"Oppression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... council, considering it only as the sequel of that course of persecution under which her Majesty has so long and so severely suffered; and which decision, if it is to furnish a precedent for future times, can have no other effect than to fortify oppression with the forms of law, and to give to injustice the sanction of authority. The protection of the subject from the highest to the lowest, is not only the true but the only legitimate object of all power; ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... and enforced her attendance. Hour after hour her fairy form flitted around the sick-chamber; or sat mute and breathless by the feverish bed; she had neither fear for contagion nor bitterness for past oppression; everything vanished beneath the one hope of serving, the one gratification of feeling herself, in the wide waste of creation, not utterly without use, as she had ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forbidden them at home. Our colonial beginnings were illustrated by sacrifices and martyrdoms even among the lowliest, and their leaders passed in sad vicissitude from pulpit to prison, back and forth, until exile became their refuge from oppression. No nation could have a nobler source than ours had in such heroic fidelity to ideals; but it cannot be forgotten that the religious freedom, which they all sought, some of them were not willing to impart when ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded and woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not native to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave defenders of liberty, since oppression is one of their unconjectured mysteries. Could they guess that the green sward on which they stand so peacefully was once strewn with human corpses and purple with their blood, it would equally amaze them that one generation of men should perpetrate such carnage, and that ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Indeed, Monsieur, I trust this century will see one more great event, the end of this Parisian tyranny, and the resuscitation of provincial life; for I must repeat, my dear sir, that your centralization, which was once an excellent remedy, is a detestable regimen! It is a horrible instrument of oppression and tyranny, ready-made for all hands, suitable for every despotism, and under it France stifles and wastes away. You must agree with me yourself, Durocher; in this sense the Revolution overshot its mark, and placed in jeopardy even its purposes; for you, who love liberty, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ever lived in the kindliest relations with its tenantry; and on the ruins of old aristocratic and municipal institutions that had long guarded and sustained popular freedom, a coarse, leveling tyranny, sometimes democratic, sometimes imperial, established; in the church the oppression of the priesthood, a heartless religious indifferentism, undignified even by attempts at philosophic speculation, propagated and encouraged; and through the poisoned channels of education the taint of infidelity transmitted to generations yet unborn. Such were the evils that followed the establishment ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of great beauty and animation, in reply. But his whole argument consisted in the sophism, that the French had been rendered savage by the long sense of oppression, and that the blame of their atrocities, (which he fully admitted,) should be visited on the monarchy, not on ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... is the crime of turning creed-stopped ears to teardrops shed By the women whom oppression robs of virtue for their bread. Satan's blush would mantle crimson could he see the stunted child Slaving in our marts and ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... who were ready and adroit in seizing upon his slightest errors, and magnifying them into crimes. Difficulties were multiplied in his path which it was out of his power to overcome. He had entered upon office full of magnanimous intentions; determined to put an end to oppression, and correct all abuses; all good men therefore had rejoiced at his appointment; but he soon found that he had overrated his strength, and undervalued the difficulties awaiting him. He calculated from his own good heart, but he had no idea of the wicked hearts ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... the poor down trodden slave, And do all in thy power to relieve him; And when from oppression he strives to be free, Do thou open thy ...
— The Kings and Queens of England with Other Poems • Mary Ann H. T. Bigelow
... suffer oppression are permitted to turn to you for relief, and I am told, further, that there is no wrong which you are unable to remedy. Listen for a few moments to my tale of woe, and then say if you can strike a blow on my behalf. I am an author, that is to say, I have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... the main sources of the Anglo-Irish difficulty has been mutual misunderstanding, generating mutual mistrust and hatred. But the root of the difficulty goes deeper. It is to be sought in the system of misgovernment and oppression which successive generations of British rulers have imposed upon what, with cruel irony, British historians and statesmen have been wont to call "the sister country." This is the real "open secret" of Ireland, a secret that all who run may read, and the effective bearing of which ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... with all their bigotry, may not have had the right of it. If they did not dance and drink they prayed and led God-fearing lives, and if they would not be driven to hear the curates preach, there was not too much to hear if they had gone. When the Covenant was the symbol of oppression, Pollock hated it, when it became the symbol for suffering he was drawn to it, till at last, to the horror of his family, he threw in his lot with the Covenanters of the west of Scotland. Being a lad of parts with competent scholarship, and having given every ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... consider it at all safe for persons to attempt the ascent, having a tendency to apoplexy, for at the height of 15,000 feet above the level of the sea, the extremely rarified state of the air, as well as the almost unbearable oppression of the sun's rays, though surrounded with snow, would increase that tendency to an alarming extent. So oppressive is the sun, that on sitting down in the shade he was asleep instantly. The passage, just above the Grande Plateau (a surface of ice and snow, many ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... finds rest Oft a beam of rapture brightens All the gloom of cloud, and lightens This oppression in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... injustice flows through the veins of society. Men are denied their natural rights; and when the oppression becomes unendurable, their oppressors make all manner of excuses. The affliction is due, they say, to the wrath of God, to the niggardliness of nature, or to the encroachments of foreign nations. Ah, the encroachments of foreign nations! When all ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... sorrel mare with the prettiest legs in the world—even this fortunate lad was apt to have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at times, in the manner of a person with a bad conscience. The only person in the circle with no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix's ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... and not by their wishes. In the next, he resolutely sacrificed his seat by opposing his constituents in supporting the removal of the restrictions on Irish trade, of which English merchants reaped the benefit. He would not be a party to what he considered the oppression of his native country, no matter what might be the effect on his political prospects; and in 1780 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... there, while watching a battle to see how great the Filipinos could be in war, he was slain with bamboo lances sharpened and hardened in fire. Amambar's Christianity did not endure, for he so wearied of the oppression and rapacity of the strangers that when a successor to Magellan appeared he invited him to a banquet and slew him at his meat. But the cross and the statue of Christ worked miracles among the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... red-headed, good-tempered looking jailer—the same, he surmised, whose sternness in duty had baffled the Breton's simple wiles—he stepped out of the sweet morning sunshine into the long stone passages. The first tainted breath of the prison brought a chill to his blood and oppression to his lungs, and the gloom of the place enveloped him like ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community. The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence is the elevation of these submerged classes, we are just beginning ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... unfavorable social conditions. In 1882 the immigration was 800,000. On a single day, in May last, nearly ten thousand arrived in Castle Garden. The steamships are overburdened, and the Cunard and White Star lines employ extra ships to accommodate the emigrants. Oppression in Ireland, and oppression all over Europe, drives the people into emigration; but a large portion of the emigration consists of a substantial population; yet we have enough of the turbulent and debased element to make a serious danger in our large cities, and a formidable ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... language; "what kind of a low-down bird are you, to be gathered in by a goose, and a blue one at that?" Jakey paused, gazing earnestly at the retreating figure of the miner. Then, shaking his fist at the man's back, "Look here, you down-trodden serf of capitalistic oppression, I'll show you! Don't you fool yourself! Tipped me the grand ha-ha; did you? Well, you just listen to me! 'Stead of milking the old cow, you've just rubbed off a few drops from her calf's nose. That's what, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... The oppression of the second class is a blow to public liberty. The magistrate cannot condemn until after the fullest evidence and a succession of facts. This leaves nothing to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... there. And then I confess that I secretly reproached myself for going away. It is comfortable to turn one's back on the Fatherland, and to find more agreeable conditions in a foreign country. But afterward one tells oneself that only egoists leave their own people fighting against darkness and oppression, and that one has no right to play the traitor to home and belongings, while those left behind are striving bitterly ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... I'll retire From splendid palaces, and glitt'ring throngs, To live embosom'd in the shades of joy, Where sweet content extends her friendly arms, And gives increasing love a lasting welcome. With thee, I'll timely fly from proud oppression. Forget our sorrows, and be ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... eighteen centuries, and the brotherhood of man by the Stoics long before them. The doctrine has proved compatible with slavery and serfdom, with wars blessed, and not infrequently instigated, by religious leaders, and with industrial oppression which it requires a brave clergyman or teacher to denounce to-day. True, we sometimes have moments of sympathy when our fellow-creatures become objects of tender solicitude. Some rare souls may honestly flatter themselves that they love mankind in general, but it would surely ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... Almighty—which meant keeping faith with his children upon earth. I reminded them of the dark days, which all of them could recall, when we had repeatedly covenanted to God and to the nation that if we could be relieved of what we deemed the world's oppression we would fulfill every obligation of our promises. I pointed out to them that the Church was passing into the ways of the world; that our people were being pauperized; that some of them were in the poorhouses in their old age after having paid tithes all their active lives; that by our ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... holes, and rallied round him in great numbers. But still his heart failed; for he could not recall his truant thoughts from the wolf-like Arab chiefs, nor help contrasting his half-starved men who had suffered so long from cruel oppression and famine with their strong sons ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... Willin', willin' would I be to say good-bye to this weary world. Death'd be welcome—welcomer to me to-day than to-morrow. For what is it we leave behind? That old bundle of aches an' pains we call our body, the care an' the oppression we call by the name o' life. We may be glad to get away from it,—But there's something to come after, Gottlieb!—an' if we've done ourselves out o' that too—why, then it's ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... It was a nice point, and the balance was even. Mr Vanslyperken's own wishes turned the scale, and he resolved to flog Jemmy Ducks if he could. We say, if he could, for as, at that time, tyrannical oppression on the part of the superiors was winked at, and no complaints were listened to by the Admiralty, insubordination, which was the natural result, was equally difficult to get over; and although on board of the larger vessels, the strong arm of power was ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... dedicated to the Apostle of Ireland, has had a chequered history. Mostly Early English in architecture, modern styles have been grafted on the building without consistency or unity of ideal. The monuments are many. Dean Swift's bears an inscription written by himself and breathing the hatred of oppression and love of liberty characteristic of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... A wicked day, and not a holy day! What hath this day deserv'd? what hath it done That it in golden letters should be set Among the high tides in the calendar? Nay, rather turn this day out of the week, This day of shame, oppression, perjury: Or, if it must stand still, let wives with child Pray that their burdens may not fall this day, Lest that their hopes prodigiously be cross'd: But on this day let seamen fear no wreck; No bargains break that ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... captain, the sergeant, Coleman's dragoman and many of the soldiers yelled human messages, and a moment later he was seen to be a poor, yellow-faced stripling with a body which seemed to have been first twisted by an ill-birth and afterward maimed by either labour or oppression, these being often identical ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of their government. The latter is an absolute despotism. The king has a nominal council with whom he may advise, but whose advice he may, if he chooses, treat with utter contempt. It is not, however, the direct oppression of the monarch that causes most suffering among his subjects. It is rather that of the inferior officers of government whose rapacity and extortion renders property, liberty, and life itself insecure. Deceit, fraud and lying are the natural, if ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lairs of the Count have had. Yes, I was moved. I, Van Helsing, with all my purpose and with my motive for hate. I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyze my faculties and to clog my very soul. It may have been that the need of natural sleep, and the strange oppression of the air were beginning to overcome me. Certain it was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me like ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... to the legal gentleman's seductive speech. So I walked up and down stairs with the kings of England looking at me out of the coloured windows quietly for a week; and then two ugly men entered the house, causing me to suffer a fearful oppression, though my father was exceedingly kind to them and had beds provided for them, saying that they were very ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... these unfortunate negroes learn cowardice and falsehood after they become slaves. When they first come from Africa, many of them show "a frank and fearless temper;"[54] but all distinction of character amongst the native Africans, is soon lost under the levelling influence of slavery. Oppression and terror necessarily produce meanness and deceit in all climates, and in all ages; and wherever fear is the governing motive in education, we must expect to find in children a propensity to dissimulation, if not confirmed habits of falsehood. Look at the true born ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... oppressively—indeed absurdly—he was responsible for what they had now thrown up to the surface. It was—through something ancient and cold in it—what he would have called the real thing. In short his hostess's news, though he couldn't have explained why, was a sensible shock, and his oppression a weight he felt he must somehow or other immediately get rid of. There were too many connexions missing to make it tolerable he should do anything else. He was prepared to suffer—before his own inner tribunal—for Chad; he was prepared to suffer even for Madame ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... thy gloomy cells and shades profound, The monk abjur'd a world, he ne'er could view; Or blood-stain'd Guilt repenting, solace found, Or Innocence, from stern Oppression, flew. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... times. The date was a month old, but the postmark showed that it had just been mailed. She must have postponed her departure somewhat after writing it, or the person with whom it had been left had neglected to post it till now. He felt a sudden oppression and need of air, and taking his hat left the house. It was evening, and the first snow of the season lay deep on the ground. Anger and grief divided his heart. "It's too bad! too bad!" he murmured, with tears in his eyes: "she might have given me one chance to speak. She hasn't ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... in and folded in the gloom cast by his wife's protesting presence. The shadow of it wrapped them even after Anne had left the dining-room, as though her indignant spirit had remained behind to preserve her protest. Gorst had changed his oppression for a nervous restlessness ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... of a Goethe, with his scientific amusements, stage-plays, ducal companionships, and art of taking good care of himself; but we cannot deny at least an equal sanity to the "fanatic" Milton, who deemed it disgraceful to pursue his own gratification while his countrymen were contending against oppression, who was content to sacrifice sight in Liberty's defence, and to live an "extreme" protester against the profligacies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... diarrh[oe]a. 517: nausea, vomiting of the ingesta, and diarrh[oe]a; repeated vomiting, first of bile, afterwards a thin, watery fluid, having a very bitter taste, with violent pains across the abdomen. 518 to 525: oppression, pressing, creeping, drawing and gnawing, pricking, soreness, heat and burning in the stomach. 528: painful sensitiveness in the pit of the stomach, with burning, like heartburn, with bilious diarrh[oe]a, rather greenish, and almost painless. 530: violent pain ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... and high commission, to a monstrous dominion and greatness, and, like giants, setting their one foot on the neck of the church, and the other on the neck of the state, were become intolerably insolent. And when the people of God, through their oppression in religion, liberties and laws, and what was dearest unto them, were brought so low, that they choose rather to die, than to live in such slavery, or to live in any other place, rather than in their own native country: then did the Lord say, "I have ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... justified in extending such engagements beyond the term of one year, much less on the principles he has avowed, namely, "that it was only an act of common justice in him to secure every man connected with him, as far as he legally could, from the apprehension of future oppression." That the oppression to which such apprehension, if real, must allude, could only consist in and arise out of the obedience which he feared a future government might pay to the orders of the Court of Directors, by making all contracts ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... return! Wherever barricades were built, the lock on press and tongue! On the free right of all debate, the daily-practised wrong! The groaning clang of prison-doors in North and South afar! For all who plead the People's right, Oppression's ancient bar! The bond with Russia's Cossacks! The slander fierce and loud, Alas! that has become your share, instead of laurels proud— Ye who have borne the hardest brunt, that Freedom might advance, Victorious ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... emancipated, and we are all enfranchised, after struggling for existence, freedom and manhood—I feel thankful for having had the glorious privilege of laboring with others for the redemption of my race from oppression and thraldom; and I would prefer to-day to be penniless in the streets, rather than to have withheld a single hour's labor or a dollar from the sacred cause of liberty, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood was a place to ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... company and the holy Fathers, holding fast the traditions which we have received. So we sing prophetically the triumphal hymns of the Church: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion; Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem. Rejoice and be glad with all thy heart. The Lord hath taken away from thee the oppression of thy adversaries; thou art redeemed from the hand of thy enemies: The Lord is a king in the midst of thee; thou shalt not see evil any more, and peace be ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... had a cause to champion, she was ready for a fight, even on the losing side. One of her characteristics was a strong sense of justice, and here, she considered, was a distinct case of oppression. She thought over her plan of campaign, and decided that she would ask to be admitted to the Dramatic Club. Next morning, accordingly, she approached the five or six girls ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... of these colonies to refuse British manufactures. Our supplying our mother country with gross materials, and taking her manufactures in return, is the true chain of connection between us. These are the bands which, if not broken by oppression, must long hold us together, by maintaining a ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... things perfect here there would be naught for man to do; If what is old were good enough we'd never need the new. The only happy time of rest is that which follows strife And sees some contribution made unto the joy of life. And he who has oppression felt and conquered it is he Who really knows the happiness and ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... advice as to indulging in manual labour when asked to do so by the Boers, and having reminded them that it would be necessary to retain the law relating to Passes, which is, in the hands of a people like the Boers, almost as unjust a regulation as a dominant race can invent for the oppression of a subject people, concluded by assuring them that their "interests would never be forgotten or neglected by Her Majesty's Government." Having read this document, the Commission hastily withdrew, and after their withdrawal the Chiefs were "allowed" to state their opinions ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... from Saint Louis and Kansas, who had conversed with thousands of the refugees, and who swore that they all told the same story of injustice, oppression and wrong. Upon the arrival of the first boat-loads at Saint Louis, in the early spring of 1879, the people of that city were deeply moved by the evident destitution and distress which they presented, and thousands of them ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... you have anticipated my wishes by the expression of your generous sentiments, so you will agree with me, that the spirit of liberty has to go forth, not only spiritually, but materially, from your glorious country. That spirit is a power for deeds, but is yet no deed in itself. Despotism and oppression never yet were beaten except by heroic resistance. That is a sad necessity,—but it is a necessity nevertheless. I have so learned it out of the great book of history. I hope the people of the United States ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... died, unheard, uncared for, unthought of; the victim not of deliberate cruelty, but of that frightfullest portent, folly armed with power. Happily the years of his imprisonment had been years of swift revolution. The House of Commons had become a tribunal where oppression would not any longer cry wholly unheard; Philips appealed to it for protection, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... prudent jealousy of our Fathers, instead of the resolution I have transcribed, we should have had a LAW, visiting with pains and penalties, all who dared to petition the Federal Government, in behalf of the victims of oppression, held in bondage by its authority. The present resolution cannot indeed consign such petitioners to the prison or the scaffold, but it makes the right to petition a congressional boon, to be granted or withheld at pleasure, and in the present case effectually withholds ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... where they would work with Him. He planned a great kingdom to overspread the earth in its rule and blessed influence, but not by the aggression of war and oppression. Their later literature is all a-flood with the glory light of the coming king and kingdom. Yet when the King came they rejected Him and then killed Him. They failed at the very point that was to have been their great achievement. God's ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... formed for the first time, only a few years ago, there was a fine burst of disapproval. The corporation was declared a scheme of oppression, a hungry octopus, a grinder of the individual. And to prove the case various instances of hardship were cited; and no doubt there was much suffering, for many people are never able to adjust themselves to new conditions without experiencing pain ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... priest nor conjuror -and have heard a vast deal about breaking carabiniers and grenadiers; though, as usual, I dare say I shall give a woful account of both. The worst part is, that by the most horrid oppression and injustice their finances will very soon be in good order-unless some bankrupt turns Ravaillac, which will not surprise me. The horror the nation has conceived of the King and Chancellor makes it probable that the latter, at least, will be sacrificed. He seems not to be without ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... poor old man did not know how he got there; they had thrust him into this strange place and locked the door on him. Long hours had passed. He sat on an uncomfortable cane-bottomed chair, his hands folded across his stomach. There was already a slight sense of oppression in that region of his body. His head, too, felt heavy. Without knowing how or why, he had fallen into a trap, after the manner of some dumb beast of earth. When would they take him out again? And when would that kind gentleman with the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of the earlier years when he led the Liberal party through its wonderful program of reform in England; nor should any prejudice against the friend of Ireland dull our perception to the clear voice which so often pleaded the cause of ignorance and oppression at home and abroad, and touched the best that was in the conscience of his countrymen. A good, great, learned, eloquent statesman, William Ewart Gladstone towers in moral grandeur above his fellows like a mountain peak above the ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Miss Van Tuyn knew. She did not choose to go down and dine alone. A lonely dinner followed by a lonely evening upstairs did not appeal to her; for a moment, like Lady Sellingworth in Berkeley Square, she felt the oppression of solitude. She went to the window of her sitting-room, drew the curtain back, pulled aside the blind, and looked out. The night was going to be fine; the sky was clear and starry; the London outside drew her. For a moment she thought of telephoning to Garstin ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... these patriots met over their cups, and over the bumper of friendship uttered the sentiments of freedom, they had often asked of one another, where should a man be found to rid Newcome of its dictator? Generous hearts writhed under the oppression: patriotic eyes scowled when Barnes Newcome went by: with fine satire, Tom Potts at Brown the hatter's shop, who made the hats for Sir Barnes Newcome's domestics, proposed to take one of the beavers—a gold-laced one with a cockade and a ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... understood that Blanch and her Sister were so hampered and Tyrannically treated by the Steward, he came to their Assistance, supplied them with Money, which he raised from the Fen-men, and fairly set them free from his Oppression and Rapine, reversed his Grants, cancelled his sham Leases, restored Possessions, Leets and Manor-Courts, made up Fences for the Tenants, and so strongly secured their Copyholds, that there is no likelihood they will ever be ousted or much disturbed again. And, to crown ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous
... not like what it was," he said, gesticulating for want of expressive phrases. "It's not like what it was. There is a sort of oppression, a weight. No—not drowsiness, would God it were! It is like a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly across something busy. Spin, spin into the darkness The tumult of thought, the confusion, the eddy and eddy. I can't express it. I can hardly keep my mind ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in- hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... convey to me assurances of the very high esteem in which I was held by the President, and to explain personally Mr. Johnson's plan of reconstruction, its flawless constitutionality, and so on. But being on the ground, I had before me the exhibition of its practical working, saw the oppression and excesses growing out of it, and in the face of these experiences even Mr. Hendricks's persuasive eloquence was powerless to convince me of its beneficence. Later General Lovell H. Rousseau came down on a like ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... if all these negroes were slaves. He had seen an occasional negro in the North, but of course they were freed. He had expected to find them different; less cheerful, perhaps, and carrying an air of oppression. And it disturbed him slightly not to ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... February, 1787. The whole story of the corruption, extortions, and cruelty of the worst of many bad rulers who have been imposed upon that unhappy nation of Hindostan, and who ignorant how to parcere subjectis, have gone on in their unjust oppression, only rendering it the more dangerous by weak concessions, is too well known to need a recapitulation here. The worst feature in the whole of Hastings' misconduct was, perhaps, his treatment of those ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Guards whom they were fighting stood for a government which on paper at its own face value represented only one class and offered hatred to all other classes. When it tried to put into effect its so-called constitution that had been dreamed out of a nightmare of oppression and hate, it failed completely. Machine gun beginning begot cruel offspring of provisional courts of justice and sword-revised soviets of the people so that packed soviets and Lenine-picked delegates and Trotsky-ridden ministers made the actual soviet government ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... pillow. It was now withdrawn, held in its place by several volunteers, and a fellow with a heavy mallet (the sound of which still haunts me at night) drove it home through the bosom of the corpse. The hole was filled with quicklime, and the bystanders, as if relieved of some oppression, broke at once into a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... and their humble follower Mr. Birrell, who in November 1911, informed his friends at Bristol that the Irish had shown a great capacity for local government and that from what people who had seen a great deal of the south and west of Ireland told him there was no fear of persecution or oppression by the Catholic majority of their Protestant fellow-subjects. In support of this, various facts are adduced, which it is well to examine in detail, remembering the poet's ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... involuntary servitude, on the plea of recompense for loss of slaves on the one hand, and, on the other, to counterbalance the influence of Yankee schools and the labor-hiring system as much as possible by oppression and cruelty. I hear that negroes are frequently driven from plantations where they either belong, or have hired, on slight provocation, and are as frequently offered violence on applying for employment. Dogs are sometimes ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... such years in England. The sanguinary struggles of the Roses, the grinding oppression of Henry the Seventh, the spasmodic cruelties of Henry the Eighth, were not to be compared with this time. Of all persecutors, none is, because none other can be, so coldly, mercilessly, hopelessly unrelenting, as he who believes himself ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... the oppression and iniustice, which is committed against realmes and nations, whiche some times liued free, and now are broght in bondage of forein nations, by the reason of this monstriferous authoritie and empire of women. But that I delay till better ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... fear. We'll see that justice is done you," began the politician in his best tub-thumping manner. "We Socialists and Communists are determined to put an end to tyranny and oppression, whether of the downtrodden slaves of Capitalism at home or our coloured brothers abroad. The British working-man wants no colonies, no India. He is determined to change everything in England and do away with all above him—kings, lords, aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... most clear and constitutional.— An Act it is that studies to create A standing army, large and permanent; Which kind of force has ever been beheld With jealous-eyed disfavour in this House. It makes for sure oppression, binding men To serve for less than service proves it worth Conditioned by no hampering penalty. For these and late-spoke reasons, then, I say, Let not the Act deface the statute-book, But blot it out ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... follow our Preacher, who can only turn away with bitterness from this closed door of Death, once more to take note of what is "under the sun." And sad and sorrowful it is to him to mark that the world is filled with oppression. He has already, in the previous chapter, noted that "wickedness was there in the place of judgment and iniquity in the place of righteousness," and the natural consequence of this is oppression. Wherever men have power they use it to bring forth ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... Osman II., in 1620 the good understanding between Poland and the Porte had continued undisturbed, save by the occasional inroads of the Crim Tartars on the one side, and the Cossacks of the Dniepr on the other, which neither government was able entirely to restrain. But the oppression to which the Polish nobles attempted to subject their Cossack allies, whom they pretended to regard as serfs and vassals, was intolerable to these freeborn sons of the steppe; and an universal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Emperor Zeno, was as follows: "Although your servant is maintained in affluence by your liberality, graciously listen to the wishes of my heart. Italy, the inheritance of your predecessors, and Rome itself, the head and mistress of the world, now fluctuate under the violence and oppression of Odoacer the mercenary. Direct me with my national troops to march against this tyrant. If I fall, you will be delivered from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with the Divine permission, I succeed, I shall ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... that the imprisoning net clings too tightly to be stripped from our limbs by our own efforts. Nay rather, the net and the captive are one, and he who tries to cast off the oppression which hinders him from following that which is good is trying to cast off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every effort at self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how to annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... many fair women of France, and after 1870 the terrors of the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the bloody struggle by which a people made mad by long oppression and infernal tyrannies strove to gain ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... and harsh oppression of the court and the nobles toward the poor had gone on increasing day by day, and day by day the latter had grown more sullen and resentful. All the while the downtrodden people of Paris were plotting secretly to rise in rebellion, kill the king and queen and all the nobles, seize their ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... same time it was declared to be unjust, that those persons in the Netherlands who had been for years in the habit of practising Protestant rites, should be suddenly compelled, without instruction, to abandon that form of worship. It was well known that many would rather die than submit to such oppression, and it was affirmed that the exercise of this cruelty would be resisted by her to the uttermost. There was no hint of the propriety—on any logical basis—of leaving the question of creed as a matter between ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all. Compare the German National Anthem "Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and violence, "and precious will their blood be in ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... without again seeing the king, but no one knew where Alfred now was, he, on finding the struggle hopeless, having retired to the fastnesses of Somerset to await the time when the Saxons should be driven by oppression ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... American arms, in the neighborhood of New York, had induced them to employ certain subordinate agents, of extremely irregular habits, in executing their lesser plans of annoying the enemy. It was not a moment for fastidious inquiries into abuses of any description, and oppression and injustice were the natural consequences of the possession of a military power that was uncurbed by the restraints of civil authority. In time, a distinct order of the community was formed, whose sole occupation appears to have been that of relieving their ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... disturbance or disease of the heart. In such cases it is clear that the struggling horses seem to dream-consciousness to embody and explain the panting struggles to which the heart is subjected. They become, as it were, a visual symbol of the cardiac oppression. In much the same way, it would appear, under the influence of sexual excitement, in which cardiac disturbance is one of the chief constituent elements, the struggling horses became a sexual symbol, and, having attained that position, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... attaining their end. One of the least respectable of the French nobles was the Duc d'Aiguillon. As Governor of Brittany, he had behaved with notorious cowardice in the Seven Years' War. He had since been, if possible, still more dishonored by charges of oppression, peculation, and subornation, on which the authorities of the province had prosecuted him, and which the Parisian Parliament had pronounced to be established. But no kind of infamy was a barrier to the favor of Louis ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... and in a few minutes was dozing again. He slept for an hour after being put to bed, but then grew restless, and the night passed wearily between intervals of heavy oppression—half-unconscious wakefulness and rambling, incoherent talk, sometimes of his street-life, of his broom, for which he felt about with weak, aimless hands, of cold and hunger; and then he would break out ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... affable salutation. Or most of all, when his fists clench, his jaws display big nervous knots, his eyes gleam with hard blue light in wrath over some palpable iniquity, some base cowardice, some outrageous act of cruelty or oppression. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... for action, with his officers and men around him, he knelt down near one of his heaviest guns and in a few words asked God to help him in the coming struggle? He might well do that, because, as you know of course, we were in the right, fighting against oppression and wrongs fit to rouse the indignation of the most patient ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... Irish Parliament which he proposed to set up as 'practically independent in the exercise of its statutory functions.' But the overriding authority of the Imperial Parliament would always be there in the background to arrest injustice or oppression, just as it is in regard to every Dominion ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the prophetic foresight vouchsafed some centuries earlier to one who may almost be called his countryman, he would have been astonished to recognize in the humble kingdom just lifting its head in the far West, and struggling to hold its own against Philistine cruelty and oppression, a power which in little more than fifty years would stand forth before the world as the equal, if not the superior, of his own state. The imperial splendor of the kingdom of David and Solomon did, in fact, eclipse for awhile the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... was affected in many ways by the fact of his belonging to a sect thus harassed and restrained. Persecution, like bodily infirmity, has an ambiguous influence. If it sometimes generates in its victims a heroic hatred of oppression, it sometimes predisposes them to the use of the weapons of intrigue and falsehood, by which the weak evade the tyranny of the strong. If under that discipline Pope learnt to love toleration, he was not untouched by the more demoralizing influences of a life passed ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... I have been obliged to stoop to dissimulation to avoid oppression. In an hour of levity, I was ready to give up my fortune to secure my choice. But I am now recovered from the delusion, and hope from your tenderness what is denied ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... dated back to a time when the only mode of accumulating wealth was through oppression. Pirates were rich—honest men were poor. To be poor proved that you were not a robber. The heroes in war took cities, and all they could carry away was theirs. The monasteries were passing rich in the Middle Ages, because their valves opened only one way—they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... government to theirs. Your forefathers went to war with the mother country on account of a few taxes. But a negro must not revolt, he must not even attempt to run away, although he feels the relentless heel of oppression grinding into the dust all his rights, all that is dear to him, all that he loves! A white man may take up arms to defend a bit of property; but a black man has no right to rise up and defend either his wife, or his child, or ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... States to deal with them. The great question to-day was whether the government was superior to the corporations, or the corporations superior to the government. The corporations had exhibited shameless and unpardonable oppression and extortion, as well as effrontery in their dealing with the people and the Government of the United States." "Our people and our country," said the speaker, "were only able to stand the drafts thus made on their liberties because they were yet young and strong and vigorous." ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... at the act itself, Henry Montagu realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair that the boy had left. But again he mastered his frightened mind and thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and coincidence. Unwillingly but helplessly, he was letting into his thoughts the theory that, after he had opened the door instead of before he had opened it, the room had been harboring a maniac. And the theory stabbed him. A mushroom ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is—I DARE! My worst enemy is moi-meme. I lie so miserably open to the inroads and incursions of a mischievous, light-armed, well-mounted banditti, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... yet laboring under the oppression caused by this painful termination of the strange scene when the parlor curtain was again lifted, and Eleanore entered the room where I was. Pale but calm, showing no evidences of the struggle she had just been through, unless by a ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... day before the ball, now that the noise had subsided and the servants were in their quarters, La Signorina went into the gardens alone. An hour earlier she had seen Hillard mount and ride away, the last time but once. There seemed to bear down upon her that oppression which one experiences in a nightmare, of being able to fly so high, to run madly and yet to move slowly, always pursued by terror. Strive as she would, she could not throw off this sense. After all, it was a nightmare, from the day she landed in ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath |
