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Mutilate   Listen
adjective
Mutilate  adj.  
1.
Deprived of, or having lost, an important part; mutilated.
2.
(Zool.) Having finlike appendages or flukes instead of legs, as a cetacean.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mutilate" Quotes from Famous Books



... fail to follow you, unless you are suggesting that it is customary for murderers who mutilate bodies to be punctilious in depositing the dismembered remains upon land belonging to their victims. In which case I am sceptical as to your facts. I am not aware of the existence of any such custom. Moreover, it appears that only a portion of the body was deposited on Mr. Bellingham's ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... obligations. On the other hand, it must be admitted that they had some customs which indicate a tinge of barbarism. They used torture for the extraction of answers from reluctant persons, employed the scourge to punish trifling offences, and, in certain cases, condescended to mutilate the bodies of their dead enemies. Their addiction to intemperance is also a barbaric trait. They were, no doubt, on the whole, less civilized than either the Greeks or Romans; but the difference does not seem to have ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... formed by Cromwell; had a series of judicial decisions, similar to that which was pronounced by the Exchequer Chamber in the case of shipmoney, transferred to the crown the right of taxing the people; had the Star Chamber and the High Commission continued to fine, mutilate, and imprison every man who dared to raise his voice against the government; had the press been as completely enslaved here as at Vienna or at Naples; had our Kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole legislative ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... confidence of your children do not threaten to mutilate the feet of their sensibilities for the sake of a narrow theory. I myself at least, after what I had experienced, would sooner have gone to the nearest police agent for intimate advice, than back ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... his insolence so far, as to declare that he should mutilate Honorius before he sent him into exile. But this assertion of Zosimus is destroyed by the more impartial testimony of Olympiodorus; who attributes the ungenerous proposal (which was absolutely rejected by Attalus) to the baseness, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... were brought to me by a cousin who has just returned from India. Now, I want you to give me a little assistance. You see, I have decided to join them together so as to make one large square cushion-cover. How should I do this so as to mutilate the material as little as possible? Of course I propose to make my cuts only along the lines ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... papers whole, and don't you dare to mutilate them." By way of letting her down easier I added: "Don't give ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... were disposed to do me such friendly offices have embraced, without restraint, every opportunity to weaken the confidence of the people, and, by having the whole game in their hands, they have scrupled not to publish things that do not, as well as those which do exist, and to mutilate the latter, so as to make them subserve the purposes ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... experimentalists have carefully examined the lower orders of animals,—among them the Abbe Spallanzani, who made a number of experiments upon snails and salamanders,—and have found that they might mutilate them to an incredible extent; that you might cut off the jaw or the greater part of the head, or the leg or the tail, and repeat the experiment several times, perhaps cutting off the same member again and again; and yet each of ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... bordered by elms cruelly cropped, pollarded, and switched. The demand for firewood occasions these mutilations. If I could waft by a wish the thinnings of Abbotsford here, it would make a little fortune of itself. But then to switch and mutilate my trees!—not for a thousand francs. Ay, but sour grapes, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... his poilu inconnu in the depths of a cathedral in order to bring an unbelieving crowd into the house of God, but puts him in the public way under the Arc de Triomphe. He does not say that the soldier died for King and Country, and then mutilate a text—"Greater love hath no man than this," but he inscribes—"Ici repose un soldat francais mort pour la patrie," and leaves the living to make their own reflections. His Paris is a city of statues and gardens but it is all dignified, it is all in good taste. Even the houses and the shops ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... genius. The jealousy of puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first rise of the Reformation in this country. It had not only banished them from our churches and altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the "wisdom" of parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface what little remained of painting and sculpture among us. Even within our own times this deadly hostility to art was not extinct; for when a proposal was made gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by a series of religious pictures, and English artists, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... miles. He bids me tell you to follow to Huejugilla el Alto, where he says arrangements will be made for my ransom. Remember Jack Burk. He spoke of the mountains to the west of Zacatecas. Pacheco threatens to mutilate me and forward fragments to you if you do not follow to the point specified. He is watching me as I write, and one of his men will carry this letter to Mendoza, and deliver it. The situation is desperate, and it strikes ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish

... consistent with her own feelings, while she absolutely turns pale, trembles, and recoils, at the institutions of these receivers! Execrable men! you do not murder the horse, on which you only ride; you do not mutilate the cow, which only affords you her milk; you do not torture the dog, which is but a partial servant of your pleasures: but these unfortunate men, from whom, you derive your very pleasures and your fortunes, you torture, mutilate, murder ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson

... after a single reading. "Without error" is to be taken literally; there must be no omission, insertion, or transposition of words. Ignore indistinctness of articulation and defects of pronunciation as long as they do not mutilate ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... of the broad message, which was the same to every man. Repentance, turning to God, works worthy of repentance, are as needful for Jew as for Gentile, and as open to Gentile as to Jew. What but universal can such a message be? To limit it would be to mutilate it. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... named Hans Thomas von Absberg, was a standing menace. It was the custom of this ruffian, who had a large following, to plunder even the poorest who came from the city, and, not content with this, to mutilate his victims. In June 1522 he fell upon a wretched craftsman, and with his own sword hacked off the poor fellow's right hand, notwithstanding that the man begged him upon his knees to take the left, and not destroy his means of earning his livelihood. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... and mode of life, the best, healthiest, and most vigorous political unit is that to which men are by their own feelings strongly drawn. Any breach of such unity, whether by forcible disruption or by compulsory inclusion in a larger society of alien sentiments and laws, tends to mutilate—or, at lowest, to cramp—the spontaneous development of social life. National and personal freedom are growths of the same root, and their historic connection rests on no accident, but ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... times this seems to have been the universal and perhaps instinctive treatment of the hand that struck a father. By Nur al-Din's flight the divorce-oath became technically null and void for Taj al-Din had sworn to mutilate his son ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... know the whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to 'mutilate' the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it. But with these letters of Mary Taylor's before us, let us not hear again that the story of Charlotte Bronte's life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately told by ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... it our fault if we have been brought so low that we must vie with your dogs and pick up the crumbs that drop from your table? Thou didst come up against us and crush us with thy powerful hand, thou didst mutilate us and chain us in these cages. No longer are we able to work or seek our sustenance. Why should these dogs have the right to bite and bark? O that the just—if still there are such men in our time—might rise up! O that one ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... roots are tough and the trunks are strong, and the sap wells surely up from those mysterious sources where, in darkness and silence, Nature works her wondrous transformations,—proving, through each waxing and waning year, by bud and leaf and branch, that, thwart and mutilate and deny her as you may, she is ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... himself, when he took his violent dislike to Swain. The act would be characteristic of a certain form of mania. Nobody else would have any motive for destroying them; in fact, no one else would dare mutilate a book he ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson

... the latter. Signa afterwards are the standards of the maniples, cohorts, and legions. [538] Latrocinium, 'a predatory attack,' as opposed to a regular battle. [539] Obtruncare in opposition to caedere (cut down) signifies 'to mutilate by cutting off a limb or limbs.' The word multos is chosen here only for variety's sake, instead of alios. [540] The words veteres novique express a whole sentence: 'as old and new soldiers were united in the several divisions (maniples and cohorts) of the army;' and it is to ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... Commons, took to sitting separately, and transacted their own business as a distinct assembly. With so much wisdom are the kingdoms of the earth governed! How else could any one in his senses have devised the idea of creating one deliberative body on purpose to mutilate or destroy the work of another? to produce from time to time a periodical crisis or a periodical deadlock? There is not a country in the world with a Second Chamber that doesn't twice a year kick and plunge to ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... of virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit to this rush and ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... one of these sanctuaries without reflecting on the rapid progress of irreligion among a people who, six months before, were, on their knees, adoring the effigies which, at that period, they were eager to mutilate and destroy. Iron crows and sledge-hammers were almost in a state of requisition. In the beginning, it was a contest who should first aim a blow at the nose of the Virgin Mary, or break the leg of her son. In one day, contracts were entered into with masons for ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... in this artificial age. Accordingly they are scarcely possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the condition of traversing their age, like scared persons, at a running pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the influence of their age, which would mutilate their genius. Never, for ay and forever, will society produce these poets; but out of society they still appear sometimes at intervals, rather, I admit, as strangers, who excite wonder, or as ill-trained children of nature, who give offence. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the barrels would pass, you would hear the universal cry, "Come out of that barrel, I see your head and feet sticking out." There might have been a mortification and a disgrace in the pillory and barrel shirt business to those that had to use them, but they did not bruise and mutilate the physical man. When one of them had served out his time he was as good as new. Old Joe had greater military insight than any general of the South, not excepting even Lee. He was the born soldier; seemed born to command. ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... mean to maintain a tolerable condition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e. g., as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself, as to exposing ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant

... for the Republicans to hold out the olive branch, to mutilate their own principles, and to bar the door against any ultimate constitutional abolition of slavery. Even the slave States still in the Union were not to be satisfied by all this, and the Confederacy gave it no heed. And ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one faculty to stunt or ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... narrative of Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... presenting themselves. In one place I saw some ten or twelve soldiers with a number of unfortunates whom they had tied back to back in a batch. With volley after volley they despatched them, and proceeded to mutilate their bodies in the usual horrible fashion. Nobody was spared, man, woman, or child, that I could see. The Chinese appeared to offer no resistance. Many of them prostrated themselves on the ground before the butchers with abject ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan

... ever recurring throughout the ages, with a different name for their Hero in each new recension, cannot pass unrecognised by the student, though they may naturally and rightly be ignored by the devotee; and when they are used as a weapon to mutilate or destroy the majestic figure of the Christ, they must be met, not by denying the facts, but by understanding the deeper meaning of the stories, the spiritual truths that the legends expressed under ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... whether he dropped that stone on his foot before or after dinner. He, and not your own evil nature, should be responsible for your instinctive wish that he had happened to be toying with a bowlder instead of a small stone which could only mutilate. ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell

... by a passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... She wished to mutilate the bodies after they were scalped. Yes, though near ninety years old, she would go through all the fatigues of a march of three hundred miles, and think it nothing, if she could be repaid by tearing the heart from one ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman

... end of his being. It is common to distinguish between the intellect and the conscience, between the power of thought and virtue, and to say that virtuous action is worth more than strong thinking. But we mutilate our nature by thus drawing lines between actions or energies of the soul, which are intimately, indissolubly bound together. The head and the heart are not more vitally connected than thought and virtue. Does not conscience include, as a part of itself, the noblest action of the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... Popular Tales from the Norse, 1888, p. 39, under the title of Hacon Grizzlebeard. A princess refuses all suitors, and mocks them publicly. Hacon Grizzlebeard, a prince, comes to woo her. She makes the king's fool mutilate the prince's horses, and then makes game of his appearance as he drives out the next day. Resolved to take his revenge, Hacon disguises himself as a beggar, attracts the princess's notice by means of a golden spinning-wheel, ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various

... letters is plain enough. But the first thing that the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement Shorter has pointed ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... keynote of this ancient document—a document which advocates massacre, condones polygamy, accepts slavery, and orders the burning of so-called witches. Its Mosaic provisions have long been laid aside. We do not consider ourselves accursed if we fail to mutilate our bodies, if we eat forbidden dishes, fail to trim our beards, or wear clothes of two materials. But we cannot lay aside the provisions and yet regard the document as divine. No learned quibbles ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... reputation of Bancroft and Hildreth could pass unchallenged when disregarding largely the use of documents and the citation of authorities, I would find myself challenged by a large number of critics. Moreover I have felt it would be almost cruel to mutilate some of the very rare old documents that shed such peerless light upon ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... she receives the guests at the sheep-shearing, and distributes the flowers, there is in the full flow of the poetry, a most beautiful and striking touch of individual character: but here it is impossible to mutilate the dialogue. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... freedom humbly to protest against the leaving out of anything. I had satisfactory reasons of my own for all that I allowed to pass; and my submission to the stage does not extend so far, that I can leave holes in my work, and mutilate the characters of men ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... glad I'm going to lose the author of 'The Purple Slipper' into the wilds of Westchester and the rhododendrons, while I extract her play from Howard and slash it myself and help Rooney to mutilate it further," said ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... a Russian sect dating from the eleventh century. They have been persecuted, but they number nearly six thousand, and regard themselves as the real Christians, the only true followers of Christ. They castrate themselves, and sometimes amputate the genitals entirely; the women even mutilate their breasts as a mark of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... This, in the language of its author and his friends, was the famous attempt to clear the Articles from the glosses encrusting them like barnacles, and to bring out the old catholic truth that man had done his worst to disfigure and to mutilate, and yet in spite of all man's endeavour it was in the Articles still. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, regarded Tract Ninety with uneasy doubts as to its drift, its intentions, the way in which the church and the world would take ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... possible," I exclaimed, "that these miserable creatures are samples of what is called the Filipino army." "Yes," an officer replied, "these are the fellows that never fight; that only stab in the back and mutilate the dying and dead." My eyes turned to the guard, our own soldiers, fine, manly fellows, who fairly represented the personnel of our own splendid army. It made me indignant that one of them should suffer at the hands of such ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... cane loop, both of which are carried slung on the back by the Torres Strait islanders and the New Guinea men of the adjacent shores, when on a marauding excursion;* these Papuans preserve the skulls of their enemies as trophies, while the Australian tribes merely mutilate the bodies of the slain, and ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... compass all the facts which my researches have furnished, not omitting those which are known, concerning the feelings and conduct of Rawleigh at these solemn moments of his life; to have preserved only the new would have been to mutilate the statue, and to injure the whole ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails of dogs and horses. Let cruelty or kindness or anything else once become customary and it will be practised by people to whom it is not at all natural, but whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else does, and who would lose their employment ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw

... thought, "have become the craftsman of Death, training my arm and intellect to be cunning in the butchery of my fellows! Wearing the instrument of torture at my side, and using the faculties God gave me to mutilate His image. Yet, from the pulpit and the statesman's chair, and far back through ages from the pages of history, precept and example have sought to record its justification, under the giant plea of necessity. But is it ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... country." Knowing the gentleman to be a northern man, she answered freely, saying that the country of herself and son was the whole country, and for it she was willing he should shed his last drop of blood, but not to divide and mutilate it, would she consent that he should ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... furtive glance around, he fetched the poker from the fireplace. He felt horribly brutal, as if he were going to mutilate and maltreat a creature that could feel; but he nerved himself to tap the back of Aphrodite's hand at the dimpled base of the third finger. The shock ran up to his elbow, and gave him acute "pins and needles," but the stone hand ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey

... consideration can be supposed to have taken place is so narrowed down that it amounts to well-nigh nothing; and it is, moreover, the very time during which Justin Martyr wrote his Apologies, and Marcion made his unsuccessful attempt to mutilate the gospel history. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... sounding like a demon's voice, which the stoutest hearts appal! His doom is utter'd!—"Twelve hours hence thy traitorous head shall fall, And for a terror be exposed upon the city wall; Thy limbs shall quarter'd be, and hung, all mutilate and bare, At Jedburgh, and Lanark town, at Glasgow, and at Ayr; That all good subjects thence may learn obedience to the State, Their duty to our gracious king, and bloody treason's fate." A horror seizes every breast—a stifled cry of dread: ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... thinks at a'!" Then, again, he said that he could not conceive how anything could daunt or cast down a man who had an aim in life. "They that have had a guid schoolin' and do nae mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him that has aye something ayont need never be weary." I have had to mutilate the dialect much, so that it might be comprehensible to you; but I think the sentiment will keep, even through a change of words, something of the heartsome ring of encouragement that it had for me: and that from a man cleaning a byre! You see what John Knox ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the blood royal have been plucked out for the good of the kingdom. Certain princes, too near to the throne, have been conveniently stifled between mattresses, the cause of death being given out as apoplexy. Now to stifle is worse than to mutilate. The King of Tunis tore out the eyes of his father, Muley Assem, and his ambassadors have not been the less favourably received by the emperor. Hence the king may order the suppression of a limb like the suppression of a state, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... burial mounds. The remaining pictures show how the chestnut blight acts in China—very differently from the way it acts in this country. In China, it produces, as the pictures show, definite cankers, which do not girdle the tree, which kill young trees occasionally, mutilate old trees, kill branches, but the cankers do not girdle the trees. That disease has been known in China we have no idea how many years, and, while it does a certain amount of harm, is said by Mr. Meyer not to be really serious in China. You can readily see, upon examining these pictures, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various

... of corrupt nature, which only bears wood and leaves. The pruning is done according to fixed rules, for it is only required that certain useless shoots should be cut off in man, and to lop off more would be to mutilate in a guilty manner. No pruning should ever be done upon the stock which has been planted in humankind through the Blessed Virgin, and is to remain in it for ever. The true Vine unites heaven to earth, the Divinity to humanity; ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich

... him why he had been rescued from the fire. Doubtless his gigantic struggles had been observed by the onlooker, and he was considered too good a man to burn. They would keep him for a slave, possibly mutilate ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... ideal of Christian life, according to convent rules, was a living and protracted martyrdom, and in some cases even the degradation of our common humanity. Christianity nowhere enjoins the eradication of passions and appetites, but the control of them. It would not mutilate and disfigure the body, for it is a sacred temple, to be made beautiful and attractive. On the other hand the Middle Ages strove to make the body appear repulsive, and the most loathsome forms of misery and disease to be hailed as favorite modes of penance. And as Christ suffered agonies ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... show that the actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with his law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the facts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts very much as Procrustes treated his victims,—he must stretch some, and mutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural organization of European civilization is distorted and torn asunder. "As the third or positive stage had accomplished its advent in his own person, it was necessary to find the metaphysical period just before; ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... the wedge graft or the bark graft. We have had equally good results with each. If any difference it is in favor of the side or bark graft which we prefer because it does not split or mutilate the stock, there is not the chance for decay, and the wounds heal over much quicker. On limbs three to four inches in diameter put in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various

... speaker, addressing Captain Prescott, "he has been a true friend to our race for years, and we must do him what kindness we can. If we leave these bodies here, the Shawnees will return and mutilate them—" ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis

... the telegraph clerks did not mutilate out of recognition or reasonable guess the words I added to Dolby's last telegram to Boston. "Tribune London correspondent totally false." Not only is there not a word of truth in the pretended conversation, but it is so absurdly unlike me that I cannot ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens

... has been repeatedly stated, as showing the highly civilized condition of the Nez Perces, that they did not scalp or otherwise mutilate the bodies of the soldiers who fell within their lines. It is true they did not while the fight was in progress, probably owing to the good influence exerted over the warriors by Chief Joseph, who is, in reality, an Indian of remarkably ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields

... source is Greco-Lat. manganum, apparatus, whence Ital. mangano, with both meanings. The verb mangle, to mutilate, is unrelated. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... friend and foe, and to robbery join cruelty so atrociously horrible that indignation at the crime is frequently lost in wonder; for the Galician robbers are seldom satisfied with booty, and unlike their brethren in other parts generally mutilate or assassinate those who are so unfortunate as to fall in their hands; prostitution is carried on to an enormous extent, and although loathsome concustant [sic] diseases stare the stranger in the face in the street, in the market-place, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... else break loose from their tetherings, when a long and wearisome pursuit is the necessary result. It is very difficult to come across the best pur sang horses, as the Arabs are afraid of the Bey's taking a fancy to them, and taking them by force; and, consequently, they often purposely mutilate them, lest he should seize them to himself. There are also some very fine bazaars at Tunis, and the otto of roses there is especially excellent. Our Consul has a very fine, large house, and dispenses his hospitalities, &c., very generously to his compatriots. His lady is also a most amiable person. ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham

... tainted spruit, he believes that his officers have done their best for him. He is ordered to fall in upon the deck of a burning troopship and to stand at attention while Death inspects the ranks. He is besieged in a hill fort on the Indian frontier by a horde of fanatics eager to kill or to mutilate him. He lies wounded on the field of battle from which, after an indecisive engagement, each combatant has retired; and there, scorched by the mid-day sun and starved by the cold of the night, and perhaps also in danger of being burnt alive by a veld fire, he waits without water for the armistice ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest"—to be convinced of this. Only a man devoid of the sense of measure and of taste could produce such types as "Titus Andronicus" or "Troilus and Cressida," or so mercilessly mutilate ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... detruncation^; amputation; abscission, excision, recision; curtailment &c 201; minuend, subtrahend; decrease &c 36; abrasion. V. subduct, subtract; deduct, deduce; bate, retrench; remove, withdraw, take from, take away; detract. garble, mutilate, amputate, detruncate^; cut off, cut away, cut out; abscind^, excise; pare, thin, prune, decimate; abrade, scrape, file; geld, castrate; eliminate. diminish &c 36; curtail &c (shorten) 201; deprive of &c (take) 789; weaken. Adj. subtracted &c v.; subtractive. Adv. in deduction ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... atrocities that followed the second blow. It has always been noticed that the sight of blood, which appals a civilized man, serves to excite and enrage the savage, till his frantic passions induce him to mutilate his victims, even as a tiger becomes furious after it has torn the first wound in its prey. For five days the strangers were doomed to hear the yells of the storming amazons as they assailed the fort for fresh victims. On the sixth the sacrifice was over:—the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... to advantage now. If you cut about the old clump and lift a good deal of earth with it, and do not interfere with its roots, no harm will be done. But if you mutilate its roots, or expose them, you need not expect any flowers from the plant for a ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... the drama, the privacy of the mails, in fact, our most intimate tastes, are at the mercy of this inexorable tyrant. Anthony Comstock, or some other equally ignorant policeman, has been given power to desecrate genius, to soil and mutilate the sublimest creation of nature—the human form. Books dealing with the most vital issues of our lives, and seeking to shed light upon dangerously obscured problems, are legally treated as criminal offenses, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... power and might like one of us: What hand has maimed and marred thee thus? What God or fiend this deed has wrought, What bard or sage of lofty thought Was armed with power supremely great Thy form to mar and mutilate? In all the worlds not one I see Would dare a deed to anger me: Not Indra's self, the Thousand-eyed, Beneath whose hand fierce Paka(459) died. My life-destroying darts this day His guilty breath shall rend away, E'en as the thirsty ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... place like the bars of a cage, and pedantically to introduce therein, in the name of Aristotle, all the deeds, all the nations, all the figures which Providence sets before us in such vast numbers in real life,—to proceed thus is to mutilate men and things, to cause history to make wry faces. Let us say, rather, that everything will die in the operation, and so the dogmatic mutilators reach their ordinary result: what was alive in the chronicles is dead in tragedy. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... Nick could not see the face of the body clearly enough to form a decision. If, however, this was only an ordinary subject for the dissecting-table, why did Dr. Jarvis mutilate it with such caution ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter

... laws. It knows no indisciplined cruelty. But in the east the earth is saturated with the blood of women and children unmercifully butchered by the wild Russian troops, and in the west dumdum bullets mutilate the breasts of our soldiers. Those who have allied themselves with Russians and Servians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of inciting Mongolians and negroes against the white race, have no right whatever to call themselves upholders ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... will pass over. {22} But I see that all men, beginning with yourselves, have conceded to him the very thing which has been at issue in every Hellenic war during the whole of the past. And what is this? It is the right to act as he pleases —to mutilate and to strip the Hellenic peoples, one by one, to attack and to enslave their cities. {23} For seventy-three years[n] you were the leading people of Hellas, and the Spartans for thirty years save one;[n] and in these last times, after the battle of Leuctra,[n] the Thebans ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes

... chicanery, guile, treachery. Deceptive, deceitful, misleading, fallacious, fraudulent. Decorate, adorn, ornament, embellish, deck, bedeck, garnish, bedizen, beautify. Decorous, demure, sedate, sober, staid, prim, proper. Deface, disfigure, mar, mutilate. Defect, fault, imperfection, disfigurement, blemish, flaw. Delay, defer, postpone, procrastinate. Demoralize, deprave, debase, corrupt, vitiate. Deportment, demeanor, bearing, port, mien. Deprive, divest, dispossess, strip, despoil. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... Metempsychosis as applied to the world and the New Era"; and saw, too, the respectable English newspapers shying, like frightened kine, over the beautiful simplicity of the tale. The mind leaped forward a hundred—two hundred—a thousand years. I saw with sorrow that men would mutilate and garble the story; that rival creeds would turn it upside down till, at last, the western world which clings to the dread of death more closely than the hope of life, would set it aside as an interesting superstition ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... hunger for the story of the Quakeress. She had perceived, she thought, a relation between it and the clouded brow, and was bent on finding for the brow's owner as amazing a part in the tale as could be contrived by any piecing together of its facts which did not absolutely mutilate them. And these facts already she had begun to collect when by the mention of this "Phyllis" she discovered that old Joy had at least a share of the facts and under due pressure would ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... too dark and horrible for belief, and made him feel as he would have done if she had told him that she was going to mutilate her beautiful face, or drink some potion that would make her mad. He clasped his hands and began ...
— The American • Henry James

... mule boy. mulo, -a mule. multitud f. multitude. mullir to beat up; to make soft. mundanal worldly. mundo world. murmurar to murmur, backbite. muro wall. musica music. musico musician. musulman, -a Mohammedan. mutilar to mutilate. mutismo ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... town and neighbourhood in the year 1838, for the African market. The captain of a vessel trading to Africa informed me in the same year that the Black Despot, who then ruled on the banks of the river Bonney, had threatened to mutilate, in a way which I will not describe, any one who should be detected in landing these counterfeit ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various

... was reserved for monks and inquisitors, in the name of religion and the Gospel, to continue, through after centuries, those brutalities toward women of which gentlemen and knights had grown ashamed, save when (as in the case of the Albigense crusaders) monks and inquisitors bade them torture, mutilate, and burn, in the name of Him who died ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... have not dealt kindly with The Luck of Roaring Camp; but the first of that ilk to mutilate the story was also the worst, to wit, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... two bulls in jealous war engage, Their blood-shot eye balls roll in furious rage; With maddened hoofs they mutilate the ground And loud their angry bellowings resound; With shaggy heads bent low they plunge and roar, Till both broad bellies drip with purple gore. Meanwhile, the heifer, whom the twain desire, Stands browsing near the ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... aggression he saw the error of his natural enemy, which brought ever nearer the realization of the dream of independence he had inherited from the past; for the same fierce passion burned within him that had made Endicott mutilate his flag, and Leverett read his king's letter with his hat on; and the guns of Lexington were music ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... and then pieces which struck his fancy; and as these little reminiscences usually recurred to him in the mornings, he regaled me with them while he was being dressed. The air that I have heard him thus mutilate most frequently was that ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Napoleon • David Widger

... first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... procession of the Ancient and Horrible Distillery Company, a few of the City Fathers in hacks, a picked bunch of Navy Yard sailors and occasionally a few samples from a Wild West Show. For 24 hours, pistols and firecrackers are allowed to mutilate Young ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz

... collections of the period which preceded it, have both been productive of serious damage. The collector is, or rather often was, a barbarian who did not hesitate, when he saw a chance of adding to his collection of specimens and rare remains, to mutilate monuments, to dissect manuscripts, to break up whole archives, in order to possess himself of the fragments. On this score many acts of vandalism were perpetrated before the Revolution. Naturally, the revolutionary procedure of confiscation and transference was also productive ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... think of it as simian-ness; they call it original sin. They regard it as the voice of some devil, and say good men should not listen to it. The scientists say it isn't a devil, it is part of our nature, which should of course be civilized and guided, but should not be stamped out. (It might mutilate us dangerously to become under-simianized. Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Washington. Worthy ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... opportunity. Then they came forth, threw down the mask which they had hitherto worn, to put on one more hideous still; overturned the statue from the pedestal upon which the public had raised it, and tried to mutilate its remains. But as the stuff of which it was made was a marble which could not be broken, they only defiled, insulted, and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... Skoptsi faith, the practice of which is strictly forbidden in Russia, entails a life of absolute chastity. This sect can only acquire new members by election, since both sexes so mutilate their persons that they can ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... well understands her interest. Even the men of inferior life among us, whose occupations, one would think, tend to produce minds as callous as the mettle they work; lay a stronger claim to civilization, than in any other place with which I am acquainted. I am sorry to mutilate the compliment, when I mention the lower race of the other sex: no lady ought to be publicly insulted, let her appear in what dress she pleases. Both sexes, however, agree in exhibiting a mistaken pity, in cases of punishment, particularly by preventing that for misconduct ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... tolerate slavery. The Speaker said that only the latter prayer could be received under the "gag" rule. Connor, of North Carolina, (p. 261) moved to lay on the table so much of the petition as could be received. Mr. Adams tauntingly suggested that in order to do this it would be necessary to mutilate the document by cutting it into two pieces; whereat there was great wrath and confusion, "the House got into a snarl, the Speaker knew not what to do." The Southerners raved and fumed for a while, and finally resorted to their usual expedient, and dropped altogether a matter ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... American libraries, though its ravages have extended far and wide among the old European ones. This minute little insect, whose scientific name is the anobium paniceum, bores through the leaves of old volumes, making sometimes holes which deface and mutilate the text. All our public libraries, doubtless, have on their shelves old folios in vellum or leather bindings, which present upon opening the disagreeable vision of leaves eaten through (usually before they crossed the sea) by these pernicious little ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... mutilate literary works, but it often suffocates the inspiration of the author. The Russian press has lately published a very interesting article on Nekrasov, explaining the frequent interruptions of his activity by a momentary paralysis ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... when he read the particulars of their scheme, which was no other than an intention to sally upon him when he should be altogether unprovided against such an attack, cut off his ears, and otherwise mutilate him in such a manner that he should have no cause to be vain of his person for the future. Incensed as he was against the brutal disposition of his own father's son, he could not help being moved at the integrity and tenderness of his sister, of whose ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... waves of a stream that just fills, but cannot overflow its banks. Otherwise, this striving after moderation would resemble only the method of those shallow moralists, who, the more readily to dispose of Man, prefer to mutilate his nature; and who have so entirely removed every positive element from actions that the people gloat over the spectacle of great crimes, in order to refresh themselves at last with the view ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... Borgia before the public. One of Lucrezia's ladies, Angela Borgia, was courted by both Giulio d' Este and the Cardinal Ippolito. The girl praised the eyes of Giulio in the hearing of the Cardinal, who forthwith hired assassins to mutilate his brother's face. Giulio escaped from their hands with the loss of one of his eyes, and sought justice from the Duke against the Cardinal in vain. Thereupon he vowed to be revenged on both Ippolito and Alfonso. His plot was to murder them, and to place Ferdinand of Este ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... ermine, Peaceful waiting for the milk-pail!" On the milk-stool sits the hostess, Milks one moment, then a second, Then a third time milks and ceases; When the bloody wolves disguising, Quick attack the hostess milking, And the bears lend their assistance, Tear and mutilate her body With their teeth and sharpened fingers. Kullerwoinen, cruel wizard, Thus repaid the wicked hostess, Thus repaid her evil treatment. Quick the wife of Ilmarinen Cried aloud in bitter anguish, Thus addressed the youth, Kullervo: "Evil son, thou bloody herdsman, Thou hast ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... gripped them to show her that I intended to be her champion, while she turned to me in confidence as though happy that it should be so. What, I wondered, was her history? What was the mystery surrounding her? What could be that secret which had caused her enemies to thus brutally maim and mutilate her, and afterwards send her to that grim, terrible fortress that still loomed up before us in the gloom? Surely her secret must affect some person very seriously, or such drastic means would never be ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... same time not to alienate or dispose or any part of it, except by lease. These propositions were warmly advocated by Pitt and others on the same side of the house, and as warmly opposed by members on the opposite benches. Mr. Powys, after condemning the whole of Pitt's plan, as tending to mutilate the constitutional authority, and after asserting that the heir-apparent ought to be invested with the full powers and prerogatives of the crown, moved an amendment to the first resolution, by which his royal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... that, informed by their friend Guerin of my situation, and foreseeing my approaching dissolution, of which I myself had no manner of doubt, they wished to delay the appearance of the work until after that event, with an intention to curtail and mutilate it, and in favor of their own views, to attribute to me sentiments not my own. The number of facts and circumstances which occurred to my mind, in confirmation of this silly proposition, and gave it an appearance of truth supported by evidence and demonstration, is astonishing. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... stared at it with his elbows on his desk, an aspect uncompromising and incorruptible. It seemed to look up at him reproachfully and to say, with its essential finish: "How could you promise anything so base; how could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?" The alterations demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude of his conception of the public mind were degrading. The public mind!—as if the public HAD a mind, or any ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James

... literally by eminent Englishmen and gentlemen, and have been printed and published as an "extra series" by Mr. Bohn's most respectable firm and solo by Messieurs Bell and Daldy. And if The Nights are to be bowdlerised for students, why not, I again ask, mutilate Plato and Juvenal, the Romances of the Middle Ages, Boccaccio and Petrarch and the Elizabethan dramatists one and all? What hypocrisy to blaterate about The Nights in presence of such triumphs of the Natural! How absurd to swallow such camels and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... importance with Charlemagne to support the papal authority, as holding out the only means of spreading Christianity, which he justly considered the most effectual instrument he could employ to enlighten and civilize the world. An attempt had been made to mutilate the Pope, and thus disqualify him for his office, by Campulus and Paschal, two disappointed aspirants to the papacy; but he escaped from their hands and brought his complaints before Charlemagne. The conspirators ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... or his Soul with my Prayers; those scenical and accidental differences between us, cannot make me forget that common and untoucht part of us both; there is under these Cantoes and miserable outsides, these mutilate and semi-bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own, whose Genealogy is God as well as ours, and in as fair a way to Salvation ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... their enemies; and had been witnesses of her savage assault upon Maranee, though ignorant of its motive. Some of them who had lost kindred in the strife, already stirred by grief and fury, were proceeding to insult the lifeless and mutilated remains—to mutilate them still more! I turned away from the loathsome scene. Neither the dead nor the living, that composed this ghastly tableau, had ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... merest fraction from the regulation standards. This is ostracism, and ostracism, so to speak, is a physiological organ of democracy. Democracy by using it mutilates the nation, without it democracy would mutilate itself. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... that would mutilate the dead. But I do not see how Emilia hoped that the substitution would pass undiscovered by Selina's friends, to ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume

... Revolution was therefore in its essence a sublime and impassioned spirituality. It had a divine and universal ideal. This is the reason why its passion spread beyond the frontiers of France. Those who limit, mutilate it. It was the accession ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... beneath Old Pine and built a fire against his instep, and that some of the explorers hacked him with an axe. The old pine had distinct records of axe and fire markings during the year 1540. It was not common for the Indians of the West to burn or mutilate trees, and as it was common for the Spaniards to do so, and as these hackings in the tree seemed to have been made with some edged tool sharper than any possessed by the Indians, it at least seems probable that they were done by the Spaniards. At any rate, from the year 1540 ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... did make a hat of paper, to be placed on Charles's head when he was more than usually naughty, to be called the fool's-cap out of derision; but this same paper hat, which was of a fantastic shape, being conical and high, the boy with scissors did dexterously mutilate and nearly destroy, and, coming quietly behind me when I was meditating the future with my excellent wife, he placed it on my head; and, to all our eyes, there was no mistaking the shape into which, fortuitously, and with no view or knowledge of such emblems, he had ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... sign of contrition, for the cruel deed he has done. No feeling save that of satisfied vengeance; no emotion that resembles remorse. On the contrary, his cold animal eyes continue to sparkle with jealous hate; while his hand has moved mechanically to the hilt of his knife, as though he meant to mutilate the form he has laid lifeless. Its beauty, even in death, seems ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... souls live, and it shall be a sure pledge to you of that eternal life. And though this be painful and laborious yet consider, that it is but the cutting off of a rotten member, that would corrupt the whole body, and the want of it will never maim or mutilate the body, for you shall live perfectly when sin is perfectly expired, and out of life, and according as sin is nearer expiring, and nearer the grave, your souls are nearer that endless life. If this do not move ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... with a moral virtue called prudence. For justice without prudence cannot be perfect. This judge, justice, will traverse the kingdom with royal powers, accompanied by wise counsel and his own prudence. He will promote and dismiss, he will judge and condemn, will condemn to death and acquit, will mutilate, blind, and restore to sight, will exalt and abase and organise, will punish and chastise according to justice, and will destroy all vices. The people of the kingdom—that is to say, all the faculties of the soul, will be supported by humility and the fear of God, submitting to Him ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge

... core of Liberalism is the right of each man to unrestricted action, provided he does not hurt his neighbour? But Home Rulers are essentially one-sided in their estimate of tyranny, and things change their names according to the side on which they are ranged. To boycott a man, to mutilate his cattle,[F] to commit outrages on his family, and finally to murder him outright for paying his rent or taking an evicted farm, are all justifiable proceedings of righteous severity. But for a landlord to evict a tenant from the farm for which he will not pay ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton

... wonder. A beautiful, wild—looking creature! Take off those things that are on him, Abel, and have them carried to Mr. Dudley Veneer's. If he does not want them, you may keep them yourself, for all that I have to say. One thing more. I hope nobody will lift his hand against this noble creature to mutilate him in any way. After you have taken off the saddle and bridle, Abel, bury him just as he is. Under that old beech-tree will be a good place. You'll see to it,—won't ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... things under his feet." Slavery puts HIM under the feet of an owner, with beasts and creeping things. Who, but an impious scorner, dare thus strive with his Maker, and mutilate HIS IMAGE, and blaspheme the Holy One, who saith to those that grind his poor, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... just as he is going to be tortured. After a prolonged search, Cutwolfe at last finds his enemy, Esdras of Granada, alone, in his shirt, and far from all help. The unfortunate man implores Cutwolfe, whose brother he had killed, to make it impossible for him to do any more harm, to mutilate him, but to spare his life. His enemy replies: "Though I knewe God would never have mercie on mee except I had mercie on thee, yet of thee no mercie would I have.... I tell thee, I would not have undertooke so much toyle to gaine heaven, as I have done in pursuing ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand

... language of that eminent philologist. In no instance has he varied from him, unless he conceived that, in so doing, some practical advantage would be gained. He hopes, therefore, to escape the censure so frequently and so justly awarded to those unfortunate innovators who have not scrupled to alter, mutilate, and torture the text of that able writer, merely to gratify an itching propensity to figure in the world as authors, and gain an ephemeral popularity by arrogating to themselves the credit due ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... may find compensation and peace in the other world if you do not mutilate her; and when I turned to the mason's lean corpse, and looked at his hands, which were harder and rougher than my own, the demon whispered the same. Then I stood before the strong, stout corpse of the prophet Rui, who died of apoplexy, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything, but what must belong to his master. The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master, who may correct and chastise him, though not with unusual rigour, or so as to maim and mutilate him, or expose him to the danger of loss of life, or to cause his death. The slave, to remain a slave, must be sensible that there is no appeal from his master." Where the slave is placed by law entirely under the control of the man who claims him, body and soul, as property, what else could ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... incessantly disputing his authority, and commanding his patients in terms claiming supernatural force to do those things which he orders them to leave undone, and to leave undone those things which he orders them to do; commanding them to be silent, to starve themselves, to kill, to mutilate or hang themselves; in short, there is in this remarkable country, peopled by so many thousand inhabitants, an imperium in imperio which renders the contest continuous between the rival authorities struggling for supremacy, sometimes, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... a pleasing argument whereby it may be proved and known that he is not wise who does not make liberal use of his knowledge so long as God may give him grace. The story is about Erec the son of Lac—a story which those who earn a living by telling stories are accustomed to mutilate and spoil in the presence of kings and counts. And now I shall begin the tale which will be remembered so long as Christendom endures. This ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... themselves over other countries, destroy one another, and establish laws and customs which sometimes only too surely prevent excess of population. In those climates where fecundity is greatest, as in China, Egypt, and Guinea, they banish, mutilate, sell, or drown infants. Here, we condemn them to a perpetual celibacy. Those who are in being find it easy to assert rights over the unborn. Regarding themselves as the necessary, they annihilate the contingent, and suppress future generations ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... think, then, Albinik, that Caesar has any suspicions? Could he suppose that a man would have the courage to mutilate himself in order to induce confidence ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue

... entire city or a curia, the public treasure, or a private fund, the names and surnames of public or private individuals; prerogatives or favors granted, such as the right of asylum, of hospitality, of citizenship; the punishments pronounced against those who should destroy or mutilate the monument; the conditions of treaties and alliances; the indications ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... VERGES, two ignorant conceited constables, who greatly mutilate their words. Dogberry calls "assembly" dissembly; "treason" he calls perjury; "calumny" he calls burglary; "condemnation" redemption; "respect," suspect. When Conrade says, "Away! you are an ass;" Dogberry tells the town clerk to write ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... Martin"—Calamity (calamitas), not from calamus, as it is usually derived, but perhaps from obs. calamis, i.e. columis, from [Greek: kholo, kolhao, kolhazo] to maim, mutilate, and so for columitas. (See Riddle's ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various

... man at his creation; the very top and flower of his existence; that by which he is distinguished from the lower animals and raised to the rank of moral and accountable beings. Shall we sacrifice this divine gift, then, in order to secure the blessings of civil society? Shall we abridge or mutilate the image of God, stamped upon the soul at its creation, by which we are capable of knowing and obeying his law, in order to secure the aid and protection of man? Shall we barter away any portion of this our glorious birthright for any poor boon of man's devising? ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... remember the scandal about the statues of Hermes. I did not mutilate them, but they have ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg



Words linked to "Mutilate" :   mangle, warp, garble, damage, falsify, cut up, mutilation, mar, mutilator, murder, distort



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