"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shot to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit of laughter. The sound was harsh even to savagery. "Go your ways, Saunderson," he said. "I've tried the bars of the cage; they're too strong. Stop on your morning round, and I'll give account of ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... you can conceive what my feelings are at the present moment, in mind and body. [Bravo!] You behold an outrage [much confusion]! Shall an exaggerated savagery like this escape punishment, and 'the calm, sequestered vale' (as the poet calls it) of private life be ravaged with impunity? [Bravo, bravo!] Are the learned professions to be trampled under foot by barbarian ignorance ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... gradually and lately that it has perished: while if it be asked, What has become of the people themselves? the answer is, that when any race (like most of the American races in the sixteenth century) is in a dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce the remnant to savagery. Greater nations than El Dorado was even supposed to be have vanished ere now, and left not a trace behind: and so may they. But enough of this. I leave the quarrel to that honest and patient warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will surely ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... fertility. Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach'd, Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, Put forth disorder'd twigs; her fallow leas The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory, Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery; The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kexes, burs, Losing both beauty and utility; And as our ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... become fairly overmastering. I can steel myself against it no longer. I want you with me in my declining years. I cannot leave here. I have become greatly attached to this part of the country, and have no doubt that you will be, also. Sylvan scenes, with a dash of human savagery in the foreground, form the best relief for a too-extended assimilation of books. It has been like balm to me, and will prove ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils—either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... admirable specimens of skilful and liberal management, as well as instances of almost insane blundering on the part of both landlord and tenant. From Blarney to the Blaskets the distance is not that of a couple of counties, but the gap between Kylemore and Rinvyle between civilization and savagery. It would be thought that worse degradation than that on Innisturk and Innisbofin would be difficult to find; but in poverty, misery, and lawlessness the population of those inclement isles is far outdone by the five-and-twenty families now in the position of ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... dictated the savage massacre and mutilation which followed. The death of Zedekiah's sons, and of the nobles who had scoffed at Jeremiah's warnings, and the blinding of Zedekiah, were all measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous delight in torturing. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... whitewashed palisades of many little settlements on the rivers and lakes of the far north are poor relics of the fur companies' ancient grandeur. That broad domain stretching from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean, reclaimed from savagery for civilization, is the best monument to the unheralded ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... passenger list does not matter, but his other name, Captain Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to scare naughty pickaninnies to righteousness from New Hanover to the New Hebrides. He had farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and hardship, the crack of Sniders and the lash of the overseers, had wrested five millions of money in the form of beche-de-mer, sandalwood, pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and copra, grasslands, trading stations, and plantations. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... the lee of a wooded promontory where a score or more of sheet-iron shacks making an unsightly blot upon the fair face of nature proclaimed the fact that civilization had set its heel. Straggling upon the outskirts were the thatched huts of natives, picturesque in their primeval savagery, harmonizing with the background of tropical jungle and accentuating the squalid hideousness of the ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots. What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term "frightfulness." As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where water has accumulated. ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... He had heard of this cruel phase of Southwestern cunning before. With the feeble sophistry of the cynic he mistrusted the good his scepticism could not understand. Howbeit, glancing sideways at the slumbering savagery of the man beside him, and his wounded hand, he did not care to show his lack of confidence. He contented himself with that equally feeble resource of weak humanity in such cases—good-natured indifference. "All right," he said ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... a lurid light on the savagery of the eighteenth century, and which, to my thinking, surpasses in pathos anything occurring in fiction, was long disbelieved. But it was only too true. It is said that ill-luck pursued the lady even after death, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... we were bound for a long voyage, and that the captain had got together a very motley crew. This did not trouble me; in fact, I was glad on both scores. The journey would take me away—I cared not where, the savagery of the crew accorded with my own wild feelings. They were a poor, degraded set, weak physically, and with the stamp of villainy upon them. Their conversation was degrading, their every thought was steeped with ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... his savagery, the fellow uttered a bellow, then, like a warrior smiting his shield with his spear before the charge, he swung his heavy weapon, smashing at one blow that silver-plated merry-go-round with ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... no malice, and very soon remits punishment he has given in the heat of the moment. I think that he regards us Scots as being a people for whom allowances must be made, on the ground of our inborn savagery and ignorance of civilized customs. He does not mind plain speaking on our part and, if in the humour, will talk with us much more familiarly than he would do to ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... the treasures and relics, and painted glass, and monuments, the plunder of the secret almerys, the intoxicated triumph of those rude northern hordes let loose in our fair and lovely island; what scenes of savagery, where now the jackdaw builds, and the blackbird whistles, and the wild water-rat plays with her brood amongst ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... beautiful in its expression of tranquil courage. Laurent, who stood beside him, had thrust his hands deep down into his pockets. The cold cruelty of the proceeding disgusted him; it seemed to him that they could not be far removed from savagery who could thus slaughter men before the eyes of their wives. He drew himself up, looked them square in the face, and in a ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... you gone Before I call the savagery that sleeps Here in the jungle to annihilate ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... had celebrated the maddest orgies on our path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the bars which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called barricades. An elderly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that was thrown in with the programme informs me that the martial spirit of the Zulus (at that time under their own regime) was "identical in many respects with 'Prussian Militarism.'" Certainly there was a savagery about the way in which they progged the air with their assegais that made one picture them as capables de tout. But any comparison, whether in point of costume or royal bearing, between King Mpande and the GERMAN ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... present chapter is an effort to point out the necessity for an understanding of the first trend of motives if we would minimize the temptations of the struggle and free the boy from the constant sense of the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet in the worn path of civilization is not an easy task, but it may give us a clue for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive spirit of adventure corresponding to ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... shrieks of a creature into whom talons have again and again gone home; and mingled with them, hoarse raging cries of triumph. Many minutes they lasted, those noises of the night, sound-emblems of all the cruelty in the heart of Nature; till at last death appeased that savagery. And any soul abroad, that pitied fugitives, might once more listen, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... killing that is seen in many white men is evidently a relic of savagery, for all of these Indians and half-breeds are full of it. Each carries a rifle, and every living thing that appears on the banks or on the water is fusilladed with Winchesters until it is dead or out of sight. This ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... his savagery, I think no one on Earth would disagree. But they are not the same thing. What I do mean is that the Nipe is undoubtedly the most superstitious and bigoted being on the ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... savagery, and there is a superfluity of both in the Soudan. I have no desperate wish so to describe the vileness of the surroundings of the correspondents' camp at Dakhala that even casual thinkers will sniff at it. The place ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... such language exaggerated glance at my piece justicative, the Saturday's article (June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." No denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique, private and personal. The "Saturday Reviler"—there is, I repeat, much virtue in a soubriquet—has grown only somewhat feebler, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that no miscalculations might frustrate their designs. And so, invading below decks, with weapons poised and every fibre on the alert, the concerted attack upon the sleeping victims would be given. With one fell swoop, and with the savagery born of their nefarious undertaking, the crew would be ruthlessly butchered, some few, perhaps, escaping in the general skirmish and fleeing up the gangway, only to be struck down by the villain ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... deeming that honor was satisfied the king ordered the fight to cease. Kamiole gave no heed to his words. He had a tiger's thirst for blood. Like a flash he leaped upon the fallen man and pounded the weapon into his heart. This rebellion against the king and the savagery of the killing caused an outcry of rage and horror. The murderer's chance was desperate. "Face down!" commanded the king. This was the command to put the offender to death. A dozen sprang to execute the order. Kamiole tugged the javelin out ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... darkened and padded cell, and finally had her cut into pieces by two surgeons," so the story goes. Terrified at what he had done and of the consequences which were sure to follow when the King heard of his savagery, the Count ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... man that he sets to goin', when they have come to full fruition skare him most to death, horrify him by the sight. I'll bet Burgoyne felt bad enough, a lookin' on her dead body, if it wuz his doin's in the first place, in lettin' loose such ignerance and savagery onto ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... "And poor Madam Rothsay, too, plunged from the height of civilization into the depths of savagery without even a maid or a mirror. I can fully sympathize with her. But what do you propose to do? Have you thought ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... not only proceeds from the simpler forms of government to the more complex, but it follows the historical order of development. From time immemorial, and down into the lowest strata of savagery that have come within our ken, there have been clans and tribes; and, as is here shown, a township was originally a stationary clan, and a county was originally a stationary tribe. There were townships and counties (or equivalent forms of organization) before there were cities. ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... the ruins of the hut, was a strange scene of rejoicing. Asensio, recovered now from his burst of savagery, was tearful, compassionate; his comrades laughed and chattered and bragged about their prodigious deeds of valor. Over and over they recounted their versions of the encounter, each more fanciful than the other, until it seemed that they must have left ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... war, a second set of changes was prompted by instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of superstition or scrupulous religion,—a permanent light of civilization began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other modes ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... savagery of the elements at their worst, the registering-pen of the anemometer in our office began to write its message. Raging in fury, the tempest leaped to eighty miles an hour, to a hundred miles an hour, to a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The air in the middle of a hurricane is estimated ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sister to moderate at any rate her language, if not her feelings. Two expressions of face were natural to him; one eloquent of good humour, in which the reader of countenances would find some promise of coming frolic;—and the other, replete with anger, sometimes to the extent almost of savagery. All those who were dependent on him were wont to watch his face with care and sometimes with fear. When he was angry it would almost seem that he was about to use personal violence on the object of his wrath. At the present moment he was rather ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of our young friends, but we do so with the feeling that before long we shall hear more about them, and be able to follow their adventures enlisted under the banner of their own beloved land in the fight against oppression and savagery. ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... could give an exact and genuine account of actual facts. Courage failed me to see all, but what I have seen can be summed up in one phrase. In the environs of Shabatz the vanquished put the finishing touch to their acts of fearful savagery by butchering their Servian prisoners, whose corpses were found heaped up in ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,—found himself transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing into its own evil and lawless ways the English who came into contact with it. Ireland had the name and the framework ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... cat's teeth which protruded from every ear; while the long feathers of the Argus pheasant waving from their war-caps, the brilliant colors of their war-coats trimmed with the black and white feathers of the hornbill, and the strange devices upon their gaudy shields but added to the savagery of their appearance as they danced and howled, menacing and intimidating, in the ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his head!" "Tar and feathers!" were several of the cries in the wild medley that went up, the spirit of philanthropy and good fellowship changed to brute savagery on ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... brother the general. The influence which that man, brought up in coast towns, acquired in a short time over the plainsmen of the Republic can be ascribed only to a genius for treachery of so effective a kind that it must have appeared to those violent men but little removed from a state of utter savagery, as the perfection of sagacity and virtue. The popular lore of all nations testifies that duplicity and cunning, together with bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than courage, as heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was the great affair of life. Courage ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... soon explained, and they joined Yonge at lunch. An hour later a dozen trim King's African Rifles cantered up—Zulus all, under command of Yonge, who maintained order through two hundred miles of savagery. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... needed in order to fit mankind for the high calling of the freeman. The problem is to transform the state-ruled-by-force into a state-ruled-by-reason. To this end man must learn to resist and subdue the two inveterate enemies of his nobility, namely, the tyranny of sense which leads to savagery, and the inertness of mind which leads to barbarism, Schiller defines the savage as a man whose feelings control his principles, the barbarian as a man whose principles destroy his feelings. At present, he declares, the mass of men still oscillate between savagery and barbarism, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... rain I stood bethinking me of this ancient city: how in the dark ages it had endured the horrors of battle and siege, had fronted the catapults of Rome, heard the fierce shouts of barbarian assailants, known the merciless savagery of religious wars, and remained a city still only for the cultured barbarian of to-day to make of it ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... find, in this nest of Islamite savagery and among these wild rocks, the uttermost accent of modern French politeness. Your presence is a windfall in quarters so retired, and you sit among orange plants and straying gazelles, while the military band throws softly out against the inaccessible crags the famous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... home, safe in bed, and thought with grotesque grief of some unfinished work. Next minute, I knew that I would not have missed the night out there for any consideration. The grey, slightly sheeny boil of the sea around us; the sweeping savagery of the sky; the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... a hundred tribes of aborigines all more or less akin to those of Kweichau and Burma, but each under its own separate chief. Some of them are fine-looking, vigorous people; but the Chinese describe them as living in a state of utter savagery. Missionaries, however, have recently begun work for them; and we may hope that, as for the Karens of [Page 53] Burma, a better day will soon dawn ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... frail little life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. Could the spluttering ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... however, that with each transference of the virus to a new organic body the bacilli were modified somewhat in form and activity. They became, so to speak, less savage. The bacterium which at the beginning had been for its savagery a wolf, became in the second body a cur; then a hound; then a spaniel; and then a diminutive lapdog! The bacteria were thus said to be "domesticated;" for the process was similar to the domestication of wild animals into tame. The virus was said to be "attenuated;" that is, made thin or fine; ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Sir Satyrane, in whom are united rude untaught chivalry and woodland savagery. He represents natural heroism and ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for you are ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... liberated from the confinement of the hold, wandered about the deck, not a little to the discomfiture of the crew in whose minds there remained a still vivid picture of the savagery of the beasts in conflict with those who had gone to their deaths beneath the fangs and talons which even now seemed itching for the ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stars," said Sadie. "Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the hills. It's grand, but it's terrible, too; and then when you think that we really are, as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of civilisation, and with nothing but savagery and bloodshed down there where the Southern Cross is twinkling so prettily, why, it's like standing on the beautiful edge of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... canoes, swimming children, and dogs, and more than thirty riders, with their feet tucked up round their horses' necks, all escorting a "pale face," was grotesque and enchanting, and I revelled in this lapse into savagery, and enjoyed heartily the kindliness and goodwill of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... sometimes evokes. I had been Margot's slave almost. My affection had brought me to her feet, had kept me there. So long as she loved me I was content to be her captive, knowing she was mine. But a change in her attitude toward me might rouse the master. In my nature there was a certain brutality, a savagery, which I had never wholly slain, although Margot had softened me wonderfully by her softness, had brought me to gentleness by her tenderness. The boy of years ago had developed toward better things, but he was not dead in me. I felt that as I walked up and down the terrace through the ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... little about the mountain's feet, they had scarcely welcomed the sight of the evening star, when they saw before them the mild glow of a window and knew they were come again to the earth that is mother to man. In their cold savagery the inhuman mountains decked themselves out like gods with colours they took from the sunset; then darkened, all those peaks, in brooding conclave and disappeared in the night. And the hushed night ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Indians, dodging from tree to tree, from rock to rock, but always advancing. When the Germans sent up two of their scouting aeroplanes to report the number of the enemy's forces, the enemy picked off the German pilots before the machines were over the tree tops. Here was a mixture of native savagery and efficiency, plus the lynching spirit, plus the pre-revolutionary American spirit and against which, with unequal numbers and complete surprise, no mathematically trained European force ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the extinction and resurrection of the deity were held (by women and girls only) amid the mountains at night, every third year, about the time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to express the excess of grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the god, were wild even to savagery, and the women who performed them were hence known by the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades. They wandered through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with ivy or snakes, brandishing wands and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... not draw admiration. At another stage distinction comes from starting a new fashion. This may be done by an ornament, if it is well selected so that it will "take."[381] Beads have been a fashionable ornament from the days of savagery until to-day. An Indian woman in Florida "had six quarts (probably a peck) of the beads gathered about her neck, hanging down her back, down upon her breasts, filling the space under her chin, and covering her ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... That black remnant of lowest savagery dates back to the time when a pursuing beast was placated by the surrender of something, or somebody; and a conqueror bought off by tribute. The medicine man made play with this race habit, and gross idols were soothed and placated by sacrifices—on which the medicine man lived. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... and their fellow-countrymen held that souls and the universe were immortal, but that fire and water would sometime prevail. Sacrifices were never made, Strabo says, without the intervention of the Druids. Pomponius Mela says that in his time (c. 44 A.D.), though the ancient savagery was no more, and the Gauls abstained from human sacrifices, some traces of their former practices still remained, notably in their habit of cutting a portion of the flesh of those condemned to death after bringing them to the altars. The Gauls, he says, in spite of their traces of barbarism, had ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... it with flashing eyes, in which for an instant he had seen the savagery of fear leap out. Beresford was troubled. The girl was right enough. If West went the length of murder, he would be an outlaw. Sleeping Dawn would not be safe with him after she had ridden out to warn his enemy that he was coming. The fellow was a primeval brute. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... for of the many Southland dogs he had known, not one had shown up worthily in camp and on trail. They were all too soft, dying under the toil, the frost, and starvation. Buck was the exception. He alone endured and prospered, matching the husky in strength, savagery, and cunning. Then he was a masterful dog, and what made him dangerous was the fact that the club of the man in the red sweater had knocked all blind pluck and rashness out of his desire for mastery. He was preeminently cunning, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... task of comprehending her. It was from intelligent perception and not merely from the feminine instinct for making excuses, that she said to herself that John was worn out with the strain of burdens long and uncomplainingly borne; and she was, it might be added, near enough to the primitive savagery of the rustic New Englanders of the last generation, to find it perfectly a matter of course that a man should make of his womenfolk a sort of scapegoat upon whom to visit his wrath against the sins alike of fate and ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... apart by itself. We read the description of the life of the Romans, and we marvel at the inhumanity of those soulless Luculli, who satiated themselves on viands and wines while the populace were dying with hunger. We shake our heads, and we marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, who were serf-owners, supporters of household orchestras and theatres, and of whole villages devoted to the care of their gardens; and we wonder, from the heights of our grandeur, at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isa. v. 8: "Woe unto them that join house to house, that ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... into the colorless literature of the empire. "Atala" is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European—that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... something archaically crude in what he was trying to believe, when he came to analyze it. Yellow Bird possessed her powers, but they were definitely limited. And to believe beyond those limitations, to ride upon the wings of superstition and imagination, was sheer savagery. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... shrine, whereto shall come On pilgrimages, in the distant days, The strong and generous youths of Canada, And, musing there in rich imaginings, Restore the balance and the beaver-pack To the wide hall; see forms of savagery, Vanished for ages, and the stately shades Of great Tecumseh and high-hearted Brock. So shall they profit, drinking of the past, And, drinking loyally, enlarge the faith Which love of country breeds in noble minds. But now to ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... among the most refined habits and methods the most barbarous and disgusting acts are found. A refined and humane spirit of culture seems, by some method, or at some time, to have been grafted on to a spirit of primitive savagery, and each to have retained its character and practices. But their social system was not an unhappy one for their people. It was an epoch of handiwork, where all were employed and all were fed; and if there were few comforts and enlightenments in their life, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... Of savagery in which the Fates Had given him birth and dwelling-place— And so, descending through estates Of gentle vassalage, his race Had come ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... last hundred years are many and great, but it is not necessary therefore to believe that in three generations a great nation has emerged from savagery. Let us see what part of La Bruyere's description may be set down to rhetoric, and to the astonishment of the scholar who looks hard at a countryman for the first time. Undoubtedly the peasant is sunburnt; unquestionably he is dirty. His speech falls roughly on a town-bred ear; ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... daughter and granddaughter of one of these gentlemen afterwards became Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The country, as far as I could see, appeared to be highly cultivated. The people in their habits and customs presented a curious mixture of savagery and civilisation. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... it all than what she had heard, and evil curiosity mingled well with distrust and the remnants of her wrath of the morning. She, impending disaster itself, walked about with gathered shadow at the eyes and the rudimentary muscles of savagery fixing the hard ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... purity of their souls. They were a humanizing influence, the guardian angels of mankind, the inspirers, the mothers, the protectors of innocence. It pleased him to think that woman had softened harsh dealings between man and man; that every mitigation of savagery, every incitement to worthy or heroic actions, was due to her gentle words, her encouraging example. From the very dawn of history woman had opposed herself to deeds of violence. What was it Count ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... place and speak vaguely of the Druidic philosophy and science. Caesar also refers to their science, but both he and Strabo speak of their human sacrifices. Suetonius describes their religion as cruel and savage, and Mela, who speaks of their learning, regards their human sacrifices as savagery.[1027] Pliny says nothing of the Druids as philosophers, but hints at their priestly functions, and connects them with magico-medical rites.[1028] These divergent opinions are difficult to account for. But as the Romans gained closer acquaintance with the Druids, they found ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... cast was up to its extremely difficult task, if you estimate that task, as it seems to me you must, to be the reproducing of the original Victory characters. Perhaps Mr. SAM LIVESEY'S Ricardo was the nearest, though the primitive savagery of his wooing had to be toned down in the interests of propriety. Mr. GAYER MACKAY made his Jones interesting and plausible in the quieter opening movements. In the intended tragic spasms one felt that he became rather comic than sinister. Not his fault, I think. He had no room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... Laurence Hope must hold a unique place in modern letters. No woman has written lines so full of a strange primeval savagery—a haunting music—the living force ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... typical frontier French city, touched alike by the glamour of reflected civilization and the barbarism of savagery, yet ever alive with the gayety of that lively, changeable people; I returned, after those five years of burial in forest depths, to discover it under the harsh rule of Spain, and outwardly so quiet as to appear fairly deserted of inhabitants. The Spanish ships of war—I counted ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... suffered from gout in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of inhuman savagery. When it was dead it ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... thousand and one indentations and peaks of the old roofs are depicted, as if in black festoons, on the clear golden sky. At this moment, there suddenly passes over merry, laughing Japan a somber shadow, strange, weird, a breath of antiquity, of savagery, of something indefinable, which casts a gloom of sadness. And then the only gayety that remains is the gayety of the population of young children, of little mouskos and little mousmes, who spread themselves like a wave through the streets filled with shadow, as they swarm out from ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... that she might give so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity—nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth—such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... that a people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the Morning Post, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah. We want the real Catholic Church above the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... over the man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain bush-men; and of the final rescue by Tasman, he who was hatcheted only last year and whose head reposed in some Melanesian stronghold—and all breathing of the warmth and abandon and savagery of the burning ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... as we have seen, is just after enlisting; the other is after he has been wounded. A clearing station is the first resting-place he has. He has had a terrible shaking, seen his chum killed perhaps, taken part in savagery let loose. He is often all broken up, seeking again for a foundation. The difficulty is that his stay is so short, as a rule only a few days. Our record patient was poor Burke, an Irishman from an Irish regiment. He had been wounded when out with a wiring party which scattered under ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... base of the new society was the freeman who fought, tilled, judged and grew from more to more. He wrought a state out of tribal kinship and fostered an independence and self-reliance which no oppression could destroy. The story of man's slow ascent from savagery through barbarism and self-mastery to civilization is the embodiment of the spirit of optimism. From the first hour of the new nations each century has seen a better Europe, until the development of the world ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... Hall, this group gives to the imaginative observer a most vivid picture of a characteristic scene in that bygone age, millions of years ago, when reptiles were the lords of creation, and 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' had lost none of her primitive savagery, and the era of brute force and ferocity showed little sign of the gradual amelioration which was to come to pass in future ages through ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... from the settled villages and from the punishment due their atrocities. Consequently, the latter were extraordinarily fierce. Many heathen were numbered among them, accustomed long since to that rudeness of life and savagery, and they were all the worst kind of people. They committed notable depredations on the civilized villages, robbed the boats that anchored in the ports and bays, and treacherously committed many murders. Their boldness rose to such a pitch that one could not cross through the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... breaking the share in tough roots, eases up, and goes over them until they decay of themselves. In really good ground they leave the soil the richer for having suffered natural decomposition. If John is prone to savagery when hungry (and he usually is), our wise wife will wait until he has dined before broaching matters that may ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... as black as her hair, which in its piled-up and metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical pale complexion—very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... amiable, intelligent and hospitable; but, like all the women of Buenos Ayres at that time, were perforce ardent Federalists and detesters of the "savage Unitarios." Farragut mentions an incident occurring at an official festivity in honor of Rosas, which shows the savagery that lay close under the surface of the Argentine character at that time, and easily found revolting expression in the constant civil strife and in the uncontrolled rule of the dictator. "In the ball-room was a picture ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... modern Attilas, and the recent invasion of the barbarians, under the form of red republicans, socialists, communists, all different phases which describe the relapse of the once converted races into their primitive condition of savagery. Austria would long ago have dissolved but for the Semitic principle, and if the north of Germany has never succeeded in attaining that imperial position which seemed its natural destiny, it is that the north of Germany has never ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... to kill him, and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick." But more than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and he would come to a recollection of himself, startled ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... loose, and they smeared their faces with their cut hands, and as for the two black women, they pounced upon those green plants with fierce swashes of their gleaming knives, and though they could have sensed little about the true reason for it all, worked with a fury of savagery which needed no motive only its ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... nothing in reply, but he went to his ball with a hint of savagery, bent, and almost without aiming sent it at terrific speed up the table. It struck first the red, then the white, pocketed the former, and whizzed ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... against my wish to stop and ask the cause of the bystanders. None, however, could make clear the matter, and all men said that thou art wont each day to ride the mare in this most brutal fashion, whereat my mind marvelled all the more. I now would ask of thee the cause of this thy ruthless savagery, and see that thou tell me every whit and leave not aught unsaid." Sidi Nu'uman, hearing the order of the Commander of the Faithful, became aware he was fully bent upon hearing the whole matter and would on no wise suffer him to depart until all was explained. So the colour of his countenance ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... sixteenth century: the ferocities, cruelties, and savagery of those wars: depopulated and ruined this rich and flourishing country: the Inquisition drove thousands of Flemings, an industrious and orderly folk, to England, where they established silk manufactures: and the carrying trade which had been wholly in the hands ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... humble. I instanced Rhodes in naming some of the world's monarchs of mind and will. Very well! Yesterday all Christendom was ringing with his imperial work. He was developing a continent; establishing the reign of law, industry, and peace where savagery and the wilderness had held sway for a ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the valley of the Mississippi, and joined with loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana. But the strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore no proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of the rivals who were soon to contest them. [Footnote: On the claim of France that all North America, except the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida, belonged to ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... a reservation at the Bosque Redondo. Here they engaged in civilized farming. A great system of irrigation was developed; but the appropriations necessary for the maintenance of so large a body of people in the course of their passage from savagery to civilization seemed too great to those responsible for making grants from the national treasury, and just before 1870 the Navajos were permitted to break up their homes at the Bosque Redondo and return to the canyons and cliffs of their ancient land. Millions were spent in conquering them where ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... have been recorded in the history of San Francisco. Hopkins lived to pass into inconsequence. Terry was released to wreak once more his violent hatred on a fellow being, to perish in a third and final outburst of that savagery which marred his ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman |
