"Ruthlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... companions thought it dangerous to spend the night alone at an inn within this belt, as the villagers near the line were as bitter against foreigners as any in the province, the German brusqueness and ruthlessness having greatly ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... life was so vigorous, so alert. It was as if during his strange sleep Valentine had been carpentering his energies, polishing his powers, setting the temple of his soul in order, gaining almost a ruthlessness from rest. He stretched his limbs now as an athlete might stretch them to win the full consciousness of their muscular force. When the doctor took hold of his hand to feel his pulse the hand was hard and tense like iron, the fingers gripped for a moment like thin bands of steel, and ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and, helping themselves, or rather compelling the inmates of the house to help them to whatever they wanted, they treacherously and with ruthlessness shot down John Raymond, an infirm old man, only because he, alarmed at this roughness and brutal conduct, was about leaving the house to seek a place of greater ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Madeline, seeing he would not hesitate to lift her out of the way, surrendered the door. He turned on the threshold. His face was still working, but the flame-pointed gleam of his eyes indicated the return of that cowboy ruthlessness. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... reserved the honored term, good-will. Neither you nor I can reasonably decline to consider the bearing of our actions on any interest whatsoever. Right conduct, since it is inconsistent with the least ruthlessness, must inevitably in the end assume the form ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and not a frog," she went on hurriedly, "he must have lived with his mother in a house. The name of the country they lived in was Egypt. And Egypt had a wicked King. This wicked King ordered all the little boy babies—" She paused, appalled at the thought of telling these infants of that long-past ruthlessness. But, again to her surprise, the infants now showed pleasurable ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... presidency endeavoured to abolish the privileges of the clergy and troops—suppressed monastic institutions—granted absolute liberty of opinion—abolished the laws against the liberty of the press—created many literary institutions; and whatever were his political errors, and the ruthlessness with which in the name of liberty and reform he marched to the attainment of his object, without respect for the most sacred things, he is generally allowed to be a man of integrity, and even by his enemies, an enthusiast, who deceives himself as ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... answered with almost Teutonic ruthlessness. Confound it! I couldn't sit here forever bullying her; sheer desperation lent me strength. "The Espagne sails from Bordeaux on Saturday, I see by the Herald, and if I were you, I should most certainly be on board. In fact, if you lose the chance, I am sure you'll regret it later. The French ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... idea—algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the place had an air of elegance; there was a certain school-boy display proportionate to the means and to the good or bad breeding of the young nobles, also a very keen discrimination among themselves as to rank, social quality, and relative importance. Those familiar with the ruthlessness of boys in their treatment of one another can easily conceive what was the reception of the newcomer, whose nobility was unknown and unrecognized in France, and whose means were of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... arms of his wife—and other crimes committed by hireling soldiers, and by brutalized officers, over which the chaste historian must draw a veil. The church of God itself was not spared during the saturnalia of lust and violence. His temple was profaned, and His altars desecrated. What British ruthlessness had left scathed and prostrate, was soon looked upon with neglect. The moles and the bats held their revels undisturbed within its once hallowed courts, and the "obscene owl nestled and brought forth in the ark of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... winced at the ruthlessness of the cold-blooded murders; but he realized the necessity which confronted them though he could not have brought himself to do the things which the Mexican did with such sang-froid and ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... treated the lands of Europe. But it was a powerful weapon, for if successfully enforced it would destroy Napoleon's Continental System entirely. Accordingly, in pursuance of his policy that fire must be fought with fire, the Emperor retorted with equal ruthlessness, fulminating the terrible Milan Decree of December seventeenth, 1807. In it he declared that any vessel which obeyed the orders of the English admiralty or suffered itself to be searched was and would be regarded as an English ship. It was essential, therefore, that any nation desiring ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... ruthless smile....That was her residue: ruthlessness. She may have left behind her in the turbulent war-zone the savage elementary lust for living at any cost, but she had ineradicably learned the value of life, its brevity at best, the still more tragic brevity of ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... these that I had called the great. His wise eyes saw qualities that weighed more than smartness. Yes, we would sit down where the bank sloped gently to the quiet stream and glance at the picture of our people, the negroes being lynched, the miners' civil war, labor's hold ups, employers' ruthlessness, the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... German soldier wrote in chalk on the door of a house where he had been well received, "Guete Leute hier," and these poor people got chalk and tried to copy the difficult German writing on every door in the street. I am afraid that did not save them, however, when their turn came. It was the utter ruthlessness and foresight with which every contingency was prepared for that appalled me and made me realize what a powerful enemy we were up against. Everything was thought out down to the last detail and must have been prepared months beforehand. Even ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... friends, our strength, so far as it avails, shall never cease to help you, not one whit, when need shall come. But Aeetes is terribly armed with deadly ruthlessness; wherefore exceedingly do I dread this voyage. And he boasts himself to be the son of Helios; and all round dwell countless tribes of Colchians; and he might match himself with Ares in his dread war-cry and giant strength. Nay, to seize the fleece in spite of Aeetes is no easy task; ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... slain in Alexandria, and avenged on the moment, at the very beginning of the great civil war? That is a diary worth the reading. There is told the story of not alone vain hopes and ungratified ambitions, but of an empty stomach and dizzy head to supplement the mental agony and make its ruthlessness complete. There were, too, the high courage which was sorely tested—and an empty stomach is a dreadful shackle—and the bulldog pertinacity which ever does things. That was a diary of real life, with little room for dreams, and much blood upon ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Consistent, persistent aggression and expansion where such policies were beneficial to Rome, with little or no regard for their effects on Roman associates, allies, friends or enemies. Studied ruthlessness. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... miles of water, just as she developed the use of barbed wire entanglements along the front. Infantry advancing across No Man's Land were held helpless before the enemy's fire by barbed wire entanglements. Germany, with her submarine policy of ruthlessness, changed the Atlantic Ocean into another No Man's Land across which every American soldier had to pass at the mercy of the enemy before he could arrive at ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... that grim significance passed on to "Red" Pierre, indeed, because he never impressed the public imagination as did the terrible ruthlessness of McGurk. At that he did enough ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... history. Neither in nor out of the Confederacy, neither protected by the Confederate lines nor policed by the enemy, they were subject at once to the full rigor of the financial and military demands of the Administration of Richmond and to the full ruthlessness of plundering raids from the North. Nowhere can the contrast between the warfare of that day and the best methods of our own time be observed more clearly than in this unhappy region. At the opening ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... mixture of genius and vice. He hates and he loves fiercely, as if there were wild gipsy blood in his veins. Though seemingly a model of decorum and devoted to his art, he complains of his "daily drudging round" and "the cramped monotony of his existence." He commits his crime with the ruthlessness of a beast, his own nature being wholly untamed. If we deduce that his father was an adventurer and a vagabond, we shall not be far wrong. If we deduce that his mother was the opium-eater, prematurely aged, who had transmitted ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... enervated and almost decaying manner. Her beauty was of the dropping-to-pieces type, bound together by wonderful clothes of a fashion peculiar to herself and very effective. But they had the energy, the ruthlessness, and the indifference to opinion of their father, and loved to startle the world he had won for himself. They were shameless, ultra-smart, with a sort of half-condescending passion for upper Bohemia. And as neither their mother nor they ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... in the hands of that woman with the cruel eyes or a victim to the ruthlessness of Strangwise made Desmond cold with apprehension. If they believed the girl knew where the jewel had disappeared to, they would stop at nothing to force a confession from her; Desmond was convinced of that. But what had ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... transformed railroads that had formerly been the playthings of Wall Street and that frequently could not meet their pay-rolls into exceedingly profitable, high dividend paying properties. In this operation Vanderbilt typified the era that was dawning—an era of ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of private rights, of contempt for law and legislatures, and yet of vast and beneficial achievement. The men of this time may have traveled roughshod to their goal, but after all, they opened ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... business it is. My brother Yoshitomo has eyes to see an opportunity. To-night, he will attack us.". It is true that Tametomo afterwards refrained from taking his brother's life, but the above proves that he would not have exercised any such forbearance had victory been attainable by ruthlessness. History does not often repeat itself so exactly as it did in these Hogen and Heiji struggles. Fujiwara Yorinaga's refusal to follow Tametomo's advice and Fujiwara Nobuyori's rejection of Yoshitomo's counsels ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... when they settled in Eastern and Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous heathen pirates. They massacred or enslaved the civilised or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants with savage ruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed the monuments of Roman occupation. They let the roads and cities fall into utter disrepair. They stamped out Christianity with fire and sword from end to end of their new domain. They occupied a civilised and Christian land, and they restored it to its ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... so much!" Mrs. Pakenham cried, a little shocked at the other's ruthlessness. "Three ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of our traits and fewer of our mental processes. Even we who have fought them so long can scarcely comprehend the chambers of horror that are their minds. Even were I able to paint a sufficiently vivid picture with words, you of Earth could not begin to understand their utter ruthlessness and inhumanity, even among themselves. You would believe that I was lying, or that my viewpoint was warped. I can say only that I hope most sincerely that none of you will ever ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... criminal affairs connected with "faked" claims and the like. The elder of the two officers in particular drew a vivid and damning picture of the man's life and personality, of the cunning with which he had evaded the law, and the ruthlessness with which he had avenged one or ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... true greatness an element of ruthlessness. Or perhaps she subsequently sent conscience money to the Red Cross anonymously. There are certain matters on which I do not ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rate of ten thousand a year. Well, we dined as we were, Carville insisting that as I was up from the country they should bar evening dress for one night. This was rather pretty in its way, and I found he was a curious mixture of prettiness and downright brutal ruthlessness. I found a man I knew slightly among the guests, a chap named Effon, son of the soap man, and he told me that Carville was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever met, that women would almost come to him at the crooking of his finger, and even men of mature age were dominated ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... before her as she talked, that horrid encounter with commercial ruthlessness: she saw again poor 'Gene's outraged face of helpless anger, felt again the heat of sympathetic indignation she and Neale had felt, recognized again the poison which triumphant unrighteousness leaves behind. She shook her head impatiently, to shake off the memory, and said aloud, "Oh, it makes ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the act; but imposed on its ceaseless sound there are very splendid things—some worn a little threadbare by now, but many still fresh. In the next act the prima donna ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... strict confidence and say that the memoir is not intended to convey a threat of submarine warfare. I should only like you to remind the Ambassador before his interview with the President of the expectations we based in the spring on Wilson and to call his attention to the increasing ruthlessness with which the enemy is carrying on the war. I take it for granted that Gerard will treat my memoir as strictly confidential and will ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... circling tide, thy namefellow, and those Rock-arched, self-hollowed caverns—thus to come Unto this land, whose womb bears iron ore? Art come to see my lot, resent with me The ills I bear? Well, gaze thy fill! behold Me, friend of Zeus, part-author of his power— Mark, in what ruthlessness he bows me down! ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... ruthlessness and prompt obedience were of no avail to him. Soon after his return from the western provinces he perished under ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... show the inability of the medival mind to understand that the past could have been different from the present. All these romances are full of picturesque adventures and present a vivid picture of the valor and loyalty of the true knight, as well as of his ruthlessness and contempt ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... there in time for business. We've gained a reputation for inhospitableness at Las Palmas that I want to overcome." In spite of their recent clash, in spite of the fact that this fellow's ruthlessness and indifference to human life shocked her, Alaire was conscious of her obligation to him, and aware also of a growing friendship between them which made the present situation all the more trying. Law was likable, and he inspired her with a sense of ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... reports of disaster and wilful acts followed with increasing rapidity. The sinking of American vessels disclosed a ruthlessness of method that was gravely condemned in President Wilson's message of armed-neutrality, only to be followed by acts of more wilful import—finally evoking the proclamation, April 6, 1917, declaring a state of war in existence between the United ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... oppressive power. It never denotes merely a physical quality; in such expressions as 'leur fauve volee', speaking of the ravens in La Fin de Satan, 'le desert fauve' (Androcles), 'son bec fauve', of the vulture (Sultan Mourad), the suggestion of wildness or ruthlessness predominates. Usually the word is used in a wholly figurative sense. Thus in La Fin de Satan the fallen archangel, flying from Jehovah, is 'fauve et hagard', Barabbas stumbling against the Cross is 'fauve', and of the lunatic ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... were defending it successfully, but, in their success, their savage instincts had run amuck. Not content with slaying the invaders they had annexed their enemy's property and squaws. Then, with characteristic ruthlessness, they had set about carrying war far and near, but only amongst the Indians. Their efforts undoubtedly had a dual purpose, The primary object was the satisfying of a war lust suddenly stirred into being in savage ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... admit your ability without admitting their own inferiority, so it isn't ability at all. It's just dirty underhanded trickery and selfish ruthlessness." He thought for a moment. "How did Government House find ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... N. revenge, revengement^; vengeance; avengement^, avengeance^, sweet revenge, vendetta, death feud, blood for blood retaliation &c 718; day of reckoning. rancor, vindictiveness, implacability; malevolence &c 907; ruthlessness &c 914.1. avenger, vindicator, Nemesis, Eumenides. V. revenge, avenge; vindicate; take one's revenge, have one's revenge; breathe revenge, breathe vengeance; wreak one's vengeance, wreak one's anger. have accounts to settle, have a crow ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Slovenes also subscribed. Francis Kossuth, the Magyar Opposition leader, welcomed with eloquent phrases the idea of an alliance between his party and the new Coalition; but when he came into power he forsook this attitude and exhibited the ordinary Magyar ruthlessness—he himself introducing a bill to make the Magyar language obligatory on Croatia's railways, and if a prospective Croat passenger did not know what name the Magyars had given to his old home and could not ask for a ticket in the Magyar language, he was told to stop where he was until he had acquired ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein |
