"Conscienceless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of them!" he announced vehemently. "I hate this upstart Cyclops and his conscienceless power. I hate the pampered brother—but Thayre is right. Great God in heaven, gentlemen, it is a family of geniuses. Stop and reflect. Fifteen years ago they were bare-footed—ragged—half-starved, the whole brood. Now consider them. Hamilton is magnificent, ruthless, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... writer was a deliberate deceiver. There can be no such explanation of his personation of John as that which satisfies our minds in the case of Daniel and Ecclesiastes; the book is either the work of John, or it is a cunning and conscienceless fraud. And it seems to me that any one who will read the book will find it impossible to believe that it is an imposture. If any book of the ages bears in itself the witness to the truth it is the Fourth Gospel. It shines by its own light. Any of us ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... King nodded, conscienceless now. The Prince scurried behind a big rock and reappeared at once with a willow branch from the end of which dangled a piece of thread. A bent pin occupied the chief end in view. He unceremoniously shoved the branch into the ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... social in character, the call of race invariably being the final appeal. The economic motive has accompanied this, however, and has been found to be of increasing importance. Says DuBois: "The fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom."[1] The question was indeed constantly recurrent, ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating conflict with the Protestants and the Duke of Guise. At last, wearied and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless king quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old duke, as he entered the king's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Admiral observed, joining in the conversation, "I consider the submarine danger the greatest to which this country has yet been exposed. No one but a nation of pirates, of ferocious and conscienceless huns, could have inaugurated such ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conscience spurs them on to reforming the world. Since they are more often wrong than right, they become, as it were, a sort of misdirected Providence, raising havoc with the happiness and comfort of others. Whether the conscienceless or those overburdened with this type of conscience have done more harm in the world is perhaps an open question, which I leave to the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... great composers and the great poets and philosophers—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, and others—has passed and been succeeded by the hard, cruel, and sterile age of materialism, and the domination of an aggressive and conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet and prophet of man's moral nature, and it is this nature—our finest and highest human sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and truth—that has been so raided and trampled ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... a story so common that the public has come to look at its monotony instead of its pity. The old tale of an unhappy married life—made so by a brutal, conscienceless husband, a robber, a spendthrift, a moral coward and a bully, who failed to provide even the means of the barest existence. Yes, he had come down in the scale so low as to strike her. It happened only the day before—there was the bruise ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... unparalleled interest, we see the sinister figure of FATE stalk deviously but relentlessly through the mystifying mazes of love, devotion, intrigue, cunning, cruelty and crime, until a conscienceless fiend, in human shape, lies prostrate in death, overwhelmed by the ruthless forces of his ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... thing of the whole is," he observed, with unwonted emphasis, "that we never suspected Roland Yorke, knowing him as we did know him. It will be a caution to me as long as I live, never to go again by appearances. Careless, thoughtless, impulsive, conscienceless Roland Yorke! Of course! Who else would have been likely to help themselves to it? I wonder what scales ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... is a conscienceless liar, but I can't help liking him, and he'll always nest warm in the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... adventurer, with its ups and downs of fortune. His widowed mother's indulgence, his own innate selfishness, and the hardening influence of war combine to render him a villain of the Richard III type, absolutely heartless and conscienceless. He robs his own family, fixes himself leech-like on that of an uncle, marries the latter's widow for her money, when he has killed her lover in a duel, drives his wife into vice, lets her die on a pallet, and refuses to pay a visit to the deathbed of his mother, whose ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... While cruelly conscienceless in pursuit of desired ends, Pierre Lanier, unlike Paul, never permitted passion to interfere ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... is too lightly adopted by thoughtless or conscienceless physicians. This practice is much on the increase. I once heard a known obstetrician of the old school say: 'I would as lief kill, if necessary, an unborn child as a rat.' So much for the estimate he put on the value of human life! ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... some plot of De Malfort's contriving—De Malfort, whom she regarded with distrust and even repugnance; for she could recall no sentiment of his that did not make for evil. Beneath that gossamer veil of airy language which he flung over vicious theories, the conscienceless, unrelenting character of the man had been discovered by those clear eyes of the meditative onlooker. Alas! what a man to be her sister's closest friend, claiming privileges by long association, which Hyacinth would have been the last to grant her dissolute admirers ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... he was going to melt a diamond and eat it. Then you sparkled all over in the dark, ever after. Another diamond he was going to plant. They say——He did it all gravely, absorbedly. About it he was as conscienceless as a savage. This was no fancy spun to pleasure a child. This was like ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... which time we purchased one thousand toys for our Christmas party. Such a time as I had coralling a taxi to carry our large crate of playthings to the station. Paris was gay and crowded, making up for its four years of gravity, and the conscienceless taxi drivers were having pretty much their own way, refusing all that were going in a direction that did not suit their convenience, and extorting enormous pour boire. I stood on the edge of the mad stream of vehicles that pressed by on the boulevard, ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... the same sympathy with the poor and the same desire to improve the condition of agricultural laborers and London artisans which led Roosevelt to promote employers' liability laws and other legislation to protect the workingman from exploitation by conscienceless wealth. Kingsley, like Roosevelt, was essentially Protestant. Neither he nor Mr. Roosevelt liked asceticism or celibacy. As a historian, Kingsley did not rank at all with the author of "The Winning of the West" and the "Naval War of 1812." On the other hand, if Roosevelt had written ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... and the boom town was if anything a little cruder than its twin across the river. The men who had drifted into Medora after the news was noised abroad that "a crazy Frenchman" was making ready to scatter millions there, were, many of them, outcasts of society, reckless, greedy, and conscienceless; fugitives from justice with criminal records, and gunmen who lived by crooked gambling and thievery of every sort. The best of those who had come that summer to seek adventure and fortune on the banks of the Little Missouri were men who cared little for their personal ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... come into his mind, a doubt which operated in her favour. To hand the note over to the police was to admit he had no faith left in her, and he had faith. He could not bring himself to regard her as being so absolutely conscienceless as the circumstances suggested. Rather did he lean towards the idea that, after all, despite the evidence of the facts as they stood, she was innocent. And on that point he wanted to ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... love, the passion, the boundless devotion she showed in those last few minutes transformed me in an instant from a selfish brute into a deeply repentant man. I knelt before her in anguish. I made her feel that, wicked as I had been, I was not the conscienceless wretch she had imagined, and that she was mistaken as to the motives which led me into her presence. And when I saw, by her clearing brow and peaceful look, that I had fully persuaded her of this, I let her speak what words she would, ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... implacable, if sometimes dissembled, hostility of their world of waters. The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... they're industrious. They mind their own business, which is killin' the Eirean porcupines we inaccurate call by the name of dinies. It's their profession! Did yea ever hear of a snake with a profession? I'll not have it said that there's snakes on Eire! And I'll denounce yea as a conscienceless politician if yea dare to put such a name on the honest, friendly, industrious Eirean porcupine eaters that up to this moment have been the savin' of the colony! I'll ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... conscienceless, virtueless, Godless applauders of Tom Paine what they ask, and it will simply amount to abandoning our posterity to the lowest, vilest sensualism known in Pagan geography along the line or borderland of a foul lust-gratifying, brutalizing hell. May all Christian people, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... stronger (for its weight) than steel and of a lightness that would have been incredible even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century—a lightness so great that, besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has forever since been capitalized on by our conscienceless competitors of Fairy Bread with their enduring ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... were the chief barrier between Rome and Frederic Barbarossa, between Frederic II and Germany. Charles of Anjou was the latest and most efficient champion of the papal cause; and he lives in history as the forerunner of the conscienceless and shameless statesmanship of the Renaissance epoch. And yet, when we have allowed for the utility of these alliances, the question remains why radical communes, rebellious feudatories, and adventurers in search of kingdoms, found it worth their while to enlist in the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... hungry, and perhaps as conscienceless and wicked a gang as ever assembled together on the earth or went down to the sea in ships, there was yet a certain reluctance on the part of some of the members to revert to cannibalism, although all agreed that it ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... is not the peace we promised our dead or our living heroes," Mr. Stenson said slowly. "We set out to fight for democracy—your cause. That fight would be a failure if we allowed the proudest, the most autocratic, the most conscienceless despot who ever sat upon a throne ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people. Sullen, malicious, conscienceless, with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink and the lowest forms of debauchery, they are filling our prisons and reformatories, marching in an ever-increasing army through the quiet country, and making a reign of terror wherever their footsteps are heard. With a little added intelligence they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... at his hesitation. He did not understand it himself. For Edith Conyngham he felt only disgust, and for Sister Claire an amused contempt; but sparkling Colette, so clever, bright, and amiable, so charmingly conscienceless, so gracefully wicked, inspired him with pity almost. He could not crush the pretty reptile, or thrust her ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... subtle, conscienceless Italian, who though he very likely dreams of crime, dares not commit it; and unlike Cromwell, who disposes of both Houses, Mazarin has had the queen to support him in his ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and it's little cause he has to stay here. They have put a new minister in his place. The Synod, the conscienceless villains, declared it vacant. Castlereagh, through his satellite Black, has corrupted them, too. He'll preach no more in the old meeting-house, nor sit over his bodes in the old manse. He's at the Widow Maclure's now, the woman whose husband was hanged. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... come when respectability will no longer be sold to great criminals by helping them to spend their ill-gotten gains. A long step in advance will have been taken when religious, educational and charitable institutions refuse to condone conscienceless methods in business and leave the possessor of illegitimate accumulations to learn how lonely life is when one prefers ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... are now sorrowing may raise complaint against Winston Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, who, by conscienceless instructions which must bring him the curse of mankind, conjured ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... sought other exercise. Some distance away stood a house, and at the front gate was a man, and Romulus knew man to be the meanest and most cruel of all living things and the conscienceless taskmaster of weaker creatures. So Romulus avoided the house and struck out across the fields. Presently he came upon a very large thing which awed him. It was a live-oak, and the birds were singing in the foliage. ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... holding the genial offender by the scruff of the neck, "you tantalizing, aggravating, irritating, lunatical, conscienceless degenerate! You assassin of Father Time, you disturber of the peace, heed! Scoop Sawyer is writing to Jack Merritt, to tell about the football team, and Bannister's chances of the Championship; he wants to ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of his more serious undertakings, there will be a thousand carriages, many of them resplendent with gold and silver ornament in relief upon the woodwork, and drawn by horses or mules whose bridles are gleaming with gold. And, if the beautiful and conscienceless Poppaea is with him, there may be a Procession of some five hundred asses, whose it is to supply her with the milk in which she bathes for the preservation of ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... that my old sin hindereth and shameth me." He was human, the Lancelot of Malory, and "fell to his old love again," with a heavy heart, and with long penance at the end. How such good knights can be deemed conscienceless and void of courtesy one knows not, except by a survival of the Puritanism of Ascham. But Tennyson found in the book what is in the book—honour, conscience, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... locked and the darkness drawn round the two of them. Then they were the only inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest were under the flood. And being alone in the world, they were a law unto themselves, they could enjoy and squander and waste like conscienceless gods. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... denied. "So far as decent speech could compass it, I have ever sought to tell her what a conscienceless ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... Congress of the United States these commonwealths had played their unscrupulous games, trading for this and for that local appropriation. Happily in some instances these Senators had been higher than their State, but in other cases they represented only too loyally the violent and conscienceless cow-man or lumber king, and now, as Redfield had said, the land-boomer was to have his term. The man who valued residents, not Wild West performers, was about to govern and despoil; this promoter, almost as selfish as the cattle king, was about to advance the State along ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... overflowing with interest, with pity, nay, with a kind of fellow-feeling, for this woman whose bravery was of the greatest known to humanity. Even to-night he had looked into the hearts of women of her own former class; and he shuddered at their conscienceless inconsistency. For the moment, probably, he forgot the sage maxim concerning "safety in numbers." The woman who yields herself to a single great passion and will neither hide it nor cap it with another, is surely lost in the world of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... world in which to live. And the existence of the Prussian army and its conscienceless masters was incompatible with the free and peaceful life of the world. We entered the war for an ideal. That ideal was in the balance when Germany made her 1918 drive ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... After a loss of many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I must in all humility beat my way back to the traditional lost ideals of our organically incorporated class.... Perhaps the most conscienceless class who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' class. But most of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating at the 'wake' of Life. With their platitudes, their prudery, and their chastity, they make for death. These languid ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... aesthetic element and doesn't look like a meat saw, which can't be said of Mr. Jones's saw that seduced Dr. Morris from church. For heavy and steady work I much prefer a carpenter's sharp hand saw. A two-edged saw is an abomination devised by conscienceless manufacturers for the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... youth rankled in his heart. The possession of such a faithful jackal as Langdon carried him to greater lengths than he would have gone had the obnoxious details been subject to his own execution. Though conscienceless, he was more or less fastidious. Had a horse broken down and become utterly useless, he would have ordered him to be destroyed without experiencing any feeling of compassion—he would have dismissed the matter entirely from his mind ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... officer of the United States Army in Taos learned of a most atrocious plot that was on foot. Two wealthy gentlemen, travelling leisurely through that section of the country, had engaged an American named Fox to hire enough men to escort them across the plains. This Fox was one of the most conscienceless wretches and desperadoes that ever lived. He formed a scheme to murder the two gentlemen at a certain point on the plains and to divide their money among him and his companions. Those whom he secured were taken into his confidence and agreed to ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the futility of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides, had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was he not physiologically unfit for happiness? ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... good thing only so far as it is accompanied by and develops a high standard of conduct—honor, integrity, civic courage. The kind of business prosperity that blunts the standard of honor, that puts an inordinate value on mere wealth, that makes a man ruthless and conscienceless in trade, and weak and cowardly in citizenship, is not a good thing at all, but a very bad thing for the Nation. This Government stands for manhood first and for business only ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to attack him. There were solemn suggestions at first that his policy and intentions might not be in accord with the best interests of the city. A little later Haguenin printed editorials which referred to Cowperwood as "the wrecker," "the Philadelphia adventurer," "a conscienceless promoter," and the like. Aileen guessed instantly what the trouble was, but she was too disturbed as to her own position to make any comment. She could not resolve the threats and menaces of Cowperwood's envious world any more than ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... officers and favorite members of a rival society "which shall be as nameless as it is shameless." All this had Miss Perkins accomplished within the first eight days of her sojourn, and by way of Hong-Kong the unexpurgated edition of her romance, thrown out by the conscienceless censor at head-quarters, eventually found its way to the United States. It was while in this uncharitable frame of mind that Miss Perkins caught sight of the little procession up the Santa Lucia when Maidie was transferred from ship to shore, and the refusal ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... victims had received a simple death sentence, but he explained that in virtue of his superior office be had seen fit to add to it. "Death" he explained, "would certainly rid the German protectorate of such conscienceless scalawaps as these, but might not be enough to discourage the bad element that disliked German rule. Natives must be taught that the very name of all that is German must be reverenced, and that German ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... wholesome and moral one to me, as jolly a reminder as that of the Death's-head which figured in the repasts of Egyptian bon-vivants, a strange sardonic memorial of Vanity Fair. What? even battered, brazen, beautiful, conscienceless, heartless, Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her shame: even lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any fence which any man in England will take, and who drives her greys in the park, while her ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... only one of the goodly company of Doctor Nesbits that trudged down the hill in his white linen suit, under his broad-brimmed panama hat. Naturally she hardly might be expected to see the conscienceless boss of Hancock and Greely counties, who handled the money of privilege seekers and bought and sold men gayly as a part of the day's work. Nor could she be expected to see the helpless little man whose face crumpled, whose heart sank and whose courage melted as he stood beside her in the garden, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... judgment. He has to exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save himself from getting into trouble. In my time I have seldom seen such daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have worked off at par on this confiding observer. It compels the conviction that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a quite unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in his behalf. They seem to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so conscienceless as ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... well like to keep it going." Stubby paused to light a cigarette. "I like it. It's our home. We'd be deucedly sore at seeing anybody else hang up his hat and call it home. So behold in me an active cannery operator when the season opens, a conscienceless profiteer for sentiment's sake. You live up where the blueback salmon ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... am his greatest jewel, and yet he would give me into the keeping of an utter stranger. I am being protected against that conscienceless varlet—Love! If love lays hands upon me—ah, my friend, you cannot possibly guess what a calamity ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon |
