DECIMATE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Decimate

"Decimate" Quotes from Famous Books

... and remember all the family anniversaries. It is by attention to such small details as this that a man may purchase immunity in larger and more important matters. I know this is most immoral, but it makes the wife happy, the husband comfortable, and would go far to decimate the divorce rate, so what ...

— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... civilisation treated each other, first as beasts for slaughter and then as beasts of burden. And what was it but want that drove them to both of these courses? Is not the conviction forced upon us that our ancestors were compelled at first to eat each other, and, when they refrained from that, to decimate each other, simply because they had become too strong to be saved from over-population by the interposition of nature? In the first epoch of civilisation man protected himself against a scarcity of food by slaying ...

— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... whose interest in the question is mainly commercial, that China's millions should be brought under a vigorous and progressive Government, able and willing to develop the vast trade resources at their disposal, than that they should decimate themselves and ruin their country by perpetual internecine strife. Whether it will be to the interest of England in a political point of view that Russia should attain the commanding position which the possession of any part of China would undoubtedly secure her, ...

— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... in the extreme even to venture back to the palisade. Any moment might bring a flicking, stinging messenger of death. Those two, alone, might easily decimate the remaining men of the colony—and now each man ...

— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... hacienda of Ake. It belongs to Don Bernardo Peon, one of the wealthiest men of the country, but on account of the insalubrity of the climate it is to-day well nigh abandoned. Only a few Indian servants, living in a constant dread of the paludean fevers that decimate their families, remained to take care of the scanty herds of cattle and horses which form now the whole wealth of the farm. In the first days of March we arrived at the gate of the farm-house. The Majordomo had received ...

— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

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