate luxuries of all kinds, were the fruits of bad government and the true causes of poverty. Kings and priests were the harpies ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... opened and to be at liberty to offer sacrifices to their idols. Thus he knew that both classes secretly entertained hostile feelings toward his predecessor, and at the same time the people in general were exceedingly exasperated by the violence of the eunuchs, and especially by the rapacity of Eusebius, the chief officer of the imperial bed-chamber. Therefore he treated all with craftiness. With some he dissembled; others he attached to himself by conferring obligations upon them, led by a desire for vainglory; but to all he manifested how he stood toward ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... deserve your insecurities, and may embrace, even as ye please, the fates which lie before you. Acquiesce in the tyranny which offends no longer, but be sure that acquiescence never yet has disarmed the despot when his rapacity needs a victim. Your lives and possessions—which ye dare not peril in the cause of freedom—lie equally at his mercy. He will not pause, as you do, to use them at his pleasure. To save them from him there was but one way—to employ them against ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... He ruled England for three years after King Henry's death. He was a glaring and unblushing church-robber, setting an example which others were only too ready to follow. Canon Overton[28] tells how Somerset House remains as a standing memorial of his rapacity. In order to provide materials for building it he pulled down the church of St. Mary-le-Strand and three bishops' houses, and was proceeding also to pull down the historical church of St. Margaret, Westminster; but public ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... private individuals, stimulated by fear, would be enough to repair the loss, and frequent legacies would soon make up for the detriment caused to the temple possessions by the enemy's sword or the rapacity of an unscrupulous lord. The residue, after the vicissitudes of revolutions, was increased and diminished from time to time, to form at length in the city an indestructible fief whose administration was a function ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... settlement is called international and is governed by a municipal council elected by the foreign ratepayers. The Chinese residents, numbering half a million, are allowed no voice in the council; and that also is felt as a grievance. They are, however, protected against the rapacity of their own officials; and it is said they took no part in the riot. In fact had it not been promptly suppressed they must have suffered all the horrors of sack and pillage. After it was over they took occasion to demand recognition ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... been visited by Cossacks, but had received no injury whatever; on the contrary the poor woman related with all the eloquence of Truth and the French animation that from their own soldiers they had suffered all that cruelty and rapacity could devise—indeed, the house and gardens bore evidence to the facts—window shutters pierced with bullets, broken doors, furniture gone, and above 800 francs' worth of honey destroyed out of pure wantonness—in short the poor people seemed quite ruined. I received a similar account in the town. ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... old days had returned," said Toussaint; "the days of Columbus and his crows. We are as the unhappy Indians to the rapacity of Europe. No wonder, if mulattoes and blacks speak of the colony as if it were the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... It is the rapacity of the chiefs of the various tribes that renders African exploration so difficult. Each tribe wishes to monopolize your entire stock of valuables, without which the traveller would be utterly helpless. The difficulty ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... respectively.[127] Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: "We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed concourse of evil passions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... horrible disaster a few months before, one reverse of fortune had succeeded another. He who had entered every country a conqueror at the head of his armies, whose myriads of soldiers had overrun every land, eating it up with ruthless greed and rapacity, and spreading destruction far and wide, was now at bay. He who had dictated terms of peace in all the capitals of Europe at the head of triumphant legions was now with a small, weak, ill-equipped, unfed army, striving to protect his own capital. France was receiving ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the no less eloquent picture of the court of the then King Otho, a German colony in the midst of the Greek people, living upon its blood, and wantoning with its treasure; and of this same Greek people, driven at length into fury by the rapacity of the hated Tudesca, who filled every position of authority and grasped at every office of emolument, and hunting them like a routed army out of the land. Still there was a depth of paternal affection in the words ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... yearnings of my soul." For a moment he covered his agitated features with his hand, and then proceeded: "I slew Heselrigge because he was a monster, under whom the earth groaned. My sorrow, deep as it was-was but one of many, which his rapacity, and his nephew's licentiousness, the whole nation without reserve! When the sword of war is drawn, all who resist must conquer or fall; but there are some noble English who abhor the tyranny they are obliged to exercise over us, and ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Minister said nobody would suspect Austria— no one could be suspected but Russia. But our experience for many years will tell us that there has been just as much menace from the West as from the East—the rapacity of the West is not less perceptible than that of the East. ['Hear.'] Some one expresses a sentiment in opposition —it is a gentleman who has never read the Blue Books—he does not know that almost the whole of this business began ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... another. We work; we talk; we eat. Ah, how we eat! No longer on short rations, we are a trifle more exacting than we were when we first commenced our 'simple life,' but by comparison with home standards we are positive barbarians, and our gastronomic rapacity knows ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the known rapacity of the French republican army in all its ranks the severest honesty of these particular officers, we must come to the conclusion, either that they had been selected for their tried qualities of abstinence and self-control, or else that the perilous tenure of their footing in Ireland had ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... believe ourselves bound to commit the murder which we have vowed? . . . 'The Saxons,' he says, 'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman, the Huns shameless. But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours? Is the Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a Christian's? If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder? He is utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood. But what of the Christian who does the same? The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... militiaman from wearing gold or silver ornamentation on his uniform. This inhibition, you must know, is intended to prevent emulation in splendor of decoration among our own people, and also to restrain the rapacity of the enemy." ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... and I think he is right, to the rapacity of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to any one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle," he whispered in Modeste's ear, "write to your father and tell ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... their insane devotion to slavery, and their conviction that nothing could save it but the dismemberment of the Republic. They forgot that the Rebellion was simply an advanced stage of slaveholding rapacity, and that instead of tempting us to cower before it and surrender our principles, it furnished an overwhelming argument for standing by them to the death. This movement was fruitful of great mischief throughout the loyal ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... is a gentle romantic Jew who cares for nothing but string quartets and stalls at fashionable theatres. He will get the credit of your rapacity in money matters, as he has hitherto had the credit of mine. You are a shark of the first order, Euripides. So much ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... talk, and a little further on, in front of a church, a noisy crowd was assembled, with soldiers among them. Having made inquiry, Felix explained the disturbance to his master. It was due to the rapacity of the Greek commander, who, scorning no gain, however small, was seizing upon the funds of the trade guilds; this morning the common chest of the potters had been pillaged, not without resistance, which resulted ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... the country with fire and sword, plundering Guelf and Ghibelline alike. Gregory's legates in the government of the ecclesiastical states rendered themselves so odious to the people by their immorality and rapacity that a league of the more powerful political factions was formed for throwing off the yoke of the "absentee" papal rulers. This was the beginning of the War of Liberation (1375) that was to shake the papal power in Italy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... would lavish on the Goths the treasures of the whole empire, to bribe them to peace and to tempt them to retreat. The Senate might possibly delay the necessary concessions, from hopes of assistance that would never be realised; but sooner or later the hour of negotiation would arrive; northern rapacity would be satisfied with southern wealth; and in the very moment when it seemed inevitable, the ruin from which the Pagan revolution was to derive its vigorous source, would be diverted from the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... passed here to-night, and the word is persecution. Perhaps I have lived too long I have lived to see honourable, upright men deprived of what was rightfully theirs, driven from their livelihood by the rapacity of those who strive to concentrate the wealth and power of the nation into their hands. I have seen this power gathering strength, stretching its arm little by little over the institutions I fought to preserve, and which I cherish over our politics, over our government, yes, and even ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... nor pause, until the last vestige of the system by which men usurped power over the lives and liberties of their fellows through economic means was destroyed. Therefore not one outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... thousand albatrosses, gulls, terns and other birds were butchered to make a Schlemmer holiday! Had the arrival of the Thetis been delayed, it is reasonably certain that every bird on Laysan would have been killed to satisfy the wolfish rapacity of one money-grubbing ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... success—adding greatly to our popularity amongst the inhabitants, which was my object in bestowing the amount. Our thus refraining from plunder was almost beyond the comprehension of a people who had bitter experience of Spanish rapacity, whilst the undisciplined Chilenos, who formed the greater portion of the squadron, as little comprehended why their plundering propensities ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... at this argument. I well knew that my brother's rapacity was not to be satisfied with millions. To sit down and say, "I have enough," was utterly incompatible with his character. I dropped the ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... outbreak among the Helvetii, which had been provoked by the dishonest rapacity of the twenty-first legion, was speedily quelled by the Roman general Aulus Caecina. Aventicum surrendered (A.D. 69), but Julius Alpinus, a chieftain and supposed ring-leader, was singled out for punishment and put to death. "The rest," says Tacitus, "were left to the ruth or ruthlessness ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... dishonesty, laziness and rapacity of servants at watering-places have long been familiar subjects of satire, it is just to say a word on the other side in favor of some extreme Northern resorts. At the White Mountains, for example, the waiters and waitresses are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... stranger led to hopes, and reports were whispered about the town that I was the bearer of the news of the disgrace of the tyrant. But his vengeance speedily fell on the principal inhabitants, for such as had hitherto escaped his rapacity were seized and stripped of their property, on the plea that they had spread ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... all more clearly since this bit of Colonial experience," she said. "Our work in the world is marked out for us; we have no choice, unless we turn cowards. Of course we shall be hated by other countries, more and more. We shall be accused of rapacity, and arrogance, and everything else that's disagreeable in a large way; we can't help that. If we enrich ourselves, that is a legitimate reward for the task we perform. England means liberty and enlightenment; let England spread ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... be informed that the violence and rapacity of a tyrannic ministry have forced the citizens of America, your brother colonist, into arms. We equally detest and lament the prevalence of those counsels, which have led to the effusion of so much human blood, and left us no alternative ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... other commodities, with great show of honesty and friendship; but having, as they imagined, laid all suspicion asleep, they soon sent another fleet of canoes, of which the crews behaved with all the insolence of tyrants, and all the rapacity of thieves; for, whatever was suffered to come into their hands, they seemed to consider as their own, and would neither pay for it, nor restore it; and, at length, finding the English resolved to admit them no longer, they discharged a shower of stones from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... resolved to continue, against all order, in the decemvirate. 12. A conduct so tyrannical produced discontents, and these were as sure to produce fresh acts of tyranny. The city was become almost a desert, with respect to all who had any thing to lose, and the rapacity of the decemvirs was then only discontinued when they wanted fresh subjects to exercise it upon. 13. In this state of slavery, proscription, and mutual distrust, not one citizen was found to strike for his country's freedom; these tyrants continued to rule without ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... theology. Nevertheless, the description, however pretty, is not an adequate account of a real earthquake, and in this moral universe there are real earthquakes, as this generation above all others ought to know, when man's sin, his greed, his selfishness, his rapacity roll up across the years an accumulating mass of consequence until at last in a mad collapse the whole earth crashes into ruin. The moral order of the world has not been trotting us on her knees these recent years; the moral ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... and was apparently pleased with the modesty and intelligence of the young gentleman's answers. George ascribed the failure of the expedition to the panic and surprise certainly, but more especially to the delays occasioned by the rapacity, selfishness, and unfair dealing of the people of the colonies towards the King's troops who were come to defend them. "Could we have moved, sir, a month sooner, the fort was certainly ours, and the little army had never been defeated," Mr. Warrington said; in which observation ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the lower class is secured against the rapacity and despotism of the great chiefs, I cannot say, but it should seem that it is sufficiently protected against private theft, or mutual depredation; for not only their plantations, which are spread over the whole country, but also their houses, their hogs, and their cloth, were left unguarded, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... growing pale in spite of himself, for he knew from report the desperate character of his guests, "that means, I suppose, that you will kill me unless I satisfy your rapacity." ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Arcot and his creditors are not adversaries, but collusive parties, and that the whole transaction is under a false color and false names. The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches. No: it is between him and them combining and confederating, on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other. These are the real plaintiffs ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... on violence, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ's law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a "War Lord" who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood, rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that Christ's words, "Resist not evil," were intended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome all forms of war (including, as they needs ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... the clergy, but of the general public. "Amongst the common people," one of their latest apologists admits, "vague rumours circulated. They talked of the covetousness and want of scruple of the Knights, of their passion for aggrandizement and their rapacity. Their haughty insolence was proverbial. Drinking habits were attributed to them; the saying was already in use 'to drink like a Templar.' The old German word Tempelhaus indicated a ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... suffused with the exuding dyes of its jewels, took now a dewy lustre, as if weeping precious gum and amber. The Jew felt an instant's sense of superstition, which he dashed away, and placing the child, already sleeping, before the fire, awakened rapacity led him to hunt the hovel over. He found nothing but a few religious books, and amongst them a leather-covered Testament, which he opened and read with insensibility—passing on, at length, to interest, then to fascination, at last to rage and defiance—the opening chapters and the close ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... trader. Rajah Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Bible has been a forbidden book in the few public educational institutions of the country. The result may now be seen in the general prevalence of ignorance, poverty and oppression; the ownership of land limited to a comparatively few persons, corruption and rapacity on the part of public officials, general improvement checked and the country impoverished by frequent insurrections and revolutions, that indicate incapacity ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... terror. Cattle in hundreds are destroyed by these great predatory animals; even full-grown horses are killed and dragged away by them! But is this all? Are the people themselves left unmolested? No. On the contrary, great numbers of human beings every year fall victims to the rapacity of the jaguars. Settlements attempted on the edge of the great Montana—in the very country where our young hunters had now arrived—have, after a time, been abandoned from this cause alone. It is a well-known fact, that where a settlement has been formed, the jaguars soon become ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... pointing to heaven as the source of his wisdom. He dwelt mainly on the truth of Christianity, the folly of idolatry, the unity and providence of God, the coming of Christ, and the judgment. At times he would severely rebuke the avarice and rapacity of his courtiers, who would loudly applaud him with their mouths and belie his exhortations by their works. One of these productions is still extant, in which he recommends Christianity in a characteristic strain, and in proof of its divine origin ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with them in their guns— were everywhere victorious, and the riches of the temples were seized; gloriously wrought vessels were hastily molten down into ingots, along with plate, shield, and wonderfully-worked flowers; rapacity was triumphant, and upon one occasion the value of the treasure collected and melted down into bars was computed at three millions and a half pounds ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... and to avoid unnecessary political complications. The show of authority was invested in a Nawab who was a mere puppet in the hands of the English company. Disorder was rampant throughout the provinces, and the unhappy Hindoos, unprotected by their native princes, were left a helpless prey to the rapacity of their foreign ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... Colonel thundered. "A country that buys peace at the price of dishonor is no better than a frump who sells her soul for gewgaws and furbalows! When posterity shall read of how the diseased mind of a single lunatic has stabbed history's richest pages with a sword of murder, rapacity and lust, it will turn a lip of contempt toward every nation that stood upon a vacuous neutrality. To hell with neutrality, when a ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... was not to be seen, but here the trees are all covered with them. Amongst the various smaller ones, we came upon a huge vulture's nest on a very small tholukh, which seemed to bend and look unhappy beneath the weight of this den of rapacity and violence. There are hereabouts no rocks for the eagles to build upon. We halted amidst abundance of herbage and small trees, which afforded a little shelter ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Savoyards of that place had not cunningly protected the magnificent statue-tombs of Marguerite d'Autriche, Marguerite de Bourbon and Philibert le Beau in their grand old church of Notre-Dame de Brou, against the rapacity of the revolutionary 'operators,' by cramming the whole church ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the essence of liberty consists, and which a free government is always most careful to protect. It denies the habeas corpus and the trial by jury. Personal freedom, property, and life, if assailed by the passion, the prejudice, or the rapacity of the ruler, have no security whatever. It has the effect of a bill of attainder or bill of pains and penalties, not upon a few individuals, but upon whole masses, including the millions who inhabit the subject States, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... These people, scattered throughout Europe—these people, whose manner of life is so mysterious and whose origin is more mysterious still—seem to be closely allied both to the Moors and to the Hindoos, not only in appearance but in their phlegm, fanaticism and rapacity. Such of our readers as have travelled in Southern Europe must have frequently encountered these Bohemians, who come from no one knows where only to disappear again like the swallows at the ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... in the direction of a policeman who had niched a banana from a bunch providentially exposed to his rapacity on a truck, ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... greatest prize they ever seized. The men were summoned to unload the ship. They made immense fires from the castle to the beach, and by their glare they robbed the merchants of their valuable cargo. It was near midnight before their rapacity was satisfied. Don Alphonzo ordered the vessel to remain where she laid until daybreak, when he intended to set her adrift, with all her crew on board, that he might see them dashed on to those rocks which you see down yonder. The Don then commanded a feast ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... Livonia, and Lithuania, although the inhabitants suffer considerably from the rapacity of wolves throughout the year, in that these animals rend their cattle, which are scattered in great numbers through the woods, whenever they stray in the very least, yet this is not regarded by them as such a serious matter as what ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... produce, further depressed by the rapacity of the railroads and the other intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, mortgages with high interest rates, and an inequitable system of taxation formed the burden of the farmer's complaint during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. These grievances and ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... Random, at hazarde. Range (put in order) arangxi. Rank (a row) vico. Rank (dignity) rango. Ransom reacxeto. Ransom reacxeti. Rant paroli sensence. Ranunculus ranunkolo. Rap frapeti. Rap frapo, frapeto. Rapacious rabema. Rapacity rabemeco. Rape forrabo. Rapid rapida. Rapidity rapideco. Rapidly rapide. Rapier rapiro. Rapine rabo. Rapt rava, entuziasma. Rapture ravo, entuziasmo. Rare (seldom) malofta. Rare (curious) kurioza. Rare antikva. Rarely malofte. Rareness ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the backs of the eleven horses in the stables, and carried off.—When property is concerned, one sort of outrage provokes another, the narrow cupidity of the lease-holder being completed by the unlimited rapacity of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to a pirate as it is to every human being who has been engaged in a conflict, but none of the joys of triumph could equal the sordid rapacity of Morgan and his men. They spent days in trying to recover the money and plate which were on board the sunken Spanish ships. The sterns of these projected above water, and a great deal of valuable treasure was recovered from them. The pirates worked very hard at this, ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... doughty Captain Dalgetty, in one cause after another, without regard to the justice of the quarrel, and might plunder the peasantry subjected to him by the fate of war with the most unrelenting rapacity; but he must beware how he sustained the slightest reproach, even from a clergyman, if it had regard to neglect on the score of duty. The following occurrence will prove the truth of ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... too indifferent and lazy to make the partnership desirable. Then came the renting system which during the Reconstruction period was general in the cotton districts. This system threw the tenant on his own responsibility and frequently made him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity of the white man. As exorbitant prices were charged for rent, usually six to ten dollars an acre for land worth fifteen to thirty dollars an acre, the Negro tenant not only did not accumulate anything but had reason to rejoice at the end of the year, ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... sanction to this change, and the people have submitted to it without murmuring, as it was introduced not suddenly but with the natural course of events, and bettered the condition of the whole while it tended to curb the rapacity of the few. Then let not short-sighted or designing persons, upon false principles of justice, or ill-digested notions of liberty, rashly endeavour to overturn a scheme of government, doubtless not perfect, but which seems best adapted to the circumstances it has respect to, and attended with ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... immediate motives of their desertion must be imputed to their landlords, may be reasonably concluded, because some Lairds of more prudence and less rapacity have kept their vassals undiminished. From Raasa only one man had been seduced, and at Col there was no wish ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... her husband was Prefect of Egypt, so far was she from acting as was usual with the wives of provincial governors, that she was as much respected and beloved as they were for the most part execrated and shunned. So serious was the evil caused by these ladies, so intolerable was their cruel rapacity, that it had been seriously debated in the Senate whether they should ever be allowed to accompany their husbands. Not so with Helvia's sister. She was never seen in public; she allowed no provincial to ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... was now exposed to the rapacity of the Roman generals who really governed the country. Crassus plundered all that Pompey spared. He took from the temple ten thousand talents—about ten million dollars when gold and silver had vastly ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... strict non-intercourse with England enjoined. While the Queen and the Viceroy were thus exchanging blows, the real sufferers were, of course, the unfortunate Netherlanders. Between the upper and nether millstones of Elizabeth's rapacity and Alva's arrogance, the poor remains of Flemish prosperity were well nigh crushed out of existence. Proclamations and commissions followed hard upon each other, but it was not till April 1573, that the matter was definitely arranged. Before that day arrived, the commerce of the Netherlands ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... other hand, under the prospect of an arrangement with France, rapidly recovered from the blow inflicted upon them by the violence and mercenary rapacity lately charged upon their French friends, but which they now insisted, was a charge without foundation. Taking advantage of the dissatisfaction at the heavy taxes necessarily imposed to meet the expenses of warlike preparations, and especially of the unpopularity of the alien and sedition laws—two ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... levied a heavy war contribution. During the early months of 1808 he was employed in reorganising his own forces, and the resources of Lisbon, where an auxiliary Russian fleet of nine ships was lying practically blockaded. In a military sense, he was successful, but the rapacity of the French, the contagion of the Spanish uprising, the memory of the old alliance with England, and the proximity of English fleets, stirred the blood of the Portuguese nation into ill-concealed hostility. The Spanish commander at Oporto withdrew his troops to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... "accept the homage of the clergy, the respects of the noblesse, and the most humble supplications of the third estate." The untimely applause which greeted the bishop's words were excited by the picture he drew of the misery in the country-places exhausted by the rapacity of the fiscal agents. At this striking solemnity, set off with all the pomp of the past, animated with all the hopes of the future, the eyes of the public sought out, amidst the sombre mass of deputies of the third (estate), those whom their deeds, good ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks—and bad manners, I am sorry to say—can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... did not confine itself to impolite remarks. It proceeded to get rid of what it deemed western rapacity by ceding the whole overmountain territory to the United States, with the proviso that Congress must accept the gift within twelve months. And after passing the Cession Act, North Carolina closed the land office in the undesired domain and ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... professions of submission and allegiance to the British government so long as they found it convenient, but with the resolution of joining the standards of their country on the first opportunity. Such duplicity and falsehood ought always to be reprobated, but the unsparing rapacity with which the inhabitants were plundered made many of them imagine that no means of deception ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... or palaces which did not take up much space. The great temple of the Sun at Cuzco had a heavy outside cornice, or moulding, of pure gold. It was stripped of this dazzling ornament to satisfy the rapacity of the conquerors. There was also a vast quantity of silver which was stored in other chambers. Silver hardly counted in view of the deluge of the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... for men who what they are would be: Penned in their narrow day no change they see Save one which strikes the blow to brutes and pride. Our faith is ours and comes not on a tide: And whether Earth's great offspring, by decree, Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock: Trim swordsmen they push forth: yet try thy steel. Thou, fighting for poor humankind, wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nowadays. And it is perfectly easy to explain how malaria might have contributed to this end. For the disease—and herein lies its curse—lowers both the physical and social standard of a people; it breeds misery, poverty and ignorance—fit soil for callous rapacity. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... if that may properly be called a system, which was rather the result of early indifference to the cries of needy adventurers, and subsequent attempts to seize upon their earnings when they became objects of rapacity. This singular train of difficulties must be considered as one of the causes of our ancient prosperity and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... suffer less from these popular abuses than the rural districts. As has been already said, associated wealth will take care of itself. It may make, and probably will make, in the earlier stages of these political changes, some capital mistakes; and there cannot be a question that in the rapacity of private efforts to accumulate, some of the most obvious and natural expedients of protection will be overlooked, until the neglect compels recourse possibly even to the use of the strong hand. Still property will eventually protect itself. For, in an age like this, when even the ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... and rapacity of the old Scandinavian race Still visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organization displayed by them from the beginning in the seizure, survey, and distribution of land—in the building of cities and castles—in the wise speculations of an extensive commerce—may ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... poverty, the effect of institutions forged by the ruling class to accumulate wealth in their own hands. The want of self-respect in the inferior class engendered by this state of things, shows itself in the acts of rapacity and fraud which the traveller meets with throughout France and Italy, and, worse still, in the shameless corruption of the Italian custom-houses, the officers of which regularly solicit a paltry bribe from every passenger as the consideration of leaving his baggage unexamined. I am told ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... than I can do. From them you will see that both in my provision for the future and in my action at the time my conduct was precisely the opposite of that which they have attributed to me, inferring my rapacity from their own. You will see that Pudentilla's dowry was small, considering her wealth, and was made over to me as a trust not as a gift, and moreover that the marriage only took place on this condition that if my wife should die without leaving me any children, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... scenes and the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hard to find a parallel in history for the rapacity combined with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless France was not the only country in which greed was insatiable and its manifestations disastrous. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... application of this fund that has been practised by his predecessors. In this case it may be converted into a fruitful source of peculation and plunder, and be at last in a great measure diverted from the public objects for which it was instituted to the satiation of private rapacity, and the colonists become gradually burdened with an overbearing load of taxation, merely for the purpose of enriching their governors. Be this, however, as it may, the illegality of levying money by the authority of any individual, is, I ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... goes directly to Holland; nominally he is still ruled by his tribal chief, to whom he is blindly and superstitiously devoted. Playing on this feudal attachment, the Dutch, while theoretically pledging themselves to protect the defenseless populace against rapacity, have yet so arranged the administration that the chiefs have unlimited opportunities of extortion. They are paid premiums on whatever their provinces furnish for the foreign market, and as they have practically full control over the persons and property of their subjects, they force these poor wretches ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various |
