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Rapine   Listen
noun
Rapine  n.  
1.
The act of plundering; the seizing and carrying away of things by force; spoliation; pillage; plunder. "Men who were impelled to war quite as much by the desire of rapine as by the desire of glory."
2.
Ravishment; rape. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rapine" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the fierce fever which consumed him the unhappy armourer was visited by visions of all the evil deeds of his past life; and Lance's blood curdled in his veins as he listened to his patient's disjointed ravings of murder, rapine, and cold-blooded cruelty of so revolting a character that he wondered how any human mind could conceive it in the first instance, and how, after it had been conceived, human hands could bring themselves ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... dissipation of valuable energy. Subduing of one's anger was a storing up of national energy, which, when set free in an ordered manner, would produce astounding results. His conception of non-co-operation did not involve rapine, plunder, incendiarism and all the concomitants of mass madness. His scheme presupposed ability on their part to control all the forces of evil. If, therefore, any disorderliness was found on the ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... Mr. Jellicorse," suggested Mrs. Carnaby, with a short hot sob. "But, Duncan, he has not the heart for it. For anything honest and loyal and good, kind people may trust him with their lives. But to tyranny, rapine, and manslaughter, he never could lend his ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... Rapine and falsehood ne'er I knew, Nor grave nor temples e'er have torn, My youthful mate still found me true— Guiltless am I although forlorn! I 've seen brave Britto's son, the wild, The powerful champion, Fergus, too, Gray-haired ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... he comes on this, who strikes the first. You both are mad; is this like gallant men, To fight at midnight; at the murderer's hour; When only guilt and rapine draw a sword? Let night enjoy her dues of soft repose; But let the sun behold the brave man's courage. And this I dare engage for Diomede,— For though I am,—he shall not hide his head, But meet you in the very face ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... been rendered any easier by the difficulty we have experienced in pacifying the simple blacks by attempts to dispel the fears of rapine and murder at the hands of our soldiers, with which the Germans have been at such pains to saturate the native mind. This, in conjunction with the suspicion which the native of German East Africa has for any European, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... plunder and made themselves secure from attack. Other members of the band dwelt in the settlements, where they concealed their robber friends by day and aided them by night in their nefarious projects of theft and rapine. ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... thought that shattered tower The mightiest work of human power; And marvelled as the aged hind With some strange tale bewitched my mind, Of foragers who, with headlong force, Down from that strength had spurred their horse, Their Southern rapine to renew, Far in the distant Cheviots blue; And, home returning, filled the hall With revel, wassail-rout and brawl."—"Marmion." Introduction to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view from Smailholme, a propos of the stanza in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... as "a man of wisdom and courage," had been elected mayor in succession to Edmund Wright.(463) The last days of Wright's mayoralty were days of sickness and tumult in the city. Numbers of disbanded soldiers from the north had made their way to London, where they carried on a system of rapine and outrage. The mayor issued precepts for search to be made in every ward for suspected persons and disbanded soldiers, as well as for keeping the streets well lighted at night by candle and lanthorn, whilst ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... foreigners, sends an envoy to declare that Maouyenshow has presented to him the portrait of the princess, and that he demands her in marriage as the only condition of peace. If refused, he will invade the South with a great power, and our rivers and hills will be exposed to rapine. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... to lay their eggs in bowels and flesh of other,—that some organisms should delight in cruelty,—that animals should be led away by false instincts,—that annually there should be an incalculable waste of eggs and pollen. From death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature we can see that the highest good, which we can conceive, the creation of the higher animals has directly come. Doubtless it at first transcends our humble powers, to conceive laws capable of creating individual organisms, each characterised by the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... art thou To catch a loathly plume fallen from the wing Of that foul bird of rapine whose whole prey Is man's good name: he never wronged his bride. I know the tale. An angry gust of wind Puffed out his torch among the myriad-roomed And many-corridored complexities Of Arthur's palace: then he found a door, And darkling felt the sculptured ornament That wreathen round it ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... into a blood-thirsty monster was absolutely true. This, of course, did not justify the Rebellion, but helps to explain it, to explain why a worthless scamp like Riel could rouse the peaceful natives to blood thirst and rapine.—Author. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... asserted, that the ruin of their property must be the consequence of such a measure. He could not help, however, distrusting their arguments. He could not believe that the Almighty Being, who had forbidden the practice of rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to any part of his universe. He felt a confidence in this persuasion, and took the resolution to act upon it. Light indeed soon broke in upon ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... petitions and remonstrances, by seizing the whole at once. They had ravaged one part of the globe, till it could glut them no longer; their prodigality required new plunder, and through the East India article tea they hoped to transfer their rapine from that quarter of the world to this. Every designed quarrel had its pretence; and the same barbarian avarice accompanied the plant to America, which ruined the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... but sanctity to treaties. Even in Algiers, a truce may be bought for money, but when ratified, even Algiers is too wise, or too just, to disown and annul its obligation. Thus we see, neither the ignorance of savages, nor the principles of an association for piracy and rapine, permit a nation to despise its engagements. If, sir, there could be a resurrection from the foot of the gallows, if the victims of justice could live again, collect together and form a society, they would, however loath, soon find themselves ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... accordingly sent Remus to Amulius, making grievous charges against him, as a lawless desperado, who, with his brother, Numitor said, were the terror of the forests, through their domineering temper and their acts of robbery and rapine. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... century, the population would be one hundred and twelve millions, and the food only sufficient for thirty-five millions, leaving seventy-seven millions unprovided for. In these ages want would be indeed triumphant, and rapine and murder must reign at large: and yet all this time we are supposing the produce of the earth absolutely unlimited, and the yearly increase greater than the ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus

... must own with shame, That often I have been to blame: I must confess, on Friday last, Wretch that I was! I broke my fast: But I defy the basest tongue To prove I did my neighbour wrong; Or ever went to seek my food, By rapine, theft, or thirst of blood. The Ass approaching next, confess'd, That in his heart he loved a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe: But yet the worst that could be said, He was ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... on that distant frontier. Life and property are there wholly insecure. The population of Arizona, now numbering more than 10,000 souls, are practically destitute of government, of laws, or of any regular administration of justice. Murder, rapine, and other crimes are committed with impunity. I therefore again call the attention of Congress to the necessity for establishing a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson

... we owe far more to accident, to fire, rapine, volcanic outbursts, and the protecting care of desolation, for the knowledge we have of times long past, than to any intentional legacies of art or learning left us by the men of those times. The lost and abandoned tools, weapons, and ornaments of the stone age are all that ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... god was of a being with qualities like their own, and as men delighted in rapine and every possible accompanying vice and crime, so they endowed their gods in like manner, fashioning beings to be feared and to whom must be given big offerings and sacrifices. So long as these were limited to beasts it was a good thing, because the priests ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... discourse concerning the manners and customs of the upper, or even the educated, classes. Slowly and reluctantly, the Baltimorean abandoned his cherished ideal of the British aristocrat—a covert Caligula, with all modern improvements—varying the monotony of orgies with interludes of murder and rapine; the instrument of these pleasant vices being always ready in the shape of a Frankenstein-monster, whose mission it is to tyrannize perpetually over the guilty lordling or lady whose secret he holds; doing a steady ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... and temple for the Deity, to whom it was consecrated. The whole history of Castor and Pollux, the two Dioscuri, is very strange and inconsistent. Sometimes they are described as two mortals of Lacedaemon, who were guilty of violence and rapine, and were slain for their wickedness. At other times they are represented as the two principal Deities; and styled Dii Magni, Dii Maximi, Dii Potentes, Cabeiri. Mention is made by Pausanias of ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant

... pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... air, And, fix'd on Cambria's solitary shore, Give to St. David one true Briton more. [b]For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? There none are swept by sudden fate away, But all, whom hunger spares, with age decay: Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire, And now a rabble rages, now a fire; Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; Here falling houses thunder on your head, And here a female atheist talks you dead. [c]While Thales waits the wherry, that contains Of dissipated ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... city in the kingdom, the convents of the religious, and the palaces of the nobility, with spies. The Familiars, or lay brethren devoted to its service, lived at charges of the communes, and debauched society by crimes of rapine, lust, and violence.[86] Ignorant and bloodthirsty monks composed its provincial tribunals, who, like the horrible Lucero el Tenebroso at Cordova, paralyzed whole provinces with a veritable reign of terror.[87] Hated and worshiped, its officers ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... In the course of an hour's conversation no word of profanity, such as is affected by many military men, had crossed his lips. The framed photograph of his wife and daughters on his desk and his respectful references to women indicated he was not the type of soldier who lusts for rapine. But seated before that dull mahogany bar, whatever inhibitions, whatever conventional shackles, whatever selfdenials and repressions had been inculcated fell from him swiftly and completely. He barked his orders at the bartender, who seemed to know him very well, as though he were ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron cheek-bones and a narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, iron-dark, where he ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... universally confessed. Venality sculks no longer in the dark, but snatches the bribe in publick; and prostitution issues forth without shame, glittering with the ornaments of successful wickedness. Rapine preys on the publick without opposition, and perjury betrays it without inquiry. Irreligion is not only avowed, but boasted; and the pestilence that used to walk in darkness, is now destroying ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... legacy of the Hundred Years' War, which, indeed, was not yet entirely ended by the Peace of Tours, was the existence of bands of men trained to nothing but war and rapine, and devoid of any other means of subsistence than freebooting on the peasantry or travellers, whence they were known as routiers—highwaymen, and ecorcheurs—flayers. They were a fearful scourge to France in the early part of the reign of Charles VII., as, indeed, they had been at ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge

... government have ordered the seizure of the persons to be made in the night, to avoid a disturbance; but that they will not be able to prevent; the mob are but too happy to prove their loyalty, when they can do so by rapine and plunder, and depend upon it that this house will be sacked and levelled to the ground before to-morrow evening. You cannot go to prison with your father; you cannot remain here, to be at the mercy of an infuriated and lawless mob. You must go with me, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... rendered the Yahoos more odious, than their undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together: and it was peculiar in their temper, that they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth, at a greater distance, than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst; after which, nature had pointed out to them a certain root that gave them a ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... of ranks, offices, honours, and positions, which ill agree with human cupidity. Hence a conflict of desires, a collision of ambitions, a contest of interests, which at all times generate among men discords, machinations, frauds, usurpations, treachery, violence, and rapine. Add the consequences of the pride and ambition, which each more or less entertains, to reach or surpass some others in power, wealth, or fame, whence many causes of disappointments and heartburnings, of hatreds and jealousies, of persecutions and calumnies, of acts of vengeance and injustice ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio

... We will talk to-night Of other things. I hear the Holy Father Has sent a letter to the King of France Bidding him cross that shield of snow, the Alps, And make a peace in Italy, which will be Worse than a war of brothers, and more bloody Than civil rapine or intestine feuds. ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde

... chief had Creon slain, And conquered Thebes, he pitched upon the plain His mighty camp, and when the day returned, The country wasted and the hamlets burned, And left the pillagers, to rapine bred, Without control to strip ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... 3: Some have held that this prohibition of the apostles is not to be taken literally, but spiritually: namely, that the prohibition of blood signifies the prohibition of murder; the prohibition of things strangled, that of violence and rapine; the prohibition of things offered to idols, that of idolatry; while fornication is forbidden as being evil in itself: which opinion they gathered from certain glosses, which expound these prohibitions in a mystical sense. Since, however, murder and rapine were held to be ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... thoughts were thine, When ceaseless from the distant line Continued thunders came! Each burgher held his breath, to hear These forerunners of havoc near, Of rapine and of flame. What ghastly sights were thine to meet, When rolling through thy stately street, The wounded showed their mangled plight In token of the unfinished fight, And from each anguish-laden wain The blood-drops laid thy dust like rain! How often in the distant drum ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott

... presented. From the days that the voortrekkers endeavoured to escape English rule, from the day that they sought the hospitality of Chief Moroka, the history of the treatment of the blacks north of the Orange River is one long and uninterrupted record of rapine and greed, without a solitary virtue to redeem the horrors which were committed in the name of civilization. Such is the opinion any impartial student must arrive at from a study even of the meagre records available. If all were told, it would ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... "So rapine and treason forever shall cease!" And they wash the stained fleece of the pale lamb of Peace; When, lo! a strong angel stands winged and white In a wonderful raiment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... there any men in this kingdom, except such as find their account in public confusion, who would hazard the introduction of such scenes of rapine, barbarity, and bloodshed, as have disgraced France and outraged humanity, for the sake of obtaining—what?—Liberty and Equality. I suspect that the meaning of these terms is not clearly and generally understood: it may be of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... private property, and had mainly accrued through the sale of the estates of her ancestors. This sum was confiscated, and several other amounts, which belonged to members of our house and to our friends. It was an act of pure rapine, so gross, that as time revolved, and the sense of justice gradually returned to the hearts of men, restitution was made in every instance except my own, though I have reason to believe that individual ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... drunkenness: simony: witch-craft: breaking of the holy-days: sacrilege: to receive GOD'S Body in deadly sin: breaking of vows: apostacy: dissipation in GOD'S service: to set example of ill deeds: to hurt any man in his body, or in his goods, or in his fame: theft: rapine: usury: deceit: selling of righteousness: to hearken ill: to give to harlots: to withhold necessaries from the body, or to give it to excess: to begin a thing that is above our might: custom to sin: falling ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire, and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress, horror, and woe rose ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... is soon covered with the dead and dying bodies of innumerable victims. Sometimes the baffled invaders are compelled to sound a retreat; too often however, as in human contests, right proves but a feeble barrier against superior might; the citadel is stormed, and the work of rapine and pillage forthwith begins. And yet after all, matters are not nearly so bad, as at first they seem to be. The conquered bees, perceiving that there is no hope for them in maintaining the unequal struggle, submit themselves to the pleasure of the victors; nay more, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... Bishop of Australia in 1840.—"Neither can I comprehend or approve the policy which thus leaves multitudes without moral or religious guidance, under every inducement to commit acts of violence and rapine, which are not only the sources of infinite misery to the unhappy perpetrators, and to their wretched victims, but actually bring upon the government itself ten times the pecuniary charge which would be incurred by the erection of as many churches, and providing ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... about in winds— ... But who their virtues can declare? who pierce, With vision pure, into those secret stores Of health and life and joy—the food of man, While yet he lived in innocence and told A length of golden years, unfleshed in blood? A stranger to the savage arts of life— Death, rapine, carnage, surfeit, and disease— The lord, and not the tyrant ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... it firmly and piously, the ancient Egyptians were a peaceful and comparatively moral people. All writers admit their industry, their simplicity of life, their respect for law, their loyalty to priests and rulers. Hence there was permanence to their institutions, for rapine, violence, and revolution were rare. They were not warlike, although often engaged in war by the command of ambitious kings. Generally the policy of their government was conservative and pacific. Military ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... were secured from raid and reprisal, and formed his ideas of the Indian character and deserts from the red men, who, either Christianized or demoralized, preferred the grudging charity of civilization to the rude and frugal spoils of the chase, or the blood-stained rapine of war. This specimen of Indian was usually so harmless, in some instances perhaps so deserving, that the well-meaning Quaker learned to receive with discredit the stories of horror from the frontier, and discouraged ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... the "sick man" could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the damning accusation against the "unspeakable Turk" in these escapes of the peaceful stragglers from massacre and rapine which every rising in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our civilization. There were whole families in such rags that they would not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city, lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... But first,' said she, 'what wager will you lay?' 'A sheep,' I answered; 'add whate'er you will.' 'I cannot,' she replied, 'make that return: Our hided vessels in their pitchy round Seldom, unless from rapine, hold a sheep. But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace porch, where when unyoked His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one and it awakens, then apply Its polished lips to your attentive ear, And ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor

... ages, and opened to one world the sources of wealth and power and knowledge, to another all unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... on the island of Wollin, near the mouth of the Oder, dwelt a daring band of piratical warriors known as the Jomsvikings, who were famed for their indomitable courage. War was their trade, rapine their means of livelihood, and they were sworn to obey the orders of their chief, to aid each other to the utmost, to bear pain unflinchingly, dare the extremity of danger, and face death like heroes. They kept all women out of their ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... hordes sacked the Eternal City. One can catch the accent of horror at the tidal waves of anarchy that everywhere swept in to engulf the falling empire. "Horrible things," said Augustine, "have been told us. There have been ruins, and fires, and rapine, and murder, and torture. That is true; we have heard it many times; we have shuddered at all this disaster; we have often wept, and we have hardly been able to console ourselves." [18] At last, the empire in ruins, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... they offer (rare in those seas) for procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the black flag often resorted; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes,— islands untenanted by man,—oftentimes it lay furled up for weeks together; rapine and murder had rest for a season, and the bloody cutlass slept within its scabbard. When this happened, and when it became known beforehand that it would happen, a tent was pitched on shore for my brother, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... alas! alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their hair, while their vestments are rent about their persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... an unjust, illiberal faction!! Such the first fruits that were to follow the incomparable blessings of liberty! The staple productions of the island, it was vainly surmised, could never be cultivated without the name of slavery; rebellions, massacres, starvation, rapine and bloodshed, danced through the columns of the liberty-hating papers, in mazes of metaphorical confusion. In short, the name of freedom was, according to their assertions, directly calculated to overthrow our beautiful island, and involve it in one mass of ruin, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Blanch and her Sister were so hampered and Tyrannically treated by the Steward, he came to their Assistance, supplied them with Money, which he raised from the Fen-men, and fairly set them free from his Oppression and Rapine, reversed his Grants, cancelled his sham Leases, restored Possessions, Leets and Manor-Courts, made up Fences for the Tenants, and so strongly secured their Copyholds, that there is no likelihood they will ever be ousted or much disturbed again. And, to crown all the ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous

... of her water dashed with red wine, that was so welcome and so precious to the parched and aching throats; and all through the march Cecil lay asleep, and the man who had thieved from him, the man whose soul was stained with murder, and pillage, and rapine, sat erect beside him, letting the insects suck his veins and pierce ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... VI., was conversant with the world, and accustomed to the splendour of courts. Quite a contrast to the plain rigidity of Benedict, he was courteous and munificent, but withal a voluptuary; and his luxury and profusion gave rise to extortions, to rapine, and to boundless simony. His artful and arrogant mistress, the Countess of Turenne, ruled him so absolutely, that all places in his gift, which had escaped the grasp of his relations, were disposed of through her interest; ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... Gustavus, who had ten days before marched northward, and all prepared for a desperate resistance. The townsfolk looked on with trembling apprehension, their sympathies were with the defenders, and, moreover, they knew that in any case they might expect pillage and rapine should the city be taken, for the property of the townspeople when a city was captured was regarded by the soldiery as their lawful prize, whether friendly to the conquerors or the reverse. The town was at once summoned to ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty

... offerings, and to lie for God, is a greater disservice to His Majesty than to rob for rapine or lie for advantage." ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer

... my country! how shall memory trace "Thy glories, lost in either Charles's days, "When through thy fields destructive rapine spread, "Nor sparing infants' tears, nor hoary head! "In those dread days, the unprotected swain "Mourn'd, in the mountains, o'er his wasted plain; "Nor longer vocal, with the shepherd's lay, "Were Yarrow's banks, or groves of Endermay." ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... their class grievance against the rich, who had been enabled to buy themselves off from serving in the army. The numbers of the original fugitives were soon increased by evil-doers from all sides—ruffians who had a natural bent for rapine—and a plague of robbers was the result, threatening all parts of Hungary. The mischief grew to such serious proportions, and it transpired that the robbers had everywhere accomplices in the towns and villages. Persons of apparently respectable ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... state, As erst you thought of the Palatinate; Or that five hundred thousand pounds doth lie In the Venice bank to help Spain's majesty; Or that three hundred thousand more doth rest In Dunkirk, for the arch-duchess to contest With England, whene'er occasion offers; Or that by rapine I fill up my coffers; Nor that an office in church, state, or court, Is freely given, but they must pay me for't. Nor shall you ever prove I had a hand In poisoning of the monarch of this land, Or ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... &c. v.; theft, thievery, latrociny|, direption[obs3]; abstraction, appropriation; plagiary, plagiarism; autoplagiarism[obs3]; latrocinium[obs3]. spoliation, plunder, pillage; sack, sackage[obs3]; rapine, brigandage, foray, razzia[obs3], rape, depredation, raid; blackmail. piracy, privateering, buccaneering; license to plunder, letters of marque, letters of mark and reprisal. filibustering, filibusterism[obs3]; burglary; housebreaking; badger game*. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... Khan of Zagatai; and, after his capture and the defeat of the Ottoman powers, the kingdom of Anatolia submitted to the conqueror, who planted his standard at Kiotahia, and dispersed on all sides the ministers of rapine and destruction. Mirza Mehemmed Sultan, the eldest and best beloved of his grandsons, was despatched to Bursa, with thirty thousand horse; and such was his youthful ardor that he arrived with only four thousand at the gates of the capital, after performing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... was typical of France itself, which was harried by human wolves intent on rapine and wanton plunder. There were great schools of theology, but the students who attended them fought and slashed one another. If a man's life was threatened he must protect it by his own strength or by gathering ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... to Rhegium, the praefect of the garrison, which had been placed there the consul Laevinus, against the Bruttians, and consisted eight thousand men, the greater part of whom had been brought from Agathyrna in Sicily, as has been before mentioned, and were men who had been accustomed to live by rapine. To these were added fugitives of the Bruttians natives of that country, equal to them in daring, and under an equal necessity of braving every thing. This band ordered to be marched, first, to lay waste the Bruttian territory, and then to attack the city Caulonia. After ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... us who will take exemplary vengeance for every insult upon His majesty. You know that the cause of America is just. You know that she contends for that freedom to which all men are entitled,—that she contends against oppression, rapine, and more than savage barbarity. The blood of the innocent is upon your hands, and all the waters of the ocean will not wash it away. We again make our solemn appeal to the God of heaven to decide between you and us. And We pray that, in the doubtful scale ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... acquaintance. We have not, at least in the Northern part of our country, had the terrible experiences of the people of Europe, who are even now hiding their money in a vague apprehension of danger, inherited from centuries of rapine; but there are few of those who have given hostages to fortune who have not had many hours, and even years, of distressing anxiety concerning the future of their families. The greater the provision made against this heart-corroding care by ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... his face lighting up with intense ire and revenge; "the stern Saxon said, 'Heed well, ye chiefs of Cymry, and thou Gryffyth the King, that if again ye force, by ravage and rapine, by sacrilege and murther, the majesty of England to enter your borders, duty must be done: God grant that your Cymrian lion may leave us in peace—if not, it is mercy to Human life that bids us cut the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... venture lives in this derring do we shall fall into danger great and neither of us will return safe from this bate; but we shall both be cut off by fate and leave our cousins desolate." Then Kanmakan laughed and knew that he was a coward; so he left him and rode down the rise, intent on rapine, with loud cries and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... he had waited for his followers too long, eager as they were for rapine. When he came to his portal of delight, there stood, stout as Britannia herself, and sweeping a long knife for her trident, the valiant cook, to protect her cauliflowers. "You be off, Bill," she cried. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... could not calculate upon a single year's immunity from invasion and slaughter. From the days of Innocent their history becomes one long harrowing tale of papal plots, interdicts, excommunications, of royal proscriptions and perfidies, of attack, of plunder, of rapine, of massacre, and of death in every conceivable and horrible way,—by the sword, by fire, and by unutterable tortures and torments. The Waldenses had no alternative but to submit to these, or deny their Saviour. Yet, driven to arms,—ever their last resource,—they ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... grief: but as the hyena when she mourns is then most guileful, so Saladyne under this show of grief shadowed a heart full of contented thoughts: the tiger, though he hide his claws, will at last discover his rapine: the lion's looks are not the maps of his meaning, nor a man's physnomy is not the display of his secrets. Fire cannot be hid in the straw, nor the nature of man so concealed, but at last it will have his ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... such a terrible instance of private vengeance could have been carried out so recent as the beginning of the seventeenth century, without any notice being taken of it, even, in those days of general blood and rapine. Notwithstanding the hideousness of sacrilege and murder, which, certainly, in magnitude of atrocity, was scarcely ever equalled, there are many living, even in the immediate neighbourhood, who are ignorant of the cause of the act. Macranuil of Lundi, captain ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various

... father, maiden," he said gently; "we slay only those who resist, and resistance on the part of a single man, and he wounded, against a whole ship's crew is madness. We are no sea-wolves who slay for the pleasure of slaying, but are Saxons, who fight for our country against the oppressions and rapine of your people. Little right have they to mercy seeing they show none; but our religion enjoins us to have pity even upon our enemies. You had best ascend to your father and see to his wounds, none will harm you ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty

... obliged to fly before unarmed peasants. Their duty on such occasions is the most unmanly part of a soldier's office; namely, to ruin, ravage, and destroy. They soon yield to the temptation of pillage, and are habituated to rapine: they give loose to intemperance, riot, and intoxication; commit a thousand excesses; and, when the enemy appears, run on board the ships with their booty. Thus the dignity of the service is debased; they lose all sense of honour and of shame; they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... as easy in their tenure as he could; and lastly, whether he has made the English interest a blessing to the country, and, whilst it provided moderate, safe, and proper emoluments to the persons that were concerned in it, it kept them from oppression and rapine, and a general waste and ravage of the country: whether, in short, he made all these three interests pursue that one object which all interests and all governments ought to pursue, the advantage and welfare ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... Kaiser claims to have won the victory of "a superman." In that he has carried murder, arson, lying, rapine, lust up to the nth power, let us concede his claim. Not otherwise two hundred years ago the Indian, with his scalping knife, his war-whoop and his tomahawk, was "a superman" in terms of savagery. Not otherwise the Spaniards under Bloody Alva were "supermen" in terms of ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... illustrated in the history of those great revolutionary events, which belong to the life and times of the Emperor Charlemagne. If any one period in history might be supposed to offer a barren and unprofitable picture of war, rapine, and bloodshed—unfeatured by characteristic differences, and unimproved by any peculiar moral, it is this section of the European annals. Removed from our present times by a thousand years, divided from us by the profound gulf of what we usually denominate ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... finished, it was time to ask his guests to their business. "Are you," demands the aged prince, "merchants destined to any port, or are you merely adventurers and pirates, who roam the seas without any place of destination, and live by rapine and ruin." ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... it Thy even and thy like straight ends Thy pitie to God and to friends The last would still the greatest be And yet all jointly less than thee. Thou studiedst conscience more than fame Still to thy gathered selfe the same. Thy gold was not thy saint nor welth Purchased by rapine worse than stealth Nor did'st thou brooding on it sit Not doing good till death with it. This many may blush at when they see What thy deeds were what theirs should be. Thou'st gone before and I wait now T'expect my when and wait my how ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... into camp, having travelled most of the night. I saw that the country was rude, but the farms were close, and the dwellings in many cases inhabited. The vicinity had previously been unoccupied by either army, and rapine had as yet appropriated only the fields for camps and the fences for fuel. I was directed to the headquarters of Major-General M'Call,—a cluster of wall tents in the far corner of a grain-field, concealed from public view by a projecting point of woods. A Sibley tent stood ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... the South, too, I'm thinking; There is war in the East, and one battle at least In the West between eating and drinking. I'm allowed to rejoice in an excellent choice Of plans for a soldier of mettle, For all of them mean bloody war and rapine. So—on which should ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... Men as vile as crime can make them, will arrogate to themselves the right to judge and censure others. The history of England for centuries past, is but a record of crime—of wars, butcheries and bloodshed—rapine, injustice, oppression and inhumanity. But she will talk about negro slavery in the United States notwithstanding—and of liberty, and justice, and truth, and righteousness, and the rights of man! "Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward

... them which are dissolved, they themselves would then rather have wished to have stolen out of the world without noise, than to be put in mind that they have purchased the report of their actions in the world by rapine, oppression, and cruelty, by giving in spoil the innocent and labouring soul to the idle and insolent, and by having emptied the cities of the world of their ancient inhabitants, and fitted them again with so many and so variable ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... fight at any moment, of keeping lookouts on the alert day and night, of working in the fields with one hand on the implements of peace and industry, and the other on the implements of war. The night attack, murder, rapine, fire and bloodshed became common experiences, and the discovery of many bodies, the skulls crushed with battleaxes, of skeletons of men slain with the deadly arrow, of bodies twisted by torture and charred by fire, reveal what a reign of terror and dread that epoch must ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... dependency of England in the west. Since the failure of the Spanish force at Smerwick the power of the English government had been recognized everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power founded solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery who had been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south sowed during the years which followed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of Ulster, divided by ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... which was no doubt natural, now that rapine was put down, and the chiefs kept no longer an open house; and the roads (even such a wandering, country by—track as the one I followed) were infested with beggars. And here again I marked a difference from my own part of the country. For our ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... without resentment. But those who have been thus busy with their sickles in the fields of their neighbours, are henceforward to take notice, that the time of impunity is at an end. Whoever shall, without our leave, lay the hand of rapine upon our papers, is to expect that we shall vindicate our due, by the means which justice prescribes, and which are warranted by the immemorial prescriptions of honourable trade. We shall lay hold, in our turn, on their copies, degrade them from the pomp of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... the emeralds, flashing green— "The fruit shall be what the seed has been— His realm shall reap what his hosts have sown; Debt and misery, tear and groan, Pang and sob, and grief and shame, And rapine and consuming flame!" ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... view, there appeared to many wise citizens a clear prospect of dwelling in [the] midst of a furious pandemonium for several years after an unfavorable termination of the war; but was this prospect realized? Where were the highway robberies, the bloody vengeances, the arsons, the rapine, the murders, the outrages, the insults? They WERE, not anywhere. With great calmness the soldier cast behind him the memory of all wrongs and hardships and reckless habits of the war, embraced his wife, patched ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... many such Families, joyned together, made a greater Monarchy, this duty of the Herealt, to distinguish Scutchions, was made a private Office a part. And the issue of these Lords, is the great and antient Gentry; which for the most part bear living creatures, noted for courage, and rapine; or Castles, Battlements, Belts, Weapons, Bars, Palisadoes, and other notes of War; nothing being then in honour, but vertue military. Afterwards, not onely Kings, but popular Common-wealths, gave divers manners of Scutchions, to such as went forth ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... from Agathyrna. These were as many as four thousand men, made up of a mixed assemblage of every description of persons, exiles, bankrupts, the greater part of them felons, who had supported themselves by rapine and robbery, both when they lived in their native towns, under the restraint of the laws, and also after that a coincidence in their fortunes, brought about by causes different in each case, had congregated them at Agathyrna. These men Laevinus thought it hardly ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... he, "some time in the early part of August, 1864, my father was conducting a revival at a little house called Pine Log Creek Church, about ten miles from Calhoun. The times were most terrible about then; murder, robbery and rapine were of daily occurrence, and the whole country was subject to visitations by marauding parties from both armies. One day the old gentleman was preaching a sermon of unusual power, and before he ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... was destined for the defence of the Republic is said to have laid waste the cultivated parts of Lucania and Bruttii, and to have diminished the abundance of those regions by its love of rapine. ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... found in his book as Chapter XI. "The Goths," he said, "came out of the woods, pulled the beards of the senators, destroyed the Roman state, murdered and pillaged the Roman people, and left the world the Gothic arch; the Vikings came over the sea, roaring their sagas of rapine and slaughter; the conquerors came to Europe with spear and sword and torch and left the outlines of the map, the boundaries of states. Luther married his nun, and set Christendom to fighting over it for a hundred years, but he left a free conscience. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... though I had read that a minion of the wicked Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in it that hold upon the interest proper ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... throughout their traffic; and that they who have no stings of conscience, in relation to unjust dealings, have by indirect ways scraped together the greatest part of their estates. But in things where money has to do, many are so hardened, that, being charged with rapine, they have either no scruple concerning it, or so very light, that it never breaks ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... storm-clouds overcast, Even like a spectre of the past,— Of rapine, feudal strife, and blood, Thou tellest an old, wild, warlike story, When squadrons on thy ramparts stood, With spear and shield in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various

... imposture. If he has a desire to commit a base or a cruel action without remorse and with the applause of the spectators, he has only to throw the cloak of religion over it, and invoke Heaven to set its seal on a massacre or a robbery. At one time dirt, at another indecency, at another rapine, at a fourth rancorous malignity, is decked out and accredited in the garb of sanctity. The instant there is a flaw, a 'damned spot' to be concealed, it is glossed over with a doubtful name. Again, we dress up our enemies in nicknames, and they march ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... between the crimes of the great who are always ambitious, and the crimes of the people who always want, and can want only liberty and equality. These two sentiments, Liberty and Equality, do not lead direct to calumny, rapine, assassination, poisoning, the devastation of one's neighbours' lands, etc.; but ambitious might and the mania for power plunge into all these crimes whatever be the time, whatever be ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... own to throw away; it is responsible to every generation to come. If war be essential to the integrity of the empire, war is as much a duty—a terrible duty, I allow—as the protection of our children's property from the grasp of rapine, or the defence of their lives against the midnight robber. But we are advised to peace. No man on earth would do more willing homage than myself to that beneficent genius of nations. But where am I to offer my homage? Am I to kneel on the high-road where the enemy's armies, fierce with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... adding that Agrippa described Pilate as "inflexible, merciless, and obstinate." He says that Pilate dreaded lest the Jews should go on an embassy to the emperor, impeaching him for "his corruptions, his acts of insolence, his rapine, and his habit of insulting people; his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never-ending, gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity." Josephus is not trustworthy, always writing "with a motive," and Philo must be considered prejudiced, since ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... sword shall your deliverance be; Not by the shedding of your master's blood, Not by rebellion—or foul treachery, Upspringing suddenly, like swelling flood; Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good. God's time is best!—nor will it long delay; Even now your barren cause begins to bud, And glorious shall the fruit be!—watch and pray, For lo! the kindling dawn ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... mean handy-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom!—We must run glittering like a brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest; The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence. And pure religion breathing household ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris

... that the sea pirate was exhausting his strength in his futile struggles. His long career of cruelty and rapine was rapidly coming to ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... Raleighs and Drakes when they divided the spoils of Spanish galleons. They were not always the aggressors. Every evidence proves that they submitted to grievances before resorting to arms. When retaliating it was with the knowledge that their own lands would be exposed to rapine. As an illustration of the view in which the Creach was held, the case of Donald Cameron may be taken, who was tried in 1752, for cattle stealing, and executed at Kinloch Rannoch. At his execution he ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... as I expected. Our long deluded people are opening their eyes, and beginning to see and smell the blood and burnings of that 'Tophet', that political hell of slavery and ruin, to which the British army is now endeavoring, by murder and rapine, to reduce them." ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... (1206-1304). The sultans were overthrown, and in the general disorder of the Mahometan world a veteran and adventurous army, which included many Turkoman hordes, was dissolved into factions who, under various chiefs, lived a life of rapine and plunder. Some of these engaged in the service of Aladin (1219-1236), Sultan of Iconium, and among these were the obscure fathers of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton



Words linked to "Rapine" :   pillaging, rape, plundering, pillage



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