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More "Rapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is trying now: ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of Charles had been extensive and formidable, but had been small indeed when compared with that which they now usurped. Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate, and freed from the control of Parliament, they displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age. The government was able through their instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without restraint. A separate council which sat at York, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... complaining. He supplied them with funds, stinting himself in order to maintain them decently and to satisfy their wishes. But the more he gave, the more they demanded; and on one or two occasions, as we shall see in the course of this biography, their rapacity and ingratitude roused his bitterest indignation. Nevertheless, he did not swerve from the path of filial and brotherly kindness which his generous nature and steady will had traced. He remained the guardian of their interests, the custodian of their honour, and the builder of their ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... may be the involuntary reaction of a man startled by a shock; it may be a motion of justifiable self-defence; it may be one struck at the command of a superior and in the defence of one's country; it may be the horrid outcome of cruel rapacity or base malevolence. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of Adooley. Visit to Adooley. Visit from the Chief of Spanish Town. Rapacity of Adooley. Visit of General Poser's Headman. Religious Rites of the Mahommedans. Sports of the Natives. The Houssa Mallams. Surgical Skill of Richard Lander. Articles demanded by Adooley. Female of Jenna. Character of Adooley. His Filial Affection. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... statesmanlike instinct the new king perceived that the cause of the past failure of the Goths lay in the alienated affections of the people of Italy. The greater misgovernment of the Emperor's servants, the coldly calculating rapacity of Alexander the Scissors, and the arrogant injustice of the generals, terrible only to the weak, had given him a chance of winning back the love of the Italian people and of restoring that happy state of things which prevailed after the downfall ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... under the roof, with a window that would not open. She offered to have the house improved at her own expense, but was told that Mr. Pettilove would raise the rent if anything were laid out on it. She went about talking indignantly of Mr. Pettilove's cruelty and rapacity, and when Mr. Dusautoy hinted that Pettilove was only agent, she exclaimed that the owner was worse, since ignorance alone could be excused. Who was the wretch? Some one, no doubt, who never came near the place, and only ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... corrupted to connive at it. Margaret listened to these woes with such patience and mercy, that she drew five hundred dollars, which had been invested for her in a safe place, and put them in those hapless hands, where, of course, the money was only the prey of new rapacity, to be bewailed by new reproaches. When one of her friends had occasion to allude to this, long ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... everybody there seemed to be on exceedingly good terms with himself. The Austrian Minister said nobody would suspect Austria— no one could be suspected but Russia. But our experience for many years will tell us that there has been just as much menace from the West as from the East—the rapacity of the West is not less perceptible than that of the East. ['Hear.'] Some one expresses a sentiment in opposition —it is a gentleman who has never read the Blue Books—he does not know that almost the whole of this business began in a threat of the most ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... [Sidenote: CABOBS.—RAPACITY OF THE SULTAN.] Saturday, 11th.—Went to a cabob shop. Cabobs are made of small pieces of mutton, about the size of a small walnut; which being strung on iron or silver skewers, and roasted over a fire, with plenty of grease, are served up with a species of soft cake, toasted, and soaked ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... of the world was accusing Mr Quiverful of rapacity for promotion and disregard for his honour, the inner world of his own household was falling foul of him, with equal vehemence, for his willingness to sacrifice their interest to a false feeling of sentimental pride. It ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a sin- gularly villanous set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of high-handed rapacity, - the crudest possible assertion of the right of the stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his life, made his way out of France, and, betak- ing himself to Italy, offered his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he enjoyed in Europe, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... hypocrisy and materialism of the British race. The bee is held up to the young as a model of industry and domestic virtue—and why? Simply because she manufactures food which we happen to like. The spider is held up to the young as the type of rapacity, malice and cruelty, on the sole ground that he catches flies, though we do not pretend that we are fond of flies, and conveniently ignore the fact that, if the spider did not swat that fly, we should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... but gradually that the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... sword over his shoulder, plundered and beat the people, terrified the women, and was eventually recognised at Leh as a murderer, and as great a ruffian in reality as he was in appearance. An attendant of this kind is a mistake. The brutality and rapacity he exercises naturally make the people cowardly or surly, and disinclined to trust a traveller ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... guns— were everywhere victorious, and the riches of the temples were seized; gloriously wrought vessels were hastily molten down into ingots, along with plate, shield, and wonderfully-worked flowers; rapacity was triumphant, and upon one occasion the value of the treasure collected and melted down into bars was computed at three millions and a half pounds sterling of ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... aristrocrat—placet Hispana nobilitas—he confessed, admitting also that de populo nil mihi curae, yet he sided with the comuneros against the Crown. While deploring their excesses, he sympathised with the cause they defended, and he lashed the insolence and the rapacity of the Flemish favourites with all the resources of invective and sarcasm of which he was master. In one of his letters (Ep. 709), he describes the disorders everywhere prevalent throughout the country. "The safest roads are no longer secure from brigands and ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... is true that the rapacity of the people, and the boldness of the barbarians, are threatening evils. But with a good fleet, a good army, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... place who had befriended them, that they wished to return.[287] Bougainville, the celebrated navigator, then aide-de-camp to Montcalm, says concerning them: "They are dying by wholesale. Their past and present misery, joined to the rapacity of the Canadians, who seek only to squeeze out of them all the money they can, and then refuse them the help so dearly bought, are the cause of this mortality." "A citizen of Quebec," he says farther on, "was in debt to one of the partners of the Great Company ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... and civilization, and is curiously deficient in the virtues of both. If he wishes to form a low idea of his species, let him spend a week or two at Washington; let him go amongst the little leaders of party in that preposterous capital, watch their little tricks, the rapacity with which they clutch the meanest spoils and wonder how political profligacy grows fat upon diet so meagre and uninviting. He will come away with a conviction, already indorsed by the more respectable portion of the American community, that their government is the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... scholars as have sat in judgment upon it through a period of three hundred and fifty years, arises in the tenth section of his Domitian. That prince, it seems, had displayed in his outset considerable promise of moral excellence: in particular, neither rapacity nor cruelty was apparently any feature in his character. Both qualities, however, found a pretty early development in his advancing career, but cruelty the earliest. By way of illustration, Suetonius ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... moment, the destruction that has befallen all around you; the convent that once housed S. Bernardino of Siena, now noisy with conscripts, the library housed in another convent, Dominican once, that like this has become a museum and public monument of vandalism and rapacity. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy: but the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit, of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot, perhaps, be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... bold stand for reform as necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the whole people of the Union eleven years ago happily rescued from the danger of a secession of States but now to be severed from a corrupt centralism which after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of carpet bag tyrannies, had "honey-combed the offices of the Federal government itself with the contagion of misrule and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... who profited so little by his master's teaching that he became the most conspicuous for his cruelty and rapacity of all the thirty tyrants set up in Athens by the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... by strong and wise measures. He resolved to suppress many abuses, but, above all things, to check feudalism and limit the power of the nobles. The people, who felt the severity of his laws, at the same time acknowledged their justice, and found themselves protected from the rapacity of their superiors. The aristocrats, however, were infuriated against him, and summoned to their aid William of Sicily. This prince landed in Epirus with a strong force, and marched as far as Thessalonica, which he took and destroyed; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... how ready were those soldiers to follow Joan wherever she would lead them, and it is not improbable that such a crusade as she dreamt of, had it been possible, in which the two nations, so closely connected by religious feeling, and so closely united by position, but so long enemies owing to the rapacity and greed of their kings, might have again placed the cross on the battlements of the Holy City, under the leadership of her whom her countrymen ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... of strangers who had lived but a brief time in the county; and of a few disreputable persons who, bent on construing liberty entirely on their own side, interposed against palpable rights and sacred family feelings their gossiping facts, their grasping rapacity, and their ruthless disposition to destroy whatever they could not control. "There is but one legal public," he defiantly concluded his first letter, "and that acts under the obligation of precise oaths, through prescribed ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... to deserve it all? That had always been John McIntyre's cry. Why must he and his be singled out for such suffering? Why should his innocent loved ones be the victims of a villain's rapacity? ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... liberty-loving men and women, came into conflict with the whites of the Carolinas and Georgia; with the state and national governments. "For two hundred years a contest involving their very existence as a people has been maintained against the unscrupulous rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By degrees they were driven from their ancestral domain to an unknown and inhabitable region" (p. 371). Now the contest is ended. The white men have the land. The Cherokees have a little patch of territory; government support; free schools and the right ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... toward Miltiades such as were never paid to any other man in the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, antipathy, and rapacity— that distempered state for which (according to Grecian morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which, in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as well as terrible in its amount." [Footnote: ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... be hard to find a parallel in history for the rapacity combined with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless France was not the only country in which ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the second Lateran Council issued a very strong declaration against usurers. 'We condemn that disgraceful and detestable rapacity, condemned alike by human and divine law, by the Old and the New Testaments, that insatiable rapacity of usurers, whom we hereby cut off from all ecclesiastical consolation; and we order that no archbishop, bishop, ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... passengers would receive at the hands of their much-dreaded enemy. They were Frenchmen, and all the property on board was French property; and notwithstanding they sailed under Spanish colors, it was predicted by some, who entertained exaggerated notions of the rapacity of Englishmen and their hatred of the French, that the flag of Spain would not serve as a protection; but that their little property would be seized upon, and themselves detained and confined as prisoners or war. Others, however, cherished a different opinion, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... for his produce, further depressed by the rapacity of the railroads and the other intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, mortgages with high interest rates, and an inequitable system of taxation formed the burden of the farmer's complaint during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. These ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... insatiable. Thus, Conde rendered himself formidable and odious to Mazarin, and made himself detested by the people as Mazarin's supporter, at the same time that by his arrogance he shocked the Parliament, already unfavourably disposed towards him on account of his rapacity and his ambition.[1] ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... tremendous length, and always carried a bag of captain's biscuits, to which he was obliged to have recourse in the height of the hottest engagement. Scudamore had short jaws, well set up, and powerful, without rapacity. But even these, after twelve hours of fasting, demanded something better than gunpowder. He could not help thinking that his host was regarding the condition of affairs very calmly, until he remembered that the day was Sunday, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... tenderer in my feelings as I grow older. At any rate, this was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these. This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart. But I felt bound to speak cheerily.—We won't die yet awhile, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... no excuse except in the selfish rapacity which prompts it. It cannot plead the example of any country bordering on the Pacific, where life and property are more secure than they have been here, under the reign of the late King; where foreigners enjoy greater privileges, and where, ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... another victim to the many already sacrificed to its rapacity and injustice. Mr. Phelps, an actor whose personation of Macduff, the Hunchback, Jaques, &c., would have procured for him in former times no mean position, has been compelled to secede from the Haymarket Theatre from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... His rapacity was beyond credence. There was an immense treasure in the hold, yet he could not leave the pockets of the two poor wretches on deck alone. I did not envy him his task. The frozen figures would bear a deal of hammering; and besides he had to work in the cold. Ah, thought I with ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... observation along the whole of our sea board, from Georgia to New England, and frequently excite great interest in the spectators. Sympathy, however, on this as on most other occasions, generally sides with the honest and laborious sufferer, in opposition to the attacks of power, injustice, and rapacity, qualities for which our hero is so generally notorious, and which, in his superior man, are certainly detestable. As for the feelings of the poor fish, they seem altogether out ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... that is virtuous in the pursuit of money-making the suggestion is inevitable that there must be some other side to it, that the common views of the rapacity of the money-maker cannot be wholly unfounded. What then are the vices of the money-making aim? In examining this question we shall first brush aside some things to which we have already referred. The ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... the lower class is secured against the rapacity and despotism of the great chiefs, I cannot say, but it should seem that it is sufficiently protected against private theft, or mutual depredation; for not only their plantations, which are spread over the whole country, but ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... he had not forgotten the condition of the people as he saw it on his journeys from Dublin to Cork—a condition which he was later to reveal in the most terrible of his satirical tracts—and he realized with almost personal anguish the degradation of the people brought about by the rapacity and selfishness of a class which governed with no thought of ultimate consequences, and with no apparent understanding of what justice implied. It was left for him to precipitate his private opinion and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... prepared to sink to the level of unprincipled nations, to content ourselves with a vulgar, guilty greatness, to adopt in our youth maxims and ends which must brand our future with sordidness, aggression, and shame? This country cannot, without peculiar infamy, run the common race of national rapacity. Our origin, institutions, and position are peculiar, and all ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sufficiently ascertained that within a few years after the conquest of Mexico, Yucatan and Central America were overrun by military adventurers whose rapacity and violence drove the harmless and timid Village Indians from their pueblos into the forests; thus destroying in a few years a higher culture than the Spaniards were able to substitute in its place. Nothing ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness, rapacity, and love of power, which up till then had not only to be honoured from the point of view of general utility—under other names, of course, than those here given—but had to be fostered and cultivated (because they were perpetually required in the common danger against the common enemies), ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Senate, chiefly by the argument that when he learned that it was the purpose of the United States to expel Spain from the Philippine Islands, he concluded it was our duty to remain there for the protection of the people against foreign rapacity and against domestic anarchy. He claimed that he had been influenced in coming to this conclusion very considerably by the fact that I was reported to have said that under no circumstances would we give ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... quickly dismantled to avoid detection from sea or land. The busy skiffs are hurried to and fro incessantly till the cargo is entirely ashore, when the secured gang, led by the captain, and escorted by armed sailors, is rapidly marched to the nearest plantation. There it is safe from the rapacity of local magistrates, who, if they have a chance, imitate their superiors by ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... quality in food and in clothing, and thus she had discovered what enormous sums are wasted through ignorance—wasted by poor even more lavishly than by rich or well-to-do, because the shops where the poor dealt had absolutely no check on their rapacity through the occasional canny customer. She had learned the fundamental truth of the material art of living; only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good. Spenser, cross-examining her as to how she passed the days, found out about this education she was acquiring. It amused ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the action de pecuniis repetundis against the avarice and rapacity of the provincial governors, they made at length a law[23] which, one may say, was against their virtues. For they prohibited them from receiving addresses of thanks on their administration, or any other public mark of acknowledgment, lest they should come to think ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.[127] Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: "We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Poland, and was determined to keep it: another had robbed half Saxony, and was bent upon maintaining his acquisition: Italy was the object of a third's solicitude. Each was protesting against the rapacity of the other; and could the Corsican but have waited in prison until all these parties were by the ears, he might have returned and reigned unmolested. But what would have become of our story and all our friends, then? If all the drops in it ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at Mabel's insistence upon the financial possibilities of literature, but in this she was only a child of her time. The point worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity with which she utilized literature to further her ambition. She was identifying herself with literature and so fortifying her position. She was really far better fitted to be the wife of a fictionist than ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of his looks, the rapacity of his hands, the frivolousness of his bearing, the foulness of his manners (which the whole neighborhood spews out), the obscenity of his lust, the ugliness of his body, the baseness of his life, his spotted reputation, I would lay bare and thrust into the face of the public, did ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... too strong cleaving to this world. As I was situated in New York, I lacked not a single earthly blessing. I had a delightful home, freedom from care, and a circle of friends whom I loved with all my heart, and who loved me in a way to satisfy even my rapacity. Only one thing was wanting to my perfect felicity—a heart absolutely holy; and was I likely to get that when my earthly cup was so full? At any rate I am content. Now and then, as the reality of this coming separation overwhelms me, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... came to do the work of ruin more thoroughly. For not only the crops and fruits, but the foliage of the forest itself, nay, the small twigs and the bark of the trees are the victims of their curious and energetic rapacity. They have been known even to gnaw the door-posts of the houses. Nor do they execute their task in so slovenly a way, that, as they have succeeded other plagues, so they may have successors themselves. They ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... him there was a younger man who, very apparently, was of the same lineage. His expression, however, was petulant and haughty and it contained more than a suggestion of rapacity and evil. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... stranger led to hopes, and reports were whispered about the town that I was the bearer of the news of the disgrace of the tyrant. But his vengeance speedily fell on the principal inhabitants, for such as had hitherto escaped his rapacity were seized and stripped of their property, on the plea that they had spread reports detrimental to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... It is really refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily delivered from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is not called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the hardships of indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of New-York hackmen. There is scarcely an offence against good taste or good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and whatever American homes may have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more readily than to most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Of course the white abettor in these cases risks trifling, if any, publicity in the matter, and is inspired with the less fear of detection. There are some few hotel-keepers who, though they more than suspect the purpose to which the liquor these whites are demanding is to be applied, permit rapacity to overpower righteous compunction or scruple, and lend themselves, likewise, though indirectly, to the law's infraction. Happily, the penalty is now so heavy ($300) that the evil is, I ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... because they were writ openly and fairly by Mr. Esmond, who made no disguise of them, who was now out of the army, and who never attacked the prodigious courage and talents, only the selfishness and rapacity, of the chief. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... and disease, Egypt is proverbial. Let us hear a scoffer's testimony, however: "In Egypt there is no middle class, neither nobility, clergy, merchants, nor landholders. A universal air of misery in all the traveler meets points out to him the rapacity of oppression, and the distrust attendant upon slavery. The profound ignorance of the inhabitants equally prevents them from perceiving the causes of their evils, or applying the necessary remedies. Ignorance, diffused through every class, extends its effects to every species ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the other, coldly. "When all the civilization of a planet has been given to destruction by the unreasoning stupidity and insatiable rapacity of its royalty, allegiance to such royalty is at an end. SIT DOWN!" he thundered as Fenor sprang to his feet. "You are no longer in your throne-room, surrounded by servile guards and by automatic rays. You are in MY laboratory, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... clergy, but of the general public. "Amongst the common people," one of their latest apologists admits, "vague rumours circulated. They talked of the covetousness and want of scruple of the Knights, of their passion for aggrandizement and their rapacity. Their haughty insolence was proverbial. Drinking habits were attributed to them; the saying was already in use 'to drink like a Templar.' The old German word Tempelhaus ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... came the Indian-traders—to whose generosity so many of the captives, taken by the natives in those early times, were indebted for their ransom. But—notwithstanding occasional acts of charity—their unscrupulous rapacity, and, particularly, their introduction of spirituous liquors among the savages, furnish good reason to doubt, whether, on the whole, they did anything to advance the civilization of the lands and people they visited. And, as we shall have occasion to refer ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... pursed his lips, and fumbled his hands a moment, the nostrils of his eagle-beaked nose breathing rapacity, sensuality throbbing in his massive jaws, and despotism frowning ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... been practised by his predecessors. In this case it may be converted into a fruitful source of peculation and plunder, and be at last in a great measure diverted from the public objects for which it was instituted to the satiation of private rapacity, and the colonists become gradually burdened with an overbearing load of taxation, merely for the purpose of enriching their governors. Be this, however, as it may, the illegality of levying money by the authority of any ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... shook the kingdom with great violence. The Scots were courted by king and parliament alike. The Highlanders were devoted to the royal government. In the year 1644 Montrose made a diversion in the Highlands. With dazzling rapacity, at first only supported by a handful of followers, but gathering numbers with success, he erected the royal standard at Dumfries. The clans obeyed his summons, and on September 1st, at Tippermuir, he defeated the Covenanters, and again ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... follow, through a series of fifty-six years, the caprices and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? The chief reason why Protestant writers have been so anxious to spread out the incidents of this reign, is in order to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of the court of Rome, and to prove, that the great dignitaries of the Catholic church, while they pretended to have nothing in view but the salvation of souls, had bent all their attention to the acquisition of riches, and were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... V.—Covetousness and rapacity must be expelled from the hearts of officers, and they must adjudicate with just discrimination in all suits that come before them. Even in a single day there are thousands of such suits, and in the course of years how great must be the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... money in ornaments composed of the precious metals. It was a sign that the merchant could not obtain a profit for the capital, which, for the sake of security, he invested in this inert form. It was a proof that the noblemen or gentlemen feared the rapacity of power, when they put their wealth into forms the most portable and the most capable of being hidden; and it showed the uncertainty of credit, when a man of judgment preferred the actual possession of a mass of a silver to the convenience ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the rapacity of the chiefs of the various tribes that renders African exploration so difficult. Each tribe wishes to monopolize your entire stock of valuables, without which the traveller would be utterly helpless. The difficulty of procuring porters limits the amount of ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... was aghast. Even his own rapacity had not thought to hold up Burroughs for such a sum. Thirty thousand dollars for speaking a man's name in joint assembly! Thus ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... incompetent men, who, besides their demonstrated incapacity to deal with finance, are dependent for their position on the illiterates of the agricultural districts, who are to a man under the thumb of the priests, and who, moreover, have shown that their rapacity is equal to their lack of integrity, and whose leading doctrine is the repudiation of lawful contracts," a point on which commercial Ulster is excessively severe. One thing is certain—Ulster will never pay taxes levied by an Irish Legislature in ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... pest, but a terror. Cattle in hundreds are destroyed by these great predatory animals; even full-grown horses are killed and dragged away by them! But is this all? Are the people themselves left unmolested? No. On the contrary, great numbers of human beings every year fall victims to the rapacity of the jaguars. Settlements attempted on the edge of the great Montana—in the very country where our young hunters had now arrived—have, after a time, been abandoned from this cause alone. It is a well-known fact, that where a settlement has been formed, the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... indifferent to the charms of chocolate, established a corner or "Bank" in the commodity. "The Bank," by barter and usurious methods, amassed a great heap of well-thumbed squares, and, when accused of rapacity, invented a scheme for the common good known as "Huntoylette." This was a game of chance similar to roulette, and for a while it completely gulfed the trusting public. In the reaction which followed, there was a rush on "The Bank," and ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and sad From proofs of hate displayed, From envy and rapacity, And kindness ill-repaid; The baseness of humanity Hath spoiled a cherished dream; Dear Heart, how different is the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... to Japanese rapacity. A democratic territory has been given over to an autocratic government. The President has conceded to Japan all that, if not more than, she ever hoped to obtain. This is the information contained in a memorandum handed by Ray ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; and his thoughts, projected into the future, dwelt bitterly on the Air Trust now already under way—the terrible, coming slavery which he, Gabriel, had struggled to checkmate, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... that I began to look over Woodruff's legislative program in advance, I was amazed at the rapacity of my clients, rapacious though I knew them to be. I had been thinking that the independent newspapers—there were a few such, but of small circulation and influence—were malignant in their attacks upon my "friends." In fact, as I soon saw, they had told only a small part of the truth. They ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... trader. Rajah Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, and thought himself pathetically in the right. The situation was complicated ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... choice, others through weakness, and it is not the weak who are the least guilty. The apathy of the majority, the timorousness of the well-meaning, the selfishness and scepticism of listless rulers, the ignorance or cynicism of the press, the rapacity of profiteers, the faint-hearted servility of the thinkers who make themselves the apostles of devastating prejudices which it should be their mission to uproot; the ruthless pride of intellectuals who value their own ideas more than they value ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... statesmen, men distinguished among a thousand parties for clear integrity, disinterested virtue, and spotless fame. This, my lord, would be a field worthy of your lordship's prowess. Could you but gain the interested, could you eternize rapacity, and preserve inviolate the blot of the English name, what laurels would ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... and Quito. The tyranny, superstition, and vices of the mother-country were introduced in ample quantities among her children. Exorbitant taxes were exacted by the Crown. The most arbitrary restrictions were imposed on their trade. And the governors were not behind hand in rapacity and extortion for themselves as well as their master. Yet, under all these difficulties, the colonies made a quick progress in population. The city of Lima, founded since the conquest, is represented by Ulloa as containing fifty thousand inhabitants near fifty years ago. Quito, which had ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Cressingham, the treasurer, and Ormesby, the justiciar, became the real representatives of the English power. Cressingham was a pompous ecclesiastic, who appropriated to his own uses the money set aside for the fortification of Berwick, and was odious to the Scots for his rapacity and incompetence. Ormesby was a pedantic lawyer, rigid in carrying out the king's orders but stiff and unsympathetic in dealing with the Scots. Under such rulers Scotland was neither subdued nor conciliated. No real effort was made to track to their ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... upon the mausoleum, glittered with gold and silver and precious stones. To complete the whole, the effigy of the king had been added to the tomb at some period subsequent to its original erection. A monument like this naturally excited the rapacity of a lawless banditti, unrestrained by civil or military force, and inveterate against every thing that might be regarded as connected with the Catholic worship. The Calvinists were masters of Caen, and, incited by the information ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... often charmed with some trinket in the toy-shops; and from moderate desires of seals and snuff-boxes, rose, by degrees, to gold and diamonds. I now began to find the smile of Charybdis too costly for a private purse, and added one more to six and forty lovers, whose fortune and patience her rapacity had exhausted. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... amputated, for replacement by the inventions of the revolutionary mechanists. Those are the keys by which the locks of cabinets and councils are henceforth to be opened, and the secrets of national wealth laid bare to the rapacity of the rabble." After this speech nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... $60, according to its quality. In Unyanyembe it is about $1-10 per pound, but in Manyuema, it may be purchased for from half a cent to 14 cent's worth of copper per pound of ivory. The Arabs, however, have the knack of spoiling markets by their rapacity and cruelty. With muskets, a small party of Arabs is invincible against such people as those of Manyuema, who, until lately, never heard the sound of a gun. The discharge of a musket inspires mortal terror in them, and it is almost impossible ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... merited. You deserve your insecurities, and may embrace, even as ye please, the fates which lie before you. Acquiesce in the tyranny which offends no longer, but be sure that acquiescence never yet has disarmed the despot when his rapacity needs a victim. Your lives and possessions—which ye dare not peril in the cause of freedom—lie equally at his mercy. He will not pause, as you do, to use them at his pleasure. To save them from him there was but one way—to employ them against him. There is no security against power but in power; ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... to prove to us that we, consumers, are your property, that we belong to you body and soul, that you have an exclusive right to our stomachs and limbs, and it is for you to nourish us and clothe us at your own price, however great may be your ignorance, your rapacity, or the inferiority of ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... second capture of the city by force of arms, and without capitulation, the troops were clamorous to be permitted to plunder. Amru again checked their rapacity, and commanded that all persons and property in the place should remain inviolate, until the will of the Caliph could be known. So perfect was his command over his troops that not the most trivial article was taken. His letter to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone—that some splendid specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest, that on the more secluded lake shores an occasional deer may yet be seen coming down to drink, and that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... difficulty in getting sailors to accompany him, and the account he gave of the countries he had discovered, and particularly the intelligence that they abounded with gold, excited the avarice and rapacity of the Spaniards, and numbers of needy adventurers of ruined fortunes and desperate circumstances, were eager to ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... carried the war on to the land, to glean what the Black Band had left. With 1200 men he took Hoorn by escalade; plunder-laden and sated, they returned to the sea. Nothing was too small or too helpless for his rapacity. Along the coast they picked up a barge of Enckhuizen. Its only crew, master and mate, were thrown overboard, and Peter's fleet sailed upon its way. We must remember that the provinces engaged in this internecine strife were not widely diverse in ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Somerset, the Lord Protector, made an honest attempt to check the rapacity of the landowners, but his proclamation and royal commission were no more successful than Wolsey's had been, and only earned for the Protector the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... social vices which Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Madame," rejoined her son, who was becoming weary of the rapacity of his loyal subjects and faithful friends. "Gentlemen, your services shall not be ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... whose manner of life is so mysterious and whose origin is more mysterious still—seem to be closely allied both to the Moors and to the Hindoos, not only in appearance but in their phlegm, fanaticism and rapacity. Such of our readers as have travelled in Southern Europe must have frequently encountered these Bohemians, who come from no one knows where only to disappear again like the swallows at the ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... pointing to heaven as the source of his wisdom. He dwelt mainly on the truth of Christianity, the folly of idolatry, the unity and providence of God, the coming of Christ, and the judgment. At times he would severely rebuke the avarice and rapacity of his courtiers, who would loudly applaud him with their mouths and belie his exhortations by their works. One of these productions is still extant, in which he recommends Christianity in a characteristic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the court of the then King Otho, a German colony in the midst of the Greek people, living upon its blood, and wantoning with its treasure; and of this same Greek people, driven at length into fury by the rapacity of the hated Tudesca, who filled every position of authority and grasped at every office of emolument, and hunting them like a routed army out of the land. Still there was a depth of paternal affection in the words upon the monument, which ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... down all those rights in which the essence of liberty consists, and which a free government is always most careful to protect. It denies the habeas corpus and the trial by jury. Personal freedom, property, and life, if assailed by the passion, the prejudice, or the rapacity of the ruler, have no security whatever. It has the effect of a bill of attainder or bill of pains and penalties, not upon a few individuals, but upon whole masses, including the millions who inhabit the subject States, and even their unborn children. These wrongs, being expressly ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... when, after having lost considerable sums, frequently they have not enough left to pay for a breakfast or dinner. What an instructive lesaon for the novice! What a subject of reflection for the philosophic spectator! At these scenes of folly and rapacity it is that the demon of suicide exults in the triumphs he is on the point of gaining over the weakness, avarice, and false pride of mortals. If the wretched victim has not recourse to a pistol, he probably seeks a grave at ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... really so often afflicted her heart. Waking from those distressing spectacles, she would fall into a fitful doze, which presented her with remembrances still more alarming: bands of fierce deserters, that eyed her travelling party with a savage rapacity which did not confess any powerful sense of inferiority; and in the very fields which they had once cultivated, now silent and tranquil from utter desolation, the mouldering bodies of the unoffending peasants, left un-honored with ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the one answering to the brilliant plates in the other,—the luminous reservoirs of the fire-flies,—the phosphorescence and electricity of many fishes,—the same analogs of moral qualities, in their rapacity, boldness, modes of seizing their prey by surprise,—their gills, as presenting the intermediate state between the spiracula of the grade next below, and the lungs of the step next above, both extremes of which seem combined in the structure ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... enquire whether his fortune is certain, or his rank indisputable; and be not satisfied with light evidence on either point. A man may be in possession of an estate and title, to which he has no better right than his own rapacity and forwardness of assumption; and supposing Mr. Mowbray jealous, as he must be, of the honour of his family, the alliance of such a one cannot but bring disgrace. This comes from one who will make good what ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of a roast joint was upon the table, and Schalken immediately proceeded to cut some, but he was anticipated; for no sooner had she become aware of its presence than she darted at it with the rapacity of a vulture, and, seizing it in her hands she tore off the flesh with her teeth ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... even his wood-cutting at the hut; his whole manner of life, in fact, had tended to promote the best development of his physical organization. He grew taller, stronger, and broader-shouldered; he held himself erect, and his pale complexion cleared and became fair. He no longer ate with a canine rapacity; his appetite was moderate, and his habits temperate, because his body was well nourished and ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that gives so keen and quick a relish for peace as husbandry and a country life, which leave in men all that kind of courage that makes them ready to fight in defense of their own, while it destroys the license that breaks out into acts of injustice and rapacity. Numa, therefore, hoping agriculture would be a sort of charm to captivate the affections of his people to peace, and viewing it rather as a means to moral than to economical profit, divided all the lands into several parcels, to which he gave the name of pagus, or parish, and over every one ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was the coachman. This mutinous individual audaciously shouted, "Where am I to sit?" But the privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he cried out in an extempore petition addressed to the Emperor through the window—"I say, how am I to catch hold of the reins?"—"Anyhow," was the imperial answer; ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... in a Vain Woman's hand), Till thou thyself go down the Way of Nothing. For what is Woman? A Foolish, Faithless Thing— To whom The Wise Self-subjected, himself Deep sinks beneath the Folly he sets up. A very Kafir in Rapacity; Clothe her a hundred Years in Gold and Jewel, Her Garment with Brocade of Susa braided, Her very Night-gear wrought in Cloth of Gold, Dangle her Ears with Ruby and with Pearl, Her House with Golden Vessels all a-blaze, Her Tables loaded with the Fruit of Kings, Ispahan Apples, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... respectable of that profession. Besides, in most places, everything is tariffed, and where it is not, the landlord never makes an unreasonable demand, or attempts to make foreigners pay more than natives; whereas in Italy if you are not spesato there are no bounds to the rapacity of the innkeepers, witness mine host of Terracina. Both Italy and Germany present the greatest convenience for travellers, as the Landkutsche or vetture are continually passing from town to town. There is however this difference between them, that the Italian ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... of the Anglo-Saxon. The world hereafter is free to the Frenchman, for robbery, spoliation, conquest, and invasion, wherever else than in England he chooses to prosecute the vocation of national crime. England is no longer the foe of French ambition or rapacity. So long as France will abstain from the invasion of the 'inviolate isle,' where for almost a thousand years no foreign enemy has placed his foot, so long she may be free from molestation from England, whatever else she may attempt; and this is the inglorious policy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... instruction to all the people. And in those popish ages, that expenditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would have been far more than adequate to this beneficent purpose. Think of the boundless cost for supporting the magnificence and satiating the rapacity of the hierarchy, from its triple-crowned head, down through all the orders branded with a consecration under that head to maintain the delusion and share the spoil. Recollect the immense system of policy for jurisdiction and intrigue, every agent ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... turn her and her little ones out in the cold northern blast, take the clothes from their backs, the bread from their mouths; all this by your laws may he do, and has he done, oft and again, to satisfy the rapacity of that monster ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... when a confederacy subsists by good-will, and all parties to the war have a common interest, men are willing to co-operate and bear hardships and persevere. But when one has grown strong, like Philip, by rapacity and artifice, on the first pretext, the slightest reverse, all is overturned and broken up. [Footnote: The original [Greek: anechaitise] is "shakes off," or "throws off," as a horse does his rider, when he rears and tosses up his neck. It will be observed ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... lays its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of obtaining ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in his address to the German nobility, speaking of the pope, "He is a shepherd: yes, so far as you have money, and no farther." The above passage from Bunyan is altogether in the manner of Luther when describing the rapacity and avarice of Rome. hath removed them. And these seeds has antichrist sown where the kingdom of Christ should stand.] as the pedlar cries, "broken or whole," is the sinews of their religion; and it is for that they set kingdoms, crowns, principalities, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... been compelled to open his bundles, and take an oath that the different articles they contained were his own exclusive property. There was, however, no remedy; and having been under some obligation to Demba Sego for his attention towards me in the journey from Joag, I did not reproach him for his rapacity, but determined to quit Teesee at all events the next morning. In the meanwhile, in order to raise the drooping spirits of my attendants, I purchased a fat sheep, and had ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... guilt of informers and the wages of their iniquity were alike detestable; where the sacerdotal order, the consular dignity, the government of provinces, and even the cabinet of the prince, were seized by that execrable race as their lawful prey; where nothing was sacred, nothing safe from the hand of rapacity; where slaves were suborned, or by their own malevolence excited against their masters; where freemen betrayed their patrons, and he who had lived without an enemy died by the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... leagues to Puerto Principe on the north side of the island, and after a short encounter, in which the Spanish governor was killed, possessed themselves of the place. Nothing of value escaped the rapacity of the invaders, who resorted to the extremes of torture to draw from their prisoners confessions of hidden wealth. On the entreaty of the Spaniards they forebore to fire the town, and for a ransom of 1000 head of cattle released all the prisoners; but ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... whites themselves they have not only embittered, but corrupted. We were pained the other day when our municipal councillors refused, by a majority, to make the production of invoices obligatory at the Custom-house. Yet who shall blame them, when the Chief Justice, with a smallness of rapacity at which all men wondered, refused to pay, and I believe, still withholds the duties on his imports? He was above the law, being the head of it; and this was how he preached by example. He refused to pay his customs; the white councillors, following in his wake, refuse to take measures to enforce ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Indians, upon seeing that wealth excited the rapacity of the encomenderos and soldiers, abandoned the working of the mines, and the religious historians assert that they counseled them to a similar action in order to free them from annoyances. Nevertheless, according to Colin ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... upon by insects; and were it not for ordinary cleanliness, he would become a mass of vermin; even this does not protect him from the rapacity of ticks, mosquitoes, fleas and many others. Intestinal worms feed on him within, and, unseen, use their slow efforts ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... appear at Mass with a flannel petticoat over her head until the end of her days. Yet she did hold the Tinkers in a perhaps somewhat too unqualified reprobation. For there are tinkers and tinkers. Some of them, indeed, are stout and sturdy thieves,—veritable birds of prey,—whose rapacity is continually questing for plunder. But some of them have merely the magpies' and jackdaws' thievish propensity for picking up what lies temptingly in their way. And some few are so honest that they pass by as harmlessly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy: but the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit, of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot, perhaps, be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... you know, we won't suppose so.' And I cannot help avowing that this was the first occasion on which I really did justice to the clear head, and the plain, patient, practical good sense, of my old schoolfellow. 'Then,' said Traddles, 'you must prepare to disgorge all that your rapacity has become possessed of, and to make restoration to the last farthing. All the partnership books and papers must remain in our possession; all your books and papers; all money accounts and securities, of both kinds. In short, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... convert. The wild Namoqua warrior was turned into a gentle child. The change in this chief was a moral miracle. Wolfish rapacity, leonine ferocity, leopardish treachery, gave way before the meekness and mildness of the calf or kid. His sole aim and ambition had been to rob and to slay, to lead his people on expeditions for plunder and violence, but he now seemed absorbed by one passion, zeal for God and ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... no less eloquent picture of the court of the then King Otho, a German colony in the midst of the Greek people, living upon its blood, and wantoning with its treasure; and of this same Greek people, driven at length into fury by the rapacity of the hated Tudesca, who filled every position of authority and grasped at every office of emolument, and hunting them like a routed army out of the land. Still there was a depth of paternal affection ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... wherever she would lead them, and it is not improbable that such a crusade as she dreamt of, had it been possible, in which the two nations, so closely connected by religious feeling, and so closely united by position, but so long enemies owing to the rapacity and greed of their kings, might have again placed the cross on the battlements of the Holy City, under the leadership of her whom her countrymen rightly called ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... His wealth excited the rapacity of the viceroy Count Lemos, who, to obtain possession of it, accused him of exciting the natives to rebellion, and cast him into prison. In vain Salcedo entreated that he might appeal to the mercy of the king, and promised to give the viceroy ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... that of Lord High Treasurer; as Justices, they now combined in their own persons almost all the power and patronage of the kingdom. Both affected a Puritan austerity and enthusiasm, which barely cloaked a rapacity and bigotry unequalled in any former administration. In Dublin, on Saint Stephen's Day, 1629, the Protestant Archbishop, Bulkley, and the Mayor of the city, entered the Carmelite Chapel, at the head of a file of soldiers, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... death that visited Spain at the close of the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests, their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy." [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to 321.] "Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the answer is still, ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... was now so distressing, that I prevailed on my uncle to accompany me to visit him; and to lend me his assistance, to prevent the whole property of the family from becoming the prey of my brother's rapacity; for, to extricate himself out of present difficulties, my father was totally regardless of futurity. I took down with me some presents for my step-mother; it did not require an effort for me to treat her with civility, or to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was about fifty millions ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... opinion was entertained that much cruelty and rapacity were exercised by the keepers of the great prisons in London. It was known that they had almost unlimited power in their hands, that they were not subject to regular inspection, and that it was scarcely possible to bring them to justice for their treatment of those committed to their charge. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... been addressed with such intelligence and tact. The few who have not approached them with sordid rapacity, but from love to them, as men, and souls to be redeemed, have most frequently been persons intellectually too narrow, too straightly bound in sects or opinions, to throw themselves into the character or position of the Indians, or impart to ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the most formidable leagues history had then recorded, the celebrated league of Cambray. No sympathy need be wasted upon the Venetians, the victims of this coalition, for they had rendered themselves universally detestable by their arrogance, rapacity, perfidy and pride. France joined the coalition, and, in view of her power, was to receive a lion's share of the prey—the provinces of Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and the Ghiradadda. The King of Arragon ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... will only the more certainly ensure her destruction, and justifies his threat of doom by his irrepressible assurance of having heard the divine voice, iii. 1-8. The doom is deserved because of the rapacity, luxury, iii. 9-15, and drunkenness, iv. 1-3, nor will their sumptuous worship save them, iv. 4, 5. Warnings enough they have had already, but as they have all been disregarded, God will come in some more ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... few may be added here. The Liburnians helped Octavius Augustus in the naval battle of Actium; and, when he became emperor, he did much for Dalmatia, in return for the assistance rendered. Yet the rebellions continued, mainly owing to the rapacity of the governors sent from Rome, as is proved by the answer of Batone to Tiberius, reported by Dion Cassius. He asked the reason for the frequent rebellions in town and country, and the implacable hatred which appeared to be nourished against the very name of Roman. Batone replied: "Because ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... can see, which is very little, has not undergone many changes. The image of war has, indeed, passed away, and we no longer see troops crossing the country in every direction; villages either ruined or hastily fortified; inhabitants sheltered in the woods and caves to escape the rapacity of the soldiers—all this has passed away. The inns are much amended. There is no occasion for that rascally practice of making a bargain—or combien-ing your landlady, before you unharness your horses, which formerly was a matter of necessity. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... an account of their early years. Several were verging upon three score years and ten. All the wealth they possessed had been plundered from another set of villains, whose misfortune was, a want of sagacity in escaping the rapacity of their more accomplished compeers. That there were a few honourable exceptions must be admitted, but I could not with a good conscience assert, that one-eighth of the police was as honest as is generally the case with those city officers, for I ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... there and then in the evening tramped back again, and ate and drank, ate heartily, danced, sang hymns, and enjoyed life. For them it was a picnic. But soon their hosts began to wear long faces; the strangers had enormous appetites, and the plantains and the bread-fruit vanished before their rapacity; the alligator-pear trees, whose fruit sent to Apia might sell for good money, were stripped bare. Ruin stared them in the face. And then they found that the strangers were working very slowly. Had they received a hint from Walker that they might take their time? At this rate by the time the road ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... roof, and when they found animals they took them away; no attention was paid to the feeling of the poor peasants and nothing was considered as being too harsh for them; in most instances the latter had run away for fear of maltreatment. Nothing is so afflicting as to see the rapacity of pillaging soldiers, stealing and destroying everything coming under their hands. They took to excess vodka found in the magazines which the enemy had not destroyed, or in the castles off the main route. In consequence of ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... himself formidable and odious to Mazarin, and made himself detested by the people as Mazarin's supporter, at the same time that by his arrogance he shocked the Parliament, already unfavourably disposed towards him on account of his rapacity and his ambition.[1] ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... representatives of the English power. Cressingham was a pompous ecclesiastic, who appropriated to his own uses the money set aside for the fortification of Berwick, and was odious to the Scots for his rapacity and incompetence. Ormesby was a pedantic lawyer, rigid in carrying out the king's orders but stiff and unsympathetic in dealing with the Scots. Under such rulers Scotland was neither subdued nor conciliated. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... had done, but it was fruitless. There were two palaces and a vineyard behind the Palatine Hill; but in these days landed property had not much value, and the two palaces and the vineyard remained to the family since they were beneath the rapacity of the pope and his son. Months and years rolled on. Alexander VI. died, poisoned,—you know by what mistake. Caesar, poisoned at the same time, escaped by shedding his skin like a snake; but the new skin was spotted by the poison till it looked like a ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... character of the converted natives, I express most unequivocally my persuasion that it has been improved, in comparison with the original disposition, by their acquaintance with the truths of the Gospel. Their haughty self-will, their rapacity, furiousness, and sanguinary inclination have been softened—I may even say, eradicated; and their superstitious opinions have given place, in many instances, to a correct apprehension of the spiritual tendencies of the Gospel. ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... a few months before, one reverse of fortune had succeeded another. He who had entered every country a conqueror at the head of his armies, whose myriads of soldiers had overrun every land, eating it up with ruthless greed and rapacity, and spreading destruction far and wide, was now at bay. He who had dictated terms of peace in all the capitals of Europe at the head of triumphant legions was now with a small, weak, ill-equipped, unfed army, striving to protect his own capital. France was receiving the pitiless treatment ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... subject, intellectual and political, despite the itch of amor, their deliberate cult of sex. They like to talk. Conversation is an art. My mind was never uncompanioned. But that deeper spiritual rapacity, one offspring of passion as it may be, they could not satisfy; for love with them is always too confused with animalism and is desiccated in the art of love-making. Fidelity is a virtue relegated to ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a future provision, and as affording you the means of passing the remainder of your days in ease and tranquillity. What would become of you in case of the worst? Your numerous creditors would besiege you with a rapacity, still further excited by the support they would receive from court. You look at me with surprise because I speak the language of truth; be a reasonable creature I implore of you once in your life, and do not thus sacrifice the interests of ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... which they traverse, but even of their best friends and companions, which forbids us to go farther in their praise. It is as unnecessary, as it would be painful, to enter on an enumeration of the instances of wanton cruelty, violence, and rapacity, which have sullied the fame of their most brilliant deeds in arms. It will be long before the French name will recover the disgrace which the remembrance of such scenes as Moscow, or Saragossa, or Tarragona, has attached to it, in every country of Europe; ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... profession, there are other considerations in the problem. The people of to-day are less disposed to controversy, and avoid employing lawyers to settle disputes and differences in court, and others often hesitate to employ a lawyer for fear of being made a victim of the rapacity of some who have brought the profession into disrepute. Again, there is less confusion in the laws. They are being collected, condensed, arranged, and simplified, and people are coming to understand the codes. Likewise, the courts are adopting simpler rules and codes of civil ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... throughout Europe—these people, whose manner of life is so mysterious and whose origin is more mysterious still—seem to be closely allied both to the Moors and to the Hindoos, not only in appearance but in their phlegm, fanaticism and rapacity. Such of our readers as have travelled in Southern Europe must have frequently encountered these Bohemians, who come from no one knows where only to disappear again like the swallows at ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... but really for conquest. Here, at least, was one record of missionary endeavor that came to full fruition and flower, and knew no fear or despair, until it attracted the attention of the ruthless rapacity and greed of the Mexican governmental authority crouching behind the project of secularization. The enforced withdrawal of the paternal hand before the Indian had learned to stand and walk alone, coupled in some sections with the dread scourge ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... had an appearance of reason. In fact, he found here neither the banter, nor the orgies, nor the reckless expenditure, nor the depravity, nor the scorn of social decencies, nor the insolent independence which had brought him to grief alike with the actress and the singer. He was spared, too, the rapacity of the courtesan, like unto the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... touch the property or the life of the lowest in rank. All this seems to me excellent; but then, on the other hand, my blood boils in my veins at the contempt in which they hold us; at their greed, their rapacity, their brutality, their denial to us of all rights. In their eyes we are but savages, but wild men, who may be useful for tilling the ground for them, but who, if troublesome, should be hunted down and slain like wild beasts. I admire them for what ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... enter the French service. In his younger days, my father had served extensively under many princes, and had found in every other military service a spirit of honor governing the conduct of the officers. Here only, and for the first time, he found ruffian manners and universal rapacity. He could not draw his sword in company with such men, nor in such a cause. But at length, under the pressure of necessity, he accepted (or rather bought with an immense bribe) the place of a commissary to the French forces in Italy. With ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... interrupted the doctor, "what such a nurse is capable of. You cannot imagine what bitterness—legitimate bitterness, you understand—joined to the rapacity, the cupidity, the mischief-making impulse—might inspire these people to do. For them the BOURGEOIS is always somewhat of an enemy; and when they find themselves in position to avenge their inferiority, they ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... Her father was a clever but unlucky artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty; all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood of his sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him? Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal I shall ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of water swallowed by Sailor Bill and his three young companions, and the rapacity with which it was gulped down, caused Golah to declare that there was but one God, that Mahomet was his Prophet, and that four of the slaves about him were ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... Those falling into the hands of the Afghans were most to be pitied. For these devils in human shape cut off the heads of all their prisoners and all wounded, whether Mohammedans, Hindus, or English, without any further ado, and in their rapacity tore the valuables from the bodies of ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... former allies, and of suspicion to new ones; nor did he blame the conduct of mankind in this respect, provided, however, that the cause, and not the name, occasioned the twofold hatred." He then recounted the services they had rendered the Carthaginian generals, and on the other hand their rapacity and insolence, together with the injuries of every kind committed against themselves and their countrymen. "On this account," he said, "his person only up to that time had been with them, his heart had long since been on that side where he believed that right and justice were ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... effect of institutions forged by the ruling class to accumulate wealth in their own hands. The want of self-respect in the inferior class engendered by this state of things, shows itself in the acts of rapacity and fraud which the traveller meets with throughout France and Italy, and, worse still, in the shameless corruption of the Italian custom-houses, the officers of which regularly solicit a paltry bribe from every passenger as the consideration of leaving his ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... for myself, though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older. At any rate, this was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these. This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart. But I felt bound to speak ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... position. Since then the terraced mountain has been marvellously developed, and every foothold has been planted with vines and figs and mulberries. The industrious peasantry, comparatively safe from Turkish rapacity, have cultivated the ledges among its crags and peaks, and enjoy the fruits of their industry, sitting under their vines and fig trees. The bloodthirsty and turbulent Druzes, restrained by law, and ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... need not be informed that the violence and rapacity of a tyrannic ministry have forced the citizens of America, your brother colonist, into arms. We equally detest and lament the prevalence of those counsels, which have led to the effusion of so much human blood, and ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... treating with that dangerous and faithless nation. In February Grenville definitely proposed dismemberment, offering the frontier fortresses and the whole of Alsace and Lorraine to Austria. It was the English who impressed on the operations, that were to follow, the character of a selfish and sordid rapacity. ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... stroked his beard. "Something cold and haughty and aloof ... men concentrated, converging breathlessly on the single flame of their spirit.... Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortes, Santa Teresa.... Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness.... Every man's life a ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of monarch and noble yielding homage to the monk, acknowledging his supremacy in what was declared to be the chief interest in life, the interference of the monk in every department of life, saturated society with supernaturalism. And although at a later period the rapacity, dissoluteness, and tyranny of the monkish orders led to revolt, by that time the imagination of all had been thoroughly impressed with the value of religion. Even to-day current theology is permeated with the monkish notions of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and contempt of the ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... exhausts its vitality in a surfeitment of caprice. The animal instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb to the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... Lion d'Or were adorned with humorous devices. On one was a satire on the hypocritical rapacity of perfidious Albion. Two English soldiers were standing with their swords hidden behind their backs, and trying to coax back to them some Indians who were running away in the distance. "Come to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... to describe the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. In the pursuit he fearlessly braves the arrow of the Indian and the distempers of the forest; he is unimpressed by the silence of the woods; the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... himself in order to maintain them decently and to satisfy their wishes. But the more he gave, the more they demanded; and on one or two occasions, as we shall see in the course of this biography, their rapacity and ingratitude roused his bitterest indignation. Nevertheless, he did not swerve from the path of filial and brotherly kindness which his generous nature and steady will had traced. He remained ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... heaven as the source of his wisdom. He dwelt mainly on the truth of Christianity, the folly of idolatry, the unity and providence of God, the coming of Christ, and the judgment. At times he would severely rebuke the avarice and rapacity of his courtiers, who would loudly applaud him with their mouths and belie his exhortations by their works. One of these productions is still extant, in which he recommends Christianity in a characteristic strain, and in proof of its divine origin cites especially the fulfilment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is now approaching, when the pride of usurpation shall be crushed, and the cruelties of invasion shall be revenged. The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... irregular, it was, or at least seemed to be, for the interest of the crown to obtain from each province as much as it could anyhow pay. When the state dues were once fixed, as the crown gained nothing by the rapacity of its officers, but rather lost, since the province became exhausted, it was interested in checking greed, and seeing that the provinces were administered ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... old days had returned," said Toussaint; "the days of Columbus and his crows. We are as the unhappy Indians to the rapacity of Europe. No wonder, if mulattoes and blacks speak of the colony as if it ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... instigated by a sincere, though misguided religious zeal. For Philip II. and Louis XIV. had, at least, a fanatical belief that they were doing God service by those holocausts of his children; while no motive inspired these massacres, tortures, and banishments, but the most sordid rapacity and avarice, the lowest and basest passions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... talking, and generally joking; and the most serious subjects never meet with five minutes' consecutive attention. The favourable side of his character is, that he is good-tempered and good-natured—by no means cruel—and, in a certain way, generous, though rapacious to as high a degree. His rapacity, indeed, is carried to such an excess as to astonish a European, and is evinced in a thousand mean ways. The presents I made him were unquestionably handsome; but he was not content without begging from me the share I had reserved for the other Pangerans; and afterwards, through Mr Williamson, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... loud, a screeching protest against the Arab brutes—the schieks being the very worst of the brutes—who have these monuments in their hands. Their numbers, the filthiness of their dress—or one might almost say no dress—their stench, their obscene indecency, their clattering noise, their rapacity, exercised without a moment's intercession; their abuse, as in this wise: "Very bad English-man; dam bad; dam, dam, dam! Him want to take all him money to the grave; but no, no, no! Devil hab him, and money too!" This, be it remembered, from a ferocious, almost blackened Arab, with ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... most painful manner, the effects of the hostile and unexpected attack of Great Britain, and that they feel them still every day." That, in the mean time, this stagnation of commerce, absolutely abandoned to the rapacity of an enemy greedy of pillage, and destitute of all protection whatever, hath appeared to the petitioners, as well as to all the other commercial inhabitants; yes! even to all true Citizens, so much the more hard and afflicting, as they not only have constantly ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... motives to ordinary integrity. I do not hesitate to say that that state which lays its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... motto of which mention has been made before. Plague nurses were numerous, but too often these were women of the worst character, bent rather upon plunder than desirous of relieving the sufferers. Grim stories were told of their neglect and rapacity. Yet amongst them were many devoted and excellent women, and the physicians who bravely faced the terrors of the time and remained at their post when others fled from the peril, deserve all honour and praise; the more so that many amongst these ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the arms of the Spaniards—the thunder and lightning they bore with them in their guns— were everywhere victorious, and the riches of the temples were seized; gloriously wrought vessels were hastily molten down into ingots, along with plate, shield, and wonderfully-worked flowers; rapacity was triumphant, and upon one occasion the value of the treasure collected and melted down into bars was computed at three millions and a half pounds ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... attraction for its owner. He had once described to a fellow-writer the impression produced on him by that plaster face, so capaciously ugly, as though comprehending the whole of human life, sharing all man's gluttony and lust, his violence and rapacity, but sharing also his strivings toward love and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nowadays. And it is perfectly easy to explain how malaria might have contributed to this end. For the disease—and herein lies its curse—lowers both the physical and social standard of a people; it breeds misery, poverty and ignorance—fit soil for callous rapacity. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... liberty consists, and which a free government is always most careful to protect. It denies the habeas corpus and the trial by jury. Personal freedom, property, and life, if assailed by the passion, the prejudice, or the rapacity of the ruler, have no security whatever. It has the effect of a bill of attainder or bill of pains and penalties, not upon a few individuals, but upon whole masses, including the millions who inhabit the subject States, and even their unborn children. These ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old domestic virtue, carried to an extreme—thrift, running into an engaging rapacity. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... were removed, and the card-tables placed, the ladies all rose, and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon joined by him, when all her views were overthrown by seeing him fall a victim to her mother's rapacity for whist players, and in a few moments after seated with the rest of the party. She now lost every expectation of pleasure. They were confined for the evening at different tables, and she had nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side of the room, as to ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... courted; free love was better than married enmity. No rite, no church, no god, could annihilate these facts or restrain their influence any more than the sea could be tamed. Duerer was touched with this spirit; we see it in his fine clothes, in his collector's rapacity, above all in his letters to his friend Pirkheimer—a man more typical of that Rabelaisian age than Duerer and Michael Angelo, who were both of them not only modern men but men conservative of the best that had ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... of the lower forces as the guide of life. Nature has her own decalogue. There is a law written upon our hearts. The wasting of power by anger, jealousy, envy, covetousness and the like, and the degradation following their expression in acts of revenge, concupiscence, and mere rapacity, are known without revelation by all races which have not suffered the downward evolution. The literatures prove this back even to the days of Hamurabi. Thus natural standards of temper and conduct are seen to exist, below which men may not live without loss, and hence there are natural laws to ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... the Helvetii, which had been provoked by the dishonest rapacity of the twenty-first legion, was speedily quelled by the Roman general Aulus Caecina. Aventicum surrendered (A.D. 69), but Julius Alpinus, a chieftain and supposed ring-leader, was singled out for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... now made it part of their business to watch their property; being determined to disappoint the rapacity of the whites. They soon learned that the Governor had sent an envoy to deal with them, and the news cheered their hearts not a little; for they earnestly wished for peace and quietness. A verbal message was brought, ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... in the council; and being supported by the popular voice, succeeded in driving out of the country Madame Berlips, a German favourite of hers, who was much hated on account of the undue influence she exerted, and the rapacity she displayed. The next measure was of equal importance. Madrid and its environs groaned under the weight of a regiment of Germans commanded by the Prince of Darmstadt. The council decreed that this regiment should be disbanded, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... have vowed? . . . 'The Saxons,' he says, 'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman, the Huns shameless. But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours? Is the Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a Christian's? If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder? He is utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood. But what of the Christian who does the same? The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better men than the Christians. The ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Congress has approved 47 out of 49 of these claims. In this connection the report calls attention to the action of Congress in 1860, and the Interior Department in 1879 in the famous Maxwell land grant case, which he characterizes as a wanton and shameful surrender to the rapacity of monopolists of 1,662,764 acres of the public domain, on which hundreds of poor men had settled in good faith and made valuable improvements. It has been as calamitous to New Mexico, says the Surveyor General, as it is humiliating to the United ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice, and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Rome, stretching its arms over the whole earth. On it was written, "The Cross of God's wrath." But from Jerusalem rose a golden cross, inscribed, "The Cross of God's compassion." Discontent was growing in Florence. The insolence and the rapacity of Pietro de' Medici increased. In the autumn of that year Savonarola delivered a famous course of sermons on Noah's Ark, warning all to take refuge from the coming flood in the mystical Ark of mercy. The flood came indeed, for suddenly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the grievance was detailed, and strict non-intercourse with England enjoined. While the Queen and the Viceroy were thus exchanging blows, the real sufferers were, of course, the unfortunate Netherlanders. Between the upper and nether millstones of Elizabeth's rapacity and Alva's arrogance, the poor remains of Flemish prosperity were well nigh crushed out of existence. Proclamations and commissions followed hard upon each other, but it was not till April 1573, that the matter was definitely arranged. Before that day ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had been greatly multiplied and abused during the Middle Ages. They were the principal weapons with which the clergy sought to protect themselves and their property from the cruelty and rapacity of the banditti in the service of the barons. They were feared by the most powerful and unprincipled, because, at the same time that they excluded the culprit from the offices of religion, they also cut him off from the intercourse of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... immediately seized on by several, and its death hastened by their blows. The "Beagle" was at the Falklands only during the summer, but the officers of the "Adventure," who were there in the winter, mention many extraordinary instances of the boldness and rapacity of these birds. They actually pounced on a dog that was lying fast asleep close by one of the party; and the sportsmen had difficulty in preventing the wounded geese from being seized before their eyes. It is said that several together (in this respect resembling the Carranchas) ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... wretches is to extort money from their victims. They have no interest in their "patients," either scientific or humane, as is shown by the readiness with which they consent to risk the lives of the poor creatures in their hands, and the rapacity with which they drain ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and 15,000 respectively.[127] Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: "We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... determined to chastise that tribe as he had the Raritans, and called upon the people to shoulder their muskets for the fray; but they, seeing the danger to which the rashness of the governor was leading them, refused. They had been witnesses of his rapacity and greed, and they now charged him with seeking war that he might "make a wrong reckoning with the colony," and reproached ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... department of the public administration are the baneful effects of that spirit of insincerity and rapacity, which is almost universal at Constantinople, more apparent than in the army. Money drawn upon the authority of false returns, and eventually appropriated by the highest people of the land, affords an example of peculation and dishonesty which is carried out through all ranks, and the result ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... thought of divers nations came to rest, like birds taking shelter from the storm. Now what refuge is there? The island has been covered by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled from the Seven Hills.—The Alps only are left for them. There, amid the rapacity of Europe, stands (for how long?) the little island of twenty-four cantons. In truth it has not the poetic radiance and glamor of the Eternal City: history has not filled its air with the breath of gods and heroes; but a mighty ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... further depressed by the rapacity of the railroads and the other intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, mortgages with high interest rates, and an inequitable system of taxation formed the burden of the farmer's complaint ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... called upon only to pay his fifteenth to the king's treasury they were contented enough, but now they are called upon for a tenth as well as a fifteenth, and often this is greatly exceeded by the rapacity of the tax-collectors. Other burdens are put upon them, and altogether men are becoming desperate. Then, too, the cessation of the wars with France has brought back to the country numbers of disbanded ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... the indulgence of inebriation. Hunting is but a licentious idle life, and if it does not always pervert good dispositions; yet, when it is united with bad luck, it leads to want: want stimulates that propensity to rapacity and injustice, too natural to needy men, which is the fatal gradation. After this explanation of the effects which follow by living in the woods, shall we yet vainly flatter ourselves with the hope of converting ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... safely be demanded when we held a great German army captive, by way of hostage. The British aim was a sound one, and it was attained. That it did not bring about the results anticipated was due to no fault in our Government, nor even to any lack of foresight upon their part; but solely to the cynical rapacity of a ruler whose ambition had made him fey, or of a Court so far out of touch with the country which supported it as to have lost its sense ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Brundusium, allowing him a share in the confiscated estates. Thence he was transferred to Cilicia, where again he proved a traitor to his superior officer, and stole from cities, private persons, temples, and public places, every thing that his rapacity coveted. One city offered him a vessel as a loan, and he refused to return it; another had a statue of Diana covered with gold, and he scraped off the precious metal to put it in his pocket. Using the money thus gained to ensure ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... should know enough about surveying to make one correct survey when given an opportunity practically to demonstrate their abilities under very favourable conditions. He had also incurred the dislike of influential caciques by defending the occupants of small holdings on friar estates from the rapacity of their rich neighbours, and by protecting free-patent applicants and homesteaders when large landowners opposed their applications in order to prevent their securing land, so that they might the more easily be held ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... put him in the way to amass riches, and for that reason there was not one perhaps of all the servants of the Emperor who performed with more exactness the affairs entrusted to him. He had many times incurred the displeasure of Aurelian, and his just rebuke for acts of rapacity and extortion, by which, never the empire, but his own fortune was profited; but, so deep and raging was his thirst of gold, that it had no other effect than to restrain for a season a passion which was destined, in its further indulgence, to ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... drinke water, that the sea-men might have ye more bear [beer] and one in his sickness desiring but a small can of beare it was answered that if he were their own father he should have none." Bradford also shows (op. cit. p. 153) the rapacity of Jones, when in command of the DISCOVERY, in his extortionate demands upon the Plymouth planters, notwithstanding ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... is virtuous in the pursuit of money-making the suggestion is inevitable that there must be some other side to it, that the common views of the rapacity of the money-maker cannot be wholly unfounded. What then are the vices of the money-making aim? In examining this question we shall first brush aside some things to which we have already referred. The pathological cases of mere crime, of sharp practice, ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... he saw it on his journeys from Dublin to Cork—a condition which he was later to reveal in the most terrible of his satirical tracts—and he realized with almost personal anguish the degradation of the people brought about by the rapacity and selfishness of a class which governed with no thought of ultimate consequences, and with no apparent understanding of what justice implied. It was left for him to precipitate his private opinion and public spirit in such form as would arouse the nation to a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... sentiment which gradually possessed itself of William's whole soul. When he was little more than a boy his country had been attacked by Lewis in ostentatious defiance of justice and public law, had been overrun, had been desolated, had been given up to every excess of rapacity, licentiousness, and cruelty. The Dutch had in dismay humbled themselves before the conqueror, and had implored mercy. They had been told in reply that, if they desired peace, they must resign their independence and do annual homage to the House of Bourbon. The injured ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this fund that has been practised by his predecessors. In this case it may be converted into a fruitful source of peculation and plunder, and be at last in a great measure diverted from the public objects for which it was instituted to the satiation of private rapacity, and the colonists become gradually burdened with an overbearing load of taxation, merely for the purpose of enriching their governors. Be this, however, as it may, the illegality of levying money by ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... Brazil were not very far from this portion of the Matto Grosso, and the pains which the emperors of Brazil had taken to draw a part of their riches from the earth was all the proof Haffgo could ask of the rapacity of the nations which called ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... occupy his throne in Rome. The Spanish cardinal after all these campaigns, which gave half Italy to the Papacy, was as rich as any king, and he founded the celebrated Spanish college in Bologna. The Pope, well aware of his robberies and rapacity, asked him to give some sort of accounts. The proud Don Gil presented him with a cart laden with keys ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not hear. Tom Teeter was standing down there between the rows of cabbages, talking to Mr. Gordon upon the "Conscienceless greed and onmitigated rapacity" of certain emissaries of the opposing political party. To all of which his neighbor was responding with: "Well, ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... succumb to the dictation of the rude masses. And what keeps up this singular action, but the constantly-recurring elections, the incessant balloting and voting, the necessity which every man feels hourly of saving his substance or his life from the devouring rapacity of those who think that ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation of the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my avenging hordes, engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of your prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my white dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing embers! A revolution plotted by men ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... finance, and is, as such, bound to be a thrifty manager of the royal treasure. He is a member of this House, and is, as such, bound to see that the burdens borne by his constituents are not made heavier by rapacity and prodigality. To all these trusts he has been unfaithful. The advice of the privy councillor to his master is, 'Give me money.' The first Lord of the Treasury signs a warrant for giving himself money out of the Treasury. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... values and prices. She had studied quality in food and in clothing, and thus she had discovered what enormous sums are wasted through ignorance—wasted by poor even more lavishly than by rich or well-to-do, because the shops where the poor dealt had absolutely no check on their rapacity through the occasional canny customer. She had learned the fundamental truth of the material art of living; only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good. Spenser, cross-examining her as to how she passed ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... firmness with which he has resisted the recent efforts to force a fraudulent treaty on the remnant of this injured people, and drive them against their will, and against law and treaties sacredly made, away from their lands, to satisfy the rapacity of ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... the vast number of big fish had quickly put an end to the little ones. But at the time of the winter solstice, in the month of Tebet, the sea grows restless, for then leviathan spouts up water, and the big fish become uneasy. They restrain their appetite, and the little ones escape their rapacity. ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... the tangled maze of conflicting national interests. "My line of conduct," he wrote to Hobart, a year after taking his command, "in obedience to the spirit of his Majesty's instructions communicated through your Lordship, has been simply this,—to conciliate all, to protect all from French rapacity. I have been honoured with your letter of January 7th, and it has given me most sincere pleasure that my whole conduct in my command here has been such as to meet his Majesty's approbation." The new Ministry, upon assuming office, requested him ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... affair does him no credit. It is true that no blood was spilt, and no revenge taken for the repeated butcheries of unoffending and defenceless settlers. It is true, also, that the French appear to have acted in bad faith. But Phips, on the other hand, displayed a scandalous rapacity. Charlevoix says that he robbed Meneval of all his money; but Meneval himself affirms that he gave it to the English commander for safe keeping, and that Phips and his wife would return neither the money nor various other articles belonging to ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... a quiver of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... who had no stores of their own to fall back upon is getting serious. Bread and meat are supplied in rations at a fair and steady price. Colonel Ward and Colonel Stoneman have seen to that, and as far as possible they check the rapacity of the Colonial contractor. But hundreds have no money left at all. They receive Government rations on a mere promise to pay. Outside rations, prices are running up to absurdity. Chickens and most nice things ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... magnanimity that commands admiration, though the end to which it was applied was in itself detestable. Even in individual life (moral principle apart) there is something that diminishes the horror attendant on injustice and rapacity, when accompanied with courage ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... other grievous penalties, by some of those numerous laws which had so fallen into disuse by their frivolous and vexatious nature as to strike before they warned. It was often more prudent to compound by money, even in false accusations, than to brave the rapacity and resentment of the king and his tools. Of his chief instruments, "Dudley was a man of good family, eloquent, and one that could put hateful business into good language; Empson, the son of a sieve-maker, of Towcester, triumphed in his deeds, putting off all other respects. They were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... nothing," replied Tutmosis, joyfully. "They trust too much in their power, they pay their spies badly, and have disgusted all Egypt with their pride and rapacity. Moreover, the aristocracy, the army, the scribes, the laborers, even the minor priests are only waiting for the signal to attack the temples, take out the treasures, and lay them at the feet of the pharaoh. When their treasures fail, all their power will be lost to the holy fathers. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... tedious narrative which would follow, through a series of fifty-six years, the caprices and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? The chief reason why Protestant writers have been so anxious to spread out the incidents of this reign, is in order to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of the court of Rome, and to prove, that the great dignitaries of the Catholic church, while they pretended to have nothing in view but the salvation of souls, had bent all their attention to the acquisition of riches, and were restrained by no sense ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... inability to grasp the laws of evidence. Missionaries had been working in China for several decades, and were no more disliked than other "foreign devils." The rising was clearly due to indignation at the rapacity of the European Powers. We may note that it gave the Russian governor of the town of Blagovestchensk an opportunity of cowing the Chinese of northern Manchuria by slaying and drowning some 4500 persons at ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... He not only made his way among the various tribes he had to pass through, but carried with him in safety a large trunk, containing Clapperton's clothes and other property, three watches, which he had secured about his person to preserve them from the rapacity of Bello, and all his master's papers and journals, with which, after a journey of nine months, accompanied by three blacks, he ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... WRETCH WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a higher, a more ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... exuding dyes of its jewels, took now a dewy lustre, as if weeping precious gum and amber. The Jew felt an instant's sense of superstition, which he dashed away, and placing the child, already sleeping, before the fire, awakened rapacity led him to hunt the hovel over. He found nothing but a few religious books, and amongst them a leather-covered Testament, which he opened and read with insensibility—passing on, at length, to interest, then to fascination, at last to rage and defiance—the opening ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... shirt, fight, like the doughty Captain Dalgetty, in one cause after another, without regard to the justice of the quarrel, and might plunder the peasantry subjected to him by the fate of war with the most unrelenting rapacity; but he must beware how he sustained the slightest reproach, even from a clergyman, if it had regard to neglect on the score of duty. The following occurrence will prove the truth of ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... the narrow margin of the rapids. With these precautions they all passed unmolested. The only accident that happened was the upsetting of one of the canoes, by which some of the goods sunk, and others floated down the stream. The alertness and rapacity of the hordes which infest these rapids, were immediately apparent. They pounced upon the floating merchandise with the keenness of regular wreckers. A bale of goods which landed upon one of the islands was immediately ripped open, one half of its contents ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... honesty and friendship; but having, as they imagined, laid all suspicion asleep, they soon sent another fleet of canoes, of which the crews behaved with all the insolence of tyrants, and all the rapacity of thieves; for, whatever was suffered to come into their hands, they seemed to consider as their own, and would neither pay for it, nor restore it; and, at length, finding the English resolved to admit them no longer, they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... had mentioned except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs been turned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion to draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of law, had obstructed the progress of civilisation, had more than once brought on the empire the curse of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... such a footing as this it is always ill with the community at large. The Hurons were among the most despicable of the Indians in their manners. They were hideous gluttons, gorging themselves when occasion offered with the rapacity of vultures. Gambling and theft flourished among them. Except, indeed, for the tradition of courage in fight and of endurance under pain we can find scarcely anything ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
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