"Ruthless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... script that cannot be improved by good editing, and after making allowance for the physical law of limitation by space: "Surgery, however, must not become decapitation or such a trimming of long ears and projecting toes as savage tribes practise. It seems very probable that by ruthless reshaping and hampering specifications in our magazines, stories and articles have been seriously affected." Further, "the passion for editorial cutting" is graphically illustrated in The Authors' League Bulletin for December (page 8) by ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Eleanor said, faintly: "I—I'm not ill—thank you very much." She tried to smile, but the ruthless glare of sunshine through the open kitchen door showed her face strained, as if in ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... either young or old desires to travel anywhere abroad at whatever time, is of no consequence. On the other hand, the refusal of states to receive others, and for their own citizens never to go to other places, is an utter impossibility, and to the rest of the world is likely to appear ruthless and uncivilised; it is a practice adopted by people who use harsh words, such as xenelasia or banishment of strangers, and who have harsh and morose ways, as men think. And to be thought or not to be thought well of by the ...
— Laws • Plato
... amusing, the talk, though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... remarkable resemblance to those of a china cat; not a natural cat, because there is something soft and appealing about a real "pussy,"—whereas Mrs. Arbroath's countenance was cold and hard and shiny, like porcelain, and her smile was precisely that of the immovable and ruthless-looking animal designed long ago by old-time potters and named "Cheshire." Her eyes were similar to the eyes of that malevolent china creature—and when she spoke, her voice had the shrill tone which was but a few notes off the actual ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... way, with no particular regard to chronological sequence, these random recollections should interest us, in the first place, as a piece of unconscious self-portraiture. The cynical Court lady, whose beauty bewitched a great King, and whose ruthless sarcasm made Duchesses quail, is here drawn for us in vivid fashion by her own hand, and while concerned with depicting other figures she really portrays her own. Certainly, in these Memoirs she is generally content to keep herself in the background, while giving us a faithful picture ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dolls, the two sought the nursery and there made a discriminating collection of her choicest treasures. Her Noah's Ark, her picture-books, her colored balls and blocks, her woolly lambs that moved on wheels, her miniature croquet set, all fell into their ruthless young hands and, as a crowning crime, were dumped into the little go-cart that was the very apple of Genevieve Maud's round eyes. It squeaked under its burden as the children drew it carefully along the hall. They carried it down-stairs with exaggerated caution, but Genevieve Maud saw ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... sought the mighty Father's grace, And trembling still and ill at ease Addressed their Lord in words like these: "The sons of Sagar, Sire benign, Pierce the whole earth with mine on mine, And as their ruthless work they ply Innumerable creatures die. "This is the thief," the princes say, "Who stole our victim steed away. This marred the rite, and caused us ill, And so their guiltless blood ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the economic life of the Jews, it had been completely undermined by the system of ruthless tutelage, which the Government had employed for a quarter of a century in the hope of "reconstructing" it. All these drumhead methods, such as the hurling of masses of living beings from villages into towns and from the border-zone into the interior, the prohibition ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... of every form and degree wherever found, Judge Troward was a ruthless destroyer of sham and pretence. To those submissive minds that placidly accept everything indiscriminately, and also those who prefer to follow along paths of well-beaten opinion, because the beaten path is popular, to all such he would perhaps appear to be an irreverent iconoclast ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... as a hard despot, ruthless as a tiger who strikes his fellow-workers numb and dumb with fear. "But he is under no illusions as to the real sentiments of the members of the Soviet who back him, nor does he deign to conceal those which he entertains toward them.... Whenever ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... them were such men as Devereaux, Brotherlin, Bryan, Irv. Withington, and the mighty McNair. The scrub team player at that time was pretty nearly any chap that was willing to take his life in his hands by going down to the field and letting those ruthless giants step on his face and generally muss up his ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... and interesting; the expressive dark eyes have lost not their usual brilliancy, save a mournful tenderness that is more often betrayed than formerly; the lustrous black hair is wantonly revelling in all the luxuriance of its former beauty. Time nor experience has not the ruthless power to desecrate such sacred charms. Lady Rosamond has yet to rejoice in these; she has yet to pluck the blossoms of happiness springing up from the soil of buried hope where seeds had been scattered by the unseen hand of Mercy. Well might Gerald Bereford have been ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... of the German soldier of to-day be the result not only of the ruthless command from the official higher up but also of the de-souling, materialistic influence of Socialism on the common people of Germany during the past twenty-five years? Is not the viciousness of Prussian militarism plus the demoralizing influence of ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... than abstract perfection and infinity, there is nothing incredible in a real incarnation, or in a real trinity inside the unity of God. But the heathen had no historic revelation of a living hope to sustain him in that age of failure and exhaustion. Nature was just as mighty, just as ruthless then as now, and the gospel was not yet the spring of hope it is in modern life. In our time the very enemies of the cross are living in its light, and drawing at their pleasure from the well of ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... intensely foolish to you, and childish; it may strike you that our men at the front are attempting to bribe Fate, or that we are returning to the days of witches and sorcerers. But it is not without its good points, this growth of superstition. Man is such a little, helpless pawn in the ruthless game of war, and death is so sudden and so strange, that the soul gropes instinctively in search of some sign of a shielding arm and a watchful power. The Bible, the Crucifix, a cheap little charm—any of these may bring comfort to the man in the trench, and give him the illusion ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... represented by his father, this had been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic—he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... claws, ruthless robber, Thou bearest away The heart of a meek Loving maid for thy prey, Three kerchiefs thou stealest, And garters a pair, From legs than the whitest Of marble more fair; And the sighs that pursue thee Would burn to the ground Two thousand Troy Towns, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... trim Liverpool packets, that lay three or four deep along the river front. The huge gray custom-house that stood at the foot of Canal Street no longer resounded with the rapid tread of sea-captains or busy merchants. From the pipes of the cotton-presses, the rush of the escaping steam, as the ruthless press squeezed the great bale into one-third its original size, was no longer heard. Most of the great towering steamboats that came rushing down the river with stores of cotton or sugar had long since been cut down into squat, powerful gunboats, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... drops of dew That sparkle on the grass, Or break into a thousand bits When ruthless ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... and her own brows were levelled at his above her stormy steel-grey eyes. The sense of her blunder made her angrier with him, and more ruthless. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... preached to them,' he said, 'but they were neither Papists nor Protestants—of no religion, but full of pride and iniquity. There was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity!—atheism, atheism!—no religion, no religion!' What such tiger-like slaughterers of women and children, such ruthless destroyers, could have meant by religion is a puzzle ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters, and some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness in Cordelia's 'Nothing;' and her tone is well contrived, indeed, to lessen the glaring absurdity of Lear's conduct, but answers ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... light was the step of the blooming girl, And glossy the hue of the raven curl, And joyous the glance of the dark eye's play, When the pride of the village was Morna Grey. But ruthless war to her dwelling came, Her brothers slept on the field of fame, Her father's blood on his hearth was shed; And the desolate orphan in anguish fled To the cottage of one who her childhood nursed, And who soothed the spirit that grief had cursed; And now in the depths of that speaking ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... hitherto striven for the independence of their nation inside Austria-Hungary. The course which this fratricidal war has taken and the ruthless violence of Vienna make it necessary for all of us to strive for independence without regard to Austria-Hungary. We are struggling for an absolutely independent ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... the hue of bronze. He had a dark eye, a falcon gaze, roving and keen. His jaw was prominent and set, mastiff-like; his lips were stern. It was youth with its softness not yet quite burned and hardened away that kept the whole cast of his face from being ruthless. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from L. W.'s bank and saw the money piling up to their credit; the first thrill of joy gave way to fear—of Stoddard, and what he might do. With interests so vast lying unprotected what could restrain his ruthless hand? And yet there was Rimrock, wrecking his life in New York and letting her watch their mine alone! A wave of resentment rose up at the thought—it was the old hatred that she tried to fight down—and she clasped her hands and gazed straight ahead as she beheld in a vision, the woman! A ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Tilden is also the story of Segelfoss, in its passing from the tranquil dignity of a semi-feudal estate to the complex and ruthless modernity of an industrial centre. Segelfoss By (1915) treats of the fortunes of the succeeding generation, and the further development of ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of industrial plants, the waste of natural resources, the exploitation of the consumers of natural monopolies, the accumulation of stagnant surpluses, child labor, and the ruthless exploitation of all labor, the encouragement of speculation with other people's money, these were consumed in the fires that they themselves kindled; we must make sure that as we reconstruct our life there be no soil in which such ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to the Grand Duchy, Quentin as the gray-bearded man, Savage as the old woman. The suffering of Dorothy Garrison during that wild night and day was the only thing that wrung blood from the consciences of these ruthless dare-devils. Philip Quentin, it must be said, lived years of agony and remorse while carrying out his part of the plan. How the plot was carried to the stage where it became Lady Saxondale's duty to acquaint ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... by which their vengeance was directed, and the cries and entreaties of their innocent and defenceless victims were alike disregarded in the accomplishment of their ends. Already had several victims fallen before the fury of the ruthless band. Law and order were laid waste, and the officers of justice looked on, some perhaps with dismay, and others with indifference, while the rights of citizens were prostrated, and their peaceful ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... submission, so there is in the very land itself. Open and prostrate it lies beneath the torrid sun of the south, and the arctic winds of the north; subdued and downtrodden for centuries, it and its people have always been at the mercy of ruthless men and ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... called, had endured for two centuries. It was a military despotism and the emperor was a military despot. His rule was the rule of fear. It subsisted by force of arms and terror was its cohering power. It had been extended by ruthless conquest alone until it comprised from eighteen hundred to two thousand square leagues, about two hundred thousand square miles of territory. The capital, situated on an island in the midst of a salt lake, was ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... said Claude, "for passion has greater perils than the road. Cupid's arrows are more terrible to him whose breast is bared by the absence of its mistress, than would be at the traveller's throat the armed and threatening hands of fifty ruthless robbers. But how have you fared since we were so ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... dream of depending upon this first coup d'[oe]il, "stroke of the eye" as the French so graphically call it, for his final diagnosis, or accept its findings until he had submitted them to the most ruthless cross-examination with the stethoscope and in the laboratory, yet it will sometimes give him a clew of almost priceless value. It is positively uncanny to see the swift, intuitive manner in which an old, experienced, and thoughtful physician will grasp the probable nature of a case in one keen ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... had ruined several fine horses. They beheaded sheep in the palace till the floors ran with blood, and then pelted the passers-by with sheep's heads. They spent the money in the royal treasury like water, and played so many heedless and ruthless boy-tricks that the period of these months of folly was known, long after, as the "Gottorp Fury," because the harum-scarum young brother-in-law, who was the ringleader in all these ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... herself), it is not to be denied that the various parts are kept up with much decision and spirit. Of the men, indeed, Hircan is the only one who has a very decided character, and is represented as fond of his wife, Parlamente, but a decided libertine and of a somewhat rough and ruthless general character—points which have made the interpreters sure that he must be Henry d'Albret. The others, except that Geburon is, as had been said, older than his companions, and that Simontault sighs vainly after Parlamente, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... with an inconsiderable diminution of numbers, returned in triumph to Dublin. For this victory the Long Parliament, in a moment of enthusiasm, voted the Lieutenant-General a jewel worth 500 pounds. If any satisfaction could be derived from such an incident, the violent death of their most ruthless enemy, Sir Charles Coote, might have afforded the Catholics some consolation. That merciless saberer, after the combat at Kilrush, had been employed in reinforcing Birr, and relieving the Castle of ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... between Mrs. Ess Kay and Potter, and though she seemed so angry with Mrs. Van der Windt and several other members of the Ball committee, for trying to make a stand against her, she was perfectly ruthless about the names she would scratch off the lists her secretary was continually making out ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... this; and he is rebuked by the other, who begs Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. To which Jesus replies, "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise," implying that he will spend the three days of his death there. In short, every device is used to get rid of the ruthless horror of the Matthew chronicle, and to relieve the strain of the Passion by touching episodes, and by representing Christ as superior to human suffering. It is Luke's Jesus who has won ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the blast of British oppression; and now, in the decline of life, sits under his own well earned vine and fig-tree, near the grave of his unfortunate countrymen, who fell gloriously, while fighting the ruthless savages, under the command of ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... what you would say," interrupted the widow, "you would tell me that she is in the hands of pirates, ruthless villains who fear neither God nor man, and that, unless a miracle is wrought in her behalf, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Wilderness" she had been reading that hideous account which appears in all the longer biographies, of the mutilation of St. Theresa's body three years after her death by some relic-hunting friars from Avila. In a ruthless haste, these pious thieves had lifted the poor embalmed corpse from its resting-place at Alba; they had cut the old woman's arm from the shoulder; they had left it behind in the rifled coffin, and then hastily huddling up the body, they had fled southwards with their ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... speedily have been torn from his guards, had not these shouted that he was placed in their hands by Saladin himself for conduct to the governor. As the emir was as sharp and as ruthless with his own people as with the prisoners who fell into his hands, the name acted as a talisman, and Cuthbert and his escort rode forward without molestation until they reached the ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... the harpoon into each other ruthless, though? Why, you could see that old girl fairly squirm when she got one of them assault-and-battery glances. Her under lip would quiver a bit, she'd wink hard three or four times, and then she'd sort of collapse, smotherin' a sigh and not finishin' ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... spring of 1864, he returned, to find his young wife and children dead, his beautiful home burned to the ground, his whole estate devastated and laid waste by the ruthless hand of war; and yet almost his first act on reaching Richmond was to go to Libby Prison, visit the two Federal officers for whom he had been held as hostage, and who, like himself, had been under apprehension of being hung, and shake hands with ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... my son! Dear hope for ever lost! The ruthless gods have served me but too well. For what a life of anguish and ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... strait-laced, searching, unsparing, iron-handed, peremptory, absolute, positive, arbitrary, imperative; coercive &c 744; tyrannical, extortionate, grinding, withering, oppressive, inquisitorial; inclement &c (ruthless) 914.1; cruel &c (malevolent) 907; haughty, arrogant &c 885; precisian^. Adv. severely &c adj.; with a high hand, with a strong hand, with a tight hand, with a heavy hand. at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet. Phr. Delirant reges plectuntur ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... of light and shade, Wherein soft rains fell slowly, and became Clouds among sister clouds, where fair spent beams And dying glories of the sun would dwell, Why have they whom I know not, nor may know, Strange hands, unseen and ruthless, fashioned me, And borne me from the silent shadowy hills, Hither, to noise and glow of alien life, To harsh and clamorous swords, and ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... from wild lips and frenzied brain! In word or thought, how fails his fate Of madness wild and desperate? (To the CHORUS) But ye, who stand compassionate Here at his side, depart in haste! Lest of his penalty ye taste, And shattered brain and reason feel The roaring, ruthless thunder-peal! ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... white under this ruthless attack: all his energies concentrated in keeping that stillness, but at the back of his mind was born a dull pain and sharp wonder, a consciousness of the Law of Consequence by which he must abide, and henceforth accept as a principle of life. There was too great confusion in his mind for ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... splashed in the old boyhood days. The sea wind sings to you as it sang of old. The old dreams come back to you, the dreams you dreamed as you slumbered upon the cornhusk mattress in the clean, sweet little chamber of the old home. Forgotten are the cares of business, the scramble for money, the ruthless hunt for fame. Here are ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... few, but, on the other hand, they are apparently prepared to go any length and to run any risk. It must also be borne in mind that the ordinary man or lad in India has not too much courage, and that the loyal are terrorised by the ruthless extremists." ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... heart for seventy years, became the main text of Walker's famous folio of 1714 on "The Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England in the Grand Rebellion." According to that book, and to Royalist tradition, it was a ruthless persecution and spoliation of all the best, the most venerable, and the most learned of the clergy of England. Fuller, however, writing at the time, and corroborated by Baxter, represents the facts ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... shocking that the female should equal the male in callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male? It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact more dangerous, more deadly as a criminal, than ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... exacted a contribution of 2,000,000 thalers in Jutland. For every fisherman's hut that the Danish fleet might injure on the German coast, he threatened to lay a Danish village in ashes. The foreign Powers objected to such ruthless campaigning. The Scandinavian States intervened on behalf of Denmark. Emperor Nicholas of Russia, who regarded the Schleswig-Holstein movement as an unjustifiable rebellion, came to their support. Lord Palmerston, who had once proposed to ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... a mental outline of his requirements. First he had to figure out the angle at which to make his attack. Once he knew the legal angle, then he could find ruthless men in the proper position of authority whose ambitions he could control. He regretted that the elder Holden had not allowed him to study civil and criminal law along with his courses in real estate and corporate law. As it was, Brennan was unsure of his legal rights, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... valley of Ajalon; after having gained a home by God's assistance in a land flowing with milk and honey; this very generation proved worse than their fathers. The original inhabitants of Canaan, whom they dispossessed, could hardly have surpassed them in sin against Jehovah; and therefore the ruthless slaughter of their conquest was as unreasonable as it was inhuman. So much for ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... Such monsters of barbarity ought to be excluded from all the privileges of human nature, and hunted down as wild beasts without pity or cessation. What infamy ought these powers to incur, who employ and encourage such ruthless barbarians?] ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... turns, with a haughty lip, On poverty, stern and grim, When he seizes the fiend with a ruthless grip, Ye need not fear for him. But when poverty comes to a little child, Freezing its bloom away— When its cheeks are thin and its eyes are wild, Give ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... determination of the Emperor Napoleon to abrogate the temporal power. Pius IX. would enjoy greater security in Turkey than in the hands of a State which combines the tyranny of the Convention, the impudent sophistry of a government of advocates, and the ruthless brutality of military despotism. Rather than trust to Piedmont, may Pius IX. remember the example of his greatest predecessors, who, relying on the spiritual might of the Papacy, sought beyond the Alps the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... encountered Wilbur; for a long while I'd forgotten him entirely. He hung to the rail a little farther forward, gazing across the maelstrom with a fixed, exhausted expression. His face was haggard; the strain of the night had marked him with a ruthless hand. As I watched him, his eye turned slowly in my direction; he gave me an anxious look, then crawled along the rail to a place ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... room was filled. The red-brown figures, naked save for the loincloth and the headdress, the impassive faces dashed with black, the ruthless eyes—I knew now why Master Edward Sharpless had gone to the forest, and what service had been bought with that silver cup. The Paspaheghs and I were old enemies; doubtless they would find their task a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... canons and monks, benefices for the education of poor students, hospitals for the care of the sick, periodical distribution of alms to the poor, to have rosaries and other prayers said and pilgrimages made for the souls in Purgatory. All these have been swept away by the ruthless hand of the civil power, wishing to reform the Church; and even at the present day, when the Christian soul is about to appear before the judgment-seat, there are legal impediments in the way of his making by will donations for prayers or Masses. Therefore, my dear people, whilst you ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... flashed over his livid face and polished helmet, but his stern features were composed even in their awe! He remained erect and motionless at his post. That hour itself had not animated the machine of the ruthless majesty of Rome into the reasoning and self-acting man. There he stood amidst the crashing elements; he had not received the permission to desert his station ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... that was all. In a flash she understood him. She felt as if he had performed some ruthless operation upon her, and she was too exhausted to say more. Unconsciously her hand pressed her heart. It was beating strangely, spasmodically; sometimes it did not beat at all. For she knew beyond all doubting that what he said ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... discovered that the schooner had been already pillaged of everything of value about her. Even the cabin door and windows were gone, and every rope and spar and sail; the cook's galley, hold and forecastle plundered of every article worth carrying off, and an air of general desolation and ruthless ransacking pervaded her from stem ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... now clear that Hitler has begun his campaign to control the seas by ruthless force and by wiping out every vestige of international ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... had come so very near ruining his letter—an important letter, describing the lair of the illicit distillers to a deputy marshal of the revenue force, who was known to be in a neighboring town. He had good reason to withhold his signature, for the name of the informer in the ruthless vengeance of the region would be as much as his life was worth. The moth had not spoiled the letter—the laborious letter; he was so glad of that! He saw no analogies, he received not even a subtle warning, as he sealed and addressed the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... made her harder, more ruthless. She was now up against her own fate. It was for her to choose between being Mrs. Skrebensky, even Baroness Skrebensky, wife of a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, the Sappers, as he called them, living with the European population in India—or being Ursula Brangwen, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... fuming And vapors of the candle starlike Into the cloud her wings she buoys on. Each, that thus sets the pure air seething, May poison it for healthy breathing— But the Critic leaves no air to poison; Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity. Thus much of Christ does he reject? And what retain? His intellect? What is it I must reverence duly? Poor intellect for worship, truly, Which tells me simply what was told (If mere morality, bereft ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... in fairer flower, The soul receives a new enrichment— Fruition sweet and full of power. But when on later altars arid It downward sweeps, about us flows— Love leaves behind such deathly traces As Autumn tempests where it blows To strip the woods with ruthless hand, And turn ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... now completely filled the feverish fancy of the child. With ruthless power he possesses himself of the boy—all opposition is vain—the silver cord is loosened. Once more he cries out in fear to his father, then his eyes are closed. The man, beside himself, strains every nerve—his own and his horse's; his haste is like a wild ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... with these cries and lamentations, she sank into a state of calm despair, and, kneeling down upon the floor, she began, with dreadful earnestness and solemnity, to call upon Almighty God, imploring him to avenge the death of her children, and invoking the bitterest curses upon the head of their ruthless murderer. ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait; Though fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing, They mock the air with idle state. Helm nor hauberk's[1] twisted mail, Nor even thy virtues, Tyrant! shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears; From Cambria's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by two ruthless passions—avarice ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... two middle-aged men, nearing fifty years, going out to a ruthless war without our wives. We had packed our own valises at the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. We realized that probably we were leaving half our things in closets and drawers and were taking the wrong things with us, and checking ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... in one of the best houses in the place; but during the battle with the buccaneers, her husband, who fought bravely in defence of the place, was killed, and she now found herself not only a widow, but a prisoner in the hands of those ruthless pirates whose very name had struck terror into the hearts of the Spanish settlers. Plunged into misery and despair, it was impossible for her to foresee what was going ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... the thing that made them men, the three shrunk to the moral stature of animals. Boland was the tiger, brooding over the city with yellow eyes, seeking whom he might devour. Druce was the wolf; cunning, ruthless, prowling. Anson was the mastiff; savage, brutal, given to wild bursts of rending passion. Love of power lashed Boland to his crimes; lechery prompted Druce in his prowlings; and whisky was the fire that ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... fearful deeds of violence; and, with a series of murders on his conscience, he eventually goes mad. Leubald, whose character is a mixture of Hamlet and Harry Hotspur, had promised his father's ghost to wipe from the face of the earth the whole race of Roderick, as the ruthless murderer of the best of fathers was named. After having slain Roderick himself in mortal combat, and subsequently all his sons and other relations who supported him, there was only one obstacle that prevented Leubald from fulfilling ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... caused the destruction by fire of many and many a superb tapestry at the Gobelins, giving as his reason that they contained emblems of royalty, reminders of the hated race of kings. The amateur can almost weep in thinking of this ruthless waste of beauty. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... had he been, he would have felt more sympathy than he did with the beginning of the great movement, with the strivings after reform which preceded it; he had, on the contrary, the sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self-righteousness and cut-and-dryness which would have made him, had he been a Frenchman, a terrorist of the most dreadful type; a regular routinist in extermination of corrupt people. Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may have been shocked by the news of the September ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... remarked in literary circles than any other current matter. There was hardly a club-meeting or a dinner at which they were not discussed. "There was something so grotesque in the idea," said a correspondent, "of this ruthless Yankee poking among the revered antiquities of Britain, that the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter." The story of his Uncle William who "followed commercial pursuits, glorious commerce—and ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and bloody-minded, to agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and did not try to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular or philosophical, seldom denied any god, seldom ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the endless wilds of Scythia had poured a vast swarm of nomad horsemen, ill-favored, fierce, ruthless, the scions of the desert and seemingly sworn to make a desert of Europe. They were led by Attila, the "Scourge of God," as he called himself, in the tracks of whose horse's hoofs the grass could never grow again, as ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... her Peeping Toms,—"compact of thankless earth," who bored moral auger-holes in fear, and spied. Her nudeness was more complete than hers of Coventry, by as much as ridicule is more ruthless than coarse curiosity. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... always the person responsible for the decrepit condition of many of the books which 'unfortunately lack the rare portrait,' or have, 'as usual,' some valuable plate or map lacking. Were this professional despoiler, or his minions, the ruthless booksellers, to destroy the sad wrecks which result from their piratical depredations, all would be well. But they set these poor maimed hulks adrift again, to seek salvage from some deluded collector, or some impoverished or ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... was disposed so far to relent, as not to destroy ALL the pale-faces in his power. Whom, and how many he meant to spare, Ungque could not tell; but his quick, practised discernment detected the general disposition, and his ruthless tendency to oppose, caused him to cast about for the means of resisting this sudden inclination to show mercy. With the Weasel, the moving principle was ever that of the demagogue; it was to flatter the mass that he might lead it; and he had an innate hostility to ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... I greet thee heartily. A function truly noble falls within thy grasp; And thou wilt with it deal as only sages can. The distant Isles are now crushed by the pow'r Of ruthless tyrants, who on plunder bent, Oppress a helpless, but a worthy race, Which groans beneath a yoke of foreign make, And hence it fitteth not the sable necks On which it now, relentless, firmly rests. ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... could give and which you refused; you, surely, never made a slave's home desolate by taking her child from her. No, such words as those which I have just quoted from your letter, are a perfect assurance that neither you nor your kindred, within your knowledge, are guilty of ruthless violations of domestic ties among your colored people. Otherwise, you could not write as you do about "desolate homes" and "the child gone." While I read your letter and think of you, I am reminded of those words: "Is not this he whom they seek to kill?" Why, if the insurgents' ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... looked the part. His lean, pointed nose and beady little eyes were of the interfering, meddling type. You could not imagine him, like the yellow-eyed ruminant next to him, sitting and waiting ruthlessly for things to happen. Noureddin Ali looked more likely to go out and be ruthless. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... into the room, and, returning to the balcony, stood before them alone, with her hands crossed and her eyes looking up to heaven, as one who expected instant death, with a firmness as far removed from defiance as from supplication. Even those ruthless miscreants were awed by her magnanimous fearlessness; not a shot was fired; for a moment it seemed as if her enemies had become her partisans. Loud shouts of "Bravo!" and "Long live the queen!" were heard on all sides; and one ruffian, who raised his gun ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... remorseless and ruthless man destroyed more than fortunes; he trafficked in human lives. There had been half a dozen mysterious suicides which had been investigated by Scotland Yard, and found directly traceable to letters received in the morning, and burnt by the despairing victim before his untimely ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... had already; for although John Hawkins, port-admiral of Plymouth, and patriarch of British shipbuilders, was a faithful husband enough, and as ready to forgive as he was to quarrel, yet he was obstinate and ruthless, and in spite of his religiosity (for all men were religious then) was by ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... eyes kindled, and his stern face flushed as he spoke, for although his own homestead had escaped the ruthless savage, friends and kindred had suffered deeply in the irruption referred to, which took place in 1819, and one or two of his intimate comrades had found early graves in the ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... waves; and casting a distant look back upon my city, after the vessel had begun her way in her return to Greece, and divided me from the land of Troy, I wretched fainted through anguish. And consigning to curses Helen, the sister of the Twin Brothers, and the Idean shepherd, the ruthless Paris, since his marriage, no marriage, but some Fury's hate hath utterly destroyed me far from my native land, and hath driven me from my home. Whom may the ocean refuse ever to bear back again; and may she never reach again ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... time, staring at a red George Washington poster, and wondering about a future with a sudden Different Line in it.... It was ten minutes past putting-out-children time! She stared aghast at the ruthless clock, then created two Monitors for Putting Out at one royal sweep. She managed the nightly eviction with such gay expedition that it almost felt like ten minutes ago when the place, except for the pride-swollen monitors, was cleared. While these officers watched the ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... time in her remembrance of him she had seen her uncle driven to positive severity, to anger even, in opposition to the truth which his heart refused to accept. When he was calmer he began to reason with her, to uphold her in the true faith, against her seeming self, in these profane and ruthless disclosures. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the New Year. The snow had folded its white mantle over the earth, and in the gardens, where the flowers had hidden their fragile beauty from the ruthless fingers of the Frost King, it gleamed whitely from amid the sombre foliage of the hardy evergreens. On lawn and terrace it lay in uneven drifts, tossed at will by the chilling winter winds. Pendant from tree and shrub hung glittering icicles, and on the window panes the frostwork looked like ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... ages. It is also, as a result especially of the nineteenth century, a city of destruction. While we may regret but not repine at the disappearance of much of interest and value as the result of progress, yet wanton, ruthless destruction, such as has taken place within the last century, deserves the sternest denunciation. In spite of its being, in consequence, a "city of destruction," York is a store-house of original material for the history of England. Its records are in earth, stone, ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... a coward; he was only ruthless and predatory after the manner of his kind. A thrill of admiration tingled his spine. The women of his race were chattels, lazy and inert, without fire, merely drudges or playthings. Here was one worth conquering, ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... this time out of breath; but I could not have answered him to save my life. Like one of his own favourite house-spiders, I had been unconsciously spinning a web of delightful self-delusion, and here came the ruthless housemaid and swept it all away. How blind I must have been not to see it long ago! John might be very fond of pheasant-shooting, and I believe, when the game is plentiful and the thing well managed, that sport is fascinating enough; but people don't travel night ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... Ambition seemed satiated; and the vanquished, after having passed under the yoke of their enemy, concluded they might wear their chains in peace. Such were the hopes of those Scottish noblemen who, early in the preceding spring, had signed the bond of submission to a ruthless conqueror, purchasing life at the price of all that makes life ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... our clothes, and the pieces of ice which flew from the blows of Peter's ax were whisked into the air, and then dashed over the precipice. We had quite enough to do to prevent ourselves from being served in the same ruthless fashion, and now and then, in the more violent gusts of wind, were glad to stick our alpenstocks into the ice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... LUCIO. Why, what a ruthless thing is this in him, for the rebellion of a codpiece to take away the life of a man! Would the duke that is absent have done this? Ere he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the Old Water Mill Had stood in the long ago, But the cataracts leap no more on the hill, And the boom of the roaring dam is still, For the gleaming stream in its grief went dry, When the ruthless hand of Art passed by And laid the Old Mill low; And the violets, cold in death, now lie Wrapped in the glistening snow; And the biting air is crisp and chill Around the ruins of the Old ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... land revealed to me once and for all the fomenting spirit of each of the Indian Wars which had accompanied the exterminating, century-long march of our invading race. In a single sentence these men expressed the ruthless creed of the land-seeker. "We intend to wipe these red sons-of-dogs from the face of the earth." Here was displayed shamelessly the seamy side of ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... plain-sailing, breezy British way, have appreciated all the subtleties of his relations with Jeanne? She would ask pointed, probably barbed, questions about Jeanne. She would tear the whole romance to shreds. Jeanne stood too exquisite a symbol for him to permit the sacrilege of Peggy's ruthless vivisection. For vivisect she would, without shadow of doubt. His long and innocent familiarity with womankind in Durdlebury had led him instinctively to the conclusion formulated by one of the world's greatest cynics in his advice to a young ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... such questions cropping up almost everywhere I went. In their dealings with the public and still more with their rivals, there was a ruthless vigor that swept old-fashioned maxims aside. And I liked this, for it got things done! I was bored to find, as I often did, these men in their homes quite old-fashioned again to suit sober old wives who still went to church. I remember one such elderly lady and the shock I unwittingly ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... wanted: the Hanoverian, the lawful, limited king upon the throne and themselves as his ministers. They were not delicate about the means they used. Since there were treason and plots, they too turned their hands to plotting and with a vigour and ruthless resolution of which the ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... ever the most vivid remembrance of the terrible and artificial torments that were used to put down new forms of religion or extinguish the old. It sees with the eye of memory the ruthless extermination of all the people of all sexes and ages, because it was their misfortune not to know the God of the Hebrews, or to worship Him under the wrong name, by the savage troops of Moses and Joshua. It sees the thumb-screws and the racks, the whip, the gallows, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... turn to the whole affair, which at once removed all cause of shame from our species; and which, if it left reason for any to blush, by a noble act of disinterestedness, threw the entire onus of the obligation on himself. Instead of dwelling on the ruthless manner in which he and his friends had been seized, the worthy Doctor very tranquilly informed his listeners, that, finding himself, by hazard, brought in contact with another species, and that the means of pushing important discoveries were unexpectedly placed in his power; ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... has not been disturbed by the fact that vast Peking, the vaunted capital, is in the hands of ruthless invaders. At first everyone thought that with the Palace empty, and all the great Boards and offices made mere camping-places for thousands of hostile soldiery, the government of the whole empire would be paralysed—sterilised. Yet that has not happened. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... mortals more than is a mortal's due. And therefore must thou keep this dreary rock, Erect, with frame unbending, reft of sleep, And many a bootless wail of agony Shalt utter. Change of mind in Zeus is none, Ruthless the rule ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Toombs. The utterances of most public men were guarded and conservative. But when Toombs spoke the people realized that he uttered the convictions of an unshackled mind and a fearless spirit. Leaders deprecated his extreme views, but the hustings rang with his ruthless candor. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... and in the other direction, had it been daylight, the aviators could have looked off to the open country, where fields lay. These were no longer covered with the fruits of the harvest, as in prewar times, but lay desolate, with ruined farm buildings, and everywhere the indelible mark of the ruthless hand of the Hun showing what had befallen the border Departments ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... came over Geoffrey. Did that ruthless "Impossible" apply to his case also? Would Lady Everington's door be closed to him on his return? Was he guilty of that worst offence against Good Form, a mesalliance? Or was Asako saved—by her ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... method. Pupils of his and their pupils have faithfully endeavored to transmit to the musical world the tradition of his individual style. The elect few have come into touch with his vision of beauty, but it has been mercilessly misinterpreted by thousands of ruthless aspirants to musical honors, in the schoolroom, the students' recital ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... wizard art, May weave wild legends, as the seers of old Made gods and heroes into being start. Perchance some mystic mound may wake the spell: A crumbled skull—a spear—a vase of clay Within its bosom half the tale may tell— And all the rest 'tis fancy's gift to say. Alas! that ruthless science in these days, To its stern crucible hath brought at last, The cherished shapes that all so fondly gaze Upon us from the dim poetic past! Else might these moonlit prairies show at dawn, The dew-swept circle of the ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... He had not recovered in the least from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such an eye as Mary's, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... his body now. With a maniacal glee he rushed upon the devilish contrivance in the corner, tearing the axe from its place with ruthless hands. Throughout the building rang the sounds of smashing wood, furious blows of steel upon wood, and high above the din arose the laugh of Elias Droom. In two minutes, the guillotine lay in chips and splinters about the room—destroyed even ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... age, he stands alone; One of the fierce Allobroges, Whose manly virtue was derived Direct from heavenly powers, Not from this dry, unfruitful earth of ours; Whence he alone, unarmed,— O matchless courage!—from the stage, Did war upon the ruthless tyrants wage; The only war, the only weapon left, Against the crimes and follies of the age. First, and alone, he took the field: None followed him; all else were cowards tame, Lost to all sense of ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... woe for the loss of his thanes, when once had been traced the trail of the fiend, spirit accurst: too cruel that sorrow, too long, too loathsome. Not late the respite; with night returning, anew began ruthless murder; he recked no whit, firm in his guilt, of the feud and crime. They were easy to find who elsewhere sought in room remote their rest at night, bed in the bowers, {2a} when that bale was shown, was seen in sooth, with surest token, — the hall-thane's {2b} hate. Such held ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... buried together at a place known for many centuries after as 'The Lovers' Grave,' and here Frederick used to loiter often, musing fondly on the dear sister who had been snatched from him in this ruthless fashion, and dreaming of the lofty artistic career which he had planned in ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... having his melody changed, if by changing it a better song can be made. And the successful lyric writer is only too glad to change his words, if a hit can be produced. With the one end in view, they go over their song time after time and change lyrics and melody with ruthless hands until a whistle-making ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... treetops, or should she cast him to the ground and thus be rid of him quickly and without trouble? No! She had longed for him, had risked her life to gain possession of him, and she would keep him against all odds. He did not fill the void left in her heart by the inroad of the ruthless eagle; he did drive her to the point of distraction; but he was new and interesting just as a doll or a mirror or a rubber ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... money paid over, and the clergyman left, with the understanding that the woman should be delivered to him at his house. It seemed as if poor Althesa would have wept herself to death, for the first two days after her mother had been torn from her side by the hand of the ruthless trafficker in human flesh. On the arrival of the boat at Baton Rouge, an additional number of passengers were taken on board; and, amongst them, several persons who had been attending the races. Gambling and drinking were now the order of the day. Just as the ladies ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... the enterprise and diligence of another. And the movement for international peace is the chance offspring of these new social forces, at once a protest and a warning against the wrecking of modern economic structures by the ruthless hand of war. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... indeed from the humiliating prospect of corruption and decay; we cling fondly to those companionships, associations, and pleasures, from which death for ever separates us; we deprecate and dread the blighting of our earthly hopes, and the ruthless frustration of our schemes. These are very painful accessories of death; but they are not its sting; they do not make it a poison for the soul as well as for the body. "The sting of death is sin." That sting has been drawn for the Christian, ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... Their very cocksureness is their chief source of strength. They combat objection with such violence and with such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly profess conversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over to prohibition in the "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out much longer. The result is that the "investigation" ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... struggle, and to overcome the destroyer. Never think you are friendless, for then you are a certain victim in the hands of the ruthless enemy—" ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... a band of these fierce Caribs that had attacked La Navidad and destroyed the fort and its garrison, impelled to this, likely enough, by some of the ruthless acts which the Spaniards were much too ready to commit. The leader of these warriors was a bold cacique named Caonabo, chief of a warlike mountain tribe. It is with this chieftain that we are at present concerned, as he was the hero, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the stream, poising and darting among the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his dagger, and found it; he then left the scene of his act of ruthless cruelty, with a conscience less troubled by so dark a deed than it would have been had he rubbed corn between his hands on the Sabbath, or neglected one of the washings prescribed by the traditions ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... So ruthless an example provoked a desperate resistance at Norba. It was betrayed to Lepidus by night; but the citizens stabbed and hung themselves or each other, and some locking themselves inside their houses, set them in flames. A wind was blowing and the town was consumed. So at Norba there was ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... spasmodically, in the last agonies, with a tiny sword-thrust cleaving his melodious throat in twain, so that from the instrument which used to gush with wondrous music only scarlet drops of blood now trickled. The manikins were ruthless. Their faces were ten times wickeder than ever, as they roamed from cage to cage, slaughtering with a fury that seemed entirely unappeasable. Presently the feathery rustlings became fewer and fainter, and the little pipings of despair died away; and in every cage lay a poor murdered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... unparalleled interest, we see the sinister figure of FATE stalk deviously but relentlessly through the mystifying mazes of love, devotion, intrigue, cunning, cruelty and crime, until a conscienceless fiend, in human shape, lies prostrate in death, overwhelmed by the ruthless forces ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... irruption of Early, and his ruthless destruction of Chambersburg led to many recommendations on the part of General Grant looking to a speedy elimination of the confusion then existing among the Union forces along the upper Potomac, but for a time the authorities at Washington ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... coalition with the people of Bonny, whose interests would likewise be affected by the new order of things, and that these men, aided by the savage inhabitants of the country residing in the vicinity of the spot, where the ruthless and cowardly assault was made, met together and resolved on the destruction of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... one hour of the day," she remarked, sinking into a large easy-chair, "which I devote to repose. How shall I preserve my fleeting youth if you break in upon it in this ruthless manner?" ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the emperor on the unfortunate city of Rome. The trembling senate made some preparations for defence but they were rendered ineffectual by the treachery of a slave, who betrayed one of the gates to the Gothic legions. That city which had been for ages the mistress of the world, became the prey of ruthless barbarians, who spared, indeed, the churches and sanctuaries, but placed no other bound to their savage passions. For six successive days the Goths revelled in the sack of the city; at the end of that period they followed Al'aric to new conquests ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... sentiment neither the national establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical growth. Both have been ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... at any time likely to awaken in wrath, to lift the earth into quaking billows like those of the sea, or pour forth torrents of liquid fire that flow in glowing and burning rivers over leagues of ruined land. Such is the earth with which we have to deal, such the ruthless powers of nature that spread around us and lurk beneath us, such the terrific forces which only bide their time to break forth and sweep too-confident man ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... guided me on my lesser pilgrimage among the cupolas and the colonnades, where grave men dream in the silence near marble fountains, or bend muttering their prayers beneath domes that are dimmed by the ruthless fingers of Time. In the buildings consecrated to prayer and to meditation I first sought for the magic that still lurks in ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... have shed or bowed the stem; But gracefully it stands— A gem in beauty's diadem, Unplucked by ruthless hands. ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... and go, Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee. Some lives are buoyant zephyrs sporting free In tropic sunshine; some long winds of woe That shun the day, wailing with murmurs low, Through haunted twilights, by the unresting sea; Others are ruthless, stormful, drunk with might, Born of deep passion or malign desire: They rave 'mid thunder-peals and clouds of fire. Wild, reckless all, save that some power unknown Guides each blind force till life be overblown, Lost in vague hollows of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... gooseherd in ruthless accents, 'I druv these 'ere geese into this 'ere town this morning.' (Here he exaggerated the number of miles traversed.) 'Twelve geese and two gander—a Brent and a Barnacle. And how many is ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the rising and sinking of a certain generation—such is the story; and the years that Tolstoy treats, fifteen or so, may be quite enough to show the sweep of the curve. At five-and-twenty a man is still beginning; at forty—I do not say that at forty he is already ending, though Tolstoy in his ruthless way is prepared to suggest it; but by that time there are clear and intelligent eyes, like the boy Nicolenka's, fixed enquiringly upon a man—the eyes of the new-comers, who are suddenly everywhere and all about him, making ready to begin in their turn. As soon as that happens the curve of time is ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... model of symmetry and breeding by the fancy, or even pronounced a beauty and exquisitely proportioned by connoisseurs; but sweetly pretty—never! I could not stomach that, especially when Albert growled and laid bare his ruthless set of ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... instances the information derived has not been considerable, owing to the total wreck of fortune, the destruction of houses, and the loss of papers, which followed the ruthless steps of the conquering army of the Duke of Cumberland. Most of the hereditary memorials of those Highland families who engaged in both rebellions, perished; and their representatives are strangely destitute of letters, papers, and memorials of every kind. The ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... this Government, the commanders of German undersea vessels have attacked merchant ships with greater and greater activity, not only upon the high seas surrounding Great Britain and Ireland but wherever they could encounter them, in a way that has grown more and more ruthless, more and more indiscriminate as the months have gone by, less and less observant of restraints of any kind; and have delivered their attacks without compunction against vessels of every nationality and bound upon every sort of errand. Vessels of neutral ownership, even ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... possible means. Of those means none was so convenient, in times of continual violence and warfare, to the habits of a nation just emerging from a savage state, and which recognised no other merit than physical force and warlike valour, as that of encouraging those sanguinary and ruthless propensities, sanctifying them in some way or other by religious sentiment, and stirring up and inflaming the passions of the nation, with a view of exterminating all persons who did not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the church and the power of its ministers. Thus it happened ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... until they seemed out of proportion. His collar was an inch too high, and he was evidently wretched in it. Also he had the look in his eyes of a man whose boots are so tight that he wishes to die. His fancy waistcoat and maroon necktie must have been forced upon him by a ruthless salesman who would stop at no crime in the way of trade, and the consciousness of these atrocities and the largeness of his scarf-pin had reduced the poor fellow to the depths of gloom. In one hand he held a pair of yellowish ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the door close upon the supposed "tramp" before venturing to make the inquiries that rushed to my lips. And even then I paused a while. When needing information from Penny, one has to be circumspect; she has a way of shutting off the supply with ruthless decision, yet with a seeming absence of deliberate purpose, whenever she ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... it was strange, in one so independent of others. He had a great faculty, at one time, for not caring, for being (or seeming) ruthless. It's a gift that a politician must envy. It hasn't been my way to lose my heart in politics: it's ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... leisure in the world would fail to elicit them. Lincoln was the type of a New England soldier; a man of fair abilities, not especially of a warlike cast, without much chivalry, but faithful and bold, and carrying a kind of decency and restraint into the wild and ruthless business ...
— A Book of Autographs - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The gaunt, ruthless autocrat of the War Office and the frail crowned descendant of kings fronted each other across the open grave, and the coffin sank between them and was gone. From the choir there came the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... in a way that made doubt impossible; Sloane, even, bewildered as he was, got the impression of his ruthless certainty. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... tell them that this was not one of those ordinary "breach-of-promise" cases which were too often the occasion of ruthless mirth and indecent levity in the court-room. The jury would find nothing of that here. There were no love-letters with the epithets of endearment, nor those mystic crosses and ciphers which, he had been credibly informed, chastely hid the exchange ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... Oh, to thy cursed scream, discordant still, Let harmony aye shut her gentle ear: Thy boastful mirth let jealous rivals spill, Insult thy crest, and glossy pinions tear, And ever in thy dreams the ruthless fox appear! ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of the whole mystery, who had seemed to the boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of his airy ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... pearls, rubies, and other precious stones which once embellished this and every other part of the edifice, were taken away by ruthless invaders of India; and their places filled by colored stones with little loss of effect. Shah Jahan's cenotaph lies unenclosed at the left, showing that it was not included in the original plan. Indeed, it had been the intention of Shah Jahan to build for himself a ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... this year. But let no one mistake him for a mere HORNE of Plenty, pouring out benefits indiscriminately upon the genuine unemployed and the work-shy. He has already deprived some seventeen thousand potential domestics of their unearned increment, and he promises ruthless prosecution of all who try to cheat the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various |
