"Cruelty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Well, he didn't give the burial squad any work." And the two laughed, a laugh that had more than a hint of sadistic cruelty in it. "If I had my way," the nurse went on, "I'd do the same with all these nuts that come back from the scout ships raving of home and mother. It's my idea that they're all bluffing. It's a good way to be shipped to the rear, where ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... bring that to pass. Mayst thou some time remember me when thou art racked with anguish; may the fleece like a dream vanish into the nether darkness on the wings of the wind! And may my avenging Furies forthwith drive thee from thy country, for all that I have suffered through thy cruelty! These curses will not be allowed to fall unaccomplished to the ground. A mighty oath hast thou transgressed, ruthless one; but not long shalt thou and thy comrades sit at ease casting eyes of mockery upon me, for all ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... is the way some of us have been treated, you know that, mates," he exclaimed, throwing the yet palpitating form of the boy into the sea, when it was eagerly seized on by the ravenous sharks, waiting for their prey supplied by the savage cruelty of man. Many even of the mutineers cried, "Shame! shame!" Hargraves turned fiercely ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... this gang will be so far reduced, in point of strength, that he will not be able to work more than 30 to 40. It will therefore require a supply of 50 new negroes to keep up his estate, and that not owing to cruelty, or want of good management on his part; on the contrary, the more humane he is, the greater the number of old people and young he will have on ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... he was thinking less of his hearers than of himself. It was at that point, Hastings thought afterwards, that he began to lose himself in the ugly enjoyment of describing his cruelty. It was as if the horrors to which he gave voice subjected him to a specious and irresistible charm, equipped him with a spurious courage, a sincere indifference ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... over the evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the history of the world—dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... 77: A man can not be)—Ver. 666. This he says by way of palliating the cruelty he was guilty of in his orders to have the ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... will easily conceive that the terms of my answer to the Duke of Buckingham were those of unmeasured indignation—yet he, the parasite, the ready instrument of royal vice, and the malignant associate of Charles in his last act of premeditated cruelty, suffered the accusations of the injured husband to pass unnoticed and unrepelled; and I am persuaded that nothing but the dread of exposure prevented me from feeling the full abuse of the power of the crown by the master I had served with so much fidelity ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... to such extremity as to be under the necessity of surrendering on any terms that might save their lives from the cruelty of the Persians, sent on the morning of the 23d, offering to put themselves into our hands, on condition that we furnished them with the means of being conveyed either to Muskat or India. We agreed to this proposal, on which Captain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... turned back to the coast by the big Englishman's orders because of unwarranted cruelty to their black followers, and one, whose name had long been heralded in civilized communities as that of a great sportsman, was driven from Africa with orders never to return when Bwana found that his big bag of fourteen lions had been made by the diligent use ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hear the fierce uproar of battle; for while we are turning our thoughts up to the God of peace, misguided men are dealing death-blows to their fellow men. I hear cries of rage, I hear the groans of the dying. But sadder than these bloody fields of open strife are the dark places of cruelty. I hear the clank of the prisoner's chain, and the crack of the slave-driver's whip. I see desperate and despairing faces revealing tortured souls to whom the light of each day brings more bitter wrongs, viler indignities, ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... like his glorious body." From this passage has come abundance of reviling of the physical system. Memoirs of good men are full of abuse of it, as the clog, the load, the burden, the chain. It is spoken of as pollution, as corruption,—in short, one would think that the Creator had imitated the cruelty of some Oriental despots who have been known to chain a festering corpse to a living body. Accordingly, the memoirs of these pious men are also mournful records of slow suicide, wrought by the persistent neglect of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Mutimer's there will almost certainly be found a disposition to cruelty, for strong instincts of domination, even of the nobler kind, only wait for circumstances to develop crude tyranny—the cruder, of course, in proportion to the lack of native or acquired refinement which distinguishes the man. We ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... and he, who was upright and good, did all he could to bestow some other living upon the Abbe, in recompense for that he had been stripped of. But the King would not consent, although often importuned, and even reproached for his cruelty. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... proposed to do in about a fortnight, he should give the lieutenant of police some information, which would infallibly lead to the scoundrel's capture. But poor Potter was disappointed in his designs; for, before he could fulfil them, he was made the victim of Cartouche's cruelty. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... insults, of every bitterness, were poured upon the unfortunate being; who seldom attempted to retaliate, or make any other return but a gesture of despair, or a supplication to be suffered to die in peace. Yet all was not cruelty nor insensibility. I saw instances, where friends, bold enough to brave the vengeance of the government, rushed forward to take a last grasp of the hand that must so soon be cold; and my heart was wrung by partings between still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... a common practice among the North American Indians. When a savage kills his enemy he runs his scalping knife round the dead man's head, seizes the hair with his left hand and tears the scalp off. Indeed this dreadful cruelty is sometimes practised before death has occurred. The scalp with its lock of hair is taken home by the victor, and hung up in his tent as a trophy of war. The man who can show the greatest number of scalps is considered the greatest warrior. The dresses ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... pocket. She has told you in that letter a number of facts in her own life, as she sees them, and you look at them as she does. It is natural. To her and to you, I appear to be a monster of evil, a hideous incarnation of cruelty, a devil in short. Did she call me ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... implied. No mind could develop healthily under the perpetual pressure of so hideous a secret; from her earliest childhood her impressions would be warped, her imagination darkened and her mental growth stunted. It would be a great cruelty to tell her the truth; it was a great mercy to tell her the falsehood. It was no selfish timidity which had prompted Mary Goddard, but a carefully weighed consideration for the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... protest against the cruelty of the project. "Nonsense!" she said to herself; "most girls flirt for sport, and it is a pity if I cannot with such a purpose in view. He will soon get over a little puncture in his heart after I have sailed away to my bright future beyond the sea, and perhaps Susie will comfort him;" and ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... came over the soldier's face at this unprovoked demonstration of heartless cruelty was fearful, but he kept his head. "Lor' blime!" he commented to me when I came up and sympathised with him over his loss, "I could have knocked the god-damned head off the swine ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... Frank! Oh, she knew—whatever he said, and however bravely and jauntily he talked. To think that her love for him should have been the principal cause of his being sent to jail, as she now believed. And the cruelty of her father! And the smallness of his enemies—that fool Stener, for instance, whose pictures she had seen in the papers. Actually, whenever in the presence of her Frank, she fairly seethed in a chemic agony for him—her strong, handsome lover—the strongest, bravest, wisest, kindest, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... gradually changed their course as the increasing numbers of the Israelites excited jealous apprehension. Yet all this varying policy and every cruel edict advanced the designs of Jehovah and promoted the welfare of his chosen people. The cruelty of the Egyptians alienated the hearts of the Israelites from the nation and from the land of Egypt, and kept freshly before them the remembrance of the inheritance promised. While considered as strangers, treated as ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... who had been wavering, once more submitted to act in concert with the French; and Hamburg, which city had partaken in the movement of Prussia, and all the country to the left of the Elbe, fell back, for the moment, into their hands. The cruelty with which the defection of Hamburg, in particular, was now revenged on the inhabitants by Marshal Davoust, has consigned to lasting abhorrence the name of that able but heartless satellite of Napoleon. All the atrocities of Junot and Massena, in Portugal, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... times, and generally succeeded pretty well, for their rules were few and sensible, and the boys, knowing that they tried to make things easy and happy, did their best to obey. But there are times when hungry boys cannot be repressed without real cruelty, and Saturday evening, after a half-holiday, was one ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... to obey only in the sense in which he is to submit to injustice, oppression, and cruelty; and that he is ever to seek to throw off the yoke in his created equality and unalienable right to ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... unveiling a monument to a favourite Hohenzollern, the Great Elector. Cuestrin, it will be remembered, is the town where Frederick the Great, another of the Emperor's favourites, was imprisoned by an angry father, along with his friend Lieutenant Katte, when Frederick was trying to escape the parental cruelty and violence. ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... occurred in North-Western history. The standing of the victims, including a Governor appointed by the Hudson's Bay Company, his staff men of position, the unexpectedness of the collison, the suddenness of the attack, the destruction of life, the cruelty and injustice of the killing, and the barbarous treatment of the bodies of the dead, by the Bois-brules war party, fill one with horror, and remind one of scenes of butchery in dark Africa or the isles ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... as Nero, Lucius Domitius, Roman Emperor; born 37; died 68; probably the most prominent type known of wickedness and cruelty, and, nevertheless, ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin
... a body was occasionally cooked by the Samoans; but they affirm that, in such a case, it was always some one of the enemy who had been notorious for provocation or cruelty, and that eating a part of his body was considered the climax of hatred and revenge, and was not occasioned by the mere relish for human flesh, such as obtained in the Fiji, New Hebrides, and New Caledonian groups. In more remote heathen times, however, they may have ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... that, rookery after rookery had been visited and every seal butchered. Old and young alike. No mercy. Worst kind of cruelty." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Very soon there'll be a fierce reaction among the men about this cheap women's labor. There's going to be a new sex struggle—the struggle for bread. Man will use all his strength and all his cruelty to defend himself. There's a time coming when gallantry and chivalry will go by the board, ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... are an incorrigibly degraded set of men. It is by no means uncommon for them to inflict chastisement on negresses with whom they are in habitual illicit intercourse, and I was credibly informed that this cruelty was often resorted to, to disabuse the mind of a deceived and injured wife who suspects unfair treatment. This attested fact, disgraceful as it is, can scarcely be wondered at in men who mercilessly subject defenceless women to the lash without a spark of human feeling, or ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Britain half our food. That we have done this, has been due to the British Navy and the Reserves—the patrols and the mine sweepers—the Fringes of the Fleet—and not least, the merchant seaman. About 6,000 merchantmen have been killed by the enemy, some with diabolical cruelty. These men are torpedoed and come into port, and go for another ship at once. On the ship on which I crossed there were seamen who had been torpedoed three times In its submarine warfare the enemy has broken every international and human law—has used "frightfulness" to its ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... intercourse with the Pacific islanders, for it seemed to me that it would be impossible to find a more quiet, amiable, peace-loving race of people on the face of the earth. I made the mistake of judging the whole by a very few, and set down the stories I had heard of treachery, cruelty, and blood-curdling tragedy as malicious fables. I was speedily disillusioned, however; for a week later we reached the Caroline Islands; and while we found some of these islanders as friendly disposed as those above-mentioned, there were others who did their utmost to entice us to land and ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... discontented when the Socialist government still hedged them in by retaining the old system for the preservation of law and order, or, as in Russia, greatly increased the restraint on their liberty by means of immense numbers of Red Guards, heavily armed and noted for cruelty. Or if these were taken away, the state would feel the enmity of all its better citizens who realized the need for guardians, police, soldiers and courts, to protect them from the crimes of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness—a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... father's undeserving head)—if this diabolical Chawner carried out his threats he would indeed be "done for"; he did not yet fully understand the other's motive, but he thought that he feared lest Paul, in declaring his own sorrows, might also accuse Tipping and Coker of acts of cruelty and oppression, which Chawner proposed to denounce himself at some more convenient opportunity; ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... covered hill and valley with a curtain of unbroken foliage, afforded a thousand lurking-places, and it was well-nigh impossible for an armed force to get within striking distance of the marauders. So, almost daily, stories of horrible cruelty came to the fort, plunging the commander into an agony of rage and dejection at his very impotence. The fort was soon crowded with refugees,—wives bewailing their husbands, husbands swearing to avenge their wives, parents lamenting their children, children of a sudden made orphans,—and ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... "Oh, his outrageous cruelty to the natives when they did not collect sufficient rubber. He used, they said, to burn the native villages and massacre the inhabitants without the slightest compunction. He was known by the natives as 'The Red ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... with whom he is relentless. Such men are thrown into prison, interred in dark cells without trial, and can languish till death sets them free. In this respect the Prince is harsh, and according to Western ideas barbaric, though local circumstances fully excuse his seeming cruelty. The smallness of the prison at Podgorica shows more forcibly than anything else the remarkable lack of crime in the land. At present (1902) dangerous lunatics are confined in the common prison, but an asylum is rapidly ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... incomprehensible supernatural significance—that ideal, destined to guide this man and his associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash, uncalled-for, and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in distress, is set down to his credit, and again the enemy's fleet twice lets him slip past. When, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... civil powers with this bloody work, it is an undeniable fact of history that the Popes often ordered or sanctioned crusades against the Waldenses, Albigenses, and other peoples (see remarks on verses 9-11, chap. 17:6), in which the sword, starvation, and every other means of cruelty imaginable were brought into use to exterminate the so-called heresy. And in view of the fact explained in the comments on verses 3 and 4 of this chapter, that killing is sometimes to be understood in ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... of an enemy, there is no cruelty which can be exercised, no species of torture, which their ingenuity can devise, too severe to be inflicted. To those who have excited a spirit of resentment in the bosom of an Indian, the tomahawk and scalping knife are instruments of mercy. Death by the faggot—by ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Coast still means that distant shore from whence the "first families" of Boston, Bristol and New Orleans exported slaves. Now, for our soap and our salad, the West Coast supplies palm oil and kernel oil, and for automobile tires, rubber. But still to it there cling the mystery, the hazard, the cruelty of those earlier times. It is not of palm oil and rubber one thinks when he reads on the ship's itinerary, "the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Bight ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... proportions because of the number of English names in Ireland. With a politic cruelty the English of the Pale passed an Act (3 Edw. IV., c. 3) compelling every Irishman within English jurisdiction "to go like to one Englishman in apparel, and shaving off his beard above the mouth," "and shall take to him an English sirname of one town, as ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... raise it a burning and shining light of loving-kindness and universal tolerance,—so shall it be the true city set on a hill which shall draw all men to its shelter! But if unjust judgment, intolerance, cruelty and fanaticism, should again be allowed, as once before in history, to blot its fairness and blight its reputation, then there is not much time left to it,—inasmuch as there is a force in the world to-day likely to prove too strong for many of us,—a mighty combat ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... at length upon the cruelty with which the Germans had been treated in the United States and at home, and was cheered when I said that had Christ come down among the civilian population at any time during the war His sense of justice and compassion ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... one daughter by her, whom he brought up in the teachings of Christ. But the Caliph, feigning that he wished to become converted, made him a visit, and brought with him a numerous escort. He slaughtered the entire garrison and threw the Emperor into a dungeon, and treated him with great cruelty in order to obtain possession of ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... Mary said last night was that sentimentality was the crudest thing in the world. It caused more tragedies, she said, than malice. She had learned the cruelty of it by experience. It's not an experience she ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... and clemency struggled for the mastery in the varying expression of his frowning face, but cruelty conquered. Grasping his sword firmly, he bent still further forward out of his chariot, and with one swift, keen stroke, severed the lifeless Prophet's head from its trunk, and taking it up on, the point of his weapon, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... hampered would at once become a mere tame and ineffective desire for the welfare of sentient things, and be wholly deprived of all the attributes of omnipotence. Besides, he saw the same qualities that produced suffering in humanity, such as the instincts of cruelty, lust, self-preservation, manifesting themselves with equal force among those sentient creatures which did not seem to be capable ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Again his course lay toward the West Indies, and again he was intercepted by the inevitable man-of-war. This time he was not so fortunate as to escape until after a month or more of captivity, during which time he was treated with the greatest cruelty on account of his persistent refusal to serve under any flag save that of his own country. At last he made his escape, and reached home. By this time he was naturally somewhat disgusted with the life of a sailor on an American merchant-vessel; and he cast about for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... had said to Adelle, ours is a world of chance and mistake, and the most wholesome thing for every generation is to wipe the slate clean as far as possible and go ahead hopefully, courageously to create a new and sounder life upon a substructure possibly of fraud and injustice and cruelty. Thus man climbed always upwards. To rend and tear and fight, to try to eradicate every wrong was also human, but ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... fear with which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was the innumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments of torture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which then existed, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness and cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of the Dragon had, in no measured terms, denounced the cruelty to the poor old inoffensive man, and were denounced in their turn as friends of the sorcerer. But all were too much exhausted by the night's work to have spirit for more than a snarling encounter of words, and the only effect was that Giles and Stephen ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was concluded, wrote Moncada, "that the Pope, having laid down his arms, may be taken unawares".[484] On the 19th he marched on Rome. Clement, taken unawares, fled to the castle of St. Angelo; his palace was sacked, St. Peter's rifled, and the host profaned. "Never," says Casale, "was so much cruelty and sacrilege."[485] ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... was found to have stopped, and was not again repaired or set in motion. Papers I never saw, had never seen since I came to dwell in shadow, save that single one so ostentatiously spread before me, announcing the loss of the Kosciusko and her passengers—a refinement of cruelty, on the part of those who sent it, worthy ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... heedlessly delayed," he continued: "cost what it may, it shall be no longer postponed. Thou wilt not accuse me of cruelty, or of dishonest silence, but remember the failing of human nature, and pity rather than blame a weakness which may be the cause of as much future sorrow to thyself, beloved Adelheid, as it is now of bitter regret to me. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... saw lately an anecdote of the cruelty of a monkey to his wife, and if I can find the book, I will ...
— Minnie's Pet Monkey • Madeline Leslie
... days of bodily torture in that first hour when his pain has gone: beaten, crushed, and cowed by suffering, he melts with gratitude because he is being left alone, he gasps with a relief so utter that it is almost abject praise of the Cruelty that has for a little loosened its hold. In this abjectly thankful mood was Fritzing when he found his worst agonies were done. What was to come after he really for the moment did not care. It was sufficient to exist untormented and ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... having a way of being many and the truth remaining but one—he held that there would always be enough; since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the unhappy, ferret into their past lives, expose their misfortunes, dig up forgotten offences, offences which have been atoned for and which go back to ten years ago; you can make use of your skill, your tricks and lies, and your cruelty to send a man to the foot of the scaffold, and worse still, you can drive people into taking a mother's children away from her—and after that you say, like Pontius Pilate, that you aren't responsible! Not responsible! Perhaps you aren't ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... to believe. No conference, synod or council is considered by our dissenting friends without a good strong sermon on this topic. Strange that it should resurrect just in time to lose "an interesting patch" of itself! This is cruelty. Why not respect the grave? We recommend the perusal of the obituary of the temporal power written in Italian politics since the year 1870. We believe the tomb ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... what ground I had for such a belief; I only know that I always felt called upon to combat the common illusion that he was by nature and temperament set apart for eternal celibacy, or even that he had ceased to be agitated by matrimonial aspirations. I dimly felt that there was a sort of refined cruelty in thus excluding a man from the common lot of the race; men often have pity but seldom love for those who either from eccentricity or peculiar excellence separate themselves from the broad, warm current ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Am I dealing fairly in allowing him to go on with his preparations? isn't it a kind of cruelty not to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... returned Juliet. "We are apt to forget during the excitement of the moment the cruelty we inflict. I read old Izaak Walton when a child. He made me mistress of the whole art of angling. It is such a quiet contemplative amusement. The clear stream, the balmy air, the warbling of happy birds, the fragrant hedge-rows ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... from its Gethsemane, And now on Golgotha is crucified; The spear is twisted in the tortured side; The thorny crown still works its cruelty. Hark! while the victim suffers on the tree, There sound through starry spaces, far and wide, Such words as in the last despair are cried: "My God! my ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the Tengger was the chosen victim offered to Siva, who, in his attribute of a Consuming Fire, occupied the volcanic abyss. The worship of the Divine Destroyer has ever been a fruitful source of crime and cruelty, and a tangible atmosphere of evil lingers round those hoary temples of India dedicated to the Avenging Deity, whose fanatical followers are reckoned by millions. Through the inversion of creed peculiar to Hindu Pantheism, the propitiation ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... watching them from the windows, and throwing out hominy and bread-crumbs for them to eat. How cold the little sparrows look, as they pick up their food! Children's hearts are generally tender, and always so unless they have been hardened by the practice of cruelty, and Mrs. Dudley's were full of sympathy for the little sufferers. "Oh! mother!" said Eddie, the youngest, "if the birds knew how we loved them, they would come into the house;" but the birds did not know, and they stayed out in the snow, and ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... she treated the novices with such cruelty, and run at them with axes and knives, to do them grievous ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... ago, in days which our own grandparents might almost remember, Christian captives were still toiling under the whips of their Moorish taskmasters in the port of Algiers, with the prospect of torture and death before them if they tried to escape and failed. But the cup of Moorish cruelty and evil-doing was very nearly full, the day of retribution was drawing near, and to England fell the honour of striking the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the victors. The SECOND PERIOD embraces the state of the Peninsula when the conquests of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the East and West Indies had raised to the highest pitch the renown of their arms; sullied, however, by superstition and cruelty. An allusion to the inhumanities of the Inquisition terminates this picture. The LAST PART of the Poem opens with the state of Spain previous to the unparalleled treachery of BUONAPARTE, gives a ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... Doubtless their cruelty was that of terror. Doubtless, although he had other ends to gain which to him were sacred, the Abbot Maldon did believe that Cicely and Emlyn had practised horrible witchcraft; that they had conversed with Satan in order to revenge themselves upon him, and therefore ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... she resented the conviction forced upon her. Reckless he undoubtedly was, at odds with the law surely, but it was hard to admit that attractive personality to be the mask of fiendish cruelty and sinister malice. And yet—the facts spoke for themselves. He had not even attempted a denial. Still there was a mystery about him, else how was it possible for two so distinct personalities to dwell together in ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... the garrison left by Baronof, believing itself in perfect safety, was attacked one night by great numbers of Kalushes, who entered the entrenchments without opposition, and murdered all they met there with circumstances of atrocious cruelty. A few Aleutians only, who happened to be out in their little baidars,[2] escaped by standing out to sea, and brought to Kodiack the news of the annihilation of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... spring bonfires. In the Vosges cats were burned on Shrove Tuesday; in Alsace they were thrown into the Easter bonfire. In the department of the Ardennes cats were flung into the bonfires kindled on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, by a refinement of cruelty, they were hung over the fire from the end of a pole and roasted alive. "The cat, which represented the devil, could never suffer enough." While the creatures were perishing in the flames, the shepherds guarded their flocks and forced them to leap over the fire, esteeming this ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... doing, how, pray, would you have made restitution? Bring me to life again, I suppose, by a miracle. Away, sir, with this cant, which is only fit for the barbarity of the dark ages, when your church was a mass of crime, cruelty, and ignorance; and when a cunning and rapacious priesthood usurped an authority over both soul and body, ay, and property too, that ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of the magnificent Gaston Phoebus were fearfully extinguished in blood and flame! Alas! the splendours of the proud castle of Orthez were dimmed with cruelty and suffering! No wonder that spectres are still said to walk and wail around the ruined tower; no wonder that the moans of the feeble prince, fainting beneath the blow of his mail-clad chief, are heard at night echoing through the loop-holes of the battered walls; or that the plaintive ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Indus flows before it reaches the Indian Ocean. Hyderabad is the capital, situated on the banks of the Indus. This country was ruled by a number of chiefs or princes, who held the title of Ameer. They were a lawless and rapacious set, and tyrannised over their subjects with the most barbarous cruelty. When, however, it was resolved (in 1831) to open up the Indus for the navigation of our merchant vessels, it became important to secure their friendship; and to effect that object, Colonel Pottinger was despatched by Lord William Bentinck, and succeeded in forming with them a treaty, ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... not conglomerate. It is not an act of cruelty on the part of Is'vara that he brings about dissolution, for he does it to give some rest to the sufferings of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Things, for He is the Order of Things Himself. Is there even in Him complete Freedom of Will, freedom to make a world other than this? One wishes, in a sense, to say so, but the horror of it! for then He is responsible for the cruelty of the ant-heap, the feeding of the carnivorous upon the vegetable eaters, the preying and persecution of the malevolent upon the kindly—and He could have made it all otherwise! With a Free Will He could have brought growth without pain, being omnipotent. Here ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... the pressure of public opinion, he had introduced, in the last few weeks or months; and did not know that in doing so he had passed sentence on a life of neglect. In the opinion of the entire bench no infamy, however notorious, could shake the testimony of a witness in a case of heresy; no cruelty was unjust when there was suspicion of so horrible a crime; while the appointment of minors to church benefices (not to press more closely the edge of the accusation) they admitted while they affected to deny it; since they were ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions; between delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor man in a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty is all the other way. He kicks the people who try to catch him; and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel. For it seems to me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty to ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... use of their artillery and small arms upon every little dispute; for as the inhabitants of Moa are well enough acquainted with the superiority which the Europeans have over them, it cannot be supposed that they will ever hazard their total destruction by committing any gross act of cruelty upon strangers who visit their coast; and it is certainly very unfair to treat people as savages and barbarians, merely for defending themselves when insulted or attacked without cause. The instance Captain Tasman gives us of ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... sire; the master of a great empire has a right to do good, but not evil. I—a fairy—am as much above you as you are above your dog. I might punish you, kill you, if I chose; but I prefer leaving you to amend your ways. You have been guilty of three faults today—bad temper, passion, cruelty: do better to-morrow." ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his qualities, but it is more difficult ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the little face before him, and went away, thinking his own thoughts. But he had the cruelty to repeat to Dr. Sandford so much of this conversation as concerned that gentleman; in doing so he unwittingly laid the foundation of more attention to Daisy on the doctor's part, than he probably would ever otherwise have given her. To say ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... buy corn they had to apply to Joseph, whom they little suspected of being the brother they had so cruelly wronged. There is a pretty story, too long to repeat here, of how Joseph disclosed himself to his astonished brethren, and forgave them their cruelty, how he sent for his father to come to Egypt to live near him, how there was a joyful reunion, and how "they all lived happily ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... is as unthinkable, as unbelievable, and as obnoxious to me as is autocracy on earth. There is no such thing as divine right, here or elsewhere,—no divine prerogatives for tyranny, for punishment, for cruelty." ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... friend," she returned. "I could not attempt such a thing. Fernando is a monster of cruelty, and would immediately put out my eyes without remorse. Poor me, what I have to endure!"—and here she placed ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... industrial competition must be considered worse than war; the social organization, which makes the few rich, and dooms the many to the slavery of poorly paid toil, must cease to exist; and if the political state is responsible for this cruelty, it must find a remedy, or be overthrown; society must be made to rest upon justice and love, without which it is but organized wrong. These principles must so thoroughly pervade our public life that it can no more be the interest ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... he 's just as dead as though the law permitted it. I 'm afraid you have n't much of a case, but if you 'll go to work and get twenty-five dollars together, I 'll see what I can do for you. We may be able to pull a case through on the ground of extreme cruelty. I might even start the case if ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... made it exalt the supernatural. Visions, dreams, portents, revelations, all symptomatic of an order of things above nature, are the stuff of what more than ninety-nine per cent of the millions of the race believe about themselves and their fate. Man's cruelty to man, through the ages, is a comment upon how vast and ramifying may be the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... back to Langdale Terrace, and prepare for dinner; whereupon a race began, in which my longer legs gave me so decided an advantage over Coleman that he declared he would deliver me up to the tender mercies of the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," for what he was pleased to call "an aggravated case of ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... dirt. I am speaking figuratively, brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back-alleys in the literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you'd know what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice. I loved cruelty; am I not a bug, am I not a noxious insect? In fact a Karamazov! Once we went, a whole lot of us, for a picnic, in seven sledges. It was dark, it was winter, and I began squeezing a girl's hand, and forced her to kiss me. She was the daughter ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... great struggle against conditions. Life is warfare—not one set of human beings warring upon other human beings—that is murder, no matter by what euphonious name it may be called; but war waged against ignorance, selfishness, darkness, prejudice and cruelty, beginning always with the roots of evil which we find in our own hearts. What a glorious thing it would be if nations would organize and train for this warfare, whose end is life, and peace, and joy everlasting, as they now train and organize for the wholesale murder and burning and pillaging ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses—or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that it passed. There was another bill—it became a law—compelling every ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be, and indeed are, admitted,—for it is impossible to vindicate the policy of the measures adopted by the two last monarchs of the house of Stuart; but neither admission will clear the Covenanters from the stain of deliberate cruelty. ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... the popular party to ill-treat the Jews during the Barons' War. Stories of Jews murdering Christian children were eagerly believed; and the cult of St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. William of Norwich,[1] two pretended victims of Hebrew cruelty, testified to the hatred which ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... A statute was, therefore, passed, by which it was made treason for any one, who had been ordained a priest by authority of the see of Rome, since Elizabeth's accession, to come into her dominions. This act was charged with cruelty at the time, and the charge is still repeated, not only by Romanist, but by many other writers: yet the act was absolutely necessary in self-defence. It was intended to keep the priests out of the country, since ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... a manner, therefore, this short history comes to an end. For the captain got well again, and the general was discovered to have found a home for himself in the shelter for children provided by the society for the prevention of cruelty to these defenceless and helpless little beings. Granger thought it best to leave Liverpool, and as soon as possible Will regained ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was not sufficient ground for divorce. 'But we finer souls must take the law into our own hands,' she wrote. 'We must teach society that the ethics of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.' But somehow the ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... Soulis' heart was not humbled, and he made up his mind, that, come what might, young Buccleuch should die. And in the wickedness and cruelty of his heart he determined that he himself should choose the ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... people of Germany were of the new faith; half the population of France had adopted it; even in Italy protest and disbelief were widespread and active. Only in Spain did the Inquisition with firmest cruelty trample down each ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are sent out by—what to her must seem a new name ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... surely enough to show the diabolical cruelty with which the siege of Antioch was carried on by both sides. The wily governor of Antioch decrees a truce, and breaks it as soon as he has provisioned the city. What would possibly have been refused to arms was given, after seven months' ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... out, and the Canadians that he took into pay, all went for nothing. Most of the soldiers, and no small number of brave Canadians, perished in enterprises ill devised and ruinous to the country, which I found on my arrival ravaged with unheard-of cruelty by the Iroquois, without resistance, and in sight of the troops and of the forts. The inhabitants were discouraged, and unnerved by want of confidence in their chiefs; while the friendly Indians, seeing our weakness, were ready to join our enemies. I was fortunate ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... of bondage. Their existence was a species of grown-up childhood, not slavery. Now they are torn away and carried off to die under the pestilence and lash of Jamaica cane-fields; and the price of their poor bodies will swell the pockets of English slave-traders. For this cruelty to those innocent, harmless people, I hope sometime, somehow, to find an opportunity to exact ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... said (he always called his wife by that endearing name), "I'm sure you are mistaken. I want to see you all again with such intense longing that I feel I shall. This life can't be all. My hearts revolts at it. It's fiendish cruelty to tear asunder forever those who love as we do. As I told you before, I'm going to take my chances—with the publican. Oh! that some one could make a prayer! ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... cruelty against his sons; for Aristobulus was desirous to bring her, who was his mother-in-law and his aunt, into the like dangers with themselves; so he sent to her to take care of her own safety, and told her that the king was preparing to put her to death, on account of the accusation that was laid ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... The sheer cruelty of it sent him pale. Yet it was not so much deliberate as unconscious. She was forcing herself to an unwonted honesty. It was her honest conviction that he was responsible for ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and can't ride or fight," she said when first she conceived her mission, and she had just the common instincts of the working woman. We may suppose her fond of children, for wherever she went she held the newborn babies at the font. She hated death and cruelty. "The sight of French blood," she said, "always makes my hair stand on end," and even to the enemy she always offered peace. "Or, if you want to fight," she sent a message to the Duke of Burgundy, "you might go and fight ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... following false leads at last gave up the search far to the south of the Sahara to turn their attention to the more profitable business of ivory poaching. In a great district they were already known for their relentless cruelty and their greed for ivory. The natives feared and hated them. The European governments in whose possessions they worked had long sought them; but, working their way slowly out of the north they had learned many things in the no-man's-land south of the Sahara which gave them immunity ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... forgiven. Throughout life he steadily practised some unusual virtues. His strict attention to religion was always marked. And his religion was not that mere lavish bounty to the Church which was consistent with any amount of cruelty or license. William's religion really influenced his life, public and private. He set an unusual example of a princely household governed according to the rules of morality, and he dealt with ecclesiastical matters in the spirit of a true reformer. He did not, like so many princes of his age, ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... The cruelty in his face eclipsed any lines of beauty which might have been there. The girl's heart froze within her as she looked once more into those eyes, which had always ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... with a laugh that echoed from Ludgate to Charing Cross, and her voice drowned all the City. He grinned rarely and with malice; he piped in a voice shrill and acid as the tricks of his mischievous imagination. She knew no cruelty beyond the necessities of her life, and none regretted more than she the inevitable death of a traitor. He lusted after destruction with a fiendish temper, which was a grim anticipation of De Sade; he would even smile as ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy |
