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Savagery   /sˈævɪdʒˌɛri/   Listen
Savagery

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






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books



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

... now than then before the intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts' desire, when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their souls cries "Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low in every man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured, like the juicy battlefields of old, "with ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... recognized discrepancy between what man is, and what he feels he should be, must be; they are the indignant protests of the race against acquiescence in the world's evil as the world's law; they are the incoherent utterances of those yearnings for nobler conditions of existence, which no savagery, no ignorance, nothing but a false and lying enlightenment ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... preferred Bagh to all other horses in the world, because it had needed persuasion, much stroking of a black beard—to hide anxiety—and many a secret night-ride—to sweat the brute's savagery—before the colonel-sahib could be made to see his virtues as a charger and accept him into the regiment. Sikh-wise, he loved all things that expressed in any way his own unconquerable fire. Most of all, however, he loved the squadron; there was no woman, nor ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy

... the preceding chapter. The present chapter is an effort to point out the necessity for an understanding of the first trend of motives if we would minimize the temptations of the struggle and free the boy from the constant sense of the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet in the worn path of civilization is not an easy task, but it may give us a clue for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive spirit of adventure corresponding to the old activity of the hunt, ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... practically restricted to the musk-ox and the reindeer, which subsist on mosses and lichens. The native people are stunted in growth; their food consists mainly of raw blubber, and they are scarcely above savagery. ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

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

... savagery, and there is a superfluity of both in the Soudan. I have no desperate wish so to describe the vileness of the surroundings of the correspondents' camp at Dakhala that even casual thinkers will sniff at ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... sisters of the masses, often have their nostrils and lower lips perforated by metallic hoops of brass or silver, and sometimes of gold; to which is often added a necklace of bright sea-shells mixed with shark's teeth, completing the oddest outfit that can well be conceived of for a human being. Savagery tinctured with civilization. The native children of six, eight, and ten, were subjects of particular interest, the boys especially, who were remarkably handsome, clean-limbed, with skins shining like satin, and brown as hazel nuts. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... over the man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain bush-men; and of the final rescue by Tasman, he who was hatcheted only last year and whose head reposed in some Melanesian stronghold—and all breathing of the warmth and abandon and savagery of the burning islands ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... crosier) for life or death, the terrible destruction, the treasures and relics, and painted glass, and monuments, the plunder of the secret almerys, the intoxicated triumph of those rude northern hordes let loose in our fair and lovely island; what scenes of savagery, where now the jackdaw builds, and the blackbird whistles, and the wild water-rat plays with her brood amongst ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... educational supervision on the plan I shall suggest later on in this book. Altogether, with the Gipsies, we have a population of over 30,000 outside our educational and sanitary laws, fast drifting into a state of savagery and barbarism, with our hands tied behind us, and unable to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... Cummins knew, there was not a white woman nearer than Fort Churchill, two hundred miles away. In all that region he knew of only two full-white men, and they were Williams and himself. The baby Melisse was hopelessly lost in a world of savagery; honest, loyal, big-souled savagery—but savagery for all that, and the thought of it brought the shadows of fear and foreboding to the two into whose lives the problem had ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... pythons fed at the zoo once," said Helen with unwonted sharpness. "I will sit here till the scene of savagery is over. You can ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... log-shanties, the bush has become a graceful fringe in the background of smooth, well-tilled fields. Like the ocean which keeps no trace of the keels that have furrowed its wastes, these beautiful fields are the speechless bequest of the men and women who redeemed them from savagery at the cost of painful privations, of exhausting, never ceasing toil, of premature decay of strength. They fought and overcame and succeeding generations enjoy the fruits of their labors—fruits they barely ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... from his book-shelf. "Now, look here: the biggest island of the lot on this map, barring Cuba, is Hayti. You know as well as I do that the western part of that island is peopled by the black republic of Hayti, and that the country is in a degenerate state of almost unexampled savagery, with a ridiculous show of civilization. There are revolutions all the time; the South American republics are peaceful and prosperous compared to Hayti. The state of the country is simply awful—read Sir Spenser St. John's ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... the final troubles that precipitated the country again into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war, constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... pictures already existed in real life, and that it was only requisite to gather up the separate traits to form a whole. Under a fine sky, in a primitive society, when all the relations are still simple, when science is limited to so little, nature is easily satisfied, and man only turns to savagery when he is tortured by want. All nations that have a history have a paradise, an age of innocence, a golden age. Nay, more than this, every man has his paradise, his golden age, which he remembers with more or less enthusiasm, according as he is more or less poetical. Thus experience itself ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

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

... Patagonians of the present day as well as of the Greeks at the time of Homer. They look upon the Patagonians as the tabula rasa of humanity, and they forget that even if we admitted that the ancestors of the Aryan race had once been more savage than the Patagonians, it would not follow that their savagery was identical with that of the people of Tierra del Fuego. Why should not the distance between Patagonian and Vedic Rishis have been at least as great as that between Vedic Rishis and Homeric bards? If there are ever so many kinds of civilized life, was ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... and they joined Yonge at lunch. An hour later a dozen trim King's African Rifles cantered up—Zulus all, under command of Yonge, who maintained order through two hundred miles of savagery. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney

... Robin. "She'll never do that, not while—." Again he became inarticulate, muttering deeply in his throat like an animal goaded to savagery. ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

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

... essentially amiable: and the same may be said of all the minor characters and of the author's disquisitions. Sterne has given us a thousand occasions to laugh, but never an occasion to laugh on the wrong side of the mouth. For savagery or bitterness you will search his books in vain. He is obscene, to be sure. But who, pray, was ever the worse for having read him? Alas, poor Yorick! He had his obvious and deplorable failings. I never heard that he communicated them. Good-humor he has ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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

... Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: "I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... I know no phrase better fitted to describe his tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It—Oh, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... waged by the rebels had aroused a feeling of corresponding, or more than corresponding ferocity on the other side. That men who a few months before had trembled to see all whom they loved best exposed to the savagery of such a mob as had set fire to the barn at Scullabogue, or murdered the prisoners at Rossbridge, should have been filled with a fury which carried them far beyond the necessities of the case is ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less? What availed the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim? Yet they received him patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's friendship. The farmer alone seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... course, the scamp knew what we all knew and no more, but it alarmed Josiah, who came to me at once. He was like a scared child. I told him to go home and that Peter had lied. He went away looking as if the old savagery in his blood might become ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... deserving poor should be assisted, and an equally strong sentiment in favour of punishing rogues and vagabonds—persons who declined to dig but were not ashamed to beg; with perhaps an excessive inclination to assume that wherever there was a doubt the delinquent should not have the benefit of it. The savagery however of the earlier Tudor laws against vagabonds was mitigated, and honest efforts were made to find a substitute for the old relief of genuine poverty by the Monasteries. This took in the first place the form of enactments for the local collection of voluntary ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... that of the horses themselves—for I was equally apprehensive of being discovered by the latter. Once inside their circle, they would take no notice of me—for doubtless there would be other Indians within sight; and I trusted to my well-counterfeited semblance of savagery to deceive the eyes of these ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... brood of children with bare heads and tattered garments eked out by deer-skin,—such was the home of the pioneer in the remoter and wilder districts. The scene around bore witness to his labors. It was the repulsive transition from savagery to civilization, from the forest to the farm. The victims of his axe lay strewn about the dismal "clearing" in a chaos of prostrate trunks, tangled boughs, and withered leaves, waiting for the fire that was to be the next agent in the process of improvement; while around, voiceless and ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... absolute power on the part of the priests, which reminds us of the Middle Ages in Europe. The old inspiring wars with the aborigines are over. The time of bearing a noble creed, meaning culture and civilization as against savagery and idolatry, is past, and only intestine quarrels and local strife have succeeded. The age of creative literature is over, and commentators, critics and grammarians have succeeded. Still more startling are the facts disclosed by literary history. The liquid poetry has become frozen prose; ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... peaks of the old roofs are depicted, as if in black festoons, on the clear golden sky. At this moment, there suddenly passes over merry, laughing Japan a somber shadow, strange, weird, a breath of antiquity, of savagery, of something indefinable, which casts a gloom of sadness. And then the only gayety that remains is the gayety of the population of young children, of little mouskos and little mousmes, who spread themselves ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... many a different chapter might have been recorded in the history of San Francisco. Hopkins lived to pass into inconsequence. Terry was released to wreak once more his violent hatred on a fellow being, to perish in a third and final outburst of that savagery which ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... the relation of events. If ever Fate was ironical, this was the occasion! He felt so sure of Hadria to-day, that he was swayed by an overpowering temptation to reveal to her the almost comic situation. It appealed to his sense of the absurd, and to the savagery that lurked, like a beast of prey, at the foundation of his nature. Her evident emotion when he arrived yesterday afternoon and all through his visit, her agitation to-day, at the mere sound of his voice, assured him that his hold over her was secure. He must ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... all versed in the procedure of criminal justice knows that it goes ahead slowly and surely and finally lays hold upon the guilty.—But as Commissioner von Stoeckel quite rightly observed: The whole moral downfall of our time, its actual return to savagery is a consequence of the lack of religion! Educated people do not hesitate to undermine the divine foundations upon which the structure of salvation rests.—But, thank God, we're always to be found at our place! ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... painful stillness she walked up to Daniel, and plucked him by the coat-sleeve: "Eh, you don't know who I am?" she asked, and her squinty eyes shone on him with enigmatic savagery: "I am Philippina; you know, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... Pauline to desert him openly for the Englishman. Why had he not the power, the audacity, the social courage which the guide undoubtedly possessed, to seize her and bear her off bodily on these occasions? This—a relic of savagery—would alone overcome the ease with which Crabbe confronted him, and despite vices and faults usually carried off the palm. As one progressed the other retrograded; the Englishman, dreaming of a good name and character restored, lay peacefully beneath Poussette's ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... for a certain strange, new hope, defining in its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so tragic for the "Christian superstition." Something of them he had heard indeed already. They had seemed to him but one savagery the more, savagery self-provoked, in a ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... Labours and Scenes in South Africa, gives us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... luckless trial of a notary's office I was apprenticed to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to steal. Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetual terror of my master's savagery, I here reached my sixteenth year. But one day, finding the city gates closed on my return from a country excursion, I determined, rather than face the inevitable thrashing, to seek my fortune ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... it is evident that man's original state was not one of savagery. Indeed there is abundant evidence to show that man has been degraded from a very much higher stage. Both the Bible and science agree in making man the crowning work of God, and that there will be no higher order of beings here on the earth than man. We must not forget that while ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... is prevalent. True, I never witness in my Grasshopper-cages the savagery which is so common in the Praying Mantis, who harpoons her rivals and devours her lovers; but, if some weakling succumb, the survivors hardly ever fail to profit by his carcass as they would in the case of any ordinary prey. With no scarcity of provisions as an excuse, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... guidance. The whitewashed palisades of many little settlements on the rivers and lakes of the far north are poor relics of the fur companies' ancient grandeur. That broad domain stretching from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean, reclaimed from savagery for civilization, is the best monument to the unheralded ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... you, and I can only do it in a sentence or two, of more important changes in these fifty years. English manners and morals have been bettered, much of savagery and coarseness has been got rid of; low, cruel amusements have been abandoned. Thanks to the great Total Abstinence movement very largely, the national conscience has been stirred in regard to the great national sin of intoxication. A national system of education has come into operation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... hut, waiting by the path, was a group of women loaded with the soldiers' gear; and beside them were some carriers bearing his green tent and apparently all his equipment. The sight cheered him a little. He attempted to find immediate consolation in the idea that the savagery of the corporal might possibly abate when they were away from the neighbourhood of the inciting agent, whom he ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of Caffre Land at their fingers' ends. It is a region aboriginal in savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander a good day's journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where stately deer will bound across our path, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... than those tribes on their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless we discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman and Greek writers give of the horrible savagery ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley

... did not altogether neglect a discreet prudence. The sympathetic person to whom he was indebted for the pointed allusion had specifically declared that they who used their feet with the desperate savagery of baffled spectres guarded the nearer limits of their position, the intention of his timely hint assuredly being that I should seek to approach from the opposite end, where, doubtless, the more humane and conciliatory grass-hoppers ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... religion. Simon de Montfort's Crusaders and the Albigenses, after them the Huguenots and the Leaguers, have so thickly sown this land with the seed of blood, to bear witness through all time to their merciless savagery, that the unprejudiced mind, looking here for traces of a grand struggle of ideals, will find little or nothing but the records of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... thrilled him now. There were no clubs here, no whips, none of the man-beasts whom he had first learned to distrust, and then to hate. It was his misfortune—that quarter-strain of wolf; and the clubs, instead of subduing him, had added to the savagery that was born in him. Men had been his worst enemies. They had beaten him time and again until he was almost dead. They called him "bad," and stepped wide of him, and never missed the chance to snap a whip over ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... brotherhood, rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow and cease, and that is justice. Not the justice of our Christless codes, with their penalties, but the instinct ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... all altered. When the order was given him to dismount from the tumbrel, he obeyed cheerfully without hesitating; nevertheless he had not about him any of that audacity, that arrogance, which in the case of malefactors is sometimes bred of their natural savagery; everything about him bore evidence to the tranquillity of a good conscience. Before he died he made a speech to the people; but none could hear him, so great was the noise which the soldiers made, according, it is said, to the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

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

... prevalent attitude now, what must have been the attitude in ancient times, when mankind was emerging from savagery, and when history seems composed of harassments by wars abroad and revolutions at home? In the most violently disturbed times indeed, those with which ordinary history is mainly occupied, science is quite impossible. It needs as its condition, in order to flourish, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... world we live in wholly is redeemed; Not man alone, but all that man holds dear: His orchards and his maize: forget me not And heartsease in his garden, and the wild Aerial blossoms of the untamed wood, That make its savagery so homelike; all Have felt Christ's sweet love watering their roots: His sacrifice has won both earth and heaven. Nature in all its fullness is the Lord's. There are no Gentile oaks, no Pagan pines; The grass beneath oar feet is Christian grass; The wayside weed is ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... regeneration, though at present it went only skin-deep, and if left to herself she would soon relapse into savagery. Ground that had been furze-ridden within the memory of man now yielded roots and grain, though not yet richly; the stubborn furze had been burnt and hacked and torn up, the thorns and thistles, the docks and sorrel, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... Doble was a strong, reckless devil of a fellow who feared neither God nor man. A primeval savagery burned in his blood, but like most "bad" men he had that vein of caution in his make-up which seeks to find its victim at disadvantage. He knew Hart too well to doubt his word. One cannot ride the range with a man ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... been to the fore. Less do I say? {26} They are not a fraction of them. [A few words will easily prove this.] I say nothing of Olynthus, and Methone, and Apollonia, and thirty-two cities in the Thracian region,[n] all annihilated by him with such savagery, that a visitor to the spot would find it difficult to tell that they had ever been inhabited. I remain silent in regard to the extirpation of the great Phocian race. But what is the condition of Thessaly? Has he not robbed their very cities of their governments,[n] and set up tetrarchies, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes

... whose lives had been spent in the welfare of their country, were massacred with unspeakable savagery, and their bodies, stripped, and hacked almost beyond recognition, were then strung up on a hastily erected gibbet in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense number of facts relating to man in his various stages of development—savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization. Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs and institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several exhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially considered from an evolutionary point of view. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash," was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated for a while, experimentally, or to "put ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

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

... treated, and there was no evidence of provocation by special abuse. There was no trace of any instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for protection and repression was enacted ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... wuz doing for 'em, what swift strides they wuz makin' along the road that leads upwards. And to see 'em workin' away right before us at all the industrial trades, to see inteligence in the eyes that had held savagery, to hear the inteligent conversation in place of gutteral ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... certain. Mrs Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed Mrs Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she could ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... us the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilization.... But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned. Well handled, it may ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

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

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

... liberty and justice is liable to fall short of humanity's hopes unless liberty and justice be themselves defined in a cooperative sense. The great liberties which man has gained, as step by step he has risen from savagery, have not been chiefly the assertion of already existing powers or the striking-off of fetters forged by his fellows. They have been additions to previous powers. Science, art, invention, associated ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts

... Englishmen walked slowly back to the hut. Between them there had sprung up from the first moment a strong and mutual antipathy. The blunt savagery of Trent, his apparently heartless treatment of his weaker partner, and his avowed unscrupulousness, offended the newcomer much in the same manner as in many ways he himself was obnoxious to Trent. His immaculate fatigue-uniform, his calm superciliousness, his obvious air of belonging to a superior ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... is contained herein will be bitterly denied. I am prepared for this. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery of the Slavery agitation—in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred directed against all those who stood by the Nation. I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told of them. I apprehend being assailed ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

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

... will be one compared to which the late war will come to seem a mere affair of outposts. Those who realize the destructiveness of the late war, the devastation and impoverishment, the lowering of the level of civilization throughout vast areas, the general increase of hatred and savagery, the letting loose of bestial instincts which had been curbed during peace—those who realize all this will hesitate to incur inconceivably greater horrors, even if they believe firmly that Communism in itself is much to ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... was about her, but yet she remained conscious—vividly horribly conscious—of the trap that had so suddenly closed upon her. Through it she saw his face close to her own, with that sneering, devilish smile about his mouth that she knew so well. And the eyes with their glittering savagery were mocking ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... of the British Government had been an inexorable landlord, and a constabulary who seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an intolerable family blood-feud to harden his heart. Savagery had begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry. He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... change has come over our attitude to this wing of the battle of life. So far from regarding it as in any sense necessary to revert to barbarism, still less to savagery, for either the prevention or the cure of disease, we have discovered by the most convincing, practical experience, that we can, in the first place, with the assistance of the locomotive and trolley, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

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

... came, the Indians of North America were stationary in their population, for the reason that under their stationary condition of culture a given area could support only so many people. In conditions of savagery, and even of barbarism, therefore, we can lay down the principle that population will increase up to the limit of food supply, will stop there and remain stationary until food supply increases. This is the condition which governs the growth of the population of all animal species, and, as we have ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... shared, was that they were in fact a shrunken and deteriorated remnant of some high race now coming to its end through age and inter-breeding. About them indeed, notwithstanding their primitive savagery which in its qualities much resembled that of other Polynesians, there was a very curious air of antiquity. One felt that they had known the older world and its mysteries, though now both were forgotten. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... the affairs of the nation had been under woman's joint control, I doubt that we should have butchered the Indians with such exterminating savagery, that, in fifty years, we should have spent seven hundred millions of dollars for war, and now, in time of peace, send twenty annual millions more to the same waste. I doubt that we should have spread slavery into nine new States, and made ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... dog-sled, after a fatiguing, if not perilous, journey across Alaska, but in the open season you may now travel there almost any week in large liners from San Francisco. It seemed like a dream to land suddenly in this modern town, within a day's journey of Whalen with all its savagery and squalor, and it was somewhat trying to have to walk up the crowded main street in our filthy, ragged state. Eventually, however, we were rigged up at a well-stocked clothing establishment in suits of dittos which would hardly have passed muster ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... Redgrave rather seriously, "we find that they have passed the zenith of civilisation, and are dropping back into savagery, but still have the use of weapons and means of destruction which we, perhaps, have no notion of, and are inclined to use them? ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... only within the limits marked out by economic principles, will never be found, unless it is sought for with a certain passionate sympathy for the outcast. The dramatic parallel which the writer establishes between the savagery of Darkest Africa and the suffering and sin of Darkest England, will arrest attention, and will of itself make the book popular. Here, however, we are concerned with the more matter-of-fact elements in the problem, and with the practical remedies which are proposed for it. The heading of ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... from those of Europe that there can scarcely be a doubt of their descent from distinct species. But both have entirely disappeared as wild animals, unless indeed the white cattle of Chillingham are really descendants of Caesar's dreadful urus and not merely domestic cattle lapsed into savagery. So have the camel, and, with a similar possible exception, the horse. Was the whole race in each of these cases subjugated, or exterminated, and that by uncivilised man with his primitive weapons? There is no analogy ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages, say from the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of history can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch upside down. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... to Hal Folsom's wild but beautiful home in the hills, and, almost as he loved Nell, his bonny daughter, did the old trader love his stalwart son. Born a wild Westerner, reared among the Sioux with only Indians or army boys for playmates, and precious little choice in point of savagery between them, Hal had grown up a natural horseman with a love for and knowledge of the animal that is accorded to few. His ambition in life was to own a stock farm. All the education he had in the world he owed to the kindness of loving-hearted army women at Laramie, women who befriended him ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... deny all religion assert that it is founded on fear. There is enough in that assertion to give it the colour of truth. Yet fear of the unseen is but the survival of savagery. Faith founded on fear becomes servile, debasing, superstitious. If religion has no higher motive than that of fear, the trembling and dread before some great omnipotent unknown, it can give the world ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... an era of stable peace, many more material improvements, actually more imperative if less spectacular, would certainly have been carried out with the vast sums of money saved from war expenditures. Whatever good ends, then, war may have served in the past, it is now superfluous, a mere survival of savagery, a relic of our barbaric past, a clear injury to man, in ways which ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... expediency dictated the savage massacre and mutilation which followed. The death of Zedekiah's sons, and of the nobles who had scoffed at Jeremiah's warnings, and the blinding of Zedekiah, were all measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous delight in torturing. Thus singularly was Ezekiel's enigma ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... had celebrated the maddest orgies on our path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the bars which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called barricades. An elderly gentleman ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

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

... by instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of superstition or scrupulous religion,—a permanent light of civilization began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... tragedy was completed. Every old man and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of the houses; strong men—fathers, lovers, sons—had been murdered with every wantonness of savagery conceivable. The only persons spared had been the budding girls, and one or two of the best ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... ships and then defeated a Turkish squadron. The prestige of the Crescent on the sea was badly weakened by these events, but suddenly Barbarossa appeared and raided the islands of the Archipelago and the coasts of the Adriatic with a savagery and sweep unmatched by anything in his long career. He arrived in the Golden Horn laden with booty, and delivered to his master, the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... brown tints of the hard and narrow brow, which the falling off of the hair had somewhat broadened, giving still more majesty to that noble ruin. The countenance—a little material, perhaps, but how could it be otherwise?—presented, like all the Breton faces grouped about the baron, a certain savagery, a stolid calm which resembled the impassibility of the Huguenots; something, one might say, stupid, due perhaps to the utter repose which follows extreme fatigue, in which the animal nature alone is visible. Thought was rare. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

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

... take to bring this people out of savagery, and to build up so many flourishing cities? The learned did not readily resign themselves to a confession of ignorance on the subject. As they had depicted the primordial chaos, the birth of the gods, and their struggles over ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the system contrast the barbarism of Richard Coeur de Lion with the culture and humanity of Saladin, they seem to forget that the race of Richard had but just emerged from the savagery of the Northmen, while Saladin and his race had not only inherited the high moral culture of Judaism and Christianity, but had virtually monopolized it. It was chiefly by the wars of the Crusaders that Western Europe became acquainted ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

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

... she would die, in the awful comfortless meaninglessness of it all. True, sunny days returned and some magic. But she was weak and feverish with her cold, which would not get better. So that even in the sunshine the crude comfortlessness and inferior savagery of the ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... was only a fence on that side of the grounds, and to look through it was like looking into the outskirts of a forest. The rabbits ran about by hundreds among the roots of the trees. The birds sang as if in their own kingdom and secure possessions. To this gentle savagery and dominion of nature the Miss Warrenders were accustomed; and in the freshness of the early summer it was sweet. They went on without speaking, for some time, and then it seemed wise to the younger sister to forestall further remark by the introduction of a new subject, which, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... were worked and country houses built, the remains of which are in some places still to be seen, and bear testimony to the increased well-being of a population which, excepting in the south-eastern part of the island, had at the arrival of the Romans been little removed from savagery. Cities sprang up in great numbers. Some of them were at first garrison towns, like Eboracum, Deva, and Isca Silurum. Others, like Verulamium, near the present St. Albans, occupied the sites of the old stockades once used as places of refuge by the Celts, ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... isn't worth so much savagery," Lucy said. "You are like Ugolino—and poor Francis ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... be too quick to jump to the conclusion that in this regard we have discovered an essential characteristic of the Japanese nature. With reference to the reported savagery displayed by Japanese troops at Port Arthur, it has been said and repeated that you have only to scratch the Japanese skin to find the Tartar, as if the recent development of human feelings were ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick



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



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