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More "Rapacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, in order the more speedily to collect the price ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... propensity for overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to enforce ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of land, at any rent, or starvation. The lord of the land was thus enabled to dictate his own terms, and therefore it has been that we have heard of the payment of five, six, eight, and even as much as ten pounds per acre. "Enormous rents, low wages, farms of an enormous extent, let by rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, to be relet by intermediate oppressors, for five times their value, among the wretched starvers on potatoes and water," led to a constant succession of outrages, followed by Insurrection Acts, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... money-lender (that providence of young men of family) to find out how far he would back the credit of his relation. The Brutus of usurers was implacable towards his great-niece, but du Tillet himself pleased him by posing as Sarah's banker, and having funds to invest. The Norman nature and the rapacious nature suited each other. Gobseck happened to want a clever young man to examine into an affair in a foreign country. It chanced that an auditor of the Council of State, overtaken by the return of the Bourbons and anxious to stand well at court, had gone to Germany and bought up all the debts ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Art, chap. 19.] since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he is communicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishes to describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falcon family, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, and extraordinary flight." He represents these facts ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when William ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... landlady's treatment, and the intrigues of the abbe Troubert ('Le Cure de Tours') absorb us as completely as the career of Caesar himself in Mommsen's famous chapter. The woes of the little orphan subjected to the tyranny of her selfish aunt and uncle ('Pierrette'), the struggles of the rapacious heirs for the Mirouet fortune ('Ursule Mirouet,') a story which gives us one of Balzac's purest women, treats interestingly of mesmerism (and may be read without fear by the young), the siege of Mlle. Cormon's mature affections ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Christians with impunity and would make their lives miserable. All that would result, would be that the bad would oppress and outrage the good with impunity. And therefore the authority of government must not be suppressed till all the wicked and rapacious people in the world are extinct. And since this will either never be, or at least cannot be for a long time to come, in spite of the efforts of individual Christians to be independent of government authority, it ought to ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... humanity which has made him the special protector of the old and the weak, and even of the Bushmen who serve the Bamangwato. Regarded as fighters, his people are far inferior to the Matabili, and he was often in danger of being overpowered by the fierce and rapacious Lo Bengula. As early as 1862 he crossed assagais with and defeated a Matabili impi (war-band), earning the praise of the grim Mosilikatze, who said, "Khama is a man. There is no other man among the Bamangwato." Though frequently thereafter threatened ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... ascribed to even a person of pure soul engaged in penances. With respect to even an ascetic living in the woods and employed in his own (harmless) acts, are raised three parties, viz., friends, neutrals, and foes. They that are rapacious hate them that are pure. The idle hate the active. The unlearned hate the learned. The poor hate the rich. The unrighteous hate the righteous. The ugly hate the beautiful. Many amongst the learned, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... having died in 1403, her wealth and rank attracted the regards of Alexander Stewart, the natural son of Robert Earl of Buchan, of royal blood. Without waiting for the ordinary mode of persuasion to establish an interest in his favour, this wild, rapacious man appeared in the Highlands at the head of a band of plunderers, and planting himself before the castle of Kildrummie, stormed it, and effected a marriage between himself and the Countess of Mar. Alexander Stewart, in cooler moments, however, perceived the danger ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... locomotives. The infant population gathered round, and besought us for "souvenirs," the most popular taking the form of "biskeet" or "bully-boeuf." Both were given freely: with but little persuasion our open-handed warriors would have fain squandered their sacred "emergency ration" upon these rapacious infants. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by-the-by), is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy, had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as every thing has, however vile, and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in a village prison from which I should be obliged to liberate her with battle-axe and six-shooter, my compensation being a joyous rest in a hospital with the fair Aline nursing me back to health and strength and cooing fond words in my rapacious ear the while I reflected on the noble endowments of a nature that heretofore had been commonplace and meek. But, no! None of these things happened and I decline to perjure myself for the privilege of getting into the list of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... them alone could be found the fulfillment of all aspiration and desire. No doubt they satisfied many women, but they could not satisfy me. They gave me little I did not find in the mere society of the many brilliant and accomplished men with whom I was surrounded. I had a rapacious mind, and there was ample satisfaction for it in the men who haunted my salon and were constantly to be met elsewhere. European men are instruits. They are interested in every vital subject, intellectual and political, despite ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... it may almost be said, that their mutual hatred was still greater. The Romans, on one side, could not without indignation see the vanquished presuming to attack them; and the Carthaginians, on the other, were exasperated at the equally rapacious and harsh treatment which they pretended to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Spencer Perceval, as enormous; he himself having secured for his own eating and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss Percevals, the reversionary sum of L21,000 a year of the public money,[48] and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster; and the best of it is, that this Minister, after abusing his predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found himself compelled, from ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... him with his wife, and his family undertook to pay him a rent for the land handed over to them. Upon this, along with a nest-egg of three hundred francs per annum, known to no one, the old people would be able to live comfortably. The division made, the family soon became rapacious; Hyacinthe never paid anything, Buteau only a part, and Delhomme, Fanny's husband, alone fulfilled his obligation. Mere Fouan died, and the old man lived alone for a year; after that he went to his daughter Fanny Delhomme, but her unkindness made his life miserable, and he accepted ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which, during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... building the enemy leaped. Before it fled group after group of persons from stores and homes. Methodically it went round the circle of shops, the most rapacious customer the town had ever seen. Quarters of beeves in the meat shop, bottles of liquids and powders on the drug-store shelves, barrels and boxes of food in the grocery store, suits of clothing in Abe Cohen's, the leather whips and carriage robes in the hardware store, all went down its ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... maintained in the delusion that the superior class which employs them has never known want or difficulty. Perhaps the maintenance of this great sham is not without its evil, as it is apt to make the waiter class rapacious and exacting, and ready to impute meanness to that superior order which has wallowed in ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... moment, sir, you cease to be my agent. You have betrayed the confidence I reposed in you; you have misled me as to the character of my tenants; you have been a deceitful, cunning, cringing, selfish and rapacious tyrant. My people you have ground to dust; my property you have lessened in value nearly one-half, and for your motives in doing this, I refer you to certain transactions and legal documents which passed between us. There is nothing cruel or mercenary which you did not practice, in order to ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... continued he with increasing energy in his accent, "your brother's phrenzy is, indeed, stupendous and frightful. The soul that formerly actuated his frame has disappeared. The same form remains; but the wise and benevolent Wieland is no more. A fury that is rapacious of blood, that lifts his strength almost above that of mortals, that bends all his energies to the destruction of whatever was once dear ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... present, in like manner, of Peruvian sheep. This was the same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... how many countries have adopted this rapacious bird for their emblem; and it forms a sad index to the motives that have hitherto actuated nations. In ancient times it was seen upon the banners of Persia and Rome. In modern days Napoleon spread its wings like black ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de la Paix—well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his health—and not feeling very healthy at that. When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before you have finished, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... next day. I always stuffed it in the evening of the day on which it was killed; and thus, although the practice cost me many a sleepless night, I preserved, and ultimately brought home, many specimens of rare and beautiful birds and beasts, which would otherwise have been destroyed by those rapacious insects. ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... harem,—insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married,—could rarely excite interest; afterwards their brilliant rivals, half Graces, half Harpies, elegant and informed, but fickle and rapacious, could ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... good deal more than the actual total cost of the construction of the whole of them. For twenty years some of these roads have been plundering the American people by the most outrageous charges, and Congress, the people's representatives, have not lifted a finger to stop the rapacious robbery. And now, when the Canadian road, built by Government subsidies, begins to compete with the American roads built with Government subsidies, the latter who have pocketed hundreds of millions of subsidy spoils and overcharge plunder, appeal to the Senate to protect the scoundrels against ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... among which he had discovered a sad deficiency in coats and pantaloons. The Arabs had respected the plunder, by compact, with the intention of making a fair distribution on the reef; but, with a view to throw a sop to the more rapacious of their associates, one room had been sacked by the permission of the sheiks. This unfortunate room happened to be that of Sir George Templemore, and the patent razors, the East Indian dressing case, the divers toys, to say nothing of innumerable vestments which the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... defence left, which came to my aid, tanquam deus ex machina. This rapacious Paul Pattison could not pretend to wrest the disputed manuscripts out of my possession, unless upon repayment of a considerable sum of money, which I had advanced from time to time to the deceased Peter, and particularly to purchase a small annuity for his aged mother. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of John, all the rapacious exactions usual to these Norman kings were not only redoubled, but mingled with outrages of tyranny still ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... she returned, "are so coarsely built, that you can never appreciate a shade of meaning. You are yourselves rapacious, violent, immodest, careless of distinction; and yet the least thought for the future shocks you in a woman. I have no patience with such stuff. You would despise in a common banker the imbecility that you expect to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Regulations; surely we shall not be depriv'd of such Blessings long. They are the great security to the Welder, that his Grain shall bear a fair encouraging Price, and at the same Time a Restraint on the rapacious Avarice of the Farmer, and the Corn-Chandler abroad and at Home; and as by being furnish'd in cheap Years, and all Exportations stopt till they're fill'd, they wou'd keep a fair Balance on the Price of Bread, he who desires to be bless'd by the Poor and the Industrious here, will not ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... partiality, or, finally, they were sums of money extorted from the givers by the terrors of power. Against the system of presents, therefore, the new commission was in general opinion particularly pointed. In the commencement of reformation, at a period when a rapacious conquest had overpowered and succeeded to a corrupt government, an act of indemnity might have been thought advisable; perhaps a new account ought to have been opened; all retrospect ought to have been forbidden, at least to certain periods. If this had not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... bountiful: he knows full well that the tree which is languishing without culture in the arid, sandy desert, that is stunted for want of attention, leafless for want of moisture, that has grown crooked from neglect, become barren from want of loam, whose tender bark is gnawed by rapacious beasts of prey, pierced by innumerable insects, would perhaps have expanded far and wide its verdant boughs from a straight and stately stem, have brought forth delectable fruit, have afforded from its luxuriant foliage under its lambent leaves an umbrageous refreshing retreat from the scorching ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... a moment still further back, the rapacious hordes already had gutted the rich stores of Central America and the northern regions of South America. The rush of the lustful conqueror was astonishingly swift. Columbus himself was as eager for gold as he was zealous for religion. From the discovery of America scarcely twenty years ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... government of the province was William Kieft. He was as energetic as he was spiteful, and as spiteful as he was rapacious. His chief pleasure lay in quarrelling. He and his council made some useful reforms, but as a rule they greatly oppressed the people. During this administration agriculture was encouraged, the growing of fruit was undertaken, and several other things done to increase ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... sound more welcome, and we watched out friend eagerly until he returned from the place where the liquor was hid, and we found about a pint of the raw material saved from his rapacious stomach. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... great financial panic when immense properties were crumbling to pittances. He undertook the Herculean task of rescuing at this time this estate from threatened ruin, and of vindicating the good name of his father from undeserved censure. He had in this gigantic work to meet and thwart the plots of rapacious railroad wreckers, and schemers; but his thorough mental discipline united with his intensely practical business training, and coupled with his native energy, tact, good sense, and fertility of resources, stood him in good stead. He inspired capitalists with confidence, money was forthcoming ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... towards them in all their distresses. We must observe, that the monks of that time, especially those from Ireland,[45] who had a considerable share in the conversion of all the northern parts, did not show that rapacious desire of riches which long disgraced and finally ruined their successors. Not only did they not seek, but seemed even to shun such donations. This prevented that alarm which might have arisen from an early and declared avarice. At this time the most fervent and holy anchorites ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... patriots; e.g. "the only legitimate basis for a treaty, if not on the part of the Continental Allies, at least for England herself [is] that she should conquer all she can, and keep all she conquers. This is not by way of retaliation, however just, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an indispensable condition of her own safety and existence." The letters were reviewed under the heading of "Illustrations of Vetus," in the Morning Chronicle, December 2, 10, 16, 18; 1813. The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... independence, and embraced the tenets of the covenant. Without imputing, with Wishart, absolute treachery to the border nobles, it may be allowed, that they looked with envy upon Montrose, and with dread and aversion upon his rapacious and disorderly forces. Hence, had it been in their power, it might not have altogether suited their inclinations, to have brought the strength of the border lances to the support of the northern clans. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... stimulates a rapacious and licentious soldiery to the personal search of women, lest these unhappy creatures should avail themselves of the protection of their sex to secure any supply for their necessities; and he positively orders that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a fairly comfortable lodging, but their resources were very limited. They were obliged to take into their room a third companion, an old Auvergnat, gloomy and rapacious, who found it possible out of his meagre salary to save something with which to buy a place in his own country. Jean Francois and Savinien were always together. On holidays they together took long walks in the environs of Paris, and dined under an arbor ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... ravens really sought for he knew all too well, for he had seen their knotted tracks by dead forms; yet somehow their passage conjured up thoughts in his brain which had never disturbed him before. They were birds of death, rapacious and evil-bringing, and they had cast their boding ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... is a cheering fact, and especially so just now, in this early fall, when we are all smarting with the fresh memories of our summer's sufferings at the hands of the hotel proprietors, their head clerks, and the rest of the rapacious crew. What an attractive picture it presents! A hotel where guests are treated with courtesy! Really, if anything could seduce us into making a visit to Boston, the desire to actually witness this surprising innovation upon our national customs would prove too strong for the reverential fear which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked bill and crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; and the Swan of Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, rushing spirit of philanthropy. He gloats ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... concealed elsewhere among the story-teller's clothing. "My followers are mostly outlawed Miaotze, who have been driven from their own tribes in Yun Nan for man-eating and disregarding the sacred laws of hospitality. They are somewhat rapacious, and in this way it has become a custom that they should have as their own, for the purpose of exchanging for money, persons such as yourself, whose insatiable curiosity has ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... and more nauseous as the pilgrimage advanced. Near Jackson Street they came upon a bedraggled pavilion of dubious gayety which lured them downstairs with its ear-splitting jazz orchestra. A horde of rapacious females descended upon them like starving locusts. Suddenly everybody in the party seemed moved with a desire for dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ahead. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... brother potentates stranded in Paris, mostly because they were so ready to gratify their own appetites at the expense of their people. I need hardly tell you, Beliani, that Kosnovia is a poverty stricken State. We have suffered from three generations of self seeking and rapacious rulers. That is all ended. I mean to render my people happy and contented. It shall be the one care of my life to make them so, and if it is the will of Providence that a Delgrado should reign in the next generation, my legacy to him will be, not millions of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the historian of music, attracted to his house the most eminent musical performers of that age. The greatest Italian singers who visited England regarded him as the dispenser of fame in their art, and exerted themselves to obtain his suffrage. Pacchierotti became his intimate friend. The rapacious Agujari, who sang for nobody else under fifty pounds an air, sang her best for Dr. Burney without a fee; and in the company of Dr. Burney even the haughty and eccentric Gabrielli constrained herself to behave with civility. It was thus in his power to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... arrived alone at Cropole's house. He had taken, without hesitation, without reflection even, the principal apartment which the hotelier had pointed out to him with a rapacious aim, very praiseworthy, some will say, very reprehensible will say others, if they admit that Cropole was a physiognomist and judged ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sling,[560] which was once at the service of the Carthaginian, and afterwards of the Roman, armies. But, in spite of their prowess, the Baliares were not a fierce people. They would allow no gold or silver to enter their country,[561] probably in order that no temptation might be offered to pirates or rapacious traders.[562] Their civilisation represented the matriarchal stage; their marriage customs expressed the survival of polyandric union; they were tenacious of the lives of their women, and even invested the money which they gained on military service in the purchase of female captives.[563] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... their command, with the revenues of kingdoms at their disposal, with power to make and depose sovereigns at their pleasure. They were what it was natural that men should be who had been raised by so rapid an ascent to so dizzy an eminence, profuse and rapacious, imperious ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the natives against insults, and establish a fair trade and friendly intercourse with them, were regulations which humanity required, and sound policy dictated. But the rapacious spirit of individuals could be curbed by no authority. Many advantages were taken of the ignorance of Indians in the way of traffic." RAMSAY's History of South Carolina, Vol. I. p. 48. For other particulars stated by him, respecting the trade with ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... greatest danger in order to avert it from their progeny. Thus a partridge will tumble along before a sportsman in order to draw away the dogs from her helpless covey. In the time of nidification the most feeble birds will assault the most rapacious. All the hirundines of a village are up in arms at the sight of an hawk, whom they will persecute till he leaves that district. A very exact observer has often remarked that a pair of ravens nesting in the rock ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... light feminine voice, as the rapacious rake unceremoniously drew in a poor, diminutive pile of gold. "Why did ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... taxation, and unable to draw a sword for the common defence. At this period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its authority declined. Towards the end of the fourteenth ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... balcony, and stood motionless to listen. The door, in truth, was opened, with singular caution, and, for an instant, Alida saw nothing but a confused area in the centre of which appeared the figure of a menacing and rapacious freebooter. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... St. Gervais, the church of the monastery to which William the Conqueror was carried, out of the noise and the feverish air of the great city, to die, and which witnessed the strange struggle, in his last moments, between his rapacious passions and his late-awakened remorse. So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... grim, gray pirate, as malleable as cast iron and as soft. He was a large, big-boned man, aggressive, dominant, the kind that takes the world by the throat and shakes success from it. The contour of his hook-nosed face had something rapacious written on it. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... undoubtedly a profligate and rapacious tyrant. In the course of a few months, he alienated his people, and offended a great number of his most powerful chiefs. The war which he undertook against the English, although at the moment unprovoked, must still be regarded as a patriotic one; and, had he not soiled ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... attitude of a man of finer temperament during eight years passed amidst scene of rapacious ferocity, something must be admitted to explain the callousness of men of fewer sensibilities and lower moral standards, who found themselves far removed from the usual restraint of civilised society ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... but failed; at length he approached so near the artful object of his pursuit as to see him breathe. Even then no alarm was exhibited; and the gentleman seizing a club, aimed a blow at him, which Reynard evaded by a leap from his singular lurking-place, having thus for a time effectually eluded his rapacious pursuers. ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... Son, the Helpless and the Poor, Nor in the chains of thine own indolence Slumber enervate, while the joys of sense Engross thee; and thou say'st, "I ask no more."— Wise Men the Shepherd's slumber will deplore When the rapacious Wolf has leapt the fence, And ranges thro' the fold.—My Son, dispense Those laws, that justice to the Wrong'd restore.— The Common-Weal shou'd be the first pursuit Of the crown'd Warrior, for the royal brows The People ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... use it. We moneyed people must balance accounts: if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do, then I cheat your lordship." Audley's moneyed conscience balanced the risk of his lordship's honour against the probability of his own rapacious profits. When he resided in the Temple among those "pullets without feathers," as an old writer describes the brood, the good man would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that they, under pretence of "learning the law, only learnt to be lawless;" and "never knew by their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... granted by his predecessor, and which extremely fettered every species of domestic industry: but the exclusive companies still remained; another species of monopoly, by which almost all foreign trade, except that to France, was brought into the hands of a few rapacious engrossers, and all prospect of future improvement in commerce was forever sacrificed to a little temporary advantage of the sovereign. These companies, though arbitrarily erected, had carried their privileges so far, that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... her sufferings from her family. But I have too often answered this plea, to need to say any more now, than that she has not suffered for my sake. For has she not been made the victim of the malice of her rapacious brother and envious sister, who only waited for an occasion to ruin her with her other relations; and took this as the first to drive her out of the house; and, as it happened, into my arms?— Thou knowest how ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... moral earnestness, mild yet firm disposition, profound erudition, and tolerant character, won for him a supreme place in Jewish life for half a century. Meir of Rothenburg was a poet and martyr as well as a profound scholar. He passed many years in prison rather than yield to the rapacious demands of the local government for a ransom, which Meir's friends would willingly have paid. As a specimen of Meir's poetry, the following verses are taken from a dirge composed by him in 1285, when copies of the Pentateuch were publicly committed to the ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... of which the front part was an empty shop. The shop had been tenanted by her father, one of whose frequent bankruptcies had happened there; after which his stock of the latest novelties in inexpensive furniture had been seized by rapacious creditors, and Mr Earp had migrated to Birmingham, where he was courting the Official Receiver anew. Ruth had remained solitary and unprotected, with a considerable amount of household goods which had been her mother's. (Like all professional bankrupts, Mr Earp had invariably ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... compressed lip, he was marked in his daring chariot entering the courtyard of Apsley House? Great was the panic at Brookes', wild the hopes of Carlton Terrace; all the gentlemen who expected to have been made peers perceived that the country was going to be given over to a rapacious oligarchy. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... here and there a silent-footed figure went by him in the gloom of the December day with the soft step of a wild animal; here and there, men leaning against the wall, glared suspiciously at him or fixed rapacious eyes on his good clothes. There were shops in this street such as Viner had never seen the like of—shops wherein coarse, dreadful looking food was exposed for sale; and there were public-houses from which came the odour of cheap ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... steep streets which are impossible for the jinrikisha. The bearers are low-class coolies from the country, whose rough gait makes riding in a chair the nearest approach to horseback exercise. The jinrikisha is also largely in evidence, but the bearers are a great contrast in their rapacious manners to the courteous and smiling Japanese in all the cities of the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... vision of sorrow-illumined men in frozen bivouacs, crying to America to hold fast to the dream of her Founders, lest the vessel of the future be drained of vital essence, indeed—to hold fast until we come ...crying for America to answer, not with rapacious intellect, not the answer of a militant body, but an answer from the soul of the New World, with its original vitality in the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... want; he who serves is, if anything, more in demand than he who is to be served; and the want of temptation produces exemption from the liability to corruption. Men will, and do, daily corrupt themselves in the rapacious pursuit of gain, but comparatively few are in the market to be bought and sold by others. Notwithstanding this, money being every man's goal, there is a secret, profound, and general deference for it, while money will do less than in almost ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... caste have been as selfish, as rapacious, as their Hohenzollern overlords. Nothing could be more sordid than their attitude in the recent campaign for financial reform. They have shifted the burden of taxation upon the weaker shoulders of the peasant and artisan. They ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... occupied a more distinguished seat; A chosen train the monarch's list complete. There unsubmitting Brask's proud genius shone, There Bernheim's might, in many a contest known; There Theodore: a bold ungovern'd soul, Rapacious, fell, and fearless of control: A harlot's favour rais'd him from the dust, To rise the pander of tyrannic lust: Graced with successive gifts, at length he shone With wondering Trollio on the sacred throne. With pleasure's arts, and sophistry's ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... Though this story is very old, the incident of the church (sogmoye wigwam, or chief house) is manifestly modern.] Then a young man beckoned to him to come in, and he listened till the end to a long sermon on the wickedness of being vindictive and rapacious; and the preacher was a gray ancient, and his ears stood up over his little cap like the two handles of a pitcher, yet for all that the Wild Cat's heart was not moved one whit. And when it was all at an end he ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... ambitious Feofar now governed this corner of Tartary. Relying on the other khans—principally those of Khokhand and Koondooz, cruel and rapacious warriors, all ready to join an enterprise so dear to Tartar instincts—aided by the chiefs who ruled all the hordes of Central Asia, he had placed himself at the head of the rebellion of which Ivan Ogareff ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... though with serious intentions of pecking at him in his present defenceless condition. He was soon aware of this additional source of alarm, and as the bird's eye brightened and twinkled with greedy anticipation, he rubbed his rapacious beak on the perch, apparently whetting it for the feast. He then jumped down on the floor, and hopping close to his victim, gave a hoarse and dismal croak, a death-warning, it might be, to the unfortunate captive. He tried to burst his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the hill, seems to set in vibration the slumbering chord of some memory of things past; yes, and he is vehemently declaiming to the comely matron who trudges beside him about the rascality of that fellow Cadet, the most rapacious of the greedy underlings of Monsieur the Intendant! Truly it is no other than our friend Jean Baptiste Boulanger, who is just hot from a visit to Quebec on some business pertaining to his craft, and whose fond and faithful Bibi ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... by the criminal bigotry of their popish predecessors, subjected at first to a foreign exaction, were afterwards, when that yoke was shaken off, liable to a like misapplication of their revenues, through the rapacious disposition of the then reigning monarch: till at length the piety of queen Anne restored to the church what had been thus indirectly taken from it. This she did, not by remitting the tenths and first-fruits entirely; but, in a spirit ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... hirelings, and bitterly did they execute their vengeance on all who were compromised. Don Pablo would have been a victim among others, had he not had timely warning and escaped; but as it was, all his property was taken by confiscation, and became the plunder of the rapacious tyrant. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... had better ask me. Well, her name is Musetta Her surname is Temptation. As to her vocation: Like a rose in the breezes, So she changes lover for lover without number. And like the spiteful screech owl, A bird that's most rapacious, The food that most she favors is the heart! Her food the heart is; Thus have I now none left! (to his friends, concealing his agitation) So pass ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... will one day succeed in driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... hitherto done was bad enough, but this capped the climax of outrages. Were the cowardly villains afraid to murder me, and was this their plan of getting it done, and at the same time getting rid of the body? Great heavens! was I to be devoured piecemeal by a rapacious horde of the wild beasts that are said to infest the Russian beds! And utterly helpless, too, without the power to grapple with as much as a single flea—the least formidable, perhaps, of the entire gang! It was absolutely fearful to contemplate such an act of premeditated barbarity; ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... been the greatest of all blessings. It is the precise boon so frequently and earnestly implored by our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultivators all over the East. But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies—only the more rapacious and pressing, that the might of the legions had so long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own sterile territories—and disasters, frequent and serious, were laying waste ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... somewhat heavier yet than fir, and stronger, nor do either of them bend sufficiently: As to the seeds, they may be sown in beds or cases at any time, during March; and when they peep, carefully defended with furzes, or the like fence, from the rapacious birds, which are very apt to pull them up, by taking hold of that little infecund part of the seed, which they commonly bear upon their tops: The beds wherein you sow them had need be shelter'd from the southern ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... made subservient to such lawless crime, as ancient record of tyrannic guilt can give no proof of, I trust that he, who boldly shall retract such oath, is deem'd less guilty in the eye of Heaven, than he who cowardly fulfills it. This for myself—for you, who, singly, have oppos'd this hydra of rapacious power, and in a glorious cause, claim'd the just right of sanctuary and of pardon—how will you meet the tenfold horrors that will soon burst forth ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... and departed for Cuzco by way of the mountain and the city of Guamanga, at the head of two hundred men well equipped, and carrying with him a great sum of money which he had collected during his march; and at Guamanga he conducted himself in the same rapacious manner ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Mrs Charlton; they were single, and lived with their grand-mother, whose fortune, which was considerable, they expected to share between them, and they waited with eagerness for the moment of appropriation; narrow-minded and rapacious, they wished to monopolize whatever she possessed, and thought themselves aggrieved by her smallest donations. Their chief employment was to keep from her all objects of distress, and in this though they could not succeed, they at least confined her ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... her class, for I do not like them. All talk about soiled doves and the rest is mere nauseous twaddle, arising from ignorance. The creatures take to their rackety life because they like it, and, though I have met some good and kind members of their class, I have observed that the majority are rapacious, cruel, and devoid of every human sentiment that does not hinge on hunger or vanity. You may treat a man as an equal in spite of his vices, and do no harm, but to treat a woman as an equal because of her vices is worse than folly. This ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... persons? who more a favourite to the most infamous? who, sometimes, appeared a braver champion? who, at other times, a bolder enemy to his country? who more dissolute in his pleasures? who more patient in his toils? who more rapacious in robbing? who more profuse in giving? Above all things, this was remarkable and admirable in him. The arts he had to acquire the good opinion and kindness of all sorts of men, to retain it with great complaisance, to communicate all things to them, to watch and serve ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... the man who had invaded Russia, ravaged its provinces, massacred its troops, and finished by leaving Moscow in flames. But he dexterously limited himself to explaining the seizure of the Duchy of Oldenburg, which was the commencement of the rapacious and absurd attempt to exclude English merchandise from the Continent. Oldenburg was one of the chief entrances by which those manufactures made their way into Germany. Its invasion, and the countless robberies which followed, had been among the first insolences of Napoleon, and the cause ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Tyrconnel. The Luttrells had, in the name of their countrymen, implored James not to subject so loyal a people to so odious and incapable a viceroy. Tyrconnel, they said, was old; he was infirm; he needed much sleep; he knew nothing of war; he was dilatory; he was partial; he was rapacious; he was distrusted and hated by the whole nation. The Irish, deserted by him, had made a gallant stand, and had compelled the victorious army of the Prince of Orange to retreat. They hoped soon to take the field again, thirty thousand strong; and they adjured ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... kindness in the nature of the rat; no nesting bird is safe from his attacks, unless her home is beyond his reach in some cleft of a rock that he cannot scale or in some fork of a tree that he cannot climb. He is a cannibal—even the young and the sick of his own kind become the victims of his rapacious hunger—and he will eat almost anything, living or dead, from the refuse in a garbage heap to the dainty egg of a willow-wren in the tiny, domed nest amid the briars at the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... nothing but himself, whose great object in government was to be without a rival, and whose art was made up of tact and gayety; and that of the rival factions of Lamballe and Polignac, guiding the queen, which were simply rapacious. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... two hundred and ninety species, which, we think, is below the number which visit the central parts of Illinois. From the central position of this State, most of the birds of the United States are found here at one season or another. For instance, among the rapacious birds, we have the three Eagles which visit America, the White-Headed, the Washington, and the Golden or Royal Eagle. Of Hawks and Falcons, fourteen or fifteen species, among which are the beautiful Swallow-tailed Hawk, and that noble falcon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... there were abundant indications of discontent in Germany, where a variety of parties inveighed against the rapacious policy of Prussia, and where Bismarck had sown a deep crop of hate. It was believed in France that the minor states would not support Prussia in a war. In Austria the defeat of 1866 rankled, and hostilities against Prussia on the part of France seemed ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... and red; the scattered oddments had been hidden from sight in the "coffin's" rapacious maw; photographs and knick-knacks gave a homy look to the rooms which had looked so bare and bleak twenty-four hours before. The Freshers tumbled into bed and ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... weakness. I sicken, Signori, of my esteem for men, as I dive deeper into their tempers and desires, and often wish myself a dog, as I study their propensities. In his appetite for power, is not the Austrian the most rapacious of all the princes of ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... refugees without a feeling of pity for the sufferings they have endured; and this spark of pity quickly warms and kindles into indignation when we think of the story of hapless Acadia—the grievous wrong done those simple-minded, harmless, honest people, by the rapacious, free-booting adventurers of merry England, and those precious ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... 1742 said that William III. 'was arbitrary, insolent, gloomy, rapacious, and brutal; that he was at all times disposed to play the tyrant; that he had, neither in great things nor in small, the manners of a gentleman; that he was capable of gaining money by mean artifices, and that he only regarded his promise when it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... clergyman, "to realize that these bare hills were once 'a land flowing with milk and honey,' producing 'grapes, pomegranates, and figs' in abundance. To-day I have been thinking of the changes that the tempests of a few short years have made in the hills of my own native state, New Hampshire, since the rapacious lumber-men have been denuding our mountains of the forests. There, the unprotected soil is being washed away by the heavy rains, gulleys have been formed, the brooks have diminished or dried up, and the part of our once beautiful White Mountains that has been cut over is desolate ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... pleaded a cause of common humanity, with the feelings of the warmest benevolence, when she entreated Montoni to allow Morano the assistance in the castle, which his situation required. But Montoni, who had seldom listened to pity, now seemed rapacious of vengeance, and, with a monster's cruelty, again ordered his defeated enemy to be taken from the castle, in his present state, though there were only the woods, or a solitary neighbouring cottage, to ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... in the hope—a vain one, as it proved—that when the resources of the pirates upon the high seas were cut off, their establishments would be necessarily broken up, and the freebooters themselves disperse. But far different was the event. No sooner had these rapacious and savage men ascertained that there were no more galleons of her bullion to be taken, than they concentrated their forces, with a determination to strike nearer the mines themselves. Powerful expeditions were therefore openly organized at Jamaica and elsewhere, for the purpose ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... whom they "espied the gifts of God" to be their preacher; he offered Knox the post, and all present agreed. Knox wept, and for days his gloom declared his sense of his responsibility: such was "his holy vocation." The garrison was, confessedly, brutal, licentious, and rapacious, but they "all" partook ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... water won a victory over adamant. It is an evidence, too, of Nature's patient methods; a triumph of the delicate over the strong, the liquid over the solid, the transitory over the enduring. At present, the softer material has been exhausted, and the rapacious river, shrunken in size, must satisfy itself by gnawing only the archaic granite which still curbs its course. Yet if this calculation overpowers us, what shall we say of the reflections awakened by the fact that all the limestone cliffs along the lofty edges of the Canon are composed ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... warmth of the Sun; and that our hopes of a plentiful harvest may not be disappointed by devouring insects, or any other calamity:—To prosper our trade and fishery, and the labor of our hands:—To protect our navigation from the rapacious hands of invaders and robbers on the seas, and graciously to open a door of deliverance to our fellow-citizens in cruel captivity in a land of Barbarians:—To continue and confirm our civil and religious liberties; and for that great purpose to bless ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... and planters were compelled to give bonds for large sums of money, to procure from him liberty to remain in posession of their property. These, and many more acts of the like atrocious nature, did this rapacious governor commit, during the short time of his administration, to increase his fees as governor and proprietor. At length the people, weary of his grievous impositions and extortions, agreed to take him by force, and ship ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... feeling tired, I covered myself up with the long grass and went to sleep. How long I lay I cannot tell, but suddenly waking up, I found to my alarm that several large vultures, having thought me dead, were contemplating me as their next meal! Had my sleep continued a few moments longer, the rapacious birds would have picked my eyes out, as they invariably do before tearing up their victim. All over the country these birds abound, and I have counted thirty and forty tearing up a living, quivering animal. Sometimes, for mercy's sake, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... was a tall man of thirty or thereabouts, and he conceived a great friendship for me, and promised that the tribute should be very light, and that he would send a man to show me the way to Myumi, which was a village on the frontier of Kanyenyi, by which I would be enabled to avoid the rapacious Kisewah, who was in the habit of enforcing large ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... excursions in this neighborhood are made upon camels or elephants. Wild animals are abundant, the tiger especially being much dreaded. Here, as at Singapore, men, women and children are daily sacrificed to their rapacious appetites in various parts of the district. It is said to be a fact, that these animals having once tasted human flesh, will be satisfied with none other, but will leave the antelope and smaller game unmolested, though they are known to abound in the vicinity, and lie in ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... being now deprived of their jurisdiction, have already lost much of their influence; and as they gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords, they will divest themselves of the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... obliged to take out a license, even in cases where it might be given gratis; and his receipt for it should contain his own acknowledgment that he has a copy of the laws, which he thoroughly understands. Particular clauses should be devoted to rapacious dealers who get collecting permits as scientific men, to poison, to shooting from power boats or with swivel guns, to that most diabolical engine of all murderers—the Maxim silencer,—to hounding and crusting, to egging and nefarious pluming, to illegal ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... running the gauntlet through the forts before daylight, and that she left a certain bag of gold ounces for him—Don Ignacio Sanchez—somewhere in a secret hole beneath a well-known rock inside the harbor. Oh, a wonderful memory for matters of this nature had our rapacious ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... rest in the enjoyment of a new purchase till he has learned the history of his grounds from the ancient inhabitants of the parish, and that no nation omits to record the actions of their ancestors, however bloody, savage, and rapacious. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the short space of a few hours, the care and industry of the last ten months were rendered utterly vain and useless, and the poor colonists found their verdant fields converted into a barren waste by these rapacious insects. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of those who are so ready to let themselves be cheated. Moreover, the ill-treatment to which they were once subjected, and the imperfect knowledge they still have of what the British Protectorate means, renders them timid and too much afraid of these rapacious merchants to dare resent, in any way, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... out that the rascally landlord seized upon every chair and table that ought by rights to have belonged to the widow. The estate to which I was heir was in the hands of rapacious creditors; and the only means of subsistence remaining to the widow and child was a rent-charge of L50 upon my Lord Bagwig's property, who had many turf-dealings with the deceased. And so my dear mother's liberal intentions towards her brother ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... part of his reign his subjects had affectionately called him the "Well-beloved," but long before he laid down the sceptre, all their early love and admiration had been turned into hatred and contempt. Besides being overbearing and despotic, the king was indolent, rapacious, and scandalously profligate. During twenty years of his reign the king was wholly under the influence of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of the day were very heavy indeed upon Lord Fawn. The whole force of the Government, however, was anti-Lizzieite; and as the controversy advanced, every good Liberal became aware that there was nothing so wicked, so rapacious, so bold, or so cunning but that Lady Eustace might have done it, or caused it to be done, without delay, without difficulty, and without scruple. Lady Glencora Palliser for a while endeavoured to defend Lizzie in Liberal circles,—from generosity rather than from any real ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... face him squarely. I did so and mentioned the amount I could dispose of. And I perceived that he was disappointed. He thought it over, his calculating gaze lost in mine, for quite a long time before he came out in a thoughtful tone with the rapacious suggestion: ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... again introduced[573], Dr. Johnson said, that 'a rapacious chief would make a wilderness of his estate.' Mr. Donald M'Queen told us, that the oppression, which then made so much noise, was owing to landlords listening to bad advice in the letting of their ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear. Machiavelli was not inclined to make little of what an unhampered ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the Prince. "It makes him hated above all things to be rapacious, and to be violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain." And if Machiavelli's despotism meets its master in the undercurrents of human instinct, governments of less determined stripe, whether of states or of persons, would hardly do well to treat ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... long, but returned to stand beside the bunk, looking down upon Essie with eyes that in the dimness of the illy-lighted cabin shone with the baleful gleam of some rapacious feline. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... promotion and retention in office. Roosevelt lamented bitterly over the injustice and he denounced the waste. Many cases of grievous hardship came to his notice. Widows, whose only means of support for themselves and their little children was their salary, were thrown upon the street in order that rapacious politicians might secure places for their henchmen. Roosevelt might plead, but the politician remained obdurate. What was the tragic lot of a widow and starving children compared with keeping promises with greedy "heelers"? Roosevelt saw that there was no redress except through ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... queen asked for some things she saw in the possession of king Solomon, is what surprises us. However, the practice is very common to this day in the East—it is not there looked upon as any degradation to dignity, or any mark of rapacious meanness. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... entire common weal from suffering at the hands of the foe. Now this seems to be above all the duty of prelates, for Gregory says (Hom. in Ev. xiv): "The wolf comes upon the sheep, when any unjust and rapacious man oppresses those who are faithful and humble. But he who was thought to be the shepherd, and was not, leaveth the sheep, and flieth, for he fears lest the wolf hurt him, and dares not stand up against his injustice." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... alliance with the natural enemy of that friend, and with an enemy of human liberty. They spoke of the court of Great Britain as the most faithless and corrupt in the world, and denounced the result of Jay's mission as a surrender of every just claim upon a rapacious enemy for restitution ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... son could not help her, for he required succour from Pitt. If, then, the farming experiments at Burton Pynsent failed, the loss fell upon Pitt. We may infer, then, that his debts were occasioned partly by rapacious servants and tradesmen in London, partly by farming and gardening at Holwood, but also by the needs of his mother and brother. The fact that Chatham paid not a shilling towards the discharge of Pitt's liabilities proves that he was in low water; and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... commander, he threw up his commission in disgust, and retired to his native village near the river Hudson. Here, collecting about him a few choice spirits like himself, he kept the inhabitants in a continual state of alarm by his plundering and rapacious conduct. Acting, as he pretended, under the orders of the king, the tories durst not oppose him, and the whigs were too few in numbers to resist his foraging excursions ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... world, all the vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written in red blood on ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... no qualifying terms; no diminutive appellations, for crimes that involve a kingdom's fate. Under the influence of this man, you have been rapacious, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black blotch on ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... the north. Thousands of flying fish spring above the surface, in order to escape some lurking enemy below, only to find their death on the deck of the ship, but oftener to fall an easy prey to some rapacious bird. Nothing can equal the gay colors of the Bonito and Dorado, a smaller kind of ravenous fish peculiar to the Southern seas, and which are always found in close pursuit of their neighbors, the flying fish. With what enchantment does the astonished spectator fasten ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... pursued his march; and, as he passed, the cities of Altinum, Concordia, and Padua were reduced into heaps of stones and ashes. The inland towns, Vicenza, Verona, and Bergamo, were exposed to the rapacious cruelty of the Huns. Milan and Pavia submitted, without resistance, to the loss of their wealth;" and "applauded the unusual clemency which preserved from the flames the public as well as private buildings, and spared the lives of the captive ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... "I have been unable to escape the vulgar publicity thrust upon me by the newspapers. The reporters are preying vultures, rapacious for sensation, and have small respect for anyone. I am sure we discourage them as much as we can. I used to weep with mortification when I found myself 'written up'; now, however, I have learned to bear such trials with fortitude—if not with resignation." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... esteem and influence was made by the "Drapier's Letters," in 1724. One Wood, of Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, had, as is said, by a present to the Duchess of Munster, obtained a patent, empowering him to coin one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the kingdom of Ireland, in which there was a very inconvenient and embarrassing scarcity of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... 1st has come and gone—drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years—all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We assume vaguely that it is blown—ever since we saw the Bohemian Glass Blowers at the World's Fair we ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the little colony whose population may by now have been five thousand. Harvey, the Governor, was rapacious; the King at home, autocratic. Meanwhile, signs of change and of unrest were not wanting in Europe. England was hastening toward revolution; in Germany the Thirty Years' War was in mid-career; France and Italy were racked ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Henriot, Foul parricide—the sworn ally of Hebert Denounced by all—upheld by Robespierre. Who spared La Valette? who promoted him, Stain'd with the deep die of nobility? Who to an ex-peer gave the high command? Who screen'd from justice the rapacious thief? Who cast in chains the friends of Liberty? Robespierre, the self-styled patriot, Robespierre— Robespierre, allied with villain Daubigne— Robespierre, the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... and the burial of the living for certain crimes; but some escape from these in safety, through their power as sorcerers. The authority and government of the chiefs is described; they are tyrannical and rapacious, and treat as slaves even chiefs who are subject to them. Combes makes special mention of some customs peculiar to the Subanos, or river-people. They are exceedingly rude and barbarous, without any government; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... of their heads, with their long hair stiff with pomatum, and their heads set inside a well-starched ruff a foot wide, "like St. John's head in a charger," as a splenetic contemporary observed, with a nimbus of musk and violet-powder enveloping them as they passed before vulgar mortals, these rapacious and insolent courtiers were the impersonation of extortion and oppression to the Parisian populace. They were supposed, not unjustly, to pass their lives in dancing, blasphemy, dueling, dicing, and intrigue, in following the King about like hounds, fawning at his feet, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... didst transgress, Defeated of his seisure many days Given thee of grace; wherein thou mayest repent, And one bad act with many deeds well done Mayest cover: Well may then thy Lord, appeased, Redeem thee quite from Death's rapacious claim; But longer in this Paradise to dwell Permits not: to remove thee I am come, And send thee from the garden forth to till The ground whence thou wast taken, fitter soil. He added not; for Adam at the news Heart-struck ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... necessaries and luxuries. This created a system of the grossest oppression; since the great monopolists not only made as much as they could at the expense of the people, but sold portions of their monopolies to grasping, rapacious underlings, who conveyed the grievance into every corner of the land. These people became a hated and oppressive class, like the farmers of the revenue in France. According to a well-known anecdote, Voltaire, when in a company, each member ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... he examined every feature of it with the most lively interest. The dilapidated buildings of the Home Farm reminded him of a lawsuit brought by a former tenant against his landlord, in which a story of mean and rapacious dealing on the part of Melrose, toward a decent though unfortunate man, had excited the disgust of the whole countryside. Melrose had never since been able to find a tenant for the farm, and the bailiff he had ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The power of the sentiment of anger increases with the offensive and defensive faculties, while, in weak and peaceful beings, terror and sadness to a great extent take their place. On the other hand, the sight of defenseless prey suffices to provoke, in the rapacious who are strong and well armed, by simple reflex association, a cruel sentiment of voluptuous anger, which is ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... inflated with gas, after decomposition, floating on the surface of the water a day or two afterwards, and can easily be secured by the sportsman, if he be vigilant enough to take them before the hungry watchful savages come and secure them, to appease their rapacious appetites. Mussulmans will even eat these amphibious creatures without cutting their throats, looking on them as cold-blooded animals, created in ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... his head doubtfully. "Whatever it is," he said slowly, "it is closely allied to the cyanide groups in its rapacious activity. I haven't the slightest idea of its true nature, but it seems to have a powerful affinity for important nerve centers of respiration and muscular coordination, as well as for disorganizing the blood. I should say that it produces death by respiratory paralysis and convulsions. To ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... that "one of the passages of POPE'S life which seems to deserve some inquiry, was the publication of his letters by CURLL, the rapacious bookseller."[208] Our great literary biographer has expended more research on this occasion than his usual penury of literary history allowed; and yet has only told the close of the strange transaction—the previous parts are more curious, and the whole cannot ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... or honour the motive?—I cannot, it is true, dive into the recesses of the human heart—yet I presume to assert, [borne out as I am by a variety of circumstances,] that he was merely influenced by the most rapacious avarice. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... fifty thousand pounds yearly and the value of a pound then would equal twenty-five to fifty of our American dollars. However much the Normans respected the place, its sanctity had no terrors for the rapacious Henry VIII. The rich revenues appealed too strongly and he made a clean sweep, hanging the mitered abbot and two of his monks on the top of Tor Hill. The Abbey is the traditional burial-place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, and four of ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... dogs after the waggon of cat's-meat; and where the frequent proposition, "You my pleni (friend)," or (with more of pathos) "You all 'e same my father," must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp the statement must be reversed. The shabby Polynesian ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boast of: so would a vulture, could it speak, with the entrails of its prey upon its rapacious talons. Of this you'll judge from what I have ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... and deep roads during the winter season which was approaching, they must fall an easy and a bloodless prey to their enemy: that if a general action were delayed, the English, sensible of the imminent danger to which their properties, as well as liberties, were exposed from those rapacious invaders, would hasten from all quarters to his assistance, and would render his army invincible: that at least, if he thought it necessary to hazard a battle, he ought not to expose his own person, but reserve, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... feel so utterly alone! I am wretched and disillusioned. In what does man transcend the beast?..." He turned towards the west, and a cruel, rapacious, predatory look flitted over his face; he took a piece of bread from his overcoat pocket and handed ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... only in finding a companion who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a fairly comfortable lodging, but their resources were very limited. They were obliged to take into their room a third companion, an old Auvergnat, gloomy and rapacious, who found it possible out of his meagre salary to save something with which to buy a place in his own country. Jean Francois and Savinien were always together. On holidays they together took long walks in the environs of Paris, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... younger boy know that he was on the lookout he kept a strict watch on all sides for more of the rapacious creatures, and at length discovered two making for him in different directions, one of them suddenly appearing between him and the yacht, which ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... enabled me to keep my countenance," said Nicaeus. "A patron of science, forsooth! Of all the insolent, shallow-brained, rapacious coxcombs—" ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... great difficulty in arranging the marriages of girls and sometimes the payment of a price to the bridegroom; while in order to retain the favour of the Bhats and avoid their sarcasm, lavish expenditure had to be incurred by the bride's father on presents to these rapacious mendicants. [469] Thus a daughter became in a Rajput's eyes a long step on the road to ruin, and female infanticide was extensively practised. This crime has never been at all common in the Central Provinces, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... further back, the rapacious hordes already had gutted the rich stores of Central America and the northern regions of South America. The rush of the lustful conqueror was astonishingly swift. Columbus himself was as eager for gold ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... starvation. The lord of the land was thus enabled to dictate his own terms, and therefore it has been that we have heard of the payment of five, six, eight, and even as much as ten pounds per acre. "Enormous rents, low wages, farms of an enormous extent, let by rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, to be relet by intermediate oppressors, for five times their value, among the wretched starvers on potatoes and water," led to a constant succession of outrages, followed by Insurrection Acts, Arms Acts, and Coercion Acts, when the real remedy ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... company, obtaining a temporary restricting order preventing the ordinance from going at once into effect. Here was an affair in point. Were it not for lawyers of the calibre of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon, hard-earned private property would soon be confiscated by the rapacious horde. Once in a while I was made aware that Mr. Watling had his eye ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... streams, growing viler and more nauseous as the pilgrimage advanced. Near Jackson Street they came upon a bedraggled pavilion of dubious gayety which lured them downstairs with its ear-splitting jazz orchestra. A horde of rapacious females descended upon them like starving locusts. Suddenly everybody in the party seemed moved with a desire for dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... hall.(916) Dried are the udders of our cows, Our elephants have juiceless brows,(917) Nor can the sweetest pasture stay The charger's long unquiet neigh. Big tears from mules and camels flow Whose staring coats their trouble show, Nor can the leech's art restore Their health and vigour as before. Rapacious birds are fierce and bold: Not single hunters as of old, In banded troops they chase the prey, Or gathering on our temples stay. Through twilight hours with shriek and howl Around the city jackals prowl, And wolves and foul hyaenas wait Athirst for blood at every gate. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the persons, whether owners or strangers, to whom he let the lands, had agreed to rents which surpassed their abilities to pay,) I need not tell you what must have been the consequence, when it got into such rapacious hands, and was taken out of the hands of its natural proprietors: that the public revenue had sunk and lost by it, and that the country was wasted and destroyed. I leave it to your Lordships' own ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... had free scope here for centuries, during which time the invaders sacrificed the entire aboriginal race; and since then millions of Africans have been slowly murdered by overwork, insufficient food, and the lash, simply to fill the pockets of their rapacious masters with gold. Few native Cubans are sugar-planters. These estates are almost universally owned and carried on by Spaniards from the European peninsula, or other foreigners, including Englishmen ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... extent.[44] Consequently it might appear that all nations stand to benefit in the same way, but in varying degrees, from the intense local demand set up in the nation at war. Thus British Trade was exhorted in a sincerely rapacious article by Captain Dixon-Johnson[45] to snatch the opportunity presented by the Balkan War; and the unparalleled boom in American trade during the present war is another obvious example. This suggests at once that the benefit occasioned by war is not a national ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... of the psychologist, Selwyn looked searchingly at the faces of the strangely assorted crowd, and the contrasts offered would have satisfied the most rapacious ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite peoples are frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy, agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of Battles;' no Te Deum can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps unjust, for he is the Supreme Being ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... had taken the farm for Reilly's father, in his own name, a step which many of the liberal and generous Protestants of that period were in the habit of taking, to protect the property for the Roman Catholics, from such rapacious scoundrels as Whitecraft, and others like him, who had accumulated the greater portion of their wealth and estates by the blackest and most iniquitous political profligacy and oppression. For about ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... while the Spartan king, Pausanias, together with some of the ephors, were also jealous of the arbitrary and oppressive conduct of Lysander. He refused to prevent the revival of the democracy. It was in this manner that Athens, rescued from that sanguinary and rapacious regime of the Thirty Tyrants, was enabled to reappear as a humble and dependent member of the Spartan alliance—with nothing but the recollection of her former power, yet with her democracy again in vigorous action ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of esteem and influence was made by the "Drapier's Letters," in 1724. One Wood, of Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, had, as is said, by a present to the Duchess of Munster, obtained a patent, empowering him to coin one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the kingdom of Ireland, in which there was a very inconvenient ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... sooner climbed over the highest precipices, but thinking themselves secure from the pursuits of their rapacious enemies, they fixed in a valley which, from its great fertility in comparison of the country they had just passed, they called Domestica[I]. They intermixed with the old inhabitants, and built some towns ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... He was not inclined to be rapacious. He had an interest in a bank in Gibraltar, and two thousand pounds would establish him there. He had thought it might be worth the president's while to put him in the way of two thousand pounds—considering everything. Promotion was slow in Bermuda ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... land with the alternate benefits of rain and warmth of the Sun; and that our hopes of a plentiful harvest may not be disappointed by devouring insects, or any other calamity:—To prosper our trade and fishery, and the labor of our hands:—To protect our navigation from the rapacious hands of invaders and robbers on the seas, and graciously to open a door of deliverance to our fellow-citizens in cruel captivity in a land of Barbarians:—To continue and confirm our civil and religious liberties; and for that ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... them, for an alliance with the natural enemy of that friend, and with an enemy of human liberty. They spoke of the court of Great Britain as the most faithless and corrupt in the world, and denounced the result of Jay's mission as a surrender of every just claim upon a rapacious enemy for restitution on ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Templemore was counting over his effects, among which he had discovered a sad deficiency in coats and pantaloons. The Arabs had respected the plunder, by compact, with the intention of making a fair distribution on the reef; but, with a view to throw a sop to the more rapacious of their associates, one room had been sacked by the permission of the sheiks. This unfortunate room happened to be that of Sir George Templemore, and the patent razors, the East Indian dressing case, the divers toys, to say nothing of innumerable vestments which the young man had left ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... which, as he would have been delighted not to have had attended them, so was he no less pleased with any opportunity to rid himself of the incumbrance. He passed, in the world's language, as an exceeding good father; being not only so rapacious as to rob and plunder all mankind to the utmost of his power, but even to deny himself the conveniencies, and almost necessaries, of life; which his neighbours attributed to a desire of raising immense fortunes for his children: but in fact it was not so; he heaped up money for ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Chase, to place his wife and child in some place of safety; whilst your father's fear was all for the treasure in gold and plate and valuables stored up in the house, which might well fall an easy prey to the rapacious hands of spoilers, should such (as was but too likely) swoop down upon the house to strive to recover the jewels and gold taken from them when they were helpless to oppose ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Your intellect has been destroyed as much as possible, and every ray of light they have attempted to shut out from your minds. The oppressors themselves have become involved in the ruin. They have become weak, sensual, and rapacious. They have cursed you—they have cursed themselves—they have cursed the earth which they have trod. In the language of a Southern statesman, we can truly say, "even the wolf, driven back long since by the approach of man, ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... up; absorb &c. (suck in) 296; draw off; suck the blood of, suck like a leech. retake, resume; recover &c. 775. Adj. taking &c.v.; privative[obs3], prehensile; predaceous, predal[obs3], predatory, predatorial[obs3]; lupine, rapacious, raptorial; ravenous; parasitic. bereft &c. 776. Adv. at one fell swoop. Phr. give an ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Denounced by all—upheld by Robespierre. Who spar'd La Valette? who promoted him, Stain'd with the deep dye of nobility? Who to an ex-peer gave the high command? 230 Who screen'd from justice the rapacious thief? Who cast in chains the friends of Liberty? Robespierre, the self-stil'd patriot Robespierre— Robespierre, allied with villain Daubign— Robespierre, the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a trade is unscrupulous, hard, rapacious, destructive. It foments all the evil passions; it is allied with all the vices; it is antagonistic to human welfare. It glories merely in strength; it worships only success. It raises wicked men to power; it prostrates and hides the good. It extinguishes what is most lovely, and spurns what ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... have been as selfish, as rapacious, as their Hohenzollern overlords. Nothing could be more sordid than their attitude in the recent campaign for financial reform. They have shifted the burden of taxation upon the weaker shoulders of the peasant and artisan. They have compelled von Buelow to reverse the Liberal ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... dissociated state it is impossible that men could have long continued. The dangers to which they must have frequently been exposed, by the attacks of fierce and rapacious beasts, by the proedatory attempts of their own species, and by the disputes of contiguous and independent families; these, together with their inability to defend, themselves, on many such occasions, must have incited them to ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life with less design ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... rather surprised at the communication you have desired your business agent here to make to me; I may well feel offended at your believing me capable of so mean a trick. It would have been a very different thing had I sold my works to rapacious shopkeepers, and then secretly made another good speculation; but, from one artist to another, it is rather a strong measure to suspect me of such a proceeding! The whole thing seems to be either a device to put me to the test, or a mere suspicion. In any event I may tell ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the old leaven," ver. 7. "I wrote to you in an epistle, not to be mingled together with fornicators," ver. 9, 11; and explaining what he meant by not being mingled together, saith, "If any named a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or drunkard, or rapacious, with such an one not to eat together," ver. 11. "Therefore take away from among yourselves that wicked person," ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, in order the more speedily to collect the price of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... picked out both shoulders and both legs. This was a pretty large share, it must be confessed, and Loki, who was always angry when anybody got more than he, no sooner saw what the eagle had taken, than he seized a great pole and began to beat the rapacious bird unmercifully. Whereupon a very singular thing happened, as singular things always used to happen when the gods were concerned: the pole stuck fast in the huge talons of the eagle at one end, and Loki stuck ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... for the common defence. At this period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its authority declined. Towards ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mean, niggardly, penurious, rapacious, close, ignoble, miserly, parsimonious, petty, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... permanent, grants of money to pay official salaries and then insisted upon electing a treasurer to dole it out. Thus the colonists learned some of the mysteries of public finance, as well as the management of rapacious officials. The legislature also used its power over money grants to force the governor to sign bills which he would ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... made no use of his advantage; he merely restored the former frontier and abolished the subsidies which had formerly been paid to the Persians. Chosroes II. was much inferior to his grandfather. He was haughty and cruel, rapacious and given to luxury; he was neither a general nor an administrator. At the beginning of his reign he favoured the Christians; but when in 602 Maurice had been murdered by Phocas, he began war with Rome to avenge his death. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... forfeiture of my whole paternal estate, for a sum not above a fourth of its value—and it is for that very reason that I press the king's government for a settlement of the debts due to my father, that I may be able to redeem my land from this rapacious creditor." ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... arrived the decision of the East India Company, that the weak and rapacious Ameer Singh should be deposed, and Serfojee placed on the throne. He conducted himself excellently as a ruler, and greatly favoured Christians in his territory, always assisting the various schools, and giving ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... masses of our people would become like the Roman populace under the Caesars; the forms of a republic might for a season be preserved, but the essence would speedily evaporate, leaving a vast, powerful, rapacious Slave Empire, ruled by some master spirit of the slaveholding oligarchy, and wielding all the power of the nation for the gratification and aggrandizement of that grasping, unscrupulous aristocracy. Having ceased to be the refuge of the hunted and the cynosure of the oppressed, this ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... something to say—everything to say. You have pursued her, plundered her, tortured her long enough. More than once she has been on the brink of discovery by your persistence in prowling over the grounds and from her attempts to conceal your rapacious extortions. All ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to enforce the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of the Equitable Life exposed conditions far worse than I had indicated to the public, and it seemed probable that the usual whitewashing process would be utilized to conceal the guilt of the rapacious criminals who had been untrue to the most sacred trust that can be imposed on man. Since that time, however, the Governor of the State of New York has appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Big Three corporations, and the resulting disclosures ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... extorted from the givers by the terrors of power. Against the system of presents, therefore, the new commission was in general opinion particularly pointed. In the commencement of reformation, at a period when a rapacious conquest had overpowered and succeeded to a corrupt government, an act of indemnity might have been thought advisable; perhaps a new account ought to have been opened; all retrospect ought to have been forbidden, at least to certain periods. If this had not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stock he was not in the possession of; all the brokers have been examined, and not one of them has been able to tell you of one single shilling stock sold by these gentlemen, or either of them, of which they were not actually in the possession. It is impossible, if he is so rapacious a man as to engage in a speculation to ruin his fortune and his character, to account for his not taking advantage of ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... talk is spent over the ancient Scandinavians who used to harry the peaceful farmers long ago. We learn that these rapacious gentlemen were above all things "deep-thoughted," and that they had rather fine notions about poetry and the future life. They were, in short, a species of bloodthirsty AEsthetics. Instead of devoting themselves to intense amours and sonnets, they were the Don Juans of Death, but in no other point ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... and whose acts of oppression are truly Asiatic; and who tamely bore all this oppression, supported by their national vanity, because they wish to bear the name of the great people: Great, because their ambition is unbounded; great as a nation of rapacious and blood-thirsty soldiers; great in every species of immorality and vice! Who, led away by this miserable vanity, have been false to their oaths, so recently pledged to a mild and virtuous prince, very unfit to rule such a race of villains, because ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... erudition, and tolerant character, won for him a supreme place in Jewish life for half a century. Meir of Rothenburg was a poet and martyr as well as a profound scholar. He passed many years in prison rather than yield to the rapacious demands of the local government for a ransom, which Meir's friends would willingly have paid. As a specimen of Meir's poetry, the following verses are taken from a dirge composed by him in 1285, when copies of the Pentateuch were publicly committed to the flames. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... one so friendless as her child? Had not she herself been wrecked among the rocks, trusting herself to one who had been utterly unworthy,—loving one who had been utterly unlovely? Men so often are as ravenous wolves, merciless, rapacious, without hearts, full of greed, full of lust, looking on female beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her very life as a toy! Were she higher in the world there might be safety. Were she lower there might be safety. But how could she send her girl forth ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... instituted lawsuits to get them back that he might destroy them. To boom a genius and cash his spiritual assets is a grave and delicate task—perhaps it is one of those things that should be left undone. Much anguish did these rapacious brothers cause the divinely gifted brown thrush, and when they began to quarrel over the receipts between themselves, he begged them to go away and leave him in peace. He finally had to adopt the ruse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... of the back country. Events were slowly converging toward a crisis in government and society. Independent in spirit, turbulent in action, the backwoodsmen revolted not only against excessive taxes, dishonest sheriffs, and extortionate fees, but also against the rapacious practices of the agents of Lord Granville. These agents industriously picked flaws in the titles to the lands in Granville's proprietary upon which the poorer settlers were seated; and compelled them to pay for the land if they had not already done so, or else to pay the fees twice over ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... didst transgress, Defeated of his seisure many dayes Giv'n thee of Grace, wherein thou may'st repent, And one bad act with many deeds well done Mayst cover: well may then thy Lord appeas'd Redeem thee quite from Deaths rapacious claimes; But longer in this Paradise to dwell Permits not; to remove thee I am come, 260 And send thee from the Garden forth to till The ground whence thou wast tak'n, fitter Soile. He added not, for ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... North, who spent their lives in elemental warfare, and rode out to meet death in tempest, lashed to the spar of their craft. And such, too, were the New World Vikings of the Pacific, who coasted the seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,—planks lashed with deer thongs, calked with moss,—rapacious in their deep-sea plunderings as beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm itself. The adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like some old legend of the sea than sober truth; ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... a small sum was left wherewith to increase irrigation and other useful works. The criminal folly of the former lavish expenditure was now demonstrated by a brilliant object-lesson. This small sum, when kept out of the hands of the rapacious bondholders, and applied to the development of the rich soil of Egypt, was found to work wonders. From the moment when the finances of Egypt were for the first time used to develop what is naturally the richest soil in the world, progress towards ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Mexico? Who thinks that the hunger for dominion will stop here of itself? It is said, to be sure, that our present acquisitions will prove so lean and unsatisfactory, that we shall seek no further. In my judgment, we may as well say of a rapacious animal, that, if he has made one unproductive hunt, he will not try for a ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... made their appearance. "Certainly," quietly retorted Beza, whose ear had caught the insulting expression, turning to the quarter whence it came, "faithful dogs are needed in the Lord's sheep-fold to bark at the rapacious wolves."[1116] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... lot,' says Dan, 'to hear you speak as you does. Thar's a rapacious sport about yere who the instant he finds how you makes them dug-out improvements sends on an' wins out a gov'ment patent an' takes title to that identical quarter-section which embraces your camp. Now he's allowin' to go squanderin' over to Tucson an' get ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... Spanish tyrants, their forefathers, the Batavi and Belgee, fifteen centuries before, combated against their Roman oppressors. Like the former, submitting reluctantly to a haughty master, and misgoverned by rapacious satraps, they broke off their chain with like resolution, and tried their fortune in a similar unequal combat. The same pride of conquest, the same national grandeur, marked the Spaniard of the sixteenth century ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... grasping men. They tried to wring all the money they could from their helpless subjects. To the extortions of the governors must be added those of the tax collectors, whose very name of "publican" [14] became a byword for all that was rapacious and greedy. In this first effort to manage the world she had won, Rome had certainly made a failure. A city-state could not rule, with justice and efficiency, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... turned their eyes towards them in all their distresses. We must observe, that the monks of that time, especially those from Ireland,[45] who had a considerable share in the conversion of all the northern parts, did not show that rapacious desire of riches which long disgraced and finally ruined their successors. Not only did they not seek, but seemed even to shun such donations. This prevented that alarm which might have arisen from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be kept as hostages?—but if so, to what end?—or taken prisoners—or asked a large ransom? This last suggestion threw them into a cold perspiration of fear. The wealthiest were seized with the worst panic and saw themselves forced, if they valued their lives, to empty bags of gold into the rapacious hands of this soldier. They racked their brains for plausible lies to dissemble their riches, to pass themselves off as poor—very poor. Loiseau pulled off his watch-chain and hid it in his pocket. As night fell ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... was strictly prohibited. The cargo the young men had brought with them from New Switzerland, which already had escaped so many perils, was, therefore, declared contraband, and seized by the French fisc—an institution that rarely permitted such a prize to quit its rapacious grasp. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... he received with demonstrations of infinite constraint and reluctance, and, in the midst of his rapacious extortion, acted so cunningly as to impose himself upon both for a miracle of disinterested integrity. Yet, not contented with what he thus could earn, and despairing of being able to steer the bark of his fortune ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... like a different creature now, sprang from his chair, and, as Burton drew a long, flat, leather case from his pocket, snatched it from the other's hand. His fingers in their rapacious haste could not at first manipulate the catch, and then finally, with the case open, he bent over the table feverishly. The light reflected back as from some living mass of crimson fire, now shading darkly, now glowing into wondrous, colourful transparency as he moved the ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... standin' by the African Desert one day watchin' them take a picture called "Rapacious Rupert's Revenge," when the Kid comes over and calls me aside. Since he had become a actor he had gave himself up to dressin' in panama hats, Palm Beach suits and white shoes. He reminded me of the handsome young lieutenant in a musical ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... in the teeming earth, 550 Green swells the germ, impatient for its birth; Guard from rapacious worms its tender shoots, And drive the mining beetle from its roots; With ceaseless efforts rend the obdurate clay, And give my vegetable babes to day! 555 —Thus when an Angel-form, in light array'd, Like HOWARD pierced the prison's noisome shade; Where chain'd to earth, with eyes to heaven ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... reign of John, all the rapacious exactions usual to these Norman kings were not only redoubled, but mingled with outrages of ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... generation could scarcely discover the ruins of Aquileia. After this dreadful chastisement, Attila pursued his march; and, as he passed, the cities of Altinum, Concordia, and Padua were reduced into heaps of stones and ashes. The inland towns, Vicenza, Verona, and Bergamo, were exposed to the rapacious cruelty of the Huns. Milan and Pavia submitted, without resistance, to the loss of their wealth;" and "applauded the unusual clemency which preserved from the flames the public as well as private buildings, and spared the lives of the captive multitude." ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... respectful sympathy and flattery, as the victims of the rapacity of their landlords—on whom were poured the full phials of Anti-corn-law wrath. The following are some of the scalding drops let fall upon their devoted heads—"Monster of impiety!" "inhuman fiend!" "heartless brutes!" "rapacious harpies!" "relentless demons!" "plunderers of the people!" "merciless footpads!" "murderers!" "swindlers!" "insatiable!" "insolent!" "flesh-mongering!" "scoundrel!" "law-making landlords!" "a bread-taxing oligarchy!"[29] Need we say that the authors ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture." This was the poet Cowley's opinion. "Of all the animals" scolds Boileau, "which fly in the air, walk on the ground, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal, in my opinion, is man." People must be very bad, indeed, who ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... down and kill an owl—a sight that made me gasp with astonishment. But I am inclined to think of this act as only a slip, a slight aberration, on the part of the falcon, so universal is the sense of relationship among the kinds that have the rapacious habit; or, at the worst, it was merely an isolated act of deviltry and daring of the sharp-winged pirate of the sky, a sudden assertion of over-mastering energy and power, and a very slight offence compared with that of the crow when he carries off and devours his callow little ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... burghers well knew their true position, and were aware that to admit the Austrian usurpation would expose their young men to be drawn upon for the Duke's wars, cause their property to be subject to perpetual rapacious exactions, and fill their hills with castles for ducal bailiffs, who would be little better than licensed robbers. No wonder, then, that the generations of William Tell and Arnold Melchthal bequeathed a resolute purpose of resistance ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him,—for though Sir Edward was secretly connected with him and Sir Giles, and took tithe of their spoliations, he disowned them in public, and would assuredly not countenance any open display of their rapacious proceedings. ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... comprehending this. Centuries of undisturbed internal intrigue had accustomed them to play the game of forfeits with each other, and nothing warned them that the time was come at which diplomacy, finesse, and craft would stand them in ill stead against rapacious conquerors. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... it in imagination and enjoying it. When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his mouth; he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly, disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily and rapacious. ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hand, there were abundant indications of discontent in Germany, where a variety of parties inveighed against the rapacious policy of Prussia, and where Bismarck had sown a deep crop of hate. It was believed in France that the minor states would not support Prussia in a war. In Austria the defeat of 1866 rankled, and hostilities against Prussia on the part of France seemed certain to win sympathy and support ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... rapacious faces, Laura realised that, come what might, she would never have the courage to confess. To them, at least. That night in deep humility she laid her sin bare to God, imploring Him, even though He could not pardon it, to ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... law, the idea of Lady Mason having been guilty seemed preposterous. Of course she was innocent, and of course she would be found to be innocent. And of course, also, that Joseph Mason of Groby Park was, and would be found to be, the meanest, the lowest, the most rapacious of mankind. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... for his own eating and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss Percevals, the reversionary sum of 21,000 pounds a year of the public money, and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster: and the best of it is, that this minister, after abusing his predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... of these tanks is temporary. As some sea-gentlemen are much more rapacious than others, and as some prey upon others, the arranging of them must have been very like the old puzzle of the fox, the goose, and the bag of seed. Then when new creatures arrive ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... enough, having inherited, as he tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash him in the public street, and the ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... obsolescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more of the Continental and American features than the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy In appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... economy or labor, from the farmers', the manufacturers' and the merchant's stores to the robes, coats, shirts and shoes, even to the beds and bed-rooms of private individuals—nothing escapes their rapacious grasp: in the country, they carry off even seed reserved for planting; at Strasbourg and in the Upper Rhine, all kitchen utensils; in Auvergne and elsewhere, even the shepherd's pots. Every object of value, even those not in public use, comes under requisition: for ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Nile, or according to others, in India. Homer tells us that the cranes used to migrate every winter to the Pygmies' country, and their appearance was the signal of bloody warfare to the puny inhabitants, who had to take up arms to defend their cornfields against the rapacious strangers. The Pygmies and their enemies the Cranes form the subject of several ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... warm and red; the scattered oddments had been hidden from sight in the "coffin's" rapacious maw; photographs and knick-knacks gave a homy look to the rooms which had looked so bare and bleak twenty-four hours before. The Freshers tumbled into bed and ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very admirable specimen of her kind—the mamestra brassicae species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf—such is the irony of nature, and the merit ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... first victory I had been a witness. Condorcanqui had been cacique of the province of Tungasuca, the corregidor of which was among the most exacting and rapacious of his class. For a long time the Indian chief had brooded over the sufferings of his countrymen, till he resolved to avenge them. He confided his plans to a few other caciques only, and to his ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... actors, the previous year, in an alligator adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left. The son, while bathing, was seized by the thigh and carried under water— a cry was raised, and the father, rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious beast, which was diving away with his victim. It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced to release his booty by the man's thrusting his thumb into his eye. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... head of his plunderers. Nothing was too small or great for his rapacious maw. He came up the marble steps of the studio of Chios ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... outlays upon the farm which she at the time believed to be for the best.[637] The eldest son could not help her, for he required succour from Pitt. If, then, the farming experiments at Burton Pynsent failed, the loss fell upon Pitt. We may infer, then, that his debts were occasioned partly by rapacious servants and tradesmen in London, partly by farming and gardening at Holwood, but also by the needs of his mother and brother. The fact that Chatham paid not a shilling towards the discharge of Pitt's liabilities proves that he was in low water; and as no one, not even Tomline, knew of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... thee, Simon Magus! woe to you, His wretched followers! who the things of God, Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver in adultery! Now must the trumpet sound for you, since yours Is the third chasm. Upon the following vault We now had mounted, where the rock impends Directly o'er the centre of the foss. Wisdom Supreme! how wonderful the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... refusing to import even a pin from the mother country, actually preferring nakedness to submission. They even solemnly voted that their venerable progenitor, instead of being, as she clearly ought to have been, a fond, protecting, and indulgent parent, was, in truth, no other than a rapacious, vindictive and tyrannical step-mother. This was the opinion, it will be remembered, when the two communities were legally united, had but one head, wore clothes, and necessarily pursued a multitude of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the various crops were a foot high; but that, in the short space of a few hours, the care and industry of the last ten months were rendered utterly vain and useless, and the poor colonists found their verdant fields converted into a barren waste by these rapacious insects. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... his country, while, in order that his eternal welfare should in no way be compromised by this bold and novel proceeding, he had obtained an express reservation to be made in his favour at Benares, overcoming, by means of considerable presents, the scruples of a rapacious and not very ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... proclaim as to the character of the King? Purity is the very foundation of His royalty. Meekness and gentleness are the very weapons of His conquest and the sceptre of His rule. The dove will outfly all Rome's eagles and all rapacious, unclean feeders, with their strong wings, and curved talons, and sharp beaks. The lesson as to the true nature of the true Kingdom, which was taught of old when the prophet said 'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, riding on an ass,' and not upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Misfortune a Convention is call'd, and proper Remedies are sought by the chief Men of the Nation against the present Mischiefs; Which we know has been done upon like Accidents. A King, either through Infirmities of Age, of Levity of Mind, may not only be missed by some covetous, rapacious or lustful Counsellor; may not only be seduced and depraved by debauch'd Youths of Quality, or of equal Age with himself; may be infatuated by a silly Wench, so far as to deliver and fling up the Reins of ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... is he who could discover the causes of things, and place under his feet all fears and inexorable fate, and the sound of rapacious Acheron: he is blest who knows the country gods, and Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... who wrote of the conduct of his chief as 'drivelling beyond contempt,' and 'sighed for a Wellesley or a Hastings.' The ultimate result of Macnaghten's negotiations with Shah Kamran was Major Todd's withdrawal from Herat. Todd had suspended the monthly subsidy, to the great wrath of Kamran's rapacious and treacherous minister Yar Mahomed, who made a peremptory demand for increased advances, and refused Todd's stipulation that a British force should be admitted into Herat. Todd's action in quitting Herat was severely ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... society in which he is placed. Slavery was established before he began to breathe. It was his inheritance. His slaves are his property by birth or testament. But why will he thus deceive himself? Why will he permit the cunning and rapacious spiders, which in the very sanctuary of ethics and religion are laboriously weaving webs from their own bowels, to catch him with their wretched sophistries?—and devour him, body, soul, and substance? Let him know, as he must one day with shame and terror own, that whoever ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... necessity; for it requires but little knowledge of human nature to discern what would be the consequence, were America again reduced to the subjection of Britain. Uncontrolled power, in the hands of an incensed, imperious, and rapacious conqueror, is an engine of dreadful execution, and woe be to that country over which it can be exercised. The names of Whig and Tory would then be sunk in the general term of rebel, and the oppression, whatever it might be, would, with very ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... were deep and gave him a slightly disagreeable aspect, but somewhere in his face there was a quality of singular thoughtfulness, as of the absorbed student dealing in generalities, which was utterly in opposition to the rapacious keenness of the eyes which ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... cat's, and his hands, behind his back, rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... Chambers of Commerce and other ornamental organizations who, being entirely uninformed on the subject, permit themselves to become the conduits through which the misrepresentation and animosity of avaricious creditors and rapacious attorneys are discharged ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... not the question. I charge you with having wilfully and criminally interfered in my life; I charge you with having robbed me of what was mine; I charge you with being utterly vile and rapacious, a hypocrite ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... to happen in after years. Erasmus, when looking at the tomb of Becket at Canterbury, wished that the jewels with which it was loaded had been given to the poor; "for," said he, "those who have heaped up all this mass of treasure will one day be plundered, and fall a prey to rapacious tyrants in power." His prediction was literally fulfilled twenty years after it was uttered. Sir Walter Raleigh regarded omens, and from these predicted truly. Tacitus foresaw the calamities which long desolated Europe on the fall of the Roman empire, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... in some instances, more than that. Land was offered them in five different places. Their greatest obstacle was the unsavory reputation of the white men who had preceded them,—the slave-traders and merchants,—men who had been gross, violent and rapacious. One of the natives who saw Mr. Mills and Mr. Burgess in prayer, said he "never knew before ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head, with owlish eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a sabreur, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity, as, in the main, a massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here he had in hand a war of his own. He revived. The ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... thou, my Son, the Helpless and the Poor, Nor in the chains of thine own indolence Slumber enervate, while the joys of sense Engross thee; and thou say'st, "I ask no more."— Wise Men the Shepherd's slumber will deplore When the rapacious Wolf has leapt the fence, And ranges thro' the fold.—My Son, dispense Those laws, that justice to the Wrong'd restore.— The Common-Weal shou'd be the first pursuit Of the crown'd Warrior, for the royal brows The People first enwreath'd.—They ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... been a great pest to poultry raising, and even mamma espoused Jack's cause after his successful battle with the rapacious foe. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... from their progeny. Thus a partridge will tumble along before a sportsman in order to draw away the dogs from her helpless covey. In the time of nidification the most feeble birds will assault the most rapacious. All the hirundines of a village are up in arms at the sight of an hawk, whom they will persecute till he leaves that district. A very exact observer has often remarked that a pair of ravens nesting in the rock of Gibraltar would suffer no vulture or eagle to rest near their station, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... itself presented a no less startling aspect. It was no longer gloomy, deserted, and silent. It was teeming with life. Every window was open, and from within came sounds of rapacious cleaning. A hundred painters had commenced a vigorous assault upon the exterior, and representatives of every branch of house decoration were attacking the interior. It was a scene ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... loud rustling amongst the bushes, and on looking towards the spot, he saw first one and then another raven mount in the air, uttering, at short intervals, the peculiar dull and complaining cry of rapacious birds when frightened from their prey. The creatures evidently meditated another descent, for, instead of betaking themselves to the neighbouring trees, they circled round and round in the air, now higher, now lower, mingling their monotonous notes with an occasional ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... politicians, and will one day succeed in driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... profane, and wanton havoc. Grant, Heaven, that here my pilgrimage may close! Yet, if this be denied, where'er my bones May lie—or in the city's crowded bounds, Or scatter'd wide o'er the huge sweep of waters, Or left a prey on some deserted shore To the rapacious cormorant,—yet still, (For why should sober reason cast away A thought which soothes the soul?) yet still my spirit Shall wing its way to these my native regions, And hover o'er this spot. Oh, then I'll think Of times when I was seated 'neath this yew ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... to bed early that night, having concluded my bargain for the morrow with a rapacious Arab who spoke English. I went to bed early in order to escape the returning party, and was again on the quay at six the next morning. On this occasion, I stepped boldly into the boat the very moment that I came along the shore. There is ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... When Hector was careering in his chariot round their fortifications, and the king of men counselled retreat, he declared he would remain, were it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So completely marked, so well defined are his characters, though they were all rapacious chiefs at first sight, little differing from each other, that it has been observed with truth, that one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, upon hearing one of the speeches read out without a name, who was the chief ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... did not mince matters. He declared that the rapacious course of the railroads in Georgia had been spoliation. Monopoly is extortion. Corporations must either be governed by the law or they will override the law. Competition is liberty. Keep the hand of the law on corporations ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... there, sees china broken; squalling.]—All my fine porcelain destroyed! monster! vile, rapacious monster! A devil, indeed, has been in the cupboard, and that's you. The china, presented to me by my grand relations, which I set such store on, smashed into a thousand pieces; 'tis too much for my weak ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... the King eats a pear, His servants rapacious the tree will uptear; For every five eggs he gives bounteously, more Than five hundred fowls ...
— Little Engel - a ballad with a series of epigrams from the Persian - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
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