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Lawlessness   /lˈɔləsnəs/   Listen
Lawlessness

noun
1.
A state of lawlessness and disorder (usually resulting from a failure of government).  Synonym: anarchy.
2.
Illegality as a consequence of unlawful acts; defiance of the law.  Synonym: outlawry.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Lawlessness" Quotes from Famous Books



... seem to mind it. The soldiers had had a few scuffles with rowdies at Blue Island and the stock yards. They had chased the toughs in and out among the long lines of freight cars, and fired a few shots. Even the newspapers couldn't magnify the desultory lawlessness into organized rebellion. It was becoming a matter of the courts now. The general managers had imported workmen from the East. The leaders of the strike—especially Debs and Howard—were giving ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... mischief that a cat shows when she has a captured mouse at the end of her paws. While the gruel was heating, she spun round the room in quest of amusement; and her sudden jerks and flings from one place and thing to another had so much of lawlessness, that Ellen was in perpetual terror as to what she might take it into her head to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... they purposed to reform our spelling, which has always been a mere rag-bag of lawlessness, I hoped that they would do it right; but I was too deeply immersed in completing the index of my forthcoming volume to spend thought upon this question; nor did I court interruption. My waste-paper basket, therefore, received ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister

... tracked nearly all the errors that are undermining political society—Communism, Utilitarianism, the confusion between tyranny and authority, and between lawlessness and freedom. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements, which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of Elia called Old China, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... territories, where the experiment is approved by the executive officers of the United States, by their courts, by their press and by the people generally, and where it has "rescued that territory from a state of comparative lawlessness" and rendered it "one of the most orderly in the Union"; and whereas upon the woman suffrage amendment to Senate bill number 44 of the second session of the forty-third congress, votes were recorded in favor of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... conception, therefore, of the Deity proves when examined with any desire to understand our own meaning (and what lawlessness so great as the attempt to impose words upon our understandings which have no lawful settlement within them?) to be no less a contradiction in terms than the Pantheistic conception. It is Atheistic, as offering us a God which is not a God, inasmuch as we can conceive of no ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler

... very property of Osterfield, which the uncle of the present Lord de Barre bought, and to which I, their descendant, am gate-keeper. What with gambling, drinking, and worse, they deserved to lose it. The results of their lawlessness are ours: we are what and where you see us. With the inherited poison, the Father gave the antidote. Rachel, my child, am I not right when I say that you thank God with me for having THUS visited the iniquities of the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... England; nay, I have the authority of a lecture delivered at the Maryland Institute, for saying that it is even worse in many places. After describing various instances of lawless conduct, the lecturer continues thus: "Such lawlessness as I have described is not tolerated in any other part of the world, and would not be tolerated here for a moment, but for the criminal apathy of our citizens generally, and the truckling, on the part of our politicians and public officers, for the votes of the very men ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... hundred and fifty years France was under the Merovingian kings, and throughout much of this period there was very little settled government, Neustria, together with the rest of France, suffering from the lawlessness that prevailed under these "sluggard" kings. Rouen was still the centre of many of the events connected with the history of Neustria. We know something of the story of Hilparik, a king of Neustria, whose brutal behaviour to his various queens and ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... lawlessness was strong within me in those days, so that I hearkened to the voice of Skegson, the tempter, and he lured my feet from the paths that led to virtue and Sadler's Wells, and we wandered into the broad and crowded ways that branch off from ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... passed among the most vicious and degrading elements of mining camps, and you do not hesitate even to take human life when in your judgment it seems necessary to preserve your own. Under this veneer of lawlessness you may, indeed, possess a warm heart, Mr. Hampton; you may be a good fellow, but you are certainly not a model character, even according to the liberal code of ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... Metastasis expresses the lawlessness of tumors as regards being limited to the original site of development. Small particles of tumors enter the blood vessels or lymph streams and are carried to distant parts of the body, where they lodge and start new tumor formations. Expansion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... the negro. The great body of the Southern people are law-abiding, with the single exception that they do not propose to respect the Fifteenth Amendment. They are committed against this. They deprecate lawlessness. They are personally kind to the negroes. They are busy in the ordinary duties of life, but the lawless know that these good people will never disturb them in their injustices to the negro. Then, there is a relatively small element of the people who ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... only bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she had long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently till she forgot ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the anarchy of his own kingdom he could only fling down his sceptre and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne. From the death of Baeda the history of Northumbria became in fact little more than a wild story of lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was swept away by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by famine and plague. An anarchy ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... set forth. Three great dangers they see threatening the inner life of congregations, viz.: the assumption, by the leading men of particular parishes, of the right to dictate, as a compensation for the perhaps greater amount expected of them for the pastor's support; the lawlessness of immigrants who abuse the freedom of the country, want to break through all rules, and revile all good order, the regular ministry, and divine service as papacy itself; the introduction of worthless men into the country as pretended ministers by the Newlanders, who sell their ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... Lord Mayor's banquet, Mr. Gladstone said that he was glad to discern signs of improvement in Ireland during the last twelve months; but the struggle between the representatives of law and the representatives of lawlessness had rendered necessary an ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... aborted under destructive pressure from his pen. A once impregnably cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a two weeks' "vacation" of Banneker's at the State Capitol. He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... breathing the spirit of new ideas and the passionate love of progress, the silent dreamer whose busy brain already teemed with the germs of all the prosperity we have enjoyed for the last ten years, was incapable of handing over three millions of Italians to reaction, lawlessness, and misery. If he had firmly resolved to put down the Republic at Rome, he was not less firm in his resolution to suppress the abuses, the injustice, and all the traditional oppressions which drove the Italians ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... so delivered the mass of the rural inhabitants of Italy to private jurisdiction. The Gothic war of course hastened the downfall of political and social order. The manners of the nobles grew violent in lawlessness; men calling themselves senators, but having in fact renounced that rank by permanent absence from Rome, and others who merely belonged to senatorial houses, turned to fortifying their villas, and to building castles on heights, whilst they gathered about them a body of retainers, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... he had taken the field Clodius could make arbiter of the proposition only by assembling the throng outside the walls), condemned the lawlessness of the action taken in regard to Lentulus, but still did not approve the punishment proposed for it. Every one knew, he said, all that had been in his mind concerning the events of that time—he had cast his vote for letting the men live—but ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... the state with deadly power, And mischief breedeth mischief, hour by hour? To him who downward from this height supreme Views the wide realm, 'tis like a troubled dream, Where the deformed deformity o'ersways, Where lawlessness, through law, the tyrant plays, And error's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the first note of a conflict which was to last for 150 years, and of which the echoes may yet be heard. The fishermen, merchants, and seamen who flocked to the coast for the fishing season vehemently resented anything which might seem to threaten their turbulent lawlessness, and the great merchants in England, who were profiting by the fisheries, were jealous lest the planters should in some way interfere with their operations; but, for a time, the planters had sufficient influence through the patentees in England to maintain themselves."[24] ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... things, and beyond. She could not think any longer of her father as an outcast because he had abandoned a religion. For all religions were surely here, marching side by side, and behind them, background to them, there was something far greater than any religion. Was it snow or fire? Was it the lawlessness of that which has made laws, or the calm of that which has brought passion into being? Greater love than is in any creed, or greater freedom than is in any human liberty? Domini only felt that if she had ever been a ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... bands of them being caught cooking human bodies in a caldron for food; slaughter that drove men to make laws authorizing every man to have two wives, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns; lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed, and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great Elector ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... days the insane extravagances and lawlessness of the Davenant family had become proverbial. There had been only three of them left to carry on the wild tradition—Timothy, Nan's father, who feared neither man nor devil, but could wile a bird off a tree or ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... appreciative. In the country the hoodlums made trouble occasionally. We talk a great deal about city toughs. In nine cases out of ten they are lads of normal impulses whose resources have all been smothered by the slum; of whom the street and its lawlessness, and the tenement that is without a home, have made ruffians. With better opportunities they might have been heroes. The country hoodlum is oftener what he is because his bent is that way, though he, too, is not rarely driven into ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... when the clearing-up comes and he discovers that he has been the victim not of society but of an individual villain; that his attempt to right wrongs by committing new wrongs, to enforce the laws by lawlessness, and to correct violence by violence, was nothing but presumptuous and criminal folly,—when all this becomes clear to him, we have a tragic situation of the most pathetic character. This element of high tragic pathos was first given to a German drama ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... you, a strong woman. But had she really taken her own measure? Could she sit there much longer; with him beside her, and his words of twenty years ago sounding in her ears; almost the feeling of the kisses she had so dutifully pointed out the lawlessness, and allowed the repetition of, in that old forgotten time—forgotten by him, never by her! Was it possible to bear, without crying out, the bewilderment of a mixed existence such as that his presence and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... advocate was his fortitude—for the nominal counsellor, who was permitted no communication with the prisoner, and was furnished neither with documents nor with power to procure evidence, was a puppet, aggravating the lawlessness of the proceedings by the mockery of legal forms: The torture took place at midnight, in a gloomy dungeon, dimly, lighted by torches. The victim—whether man, matron, or tender virgin—was stripped naked, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... articles of food; but they are poor and ignorant; have been kept in ignorance so long that we cannot reasonably expect in them a very strong sense of the rights of property and the duty of obedience to law; yet I have never been able to discover any indications of combined lawlessness among them. On the contrary they are themselves fearful ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... King and the ministers was not of long duration. His promises of amended government were soon forgotten; the lawlessness of the nobles continued unchecked; agents of Rome were again busy in the country in collusion with the Popish nobles, and nothing was done to counteract them. In these circumstances the ministers ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison

... here Columbus remained upward of a year awaiting the return of his lieutenant Diego Mendez, whom he had dispatched to Ovando for assistance. During his critical sojourn here the Admiral suffered much from disease and from the lawlessness of his followers, whose misconduct had alienated the natives, and provoked them to withhold their accustomed supplies, until he dexterously worked upon their superstitions by prognosticating an eclipse. Two vessels having at last arrived for ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... Commander, and which will endure as long as there is darkness and misery upon the earth; even the battle of the living God against the baser instincts of our nature, against ignorance and folly, against lawlessness and tyranny, against brutality and sloth. Those, the deadly enemies of the human race, you are all bound to attack, if you be good men and true, wheresoever you shall meet them invading the kingdom of your Saviour and your God. ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... Sin, Let thy stinging red kisses pour down fiery red wine into our blood. Sound the trumpet of imperious evil And cross our forehead with the wreath of exulting lawlessness, O Deity of Desecration, Smear our breasts with the blackest ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... The lawlessness of all that followed strikingly exposes the frightful state of criminal justice at that time, wherever Spanish law prevailed. No evidence appeared to connect Catalina in any way with the death of Fernando Acosta. The Portuguese gamblers, besides that perhaps they thought lightly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... Kearney Street she turned without hesitation to the left, and walked toward those regions which are associated in the minds of every San Franciscan with lawlessness and crime. She had given a swift glance to the right before turning; the region of respectable shops and fashionable promenade was as black as a tunnel; the eccentric economy of the city forbade the light of street lamps when the moon was out, whether clouds ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... could but remind Ida of her own entanglement. She had bound herself by a chain that could never be broken, and here she read of how all noblest and grandest impulses are above the law, and refuse to be so bound; and how, in such cases, it is noble to defy and trample upon the law. A kind of heroic lawlessness, spiritualized and diffused in a cloud of exquisite poetry, was what she found in her Shelley; and it comforted her to know that before her time there had been lofty souls caught in the web of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... his sturdy answer; for he was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon time, with feminine lawlessness. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... the fearful lull after such a victory, the town was filled with dangers of the most horrible sort. Murder, crime of every kind, lawlessness in every guise, stalked through the streets or lurked down the narrow, dark and twisted alleys. The unfortunate citizens who had not retreated in time hid, when they could, in all sorts of strange places. They gathered in trembling, whispering groups, into garrets and cellars; even ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston

... upon English, Dutch, or French, was sure of a welcome in Cuba. When Governments suddenly took to being virtuous, a sense of wrong inflamed the minds of the men who had hitherto been allowed to live in recognised lawlessness. Captain Kidd, for example, manifestly thought that Lord Bellomont and the other gentleman who sent him out to Madagascar to cruise against the pirates, were only assuming a decent excuse for a little speculation in piracy on their own account. The freebooters who ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... with any idea of palliating the possible lawlessness of her action in the eyes of her companion, she wasted her words. Halfman had not been so happy since his return to England, not even in the briskest days of the siege, as he was now in the staging of this lawless comedy. The old pirate jigged ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm the perpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere. Between their inception and their present stage of development there is scarcely the beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and lawlessness, the people of both continents, with all their diversities of race and character, have shown themselves about equally unfit. To become a nation of scoundrels all that any people needs is opportunity, and what we are pleased to call by the impossible name of "self-government" ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... under false pretences. It has no right to its name, for the word Whitechapel arouses grim fears in the minds of those who know it not. Its reputation is as theatrically artificial as that of the New York Bowery. Its poverty and its tradition of lawlessness are sedulously fostered by itself for the benefit of the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... then administered, having the purpose to bring about a general removal of political disabilities, would effect the subjugation of the loyal men of the South to the disloyal. It would, moreover, appear to the Ku Klux Klan to be an indorsement of their campaign of lawlessness, depredation, and crime, fostered and abetted by the men whose political disabilities it was then ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... they ought; and I want to do just that; I want to co-operate, and a whole heap of us want to co-operate with the good white people to keep down crime and lawlessness. I know there's good white people who want to see justice done—but they ain't always strong enough to run things; an' if any one of us coloured folks tells on another one, he's liable to lose all his frien's. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... exaggerated her prudence and her modesty; I declared, what was the simple truth, that she was the last person in the world against whom such a scandalous insinuation should be directed, and that she was singularly inaccessible to vulgar temptation. I added that notwithstanding her seeming lawlessness she was not only remarkably sensitive to any accusation of bad manners, but that upon certain matters she could not endure even a joke. The only quarrel I remember to have had with her was when I lapsed into some commonplace jest about her intimacy with a music-master who gave ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... Ferocity, lawlessness, rapine, cruelty, and—when they were glutted and debauched by the spoils of the Roman empire—sensuality, were the evils which were making Europe uninhabitable for decent folk, and history—as Milton called ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... fire played a principal part in the destruction of the ancient cities, and it was at one time supposed that these extensive conflagrations were partly accidental and partly attributable to the wide-spread lawlessness that marked the closing hours of the greatest drama in all history. But later researches have evolved a new theory, and it now seems probable that the torch was employed by the authorities themselves as a final and truly a ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... not treat all those who come in contact with her law as mere monsters. The task before us is to humanize law and opinion, to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished, to create a social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlightening vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of them, and by bringing to bear upon the guilty the healing influence of pardon. At bottom is it not a Christianization of society, this extension of charity from the sinner ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... involuntary discharge of energy (directed muscular movement), control of the muscles means development of will as well as of skill. To prevent or cut off the natural outflow of nervous energy results in fatigue and diseased nerves. Unrestrained and uncontrolled expenditure of nervous energy results in lawlessness and weakened will. ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd

... continuously, though interrupted by frequent intervals of imprisonment. In former times, once caught, he never could steal again, except in the land of the shades. While this explanation has some force, it does not cover the ground. A better explanation for the modern increase of lawlessness is the change in the social order itself. The new order gives each man wider liberty of individual action. He is free to choose his trade and his home. Formerly these were determined for him by the accident of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... functions in the community and justifying their existence. The impression had been the more painfully deepened in him by the sudden eruption of a spirit of recklessness and a certain tendency to general lawlessness in some of the young men of the village. As a result of a conference with the leading men of his congregation, he had decided to organise a young men's club. The business of setting this club in active operation was handed over to Mr. Gwynne, than whom no one in the village was better fitted ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... than the drama, from its want of graduation, permits. Shelley, however, was only six-and-twenty when he wrote it. He must have been attracted to the subject by its embodying the concentration of tyranny, lawlessness, and brutality in old Cenci, as opposed to, and exercised upon, an ideal loveliness and nobleness ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... the quarters. Chunk represented the worst offences of which the slaves could be guilty; the most solemn warnings had been given against aiding and abetting him in any way. To do nothing now would be a virtual permission of lawlessness. There was no thought of mercy for Zany, but Aun' Jinkey's age, feebleness, together with her relations to Chunk and Miss Lou, ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... right to sit there, and were called Paris De France, in distinction from the other nobles who only had seats in the Parliament in whose province their lands might lie. To these St. Louis, in his anxiety to repress lawlessness, had added a certain number of trained lawyers and magistrates; and these were the working members of these Parliaments, which were in general merely courts of justice for civil and criminal causes. The nobles only attended on ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... boundaries and the title to mica mines, and with the revenue officers; and force was the arbiter of all disputes. Within the year four murders were committed in the sparsely settled county. Travel on any of the roads was unsafe. The tone of morals was what might be expected with such lawlessness. A lady who came up on the road on the 4th of July, when an excursion party of country people took possession of the cars, witnessed a scene and heard language past belief. Men, women, and children drank from whisky bottles that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... to reassure me: "Our country is a country of laws; we have order, and hate lawlessness. You will feel safe among the people. You will find where the country is uninhabited, or where the farms are very wide apart, houses or farms of refuge where you can get food and reindeer to take you further on. These are post stations ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... deputies were only a small group of men in the great royal city garrisoned with all the traditions of the French royalty and 5,000 sabres and bayonets besides. It was natural that they should seek support then, even if that support meant violence, lawlessness or insurrection. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... breach of settlement," says Njal, "that any man should take the law against another; for with law shall our land be built up and settled, and with lawlessness ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... north they recognized it at once as a protest against the sluggishness and ignorance of the south. In the west they spoke of it as a revolt against the spirit of the east and in the east they called it a reaction against the lawlessness of the west. But everywhere they hailed it as a new sign of the glorious unity of ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... the strife and clamour of the next few days one thing stands out now in my mind with sinister radiance. It is that peculiar form of lawlessness which broke out and had as its object the ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... the Count of Flanders a new treaty was made, and Richard was released from his engagement, paying 10,000 marks to the king of France. Quarrels with the inhabitants of Messina, due partly to the lawlessness of the crusaders and partly to Richard's overbearing disposition, led to almost open hostilities, and indirectly to jealousy on the part of the French. Domestic politics in the kingdom of Sicily were a further source of trouble. Richard's brother-in-law, King William, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... of Simon and Jude. And there was Harold the earl, and would work their reconciliation if he might, but he could not: but all his earldom him unanimously forsook and outlawed, and all who with him lawlessness upheld, because he robbed God first, and all those bereaved over whom he had power of life and of land. And they then took to themselves Morkar for earl; and Tosty went then over sea, and his wife with him, to Baldwin's land, and they ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... be trifled with. Once, when a band of marauders had taken possession of the old adobe church and were helping themselves to the buried cash of the inhabitants of the ranches, he rallied the terrorised people, gave the robbers battle and routed them effectually. He upholds authority against lawlessness, and wants justice to have its course, except when one of his own relatives has done the shooting—I was sorry to learn that in this regard he was probably not beyond rebuke; but his many good deeds to the needy and oppressed, whether Mexican or Indian, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... the Arab looters fighting amongst themselves. Their fights would last a long time, the men circling round one another with knives, or sniping from street corners. There was a great deal of musket firing at night. This state of lawlessness went on for three days, and then we made our first appearance in the form of a gun-boat that fired three rounds from one of her guns, "Not to hit something, but to make a salaam." The barricaded ones felt more comfortable. When the Sixth Division ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne

... posts had been kept a secret from the general public; but he was apprehensive that they might be followed by some of the desperate characters which infested Santa Fe at that time. But nothing of danger or lawlessness was seen during their first day and night, and when they resumed their journey on the morrow, they began to dismiss all thoughts of danger from ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne

... about 1590, the other about 1790, show how extensive this devastation had been. This cause, and others arising from it, the gradual decay of the shipping and fishing industries, had left the town in the main a poor and squalid place, the scene of much smuggling and other lawlessness. Time and the ocean wave had left only "two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses." Nor was there much relief, aesthetic or other, in the adjacent country, which was flat, marshy, and treeless, continually ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger

... sound, that she could answer with a curt denial, so bent was her heart on another man in the land she hoped to see so soon. Yet he was a nice fellow, too, thought old Mrs. Prichard as she sat before Mrs. Masham's fire at the Towers; and she forgave him the lawlessness of his impulse for its warmth, bred in the narrow limits of a ship on the seas for three long months!—how could he help it? Such a common story on shipboard, and ... such an uncommon ending! Ask the captains of passenger ships what they think, even now that ships steam twenty ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... still to transient love be bound; But, finding these so false, we pass beyond Unto the Love of loves that never dies. Nay, things that die cannot assuage the thirst Of souls undying; nor Eternity Serves Time, where all must fade that flourisheth Sense is not love, but lawlessness accurst: This kills the soul; while our love lifts on high Our friends on ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... such exploits were deservedly rather reprobated than otherwise, even when judged by the under-graduate scale of morality; and even in the parties concerned, were the offspring rather of a Robin-Hood-like lawlessness than a genuine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... lawlessness in Ireland during the past two hundred years has been directed against the landlord's agent. This is a very Irish-like proceeding—to punish the agent for the sins of the principal. When the landlord himself comes over from England he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... the utter bankruptcy to which sin reduces men. They become "full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matt. 23:28), so depraved that they are like bad trees, unproductive of any but bad fruit (rotten, in the Greek, Matt. 7:17); the very light in them is darkness, and how great darkness (Matt. 6:23). They are cut off from ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... us is: How can we save and strengthen the fine qualities which this spontaneous association with other boys produces without encouraging the lawlessness and the destructiveness and the secretiveness of the gang? First of all, we mothers must recognize not only that the boy cannot be happy without his associates, but also that the social virtues will never be developed in him at all if we keep him at home away from the ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off no worse than ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... American people in the pride of their own authority.... I can only say, and do most emphatically declare to Germans abroad, to German-American citizens of the United States, to the American people all alike, that whoever is guilty of conduct tending to associate the German cause with lawlessness of thought, suggestion or deed against life, property, and order in the United States is, in fact, an enemy of that very cause and a source of embarrassment to the German Government, notwithstanding what he or they ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... youth, and as they advance they are immersed in this contagion in prisons, which are the moral pest-houses in which law maintains the intense contagion of criminal depravity. Napoleon was an admirable subject for such contamination, and when we learn how he was reared amid the lawlessness and general scoundrelism of Corsica, we do not wonder that he became an imperial brigand. The low ethical standard of mankind, generally, and especially of historians, has heretofore prevented a just estimate of the character of Napoleon. Royal criminals have escaped condemnation; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various

... the evil. The Archduke Ferdinand of Gratz congratulated the Emperor upon an event, which would justify in the eyes of all Europe the severest measures against the Bohemian Protestants. "Disobedience, lawlessness, and insurrection," he said, "went always hand-in-hand with Protestantism. Every privilege which had been conceded to the Estates by himself and his predecessor, had had no other effect than to raise their ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... of the overtures that were made to him from the Guild of Santa Maria Zobenigo, where he had risen to be one of the bancali or governors, his qualities of force and daring making him useful in this age when lawlessness was on the increase. He was beginning to feel a sense of satisfaction, not all barbaric, in the position he had won among men who had some views of order, and to perceive that there might be a lawful use, almost as pleasant, for those very attributes which had rendered him so ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... our great country welcomes to its bosom the alien who flies from the despotisms of Europe? Is it that they shall themselves become tyrants over the very men who have given them shelter, and that a state of terrorism and lawlessness should be established under the very shadow of the sacred folds of the starry Flag of Freedom which would raise horror in our minds if we read of it as existing under the most effete monarchy of the East? The men are known. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle

... humor every whim. He was petted and coaxed out of his frequent fits of passion, and beguiled from his obstinate and sulky moods by bribes. He was the eldest child and only son, and his little sisters were taught to yield to him, right or wrong, he lording it over them with the capricious lawlessness of an Eastern despot. Chivalric deference to woman, and a disposition to protect and honor her, is a necessary element of a manly character in our Western civilization; but young Haldane was as truly ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... and acquaintances may not. More than this: if you use coarse words, or those which may be interpreted in various ways, then coarse manners will soon follow coarse tones, and a general swaggering and lawlessness. My dear girls, I am only prophesying what will be if no prevention is employed. Surely you will give no cause for censure, if you ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... the nature of law, it needs to be in accord with some rule of reason. And in this sense is to be understood the saying that the will of the sovereign has the force of law; otherwise the sovereign's will would savor of lawlessness rather than of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... 'generous' treatment. If the injured Basutos submit, their case will be carefully considered.... Nothing was to me more obvious than that as soon as he saw a beginning of unruly conduct in Ireland, he should have pledged himself to clearly defined measures, and have insisted on the existing law against lawlessness. But 'Boycotting' is not lawlessness. Lynch-law against oppressive landlords or their agents cannot be put down by intensifying national hatred.... Has the Coercion been wisely directed and reasonably guarded from abuse? ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes? A community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not mobs, execute its penalties is the only attractive field for ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... there are not wanting sociologists who maintain that the cause of the outburst of lawlessness and crime which has undeniably characterised Florence of late years is to be sought for exactly in that old-time, easy-going tolerance in religious matters, which they say is now producing a tardy but sure crop from ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... would be quite ready to fight to the last gasp, if need be. And I was impressed, at the very first glance, with the fact that they were all quietly and steadily going about their work, talking quietly together, and behaving without a single trace of that lawlessness that I had expected to prevail among ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... playing their part in the story also owe their existence to no special experience but to the general knowledge of the condition of Russia and of the moral and emotional reactions of the Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness, which, in general human terms, could be reduced to the formula of senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny. What I was concerned with mainly was the aspect, the character, and the fate of the individuals as they appeared to the Western Eyes of the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... at the idea of the countryside about this very Haunted House. He had added two or three ghost tales to those current; and, though he believed firmly in every weird story of the two parishes, he had not felt a single scruple in inventing others to terrify people from the spot. His love of lawlessness and danger was infinitely stronger than his inherited faith in the supernatural. The Haunted House brought to his mind the festival of Les Brandons, when the dreaded place had lost its horror for the time being, owing to the safety that is supposed to lie in numbers. He chuckled ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin

... many of them led to a widespread belief that enforcement was, in the nature of the case, impossible; and thus, instead of marking ground already won, they were too often sources of distinct moral deterioration. Certainly the carnival of lawlessness that succeeded the Act of 1807, and that which preceded final suppression in 1861, were glaring examples of the failure of the efforts to suppress the slave-trade by ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... proves this. But Madrid more plainly than any other capital shows the traces of having been set down and properly brought up by the strong hand of a paternal government; and like children with whom the same regimen has been followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawlessness and insipidity. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... day?" Said they, "They are with us and we will present them to our lord the king for Mamelukes to serve him and give him wealth galore that we have gotten together and doff all we own and repent from lawlessness and fight in thy service." Abu Sabir, however, paid no heed to their words, and seized all their good and bade put them all to death. Furthermore. he took his two boys and rejoiced in them with exceeding joy, whereat the troops murmured among themselves, saying, "Verily, this is a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... defended or apologized for the brutal lynchings of I.W.W. agitators and the savage assaults committed upon other peaceful citizens whose only crime was exercising their lawful and moral right to organize and strike for better wages, denounce the Bolsheviki for their "brutality" and their "lawlessness" and cry for vengeance upon them, honest and sincere ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... because to-day was originally assigned for the opening of the Committee stage of the Home Rule Bill that Members in both Houses drew special attention to the present state of lawlessness in Ireland. If their idea was to create a hostile "atmosphere" it did not succeed, for, owing to Mr. LONG'S indisposition, the Bill was postponed. Besides, the fact that every day brings news of policemen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various

... work to take counsel with one's own heart. "Fool" and "lawless one" come to their foolish and wicked conclusions there (Ps. xiv. 1); and what else than "folly" could be expected in hearkening to that which is "deceitful above all things"—what else than lawlessness in taking counsel with that ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings

... held the incoming troops well under control, but the stores of wine were easy to reach, and by the morning there were wild scenes of disorder. When Charles arrived, however, on the morrow, Tuesday, just a week after the beginning of the siege, lawlessness was checked with a strong hand. Any ill treatment of women was peculiarly repugnant to him, and he did not hesitate to execute the sternest justice ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... trooper as she passed their couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... Erasmus Darwin's intrepid pussy (a better poet than her master) to the cat of Miss Anna Seward, surely the last lady in all England to have encouraged such lawlessness on the part ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier



Words linked to "Lawlessness" :   government, lawless, illegality, nihilism, governance, administration, government activity, governing, disorder



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