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More "Rapacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sleep and flung a jewelled hand over his face. Those broad gold rings with the green stones that sparkled like serpents' eyes as they caught the light! They were fixed indelibly in her memory, for she had seen them on the rapacious hand that had seized upon her while it was still red with her father's blood. Only from them, she could reconstruct every hard line of the hidden face. Suddenly, in the rage that rose in her at the recollection, she found ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... unnatural crimes, which they punish with death. Among the Moros is practiced the ordeal by fire, and the burial of the living for certain crimes; but some escape from these in safety, through their power as sorcerers. The authority and government of the chiefs is described; they are tyrannical and rapacious, and treat as slaves even chiefs who are subject to them. Combes makes special mention of some customs peculiar to the Subanos, or river-people. They are exceedingly rude and barbarous, without any government; and a perpetual petty warfare is waged among them. Their women, however, are more chaste ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... overbearing, domineering, ruthless and his victims are powerless to retaliate. Love is the greatest tyrant in all the world, Mr. Schmidt, and we poor wretches can never hope to conquer him. We are his prey, and he is rapacious. Do you ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... prisoners—or asked a large ransom? This last suggestion threw them into a cold perspiration of fear. The wealthiest were seized with the worst panic and saw themselves forced, if they valued their lives, to empty bags of gold into the rapacious hands of this soldier. They racked their brains for plausible lies to dissemble their riches, to pass themselves off as poor—very poor. Loiseau pulled off his watch-chain and hid it in his pocket. As night fell their ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... congenial outlay, was in the relief of the distressed. She could not endure to deny the petition of any whom she believed to be suffering from want; and this tenderness of heart was often imposed on by the artful and rapacious. Those who, from interested motives, desired to separate her from Napoleon, felt a secret satisfaction in the uneasiness which her large expenditure occasionally gave him. To their misrepresentations ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Wicomico, with the coast between them, offered no strong temptation to a rapacious foe, and the inhabitants reposed in the fancied security of their isolation and unimportance. The business of life went on, faintly and sorrowfully, to be sure, but still went on. The village shops at B—— and C—— were kept open, though tended ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... nor do either of them bend sufficiently: As to the seeds, they may be sown in beds or cases at any time, during March; and when they peep, carefully defended with furzes, or the like fence, from the rapacious birds, which are very apt to pull them up, by taking hold of that little infecund part of the seed, which they commonly bear upon their tops: The beds wherein you sow them had need be shelter'd from the southern aspects, with some skreen of reed, or ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... but the quezal, when the Spaniards came And plundered all the white imperial town, Saw in a storm of red rapacious flame The ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... so coarsely built, that you can never appreciate a shade of meaning. You are yourselves rapacious, violent, immodest, careless of distinction; and yet the least thought for the future shocks you in a woman. I have no patience with such stuff. You would despise in a common banker the imbecility that you expect ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of gold; The Arctics lay before me, vast and drear; The sea was green and rough; no gay fish darted Like silver arrows from the quivering wave; But monsters, with thick scales and hideous eyes, Looked sullenly up in stupid wonderment, While some swam to'ards me, with rapacious maws Sharp-fanged and bloody, and exulting fins Flapping with demon slowness their huge sides;— And ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... injustice and he denounced the waste. Many cases of grievous hardship came to his notice. Widows, whose only means of support for themselves and their little children was their salary, were thrown upon the street in order that rapacious politicians might secure places for their henchmen. Roosevelt might plead, but the politician remained obdurate. What was the tragic lot of a widow and starving children compared with keeping promises with greedy "heelers"? Roosevelt saw ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... performers of that age. The greatest Italian singers who visited England regarded him as the dispenser of fame in their art, and exerted themselves to obtain his suffrage. Pacchierotti became his intimate friend. The rapacious Agujari, who sang for nobody else under fifty pounds an air, sang her best for Dr. Burney without a fee; and in the company of Dr. Burney even the haughty and eccentric Gabrielli constrained herself to behave with civility. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... water company, obtaining a temporary restricting order preventing the ordinance from going at once into effect. Here was an affair in point. Were it not for lawyers of the calibre of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon, hard-earned private property would soon be confiscated by the rapacious horde. Once in a while I was made aware that Mr. Watling had his eye ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... story-teller's clothing. "My followers are mostly outlawed Miaotze, who have been driven from their own tribes in Yun Nan for man-eating and disregarding the sacred laws of hospitality. They are somewhat rapacious, and in this way it has become a custom that they should have as their own, for the purpose of exchanging for money, persons such as yourself, whose insatiable curiosity has ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... half-animated heaps of woe and dye, the glances of Rose and Henrietta met in an understanding pleasing to both. This mourning had a professional, almost a rapacious quality, and if these women had no hope of material pickings, they were getting all possible nourishment from emotional ones. Their eyes, very sharp, but veiled by seemly gloom, criticized the slim, upright figures of these young women who could wear ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... firm as a thousand rocks, incrusted with stockades, and intrenched to the chin in mud batteries. He was a gigantic Swede, who, had he not been rather knock-kneed and splay-footed, might have served for the model of Samson or a Hercules. He was no less rapacious than mighty, and withal as crafty as he was rapacious, so that there is very little doubt that had he lived some four or five centuries since he would have figured as one of those wicked giants who took a cruel ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the younger boy know that he was on the lookout he kept a strict watch on all sides for more of the rapacious creatures, and at length discovered two making for him in different directions, one of them suddenly appearing between him and the yacht, ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... that proud eminence," and the husband of the Herodian princess Drusilia, who had become a pagan in order to marry him. Tacitus, the Roman historian, says[1] that "with all manner of cruelty he exercised royal functions in the spirit of a slave." Under his rapacious tyranny the people were goaded to fury. Bands of assassins, Sicarii (so called by both Romans and Jews because of the short dagger, sica, which they used), sprang up over the country. Now they struck down Romans and Romanizers, and now they were employed by ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... acquired a certain purchasing value which procured advantages and luxuries impossible in the preceding period when the brave man was worth infinitely more than the rich who, scorned and considered as a rapacious Jew, was isolated and in constant fear of being robbed or killed. As the number of government officials increased, individual fortunes grew; men became enormously wealthy through the various offices bought by them or given ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... in the teeming earth, 550 Green swells the germ, impatient for its birth; Guard from rapacious worms its tender shoots, And drive the mining beetle from its roots; With ceaseless efforts rend the obdurate clay, And give my vegetable babes to day! 555 —Thus when an Angel-form, in light array'd, Like HOWARD pierced the prison's noisome shade; Where chain'd ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... putrescent insects were collected. Whilst, therefore, these pitchers are answering the double purpose, of being a reservoir to retain a fluid, however produced, for the nourishment of the plant in the exigency of a dry season, as also a repository of food for rapacious insects, as in sarracenia, or the American pitcher-plant; it is also probable that the air, disengaged by these drowned ants, may be important and beneficial to the life of the Australian plant, as Sir James E. Smith has suggested, in respect to the last-mentioned genus, wild in the swamp ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hills, and plains, and rocks, Speed the scared leveret and rapacious fox; On rapid pinions cleave the fields above The hawk descending, and escaping dove; With nicer nostril track the tainted ground The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound; Converge reflected light with ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... invention is there seldom exercised beyond suggesting the means of providing for the first necessities and the most pressing wants. A man, indeed, is afraid here to be considered as wealthy, well knowing that some of the rapacious officers of the state would find legal reasons to extort his ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of Merdjan is picturesquely situated on a gentle declivity near the foot of the mountain, and is surrounded by orchards, and poplar trees, which have escaped the rapacious hands of the Arabs: hard by flows a rivulet, which irrigates the adjacent grounds. We left Merdjan early in the morning. Twenty minutes north is Ain Toby [Arabic], or the spring of the gazelle, consisting of several wells, round one of which are ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... pleadest her sufferings from her family. But I have too often answered this plea, to need to say any more now, than that she has not suffered for my sake. For has she not been made the victim of the malice of her rapacious brother and envious sister, who only waited for an occasion to ruin her with her other relations; and took this as the first to drive her out of the house; and, as it happened, into my arms?— Thou knowest how much ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... though it be death to the Cubans. Relieved of the enormous taxation and oppression generally which her people labor under in every department of life, Cuba would gradually assume a condition of thrift and plenty. But while she is so trodden upon, so robbed in order to support in luxury a host of rapacious Spaniards, and forbidden any voice in the control of her own affairs, all the treaty concessions which we could make to Spain would only serve to keep up and perpetuate the great farce. Such a treaty as is proposed would be in ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... alone could be found the fulfillment of all aspiration and desire. No doubt they satisfied many women, but they could not satisfy me. They gave me little I did not find in the mere society of the many brilliant and accomplished men with whom I was surrounded. I had a rapacious mind, and there was ample satisfaction for it in the men who haunted my salon and were constantly to be met elsewhere. European men are instruits. They are interested in every vital subject, intellectual and political, despite the itch of amor, their deliberate cult of sex. They ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... butcher, with many blessings invoked on King Harry's head, declared that the country was being sucked dry by these rapacious ecclesiastics; that the monks encroached every year on the common land, absorbed the little farms, paid inadequate wages, and—which appeared his principal ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... syl.), John Graham of Claverhouse (Viscount Dundee), a relentless Jacobite, so rapacious and profane, so violent in temper and obdurate of heart, that every Scotchman hates the name. He hunted the Covenanters with real vindictiveness, and is a by-word ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... to cruise in comfort one must pay and be pleasant," declared the man with the fair beard. "In Greece and the Levant they are more rapacious than in Naples, and the Customs officers always want squaring, otherwise they are for ever rummaging and ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... his advantage; he merely restored the former frontier and abolished the subsidies which had formerly been paid to the Persians. Chosroes II. was much inferior to his grandfather. He was haughty and cruel, rapacious and given to luxury; he was neither a general nor an administrator. At the beginning of his reign he favoured the Christians; but when in 602 Maurice had been murdered by Phocas, he began war with Rome to avenge his death. His armies plundered Syria and Asia Minor, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... preacher; he offered Knox the post, and all present agreed. Knox wept, and for days his gloom declared his sense of his responsibility: such was "his holy vocation." The garrison was, confessedly, brutal, licentious, and rapacious, but they "all" partook ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... man. He was not inclined to be rapacious. He had an interest in a bank in Gibraltar, and two thousand pounds would establish him there. He had thought it might be worth the president's while to put him in the way of two thousand pounds—considering everything. Promotion was slow in ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... standin' by the African Desert one day watchin' them take a picture called "Rapacious Rupert's Revenge," when the Kid comes over and calls me aside. Since he had become a actor he had gave himself up to dressin' in panama hats, Palm Beach suits and white shoes. He reminded me of the handsome young lieutenant in a musical comedy. Every time I seen him in that outfit I expected ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... juiceless brows,(917) Nor can the sweetest pasture stay The charger's long unquiet neigh. Big tears from mules and camels flow Whose staring coats their trouble show, Nor can the leech's art restore Their health and vigour as before. Rapacious birds are fierce and bold: Not single hunters as of old, In banded troops they chase the prey, Or gathering on our temples stay. Through twilight hours with shriek and howl Around the city jackals prowl, And wolves and foul hyaenas wait Athirst for blood at every ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... who could not know their wants and who fell no interest in their prosperity; and then they were administered by a set of agents as ignorant as their masters; men who, from the nature of their employment and accountability, must in general be oppressive and rapacious. ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... depended upon, and for the slightest inducement, or with the least irritation, it will fly at its feeder. At other times it seeks perfect solitude, and can only be captured with the utmost skill and perseverance. It generally feeds three times a day, but its appetite is not rapacious; it sleeps little, is usually on the wing at sunrise, and proves that it slumbers but little in the night by ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... attorney, in a very high tone indeed, that on no account would he take any step to harass the lady. It was simply against Sir John Ball that he wished to proceed. "Things would come out in that trial, Mr Walker," he said, "which would astonish you and all the legal world. A rapacious scheme of villainy has been conceived and brought to bear, through the stupidity of some people and the iniquity of others, which would unroll itself fold by fold as certainly as I stand here, if it were properly handled by ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the French governor, began to shake with apprehension, when he heard their repeated threats, but they durst not apply to this magistrate, who, upon a fair representation of the case, would have punished them severely for their rapacious and insolent behaviour. Peregrine, without further molestation, availed himself of his own attendants, who shouldered his baggage and followed him to the gate, where they were stopped by the sentinels until ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... manner, that he easily drew from the youth the whole history of his acquaintance with Sir James Stewart, of the rescue of his sister, and the promise to conduct him to the captive King of Scots, as the only means of saving him from his rapacious kindred. ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always disapproved the antecedent democracy, and that he entered on the new scheme of government with full hope of seeing justice and wisdom predominant He was soon undeceived. The government of the Thirty proved a sanguinary and rapacious tyranny, filling him with disappointment and disgust. He was especially revolted by their treatment of Socrates, whom they not only interdicted from continuing his habitual colloquy with young men, but even tried to implicate in nefarious murders, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... acquisition of esteem and influence was made by the Drapier's Letters, in 1724. One Wood, of Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, had, as is said, by a present to the dutchess of Munster, obtained a patent, empowering him to coin one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the kingdom of Ireland, in which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Seler considers synonymous, is probably essentially distinct, as it bears a somewhat stronger resemblance to the chuen than to the akbal symbol. In character 54, plate LXIV, from Dres. 17b, which denotes the vulture or rapacious bird figured below the text, it probably indicates the c sound, as the most reasonable interpretation of the symbol is hchom, "the sopilote" (Perez), or hchuy, "a hawk or eagle." If the character shown in plate LXIV, 54, is intended ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... does it proclaim as to the character of the King? Purity is the very foundation of His royalty. Meekness and gentleness are the very weapons of His conquest and the sceptre of His rule. The dove will outfly all Rome's eagles and all rapacious, unclean feeders, with their strong wings, and curved talons, and sharp beaks. The lesson as to the true nature of the true Kingdom, which was taught of old when the prophet said 'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, riding on an ass,' and not upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... mad man, and the dead and crippled wolves lay as trophies around the bold soldier. In a hollow near the river they found a horse and man partly eaten up, and several cattle that had apparently been hotly pursued and torn to death by the rapacious beasts. They started out in search of the spot from whence the drover had heard the firing in the night. They soon discovered the place; at the foot of a large dead sycamore stump, some twelve feet high lay the carcasses ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... thy thirst with berry-juice? O think how this dry palate would rejoice! If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice, 330 O think how I should love a bed of flowers!— Young goddess! let me see my native bowers! Deliver me from this rapacious deep!" ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... "so vast in comparison with those furnished by the African Society, were, to our thinking, partly the cause of his loss. The rapacious demands of the African kings grew in proportion to the riches they supposed our traveller to possess; and the effort to meet the enormous drain made upon him, was in great part the cause of the catastrophe which brought the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... some advantage of the wreck, and appropriating such iron- work as he could gather from it to his own use; for that metal is become very valuable to those savages, since their commerce with the Spaniards has taught them to apply it to several purposes. But as the secreting any thing from a rapacious Spanish rey or governor (even an old rusty nail) by any of their Indian dependants, is a very dangerous offence, he was careful to conceal the little prize he had made till he could conveniently carry it away; for in order to make friends of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... and bade them watch it well, for when that tree should fall and the fire die out, then he would return from the far East, and lead his loyal people to victory and power. When the present generation saw their land glide, mile by mile, into the rapacious hands of the Yankees—when new and strange diseases desolated their homes—finally, when in 1846 the sacred tree was prostrated, and the guardian of the holy fire was found dead on its cold ashes, then they thought the hour of deliverance had come, and every morning at ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... venerable forms of saints and martyrs,—it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... rapacity of their landlords—on whom were poured the full phials of Anti-corn-law wrath. The following are some of the scalding drops let fall upon their devoted heads—"Monster of impiety!" "inhuman fiend!" "heartless brutes!" "rapacious harpies!" "relentless demons!" "plunderers of the people!" "merciless footpads!" "murderers!" "swindlers!" "insatiable!" "insolent!" "flesh-mongering!" "scoundrel!" "law-making landlords!" "a bread-taxing oligarchy!"[29] Need we say that the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... been a rapacious lawyer, and have never omitted any means of amassing a fortune, have, with a truly consistent spirit, shown an implacable enmity to all those who are raised to a condition above want and dependence. And though you kick against the parallel drawn between you and the ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... could reward be hoped? Could the robbed passenger expect a bounty From those rapacious hands, who ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... literally a walking pitfall for luckless aquatic insects; but when transformed into a fly, ever on the wing in pursuit of its prey, it throws off all concealment, and reveals the more unblushingly its rapacious character. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Thus, practically all the other girls had the advantage over Susan. Soon after they definitely abandoned respectability and appeared in the streets frankly members of the profession, they became bold and rapacious. They had an instinctive feeling that their business was as reputable as any other, more reputable than many held in high repute, that it would be most reputable if it paid better and were less uncertain. They respected themselves for all things, talk to the contrary in the search ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... keep my countenance," said Nicaeus. "A patron of science, forsooth! Of all the insolent, shallow-brained, rapacious coxcombs—" ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... monster? how was he to cover it?—he knew not. He understood well that at the bottom of this all lay an error. On the road of life there was something which he had not noted; something which he had not recognized; he had let something slip from his hands which still were so rapacious; he, an architect, observing with mighty diligence the law of equilibrium in buildings reared by him, had not preserved that equilibrium in his own house; so that now it was hard for him to dwell there, and he wished to depart ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... also invent ingenious combinations to reach a good flier. Most of the great rapacious birds of rapid flight or with powerful talons are so well organised for the chase that they have no need of cunning. To see the prey, to seize it and devour it, are acts accomplished in a moment by the single fact of their natural organisation. It is rather among those ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... of his own need; yet, at the anticipation of the vigorous course certain to follow a decision to use his money in opposition to the old, established, rapacious greed, he was conscious of a sudden tightening of his mental and physical fibers. The belligerent blood carried by George Gordon Makimmon from world-old wars, from the endless strife of bitter and rugged men in high, austere places, stirred once more through ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 37), are interesting and suggestive. Under the vivid realizations expressed in these notes we seem to see the Apostles sitting in permanent conclave (iv. 35), the daughters of Philip as members of an incipient, "order of Virgins" (xxi. 9), or the rapacious Felix catching at the words "alms and offerings" when uttered by St. Paul (xxiv. 26). The extreme fertility of conjecture which we noticed in the Commentary on the Gospels is somewhat chastened, and is exercised in ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... house, it is claimed, was closed, and the Schapiras met with their tragic end, because "as printers they scrupulously abstained from publishing Haskalah literature." Maskilim were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and these, as is ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides executing the harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own aggrandizement, and harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways conceivable. Many of them even hindered the colonization movement, because, if allowed to mature, it would deprive ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... back, rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of the bird that ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... he, "are recorded the heroic deeds of our race while fighting to save our firesides from a rapacious foe. Every character is a history in itself. Yet your race know it not; but still boast of sciences ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... disguised by an appearance of military frankness: in his highest fortune he was accessible and courteous to his fellow soldiers, and while he indulged the prejudices of his new subjects, he affected in his dress and manners to maintain the ancient fashion of his country. He grasped with a rapacious, that he might distribute with a liberal hand; his primitive indigence had taught the habits of frugality; the gain of a merchant was not below his attention; and his prisoners were tortured with slow and unfeeling cruelty to force ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... state of mind which put me on the venture. When I was a boy, and listened to Homer's and Hesiod's tales of war and civil strife—and they do not confine themselves to the Heroes, but include the Gods in their descriptions, adulterous Gods, rapacious Gods, violent, litigious, usurping, incestuous Gods—, well, I found it all quite proper, and indeed was intensely interested in it. But as I came to man's estate, I observed that the laws flatly contradicted the poets, forbidding adultery, sedition, and rapacity. So I was in a very hazy state ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... died in 1403, her wealth and rank attracted the regards of Alexander Stewart, the natural son of Robert Earl of Buchan, of royal blood. Without waiting for the ordinary mode of persuasion to establish an interest in his favour, this wild, rapacious man appeared in the Highlands at the head of a band of plunderers, and planting himself before the castle of Kildrummie, stormed it, and effected a marriage between himself and the Countess of Mar. Alexander Stewart, in cooler moments, however, perceived the danger of this ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... person of pure soul engaged in penances. With respect to even an ascetic living in the woods and employed in his own (harmless) acts, are raised three parties, viz., friends, neutrals, and foes. They that are rapacious hate them that are pure. The idle hate the active. The unlearned hate the learned. The poor hate the rich. The unrighteous hate the righteous. The ugly hate the beautiful. Many amongst the learned, the unlearned, the rapacious, and the deceitful, would falsely accuse an innocent person even ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... very rarely leaves his palace, and is seldom seen abroad in the streets of Kelat except on Fridays, when he goes to the mosque on foot, attended by an escort armed to the teeth. He is said to live in constant dread of assassination, for his cruel, rapacious character has made him universally detested in and around the capital. His one thought in life is money and the increase of his income, which, with the yearly sum allowed him by the British Government, may be put down at considerably over L30,000 per annum. A thorough miser, the Khan ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... it is so dangerous to generalize about human nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal reformer, and a rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These versions differ by codes in the same person, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... stealings; bands of miscreants resembling foul and unclean birds which clamor and fight for the chance of settling down upon and devouring the body to which their keen scent hag directed them; all were astir and with but little effort obtained all that they desired. The offices were thus filled by rapacious and unscrupulous men. The agents who had helped to elect them, or impose them upon the people by fraud, were supported and protected in their villainies; and in the consciousness of impunity for crime, walked the streets heavily armed and ready on the instant to ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... The deep-set, rapacious eyes of the Scotchman burned into hers for an instant. Without a word he released her ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Simon Magus! woe to you, His wretched followers! who the things of God, Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver in adultery! Now must the trumpet sound for you, since yours Is the third chasm. Upon the following vault We now had mounted, where the rock impends Directly o'er the centre of the foss. Wisdom Supreme! how wonderful the art, Which thou dost manifest ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... were sums of money extorted from the givers by the terrors of power. Against the system of presents, therefore, the new commission was in general opinion particularly pointed. In the commencement of reformation, at a period when a rapacious conquest had overpowered and succeeded to a corrupt government, an act of indemnity might have been thought advisable; perhaps a new account ought to have been opened; all retrospect ought to have ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... garden the King eats a pear, His servants rapacious the tree will uptear; For every five eggs he gives bounteously, more Than five hundred fowls will ...
— Little Engel - a ballad with a series of epigrams from the Persian - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... shop. The shop had been tenanted by her father, one of whose frequent bankruptcies had happened there; after which his stock of the latest novelties in inexpensive furniture had been seized by rapacious creditors, and Mr Earp had migrated to Birmingham, where he was courting the Official Receiver anew. Ruth had remained solitary and unprotected, with a considerable amount of household goods which had been her mother's. (Like all professional ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... taxation, and unable to draw a sword for the common defence. At this period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its authority declined. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the doctrines of Wicklif had made great progress ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... looking as nearly like a dangerous old eagle as a human being well could. Rapacious, merciless, tyrannical; a famous philanthropist. Stingy to pettiness; a giver away of millions. Rigidly honest, yet absolutely unscrupulous; faithful to the last letter of his given word, yet so treacherous where his sly mind ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... names. He called the judges Nogod, Lovestrife, Hearsay, Partial, Loveself, Lovegold, Takegift, Ignorant, Knowlittle, Hasty and Slovenly; he called the witnesses Calumny, Lie and Suspicion; and, in obvious allusion to Ferdinand's seizure of property, he named the statute-book "The Rapacious Defraudment of the Land." He saw the lords oppressing the poor, sitting long at table, and discussing lewd and obscene matters. He saw the rich idlers with bloated faces, with bleary eyes, with swollen limbs, with bodies covered with sores. He saw the moral world turned upside ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... King has been pleased, this very day, to give me a gift of all Fraserdale's escheat." Still, however, one thing was wanting; the rapacious Lovat had not obtained his former enemy's plate; General Wightman had taken possession of it as from the person with whom it was deposited; and he was celebrated for his unwillingness to part with what he had gained. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... tends to reestablish the latter. The power of the sentiment of anger increases with the offensive and defensive faculties, while, in weak and peaceful beings, terror and sadness to a great extent take their place. On the other hand, the sight of defenseless prey suffices to provoke, in the rapacious who are strong and well armed, by simple reflex association, a cruel sentiment of voluptuous anger, which ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the most," resumed the Earl, "is, not the enemy without, but the jealousy within. By the side of Harold stands Tostig, rapacious to grasp, but impotent to hold—able to ruin, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sky remained and the earth with a few juniper bushes and countless rows of tree-trunks, hastily stripped of their branches. The rapacious axe had not spared one of the leafy tribe. Not one—not even the centenarian oak which had been touched by lightning more than once. Gazing upwards, this defier of storms had hardly noticed the worms turning round its feet, and ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... that the rascally landlord seized upon every chair and table that ought by rights to have belonged to the widow. The estate to which I was heir was in the hands of rapacious creditors; and the only means of subsistence remaining to the widow and child was a rent-charge of L50 upon my Lord Bagwig's property, who had many turf-dealings with the deceased. And so my dear mother's liberal intentions towards her brother ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... certainty, run with such speed. In his right hand he bore a great dart, which he cast with much skill[6]." No wonder that such a rider, upon such a horse, should have struck terror into the very souls of the colonists, and induced them to comply with any demands, however rapacious and humiliating, rather than have to meet him face to face in ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... month.——A new filtering apparatus, intended to render sea-water drinkable, has recently been brought to the notice of the Paris Academy.——A letter in the London Athenaeum from the Nile complains bitterly of the constant devastation of the remains of ancient temples, &c., caused by the rapacious economy of the government. The writer states that immense sculptured and painted blocks have been taken from the temple of Karnac, for the construction of a sugar factory; a fine ancient tomb has also entirely disappeared under this process. Very earnest complaints are ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... What they had hitherto done was bad enough, but this capped the climax of outrages. Were the cowardly villains afraid to murder me, and was this their plan of getting it done, and at the same time getting rid of the body? Great heavens! was I to be devoured piecemeal by a rapacious horde of the wild beasts that are said to infest the Russian beds! And utterly helpless, too, without the power to grapple with as much as a single flea—the least formidable, perhaps, of the entire gang! It was absolutely fearful to contemplate such ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... gone long, but returned to stand beside the bunk, looking down upon Essie with eyes that in the dimness of the illy-lighted cabin shone with the baleful gleam of some rapacious feline. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... besieged therein at this time. The other effects of this woman had been already seized upon, such I mean as she had brought with her out of Perea, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides, as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for that purpose. This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by the frequent reproaches and imprecations she east at these rapacious villains, she had provoked them to anger against her; but none of them, either ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... one to another. Hardly had Olivier raised the cover of the hell of humanity than there rose to his ears the plaint of all the oppressed, the exploited poor, the persecuted peoples, massacred Armenians, Finland crushed and stifled, Poland rent in pieces, Russia martyred, Africa flung to the rapacious pack of Europe, all the wretched creatures of the human race. It stifled him: he heard it everywhere, he could no longer close his ears to it, he could no longer conceive the possibility of there being people with any other thought. He was for ever talking about it to Christophe. Christophe grew ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... curious talk is spent over the ancient Scandinavians who used to harry the peaceful farmers long ago. We learn that these rapacious gentlemen were above all things "deep-thoughted," and that they had rather fine notions about poetry and the future life. They were, in short, a species of bloodthirsty AEsthetics. Instead of devoting ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked bill and crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; and the Swan of Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, rushing spirit of philanthropy. He gloats over its ravages; ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... rodent heard the noise, turned back and rushed to the attack, trying to break through to his hole where he had evidently left his family. The struggle began. The eagle fought with one free wing, one leg and his beak but did not withdraw the bar to the entrance. The marmot jumped at the rapacious bird with great boldness but soon fell from a blow on the head. Only then the eagle withdrew his wing, approached the marmot, finished him off and with difficulty lifted him in his talons to carry him away to the ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to him so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had not hitherto befallen him to be made to feel that he was not—and could not be—a factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed to keep that favourable setting for herself. He let her know that she was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a beautiful nature to her antediluvian theories and love of power, a vigilant daily press—whose business it was to ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... possibly make the Subject of a future Speculation, records some beautiful Transmigrations; as that the Soul of Orpheus, who was musical, melancholy, and a Woman-hater, entered into a Swan; the Soul of Ajax, which was all Wrath and Fierceness, into a Lion; the Soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an Eagle; and the Soul of Thersites, who was a Mimick and a Buffoon, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in the Ogre's demesne; and he examined every feature of it with the most lively interest. The dilapidated buildings of the Home Farm reminded him of a lawsuit brought by a former tenant against his landlord, in which a story of mean and rapacious dealing on the part of Melrose, toward a decent though unfortunate man, had excited the disgust of the whole countryside. Melrose had never since been able to find a tenant for the farm, and the bailiff he had put in was a drunken ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... speculations, who can seriously doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... accomplices, therefore, he loaded a ship with the plunder, and secretly set sail; leaving over half of his band, without food or shelter, in a hostile country. Many of the abandoned buccaneers starved, some were shot or hanged by the enraged Spaniards; but the leader of the rapacious gang reached Jamaica with a huge fortune, and was appointed governor of the island, and made a baronet by the reigning king ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... opportunity to make terms in the interest of the taxpayers. It made annual, not permanent, grants of money to pay official salaries and then insisted upon electing a treasurer to dole it out. Thus the colonists learned some of the mysteries of public finance, as well as the management of rapacious officials. The legislature also used its power over money grants to force the governor to sign bills which he ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... wolves may prevent us, Beric; we heard them howling several times as we came along this morning. The rapacious brutes have not been so bold for years, and it is high time that we hunted them down, or at any rate made our part of the country too hot to hold them. I told Borgon before I started that if we did not return by an hour after midnight it would be because we had been obliged to take to a tree, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Frederick, who owed him at least a debt of gratitude for having helped to keep his territory free from the rapacious Tetzel, but who, both now and afterwards, conscientiously held aloof from the contest, gave proof on this occasion of his undiminished kindness and regard for him, in a letter he addressed to Staupitz. He ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... steed-fam'd Ilium; just revenge they sought For Atreus' sons, but perished first themselves. 655 As two young lions, in the deep recess Of some dark forest on the mountain's brow Late nourished by their dam, forth-issuing, seize The fatted flocks and kine, both folds and stalls Wasting rapacious, till, at length, themselves 660 Deep-wounded perish by the hand of man, So they, both vanquish'd by AEneas, fell, And like two lofty pines uprooted, lay. Them fallen in battle Menelaus saw With pity ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... sovereign can make. Before I came here a delegation of my people approached me. On bended knees they asked me not to voluntarily return the principality to the King, who was likely to give them a ruler rapacious or cruel or indifferent. And while they understood what a sacrifice it meant to me, they asked me to bend my will to the King's and wed the Prince, vowing that I alone should be recognized as their sovereign ruler. Since my coronation they said that they had known ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... and other islands, putting them under contribution, and in this manner raised some eight thousand ducats; from a pen of guinea-fowl to a king's ransom, nothing escaped the maw of this most rapacious of corsairs. Candia and some other islands yielded up some small spoil, but the sufferings of such insignificant folk as the wretched islanders were soon lost to the sight of the Christian world in the magnitude of the events which were ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... celebrated collection of portraits, principally by Vandyck, which Lord Dartmouth, in his notes on Burnet, distinctly accuses the Lord Chancellor Clarendon of having obtained by rapacious and corrupt means; that is, as bribes from the "old rebels," who had plundered them from the houses of the royalists, and who, at the Restoration, found it necessary to make fair weather with the ruling powers. The extensive ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... ascendant. The lasting influences were that of Maurepas, an old man who cared for nothing but himself, whose great object in government was to be without a rival, and whose art was made up of tact and gayety; and that of the rival factions of Lamballe and Polignac, guiding the queen, which were simply rapacious. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... them, for an alliance with the natural enemy of that friend, and with an enemy of human liberty. They spoke of the court of Great Britain as the most faithless and corrupt in the world, and denounced the result of Jay's mission as a surrender of every just claim upon a rapacious enemy for restitution on account ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... these orders and decrees was simply that any American ship which fell in with an English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British, and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the harbor. Their crews were impressed, their cargoes, not yet discharged, seized, the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... friend to receive and guide him, but rapacious agents ready to take every advantage of his ignorance, with an eye to his scanty purse. A host of captains, mates, and sailors, eager to make up so many heads for the voyage, pack them aboard like sheep, and cross the Atlantic, either to ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... lodgings, or into a hotel of a kind happily obsolescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more of the Continental and American features than the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy In appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It has a table-d'hote dinner at separate tables and ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... and why the very name of the place had always caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... wore a long mourning robe, her forehead was lightly daubed with Nile-mud, and in the midst of her chaffering with the functionaries of the embalming-house, whose prices she complained of as enormous and rapacious, from time to time she broke out into a loud wail ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fortified himself, in fear of an assault; but Peter, having learned a little wisdom from experience, thought it best to avoid hostilities. He passed three nights in quietness under the walls, and the duke, not wishing to exasperate unnecessarily so fierce and rapacious a host, allowed the townspeople to supply them with provisions. Peter took his departure peaceably on the following morning; but some German vagabonds, falling behind the main body of the army, set fire to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... commander, he threw up his commission in disgust, and retired to his native village near the river Hudson. Here, collecting about him a few choice spirits like himself, he kept the inhabitants in a continual state of alarm by his plundering and rapacious conduct. Acting, as he pretended, under the orders of the king, the tories durst not oppose him, and the whigs were too few in numbers to resist his foraging excursions with any ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... scratched and breathless, and his shirt was torn when at last the rapacious Thomas was satisfied. Then he partook of a little refreshment himself, while Thomas turned ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... gods of infinitely more polite peoples are frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy, agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of Battles;' no Te Deum can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... all these fairylike effects of summer suggested only prosaic and misanthropic reflections in Julien's mind. He thought of the tricks, the envy and hatred that the possession of these little squares of ground brought forth among their rapacious owners. The prolific exuberance of forest vegetation was an exemplification of the fierce and destructive activity of the blind forces of Nature. All the earth was a hateful theatre for the continual enactment of bloody and monotonous ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the jackal are confounded by the Arabic dialects not by the Persian, whose "Rubah" can never be mistaken for "Shaghal." "Sa'lab" among the Semites is locally applied to either beast and we can distinguish the two only by the fox being solitary and rapacious, and the jackal gregarious and a carrion-eater. In all Hindu tales the jackal seems to be an awkward substitute for the Grecian and classical fox, the Giddar or Kola (Cants aureus) being by no means sly and wily as the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... versions of the above story, the hero, after he is abandoned by his brothers in the cistern or cave, is borne into the upper world by an eagle. The rapacious bird on the journey demands from the young man flesh from time to time. At last the stock of flesh with which he had provided himself is exhausted and he is obliged to cut off and give the eagle a piece of his own flesh. In one version (Pitre, ii. p. 208) he gives the ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... "At length 't is granted, what I long desir'd! This, this is what my frequent vows requir'd. Ye gods, I take your omen, and obey. Advance, my friends, and charge! I lead the way. These are the foreign foes, whose impious band, Like that rapacious bird, infest our land: But soon, like him, they shall be forc'd to sea By strength united, and forego the prey. Your timely succor to your country bring, Haste to the rescue, and ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... They are quite abundant birds in their range, and are very quarrelsome, both among themselves and other species. They do not breed in as large colonies as do the other Gulls, half a dozen pairs appropriating a small island to the exclusion of all other birds. They are very rapacious birds and live to a great extent, especially during the breeding season, upon the eggs and young of other birds such as Ducks, Murres and smaller Gulls. They place their nests upon the higher portions of ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... conversation and have not the Arab respect for women. I only speak of the common people—not of educated Copts. The best fun was to hear the Greeks (one of whom spoke English) abusing the Copts—rogues, heretics, schismatics from the Greek Church, ignorant, rapacious, cunning, impudent, etc., etc. In short, they narrated the whole fable about their own sweet selves. I am quite surprised to see how well these men manage their work. The boat is quite as clean as an English boat as crowded could be kept, and the engine ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... are told that God never made the clerk who could have written the muster-roll of the crusading army in two or even three months. One of the first victims was the young and gallant Viscount of Beziers, who, the same author assures us, was a good Catholic, but whose lands and towns the rapacious horde lusted to acquire. When they sat down before Beziers, then the Catholics within the walls made common cause with the heretics, and refused ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... that even the Hawk, rapacious as he undoubtedly is, is a useful bird. Sent for the purpose of keeping the small birds in bounds, he performs his task well, though it may seem to man harsh and tyranical. The Marsh Hawk is an ornament to our rural scenery, and a ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... bring public shame upon me too, and Rome! Away to thy tent! and put in order thine own affairs and mine. Thou hast lived too long. Soldiers, let him be strongly guarded.—Let Virro now receive his just dues. Men call me cruel, and well I fear they may; but unjust, rapacious, never, as I believe. Whom have I wronged, whom oppressed? The poor of Rome, at least, cannot complain of Aurelian. Is it ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... metaphor, one that is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, in order the more speedily to collect the price ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... reside in this quarter. The majority of those who have provided themselves with houses by the river and fronting on the street most approved, looking out through groves and gardens, are Chinese half-castes, claiming Chinese fathers and Philippine mothers. These are the most rapacious and successful accumulators, and they would all be glad to see the Americans stay, now that they are there, and have shown themselves so competent to appreciate desirable opportunities and understand the ways and means, the acquirements ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... their attention to restoring the arts of falconry. Enough of the practice and of the traditions is left to make it an easy task to reinstitute all the important parts of the custom. Moreover, those who essayed the matter would have access to a much greater range of rapacious birds than our forefathers, who had to content themselves with the limited number of wild species which inhabit the continent of Europe. Especially on our Western plains, where game-birds abound and ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... nearly unanimous application of the Scottish friends of government in his favour. This had been so general and so powerful that it was almost thought his estate might have been saved, had it not passed into the rapacious hands of his unworthy kinsman, whose right, arising out of the Baron's attainder, could not be affected by a pardon from the crown. The old gentleman, however, said, with his usual spirit, he was more gratified by the hold he possessed in the good opinion of his neighbours than he would have ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and sows seeds of discord between the Italian states. His viceroys are elected from the cruelest, the most unjust, the most rapacious, and the most luxurious of the courtiers crawling round his throne. The College of Cardinals is bought and sold. No prince dares move a finger in his family or state without consulting the Iberian senate; still less can he levy troops for self-defense. Yet ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... soldier and statesman is revealed in the existence of his empire; we find in the Code of Du[vs]an, before such a thing flourished in England, the institution of trial by jury, while Hermann Wendel[17] has pointed out that the peasants were protected from rapacious landowners much more effectively than in the Germany of that age.... We need not try to establish whether the simple Macedonian desired to be under Simeon or Du[vs]an; but even if these two monarchs had, each of them, as far as was then possible, complete ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... governors of the conquered lands were corrupt and grasping men. They tried to wring all the money they could from their helpless subjects. To the extortions of the governors must be added those of the tax collectors, whose very name of "publican" [14] became a byword for all that was rapacious and greedy. In this first effort to manage the world she had won, Rome had certainly made a failure. A city-state could not rule, with ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... from the drunken insolence Of wassailers profane, and wanton havoc. Grant, Heaven, that here my pilgrimage may close! Yet, if this be denied, where'er my bones May lie—or in the city's crowded bounds, Or scatter'd wide o'er the huge sweep of waters, Or left a prey on some deserted shore To the rapacious cormorant,—yet still, (For why should sober reason cast away A thought which soothes the soul?) yet still my spirit Shall wing its way to these my native regions, And hover o'er this spot. Oh, then I'll think Of ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... different churches and halls remote from the scene of conflagration. But in spite of all their caution, much property was carried off by the depredators, and amongst others by Chowles and Judith, who contrived to secure a mass of plate, gold, and jewels, that satisfied even their rapacious souls. While this was passing in the heart of the burning city, vast crowds were streaming out of its gates, and encamping themselves, in pursuance of the royal injunction, in Finsbury Fields and Spitalfields. Others crossed ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... possessed. Dams will throw themselves in the way of the greatest danger in order to avert it from their progeny. Thus a partridge will tumble along before a sportsman in order to draw away the dogs from her helpless covey. In the time of nidification the most feeble birds will assault the most rapacious. All the hirundines of a village are up in arms at the sight of an hawk, whom they will persecute till he leaves that district. A very exact observer has often remarked that a pair of ravens nesting in the rock of Gibraltar would ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... which we know Turner emanated from an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and rapacious bickering—of his life naught became him like the leaving. He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures—three hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings—should become the property of the nation, the only condition ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... can seriously doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... as an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked bill and crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; and the Swan of Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... and luxuries. This created a system of the grossest oppression; since the great monopolists not only made as much as they could at the expense of the people, but sold portions of their monopolies to grasping, rapacious underlings, who conveyed the grievance into every corner of the land. These people became a hated and oppressive class, like the farmers of the revenue in France. According to a well-known anecdote, Voltaire, when in a company, each member ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... moral. The Moreens were adventurers not merely because they didn't pay their debts, because they lived on society, but because their whole view of life, dim and confused and instinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was speculative and rapacious and mean. Oh they were "respectable," and that only made them more immondes. The young man's analysis, while he brooded, put it at last very simply—they were adventurers because they were toadies and snobs. That was the completest account of them—it was the law ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... scene was but the first of many similar escapes, the report of which sounds like a fable. He did not, however, at once succeed to the dignity of Imam: the office was usurped for more than a year by Hamsad Beg (Bey), whose rapacious and savage treatment of some of the princely families of Daghestan nearly caused a fatal reaction against the new sect, and the destruction of its main support, the Murids. Hamsad Beg performed no action of consequence against the Russians; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... real independence under the shadow of such a power. It was, moreover, not the power of France; for, by special order of Bonaparte, the civil agents of the Directory were subordinated to the military commanders, ostensibly because the former were so rapacious. Lombardy in this way became his very own. Rome had made the armistice of Bologna merely to gain time, and in the hope of eventual disaster to French arms. A pretext for the resumption of hostilities was easily found by her in a foolish command, issued from Paris, that the Pope ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... low-class coolies from the country, whose rough gait makes riding in a chair the nearest approach to horseback exercise. The jinrikisha is also largely in evidence, but the bearers are a great contrast in their rapacious manners to the courteous and smiling Japanese in all the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... slaves and fighting-cocks, inheriting an undisputed power over their subjects, and under all circumstances, whether of riches or poverty, receiving the abject submission of those around their persons, are naturally the slaves of their passions—haughty, rapacious, vindictive, weak, and tenacious unto death of the paltry punctilio of their court The followers of such rajahs it is needless to describe; they are the tools of the rajah's will, and more readily disposed for evil than for good; unscrupulous, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... to what you say of France. Do you not think that a democratic republic, in which every citizen is striving to get all he can for his vote at the expense of the State, necessarily becomes the most rapacious and corrupt form of government? It is this which has raised the budgets of France for 1883 to 122 millions sterling; and if you add the communal expense, to 154 millions. It is this which compels them to persist in a reckless expenditure, and to invent new modes of spending money ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... with rapid, nervous stride, the animal came after. Darker grew the road; deeper hued the fields and stubble; more somber the distant castle against the gloaming. Only the cry of a diving night-bird startled the stillness of the tranquil air; a rapacious filcher that quickly rose, and swept onward through the sea of night. Its melancholy note echoed in the breast of the fool; mechanically, without relaxing his swift pace, he looked upward to follow it, when a short, sharp bark behind him ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... emigration being again introduced, Dr Johnson said, that 'a rapacious chief would make a wilderness of his estate'. Mr Donald M'Queen told us, that the oppression, which then made so much noise, was owing to landlords listening to bad advice in the letting of their lands; that interested and designed people flattered them with golden dreams of ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... tribes of North Germany, he obtained the favor of Augustus, and was inscribed among the Roman knights. On his return to his native country, he resolved to deliver it from the Romans, whose oppression had become intolerable. Quintilius Varus, a rapacious man, was then the Roman governor in Germany. He had held office in Syria, where he had ruled with great harshness; and fancying that he might act in the same way toward the fierce tribes of the North, he roused among them a bitter hatred of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to building the enemy leaped. Before it fled group after group of persons from stores and homes. Methodically it went round the circle of shops, the most rapacious customer the town had ever seen. Quarters of beeves in the meat shop, bottles of liquids and powders on the drug-store shelves, barrels and boxes of food in the grocery store, suits of clothing in Abe Cohen's, the leather whips and carriage robes ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the rapacity of their landlords—on whom were poured the full phials of Anti-corn-law wrath. The following are some of the scalding drops let fall upon their devoted heads—"Monster of impiety!" "inhuman fiend!" "heartless brutes!" "rapacious harpies!" "relentless demons!" "plunderers of the people!" "merciless footpads!" "murderers!" "swindlers!" "insatiable!" "insolent!" "flesh-mongering!" "scoundrel!" "law-making landlords!" "a bread-taxing oligarchy!"[29] Need we say that the authors of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... of the Roman Catholic Church, caused by the great mental awakening which had taken place everywhere in Europe, the persistent and shameless profligacy of the clergy and the various monastic orders and sects, the dissolute and rapacious character of many of the popes, and the imperial attitude of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... be feared that the meddling diplomatist with his want of education, was perhaps a better example of the clergy of Scotland, who about this time began to be the mark of all assailants as illiterate, greedy, vicious, and rapacious, than such a gentle soul as the other poet of the age, afterwards bishop of Dunkeld, the one mild and tranquil possessor of the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the actors, the previous year, in an alligator adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left. The son, while bathing, was seized by the thigh and carried under water— a cry was raised, and the father, rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious beast, which was diving away with his victim. It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced to release his booty by the man's thrusting his thumb into his eye. The ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... most vulnerable part appears to be the snout,—just where the sailor had chosen to make his hit; and a blow delivered there with an axe, or even a handspike, usually puts a termination to the career of this rapacious tyrant of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... in that wonderful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists has expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I can't but think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... July 1st has come and gone—drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years—all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We assume vaguely that it is blown—ever since we saw the Bohemian Glass Blowers at the World's Fair we ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed by ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life with less design than myself. Never have I given a thought to the advantage ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... usage the women boast of: so would a vulture, could it speak, with the entrails of its prey upon its rapacious talons. Of this you'll judge from what I have ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... on a sudden breach of truce, they cared little to waste their time in cultivating crops, to be reaped by their foes. Their cattle was, therefore, their chief property; and these were nightly exposed to the southern borderers, as rapacious and active as themselves. Hence, robbery assumed the appearance of fair reprisal. The fatal privilege of pursuing the marauders into their own country, for recovery of stolen goods, led to continual skirmishes The warden also, himself ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... scarce, and the necessities of the populace were utilised by unscrupulous officials who amassed riches by victimising those who had been placed under their authority. The Marquis de Caylus, governor of the Windward Islands, was one of the most rapacious of these harpies; and although, perhaps, he was more a tool in the hands of others than an independent actor, the feeling of the people was strong against him, and it was hoped that the newly-arrived prince would supersede him, and redress the grievances ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... succeeding reign of John, all the rapacious exactions usual to these Norman kings were not only redoubled, but mingled with outrages of tyranny still ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... when the style of song of which she and Mme. Melba are still the brightest exemplars, is not as familiar as it used to be when they were children, also found it necessary to have an extended list of pieces ready at hand to satisfy the rapacious public. She was wont at first to sing Proch's Air and Variations, but that always led to a demand for more, and whether she supplemented it with "Ah! non giunge," from "La Sonnambula," the bolero from "The Sicilian ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... remembrance of your fellow citizens. Could it be possible for men who have served and fought under you, to be now forgetful of that general, by whose prudent conduct their lives have been saved and their families preserved from being plundered by a rapacious enemy? We mean not to flatter you. At this time it is impossible for you to suspect it. Our present language is the language of free men expressing only sentiments of gratitude. Your achievements may not have sufficiently swelled ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... manners and conversation and have not the Arab respect for women. I only speak of the common people—not of educated Copts. The best fun was to hear the Greeks (one of whom spoke English) abusing the Copts—rogues, heretics, schismatics from the Greek Church, ignorant, rapacious, cunning, impudent, etc., etc. In short, they narrated the whole fable about their own sweet selves. I am quite surprised to see how well these men manage their work. The boat is quite as clean as an English boat as crowded could be kept, and the engine ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... us, Beric; we heard them howling several times as we came along this morning. The rapacious brutes have not been so bold for years, and it is high time that we hunted them down, or at any rate made our part of the country too hot to hold them. I told Borgon before I started that if we did not return by an hour after midnight it would be because we had been obliged ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... The Secret History of One Year—the year after William's accession—vindicating the King's clemency towards the abettors of the arbitrary government of James, and explaining that he was compelled to employ many of them by the rapacious scrambling of his own adherents for places and pensions. The indirect bearing of this tract is obvious. In October three pamphlets came from Defoe's fertile pen; an Advice to the People of England to lay aside feuds and faction, and live together under the new King ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of the ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... preceding, and a present, in like manner, of Peruvian sheep. This was the same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... on the sidewalks; evil and sinister eyes looking out of dirty windows; here and there a silent-footed figure went by him in the gloom of the December day with the soft step of a wild animal; here and there, men leaning against the wall, glared suspiciously at him or fixed rapacious eyes on his good clothes. There were shops in this street such as Viner had never seen the like of—shops wherein coarse, dreadful looking food was exposed for sale; and there were public-houses from which came the odour of cheap gin and bad beer and rank tobacco; an atmosphere of ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... funnel, the vibration of her wings, acting on the confined air, occasions a rumbling like thunder. It is not improbable that the dam submits to this inconvenient situation so low in the shaft, in order to secure her broods from rapacious birds; and particularly from owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in attempting to get at ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... hall.(916) Dried are the udders of our cows, Our elephants have juiceless brows,(917) Nor can the sweetest pasture stay The charger's long unquiet neigh. Big tears from mules and camels flow Whose staring coats their trouble show, Nor can the leech's art restore Their health and vigour as before. Rapacious birds are fierce and bold: Not single hunters as of old, In banded troops they chase the prey, Or gathering on our temples stay. Through twilight hours with shriek and howl Around the city jackals prowl, And wolves and foul hyaenas wait Athirst for blood at every gate. One sole atonement ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... examined, and not one of them has been able to tell you of one single shilling stock sold by these gentlemen, or either of them, of which they were not actually in the possession. It is impossible, if he is so rapacious a man as to engage in a speculation to ruin his fortune and his character, to account for his not taking advantage of such ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... the Directors were as needy and rapacious as their chiefs. Everything could be had for money. England and the United States were offered treaties on the basis of first purchasing the good will of ministers for Foreign Affairs or Directors. In the gilded halls of the Luxembourg, Barras, surrounded by a raffish ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... unscrupulous, hard, rapacious, destructive. It foments all the evil passions; it is allied with all the vices; it is antagonistic to human welfare. It glories merely in strength; it worships only success. It raises wicked men to power; it prostrates and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... a long mourning robe, her forehead was lightly daubed with Nile-mud, and in the midst of her chaffering with the functionaries of the embalming-house, whose prices she complained of as enormous and rapacious, from time to time she broke out into a loud wail of grief—as the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enabled me to keep my countenance," said Nicaeus. "A patron of science, forsooth! Of all the insolent, shallow-brained, rapacious coxcombs—" ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... proceeds to show, in a severe and searching examination of the proceedings of this secretary, that the transfers were utterly unwarrantable; that he tampered with the public moneys to sustain the staggering credit of selected depositaries, and "scatter it abroad among swarms of rapacious political partisans." After stating and answering all the charges brought by the Secretary of the Treasury against the Bank of the United States, and showing their falsehood or futility, he declares all the proceedings of the directors of the bank to have ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... plough-bullocks are too few in number for the area of land under cultivation. The tillage suffers, the crops deteriorate, this reacts on prices, the ryot sinks lower and lower, and gets more into the grasp of the rapacious money-lender. In many villages I have seen whole tracts of land relapsed into purtee, or untilled waste, simply from want of bullocks to draw the plough. Severe epidemics, like foot and mouth disease ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... crusading army in two or even three months. One of the first victims was the young and gallant Viscount of Beziers, who, the same author assures us, was a good Catholic, but whose lands and towns the rapacious horde lusted to acquire. When they sat down before Beziers, then the Catholics within the walls made common cause with the ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... for three hours watching Emmett bring over the rest of his party, which he did without accident, but at the expense of great effort. And all the time in my ears dinned the roar, the boom, the rumble of this singularly rapacious and purposeful river—a river of silt, a red river of dark, sinister meaning, a river with terrible work to perform, a river which never gave up ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... have not looked to God in their lives. By means of things of the understanding they raise themselves aloft and even enter heaven at times and feign themselves angels of light. But when they are deprived of truths and are cast out, they fall down to hell. Eagles also signify rapacious men with intellectual acumen, and wings signify spiritual truths. Such, we said, are those who have not looked to God in their lives. To look to God in life means simply to think that a given evil is a sin against God, and for that reason ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... mean, niggardly, penurious, rapacious, close, ignoble, miserly, parsimonious, petty, stingy. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... was committed by the savage tyrant who inherited it; he was ostentatious—the treasures of the nation were lavished at his feet; he was vindictive—the blood of the wise, the noble, and the beautiful, was shed, like water, to gratify his resentment; he was rapacious—the accumulations of ancient piety were surrendered to glut his avarice; he was arbitrary—and his proclamations were made equivalent to acts of Parliament; he was fickle—and the religion of the nation was changed to gratify ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... give the landlord of the "George Inn," in the High Street, the benefit of his rapacious appetite, and about five o'clock (his latest London hour) they sat down to dinner. The "George" is neither exactly a swell house like the "Royal Hotel" or the "Plough," nor yet a commercial one, but something betwixt and between. The coffee-room is very ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers—what not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting by authorship! 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Magus! woe to you, His wretched followers! who the things of God, Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver in adultery! Now must the trumpet sound for you, since yours Is the third chasm. Upon the following vault We now had mounted, where the rock impends Directly o'er the centre of the foss. Wisdom ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... encounter, she armed herself with an immense sword; and, meeting with the demon, she ran him through the body. His blood flowed in torrents as he fell dead at her feet; but from every drop there sprang up another monster, as rapacious and as terrible as the first. Again the goddess upraised her massive sword, and hewed down the hellish brood by hundreds; but the more she slew, the more numerous they became. Every drop of their blood generated a demon; and, although the goddess endeavoured to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... looking more close, both he and Gurth were struck by the evident dismay on the King's face, while the collected light of Edward's cold eye showed that his mind was awake to the human world. In truth, it is probable that Edward, at that moment, was recalling rash hints, if not promises, to his rapacious cousin of Normandy, made during his exile. And, sensible of his own declining health, and the tender years of the young Edgar, he might be musing over the terrible pretender to the English throne, whose claims his earlier indiscretion ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sword for the common defence. At this period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its authority declined. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the doctrines of Wicklif had made ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... assembly gave a shout for joy; and Benefico holding in his hand the monster's yet grinning head, thus addressed his half-astonished companions: 'See here, my friends, the proper conclusion of a rapacious cruel life. But let us hasten from this monster's gloomy cave; and on the top of one of our highest mountains, fixed on a pole, will I set up this joyful spectacle, that all the country round may know themselves at liberty to pursue their rural business or amusements, without the dread of any ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... where bosom'd in the teeming earth, 550 Green swells the germ, impatient for its birth; Guard from rapacious worms its tender shoots, And drive the mining beetle from its roots; With ceaseless efforts rend the obdurate clay, And give my vegetable babes to day! 555 —Thus when an Angel-form, in light array'd, Like HOWARD pierced the prison's noisome shade; Where chain'd to earth, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... excavate. It means, therefore, a cavity, or empty subterranean place. Its derivation is usually connected, however, with the secondary meaning of the Hebrew word referred to, namely, to ask, to desire, from the notion of demanding, since rapacious Orcus lays claim unsparingly to all; or, as others have fancifully construed it, the object of universal inquiry, the unknown mansion concerning which all are anxiously inquisitive. The place is conceived on an immense scale, shrouded in accompaniments of gloomy grandeur and peculiar ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... brother; I feel so utterly alone! I am wretched and disillusioned. In what does man transcend the beast?..." He turned towards the west, and a cruel, rapacious, predatory look flitted over his face; he took a piece of bread from his overcoat pocket and handed it ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... not gone long, but returned to stand beside the bunk, looking down upon Essie with eyes that in the dimness of the illy-lighted cabin shone with the baleful gleam of some rapacious feline. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... owner—ay, but there was the rub! What a disheartening and disgusting specimen of such new owner had disclosed itself to their anxiously expecting but soon recoiling eyes—always, however, making due allowances for one or two cheering indications, on Mr. Titmouse's part, of a certain rapacious and litigious humor, which might hereafter right pleasantly and profitably occupy their energies! Their professional position, and their interests had long made them sharp observers; but when did ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... contradictions; "there are poems which men take as histories; prophecies which have not been and never will be fulfilled; stories of miracles that never happened; stories which make God a man of war, cruel, rapacious, revengeful, hateful, and not to be trusted. We find amatory songs, selfish proverbs, skeptical discourses, and the most awful imprecations human fancy ever clothed in speech." The minds of the writers of the Old Testament were not decided in favor of the exclusive existence ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... sounded wherever two or three fashionable persons were gathered together; men and women quarrelled, and society became a mere jumble of people who suspected and hated and thought to rob each other. It is horrible, even at this distance of time, to think of those rapacious beings who forgot literature, art, friendship, and family affection for the sake of high play. One weary, witty debauchee said, "Play wastes time, health, money, and friendship;" yet he went on pitting his skill against that of unsexed ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... months later? The question is now, not whether she is an innocent woman (I do not insist one way or the other—I do not wish to); but can her whole career justify such intolerable pride, such insolent, rapacious egotism as she has shown? Forgive me, I am ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me in morbid ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... be doing any thing, or in taking patterns of some elegant new dress, in which her appearance the day before had thrown them into unceasing delight. Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing; and the excessive affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards her offspring were viewed therefore by Lady Middleton without the smallest surprise ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... For twenty centuries the Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, and France had been beating them back to save her national life. That they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted. Everyone in France who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France's wealth, its hatred of ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... feelings of the warmest benevolence, when she entreated Montoni to allow Morano the assistance in the castle, which his situation required. But Montoni, who had seldom listened to pity, now seemed rapacious of vengeance, and, with a monster's cruelty, again ordered his defeated enemy to be taken from the castle, in his present state, though there were only the woods, or a solitary neighbouring cottage, to shelter him from ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of cat's-meat; and where the frequent proposition, "You my pleni (friend)," or (with more of pathos) "You all 'e same my father," must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp the statement must be reversed. The shabby Polynesian is anxious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight." The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. it is still colossal. slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... guilty seemed preposterous. Of course she was innocent, and of course she would be found to be innocent. And of course, also, that Joseph Mason of Groby Park was, and would be found to be, the meanest, the lowest, the most rapacious of mankind. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... considerable part of my thoughts without contributing largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egoistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... not think I ever meant to trouble him by law, or any other annoyance! I'd like to see a stain removed from my family, and my name restored; but to touch his property, O, no!—O, no! that never entered my mind, by heaven! that never entered my mind, Mrs. Julaper. I'm not cruel; I'm not rapacious; I don't care for money; don't you know that, Mrs. Julaper? O, surely you won't think me capable of attacking the man whose bread I have eaten so long! I never dreamed of it; I should hate myself. Tell me you don't believe it; O, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... rarely leaves his palace, and is seldom seen abroad in the streets of Kelat except on Fridays, when he goes to the mosque on foot, attended by an escort armed to the teeth. He is said to live in constant dread of assassination, for his cruel, rapacious character has made him universally detested in and around the capital. His one thought in life is money and the increase of his income, which, with the yearly sum allowed him by the British Government, may be put down at considerably over L30,000 per annum. A thorough miser, the Khan ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... more distinguished seat; A chosen train the monarch's list complete. There unsubmitting Brask's proud genius shone, There Bernheim's might, in many a contest known; There Theodore: a bold ungovern'd soul, Rapacious, fell, and fearless of control: A harlot's favour rais'd him from the dust, To rise the pander of tyrannic lust: Graced with successive gifts, at length he shone With wondering Trollio on the sacred throne. With pleasure's arts, and sophistry's refined, Alike ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... Kearny. Everywhere the drinks flowed in covert streams, growing viler and more nauseous as the pilgrimage advanced. Near Jackson Street they came upon a bedraggled pavilion of dubious gayety which lured them downstairs with its ear-splitting jazz orchestra. A horde of rapacious females descended upon them like starving locusts. Suddenly everybody in the party seemed moved with a desire for dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ahead. He had reached the extreme point of his drunkenness and he was pulling toward sobriety ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair; but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose bottom no man ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... bidding of Whitehall. The Indian Nationalist Press has not been alone in describing the recent imposition on the Indian taxpayer of a capitation allowance amounting to L300,000 a year to meet the increased cost of the British soldier as "the renewed attempt of a rapacious War Office to raid the helpless Indian Treasury," and even the increase in the pay of the native soldier, which Lord Kitchener obtained for him, does not prevent him and his friends from drawing their own comparison between the squalor of the quarters ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... and Patusan inhabitants had been summoned for a talk. Tamb' Itam himself hoped there would be some fighting. "What was it but the taking of another hill?" he exclaimed regretfully. However, in the town many hoped that the rapacious strangers would be induced, by the sight of so many brave men making ready to fight, to go away. It would be a good thing if they went away. Since Jim's arrival had been made known before daylight by the gun ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... France had quickened their ideas, and had given them a taste for stronger and more rapid measures. They now openly "resolved" that England was "a prey to an arbitrary King, a senile Peerage, a corrupt House of Commons, and a rapacious and intolerant Clergy." A third club, the Corresponding Society, was younger and more violent, with branches and affiliations all over England on the Jacobins' plan, and in active correspondence with that famous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... like measure of rice, is the ordinary quantity of provision for a hard working slave; to which a small quantity of meat is occasionally, tho' rarely, added. While those miserable degraded persons thus scantily subsist, all the produce of their unwearied toil, is taken away to satiate their rapacious master. He, devoted wretch! thoughtless of the sweat and toil with which his wearied, exhausted dependents procure what he extravagantly dissipates, not contented with the ordinary luxuries of life, is, perhaps, planning, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... wife, "we shall get to-day's hot lunch cold to-morrow, and a rapacious Scotch-woman will charge us for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... secondary part. Elsewhere worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool of worldliness. A King, whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was delivered from the yoke of Rome. The work which had been begun by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... In spite of the very handsome rug that they had sent the couple, Mrs. Horatio preserved a cold demeanor towards her husband's daughter, as if she still suspected the young woman of designs upon Horatio and had married him for the sole purpose of protecting him for the future from this rapacious creature. Milly, quickly perceiving the situation, mischievously redoubled her demonstration over poor Horatio, who was visibly ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... Several weeks were consumed in preparations, and at last the cavalcade started away, with Rubens in the carriage and eleven velvet suits in his chest, as he himself has told us. It was a long, hard journey to Madrid. There were encounters with rapacious landlords, and hairbreadth escapes in the imminent deadly custom-house. But in a month the chromatic diplomat arrived and entered Madrid at the head of his company, wearing one of the velvet suits, and riding ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... light as the two canoes shoved out in the river and resumed their journey. The rapacious wolverines, enraged at the loss of their expected prey, followed them to the very edge of the stream, where their ear-splitting clamor grew more furious than ever. At one time, indeed, it looked us though they were about to jump into the water and swim out to them; and both ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... assented, and thanked him; indeed, if I had had my way, the subject should never have been mentioned, I felt so hardhearted and rapacious; but Lord Ilbury explained that the trustees were constrained by the provisions of the will, and that I really had no power to release them; and I hoped that Uncle Silas also understood ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... deal of tyranny and extortion on the part of those engaged to levy the taxes, and creates a corresponding duplicity among the fellahs, who are not only wretchedly poor among themselves, but whose object is to appear still more poor, and guard their money from their rapacious overseers. Thus the Orient is much maligned; but everybody cheats there: that is a melancholy fact. The Pasha robs and cheats the merchants; knows that the overseer robs him, and bides his time, until he makes him disgorge by the application of the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flushed with hope, and fear and dismay were in the paths of Ahubal. The Prince himself, in confusion, sounded the retreat; and the backs of his troops were already exposed to the darts of the Sultan, when the swarthy enchanter Tasnar appeared aloft, seated on a rapacious vulture. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... with novelty can never reconquer for ourselves the thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. But imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You could have seen it in the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious attention, in the conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous applause pent and pitted against all the instinctive protest of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
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