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Lawless   /lˈɔləs/   Listen
Lawless

adjective
1.
Without law or control.  Synonyms: anarchic, anarchical.
2.
Lax in enforcing laws.  Synonym: wide-open.
3.
Disobedient to or defiant of law.  Synonym: outlaw.



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"Lawless" Quotes from Famous Books



... promenaders and thick with carriages. Other autos met them with cordial clamor of gongs, and now and then some driver more lawless than Hugh dashed past them in reckless race towards the park. The playwright had never seen so many of New York's glittering carriages, and the growing arrogance of its wealth took on a new aspect from his newly acquired viewpoint. Here were ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... Manila, and of Manila alone amongst all the colonies of Spain or the other European states. If the natives of Manila have been more fortunate than those of Cuba, Peru, Jamaica, and Mexico, it has been owing to the absence of gold, which in other places attracted adventurers so lawless that neither the Church nor Courts ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort,—the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... unaccountably reasonable incongruities: the sensible look in dreams of what to the waking mind is utterly incoherent, is the most puzzling of things to him who would understand his own unreason. And the wild MR CHENHAFT lovelinesses that fashioned themselves thus in his brain, outwardly lawless, but inwardly so harmonious as to be altogether credible to the dreamer, were not lost in the fluttering limbo of foolish invention, but, in altered shape and less outlandish garments, appeared again, when, in after years, he sought vent for the all but unspeakable. During this time he ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... warned, and protested enough; he who will not heed or believe it may go on until he learns this by experience Yet it must be impressed upon the young that they may be careful not to follow the old lawless crowd, but keep their eyes fixed upon God's commandment, lest His wrath and punishment come upon them too. It behooves us to do no more than to instruct and reprove with God's Word; but to check such open wantonness there is need of the ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther

... is nominally so," answered Bob, "but it is not so in reality, and never will be so long as these hostile Indians and lawless Mexicans continue to raid over the Texas border. If you skip out, as you threaten to do, you may rest assured that you will be brought back by force of arms, and if you resist you ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon

... suspected the popularity of Germanus with the soldiers and citizens: he feared, he threatened, but he delayed to strike; the patrician fled to the sanctuary of the church; the people rose in his defence, the walls were deserted by the guards, and the lawless city was abandoned to the flames and rapine of a nocturnal tumult. In a small bark, the unfortunate Maurice, with his wife and nine children, escaped to the Asiatic shore; but the violence of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... even begin as yet to comprehend the magnitude that the tiny whirlpool of discontented and lawless schemers would attain. But boy though I was, in those first months of the voyage I had learned enough about the different members of the crew to realize that serious consequences might grow ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... Sweden, and Turkey. However we may view these transactions, and whether we describe them by the stern words of the moralist, or the more deprecatory words of the diplomatist, they are the first sources of that storm of lawless rapine which swept over every part of Europe for five and twenty years to come. The intervention of Austria and Prussia in the affairs of France was originally less a deliberate design for the benefit of the old order, than an interlude in the intrigues of Eastern Europe. But the first effect of ...
— Burke • John Morley

... masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a state of sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. My eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences, lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had left me untouched. Indeed they were other men's adventures, not mine. Except for a little ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... Seminoles soon wandered off, leaving the fort without a garrison. This gave an opportunity to a negro bandit and desperado named Garcon to seize the place, which he did, gathering about him a large band of runaway negroes, Choctaw Indians, and other lawless persons, whom he organized into a strong company of robbers. Garcon made the fort his stronghold, and began to plunder the country round about as thoroughly as any robber baron or Italian bandit ever did, sometimes venturing across the border ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston

... stout-hearted, strong-limbed, cool-brained,—a nursery of soldiers; quick, self-possessed, brave and cautions and wary, ready in invention, skilful to command men and evolve from a mob an army,—a nursery of gentlemen, reminiscent of no lawless revels, midnight orgies, brutal outrages, launching out already attainted into an attainting world, but with many a memory of adventure, wild, it may be, and not over-wise, yet pure as a breeze ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... is scarcely necessary to tell readers who are familiar with American History, that Jean Lafitte was not properly a pirate, although he was called so in 1814; nor is it necessary to tell here how the British attempt to use his lawless band against the Americans miscarried. All that belongs to ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston

... bucklers, and the modern colivers and petronils (in King Charles I.'s time) turned into muskets and pistols. Then were entails in fashion, (a good prop for monarchy). Destroying of manors began temp. Henry VIII., but now common; whereby the mean people live lawless, nobody to govern them, they care for nobody, having no dependance on anybody. By this method, and by the selling of the church-lands, is the ballance of the Government quite altered, and put into the hands of the common people. No ale-houses, nor yet ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... years he was Cummins' partner. As sheriff of Nevada County he would free it of thugs and murderers as he frees every claim that he works of rattlesnakes. He is death on rattlers. Killed more than a hundred of them last summer. But the lawless element of this county take mighty good care that Keeler is not elected sheriff. So much the better for us, for he is ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall

... sleepless, wondering, nervously dreading the morrow. For these people who should know gave Hill's Corners the same name that Mr. Templeton had given it, the same name it bore as far as Crystal City and beyond. It was one of those far removed towns which are the last stand of the lawless, the ultimate breastwork before the final ditch into which in his hour the gunfighter has finally gone down. Desperate characters, men wanted in two states and perhaps in many more, flocked here where they found the one chance to live ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... Peruvians were at all obsequious or servile. They were a reckless, lawless, Godless gang, perpetually bearing themselves with the careless insolence which had characterized them at first, blasphemous of speech toward one another—but never toward the North Americans. Disputes arose among them with volcanic suddenness, and ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... most desperate characters in the surrounding country had volunteered for the attack. Urged by his friends, Blennerhasset and the few men with him escaped by the boats. His flight was not a moment too soon, for having been branded as a traitor, no one knows what might have befallen him had the lawless men who arrived immediately after his departure found him in their power. Colonel Phelps, the commander of the militia, started in pursuit, and the remainder of his men, with no one to restrain them, gave full play to their ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... good, that the weight of national evil increases upon us daily. Break through at least this pretence of existence; determine what you will be, and what you would win. You will not decide wrongly if you resolve to decide at all. Were even the choice between lawless pleasure and loyal suffering, you would not, I believe, choose basely. But your trial is not so sharp. It is between drifting in confused wreck among the castaways of Fortune, who condemns to assured ruin those who know not either how to resist her, or obey; between this, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... unwilling to make any agreement. They were leading the sort of lawless and licentious life that exactly suited them, and were disinclined to submit to any authority. The interests of their leaders, however, were not quite the same, and the acceptance of advantageous terms would ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... next blow at the English on Lake Champlain. In July, 1757, he had eight thousand men at Ticonderoga, at the northern end of Lake George. Two thousand of these were savages drawn from more than forty different tribes—a lawless horde whom the French could not control. A Jesuit priest saw a party of them squatting round a fire in the French camp roasting meat on the end of sticks and found that the meat was the flesh of an Englishman. English prisoners, sick with horror, were ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... to the mock peers of the Midnight Court, real nobles from that of St. Charles. I did not know then that they were ruined gamesters, vicious profligates, and desperate broken-down roues, who would have gone to pandemonium itself, nightly, for the mad license and lawless excesses they could indulge in here to their heart's content. But I got tired of it all, after a time: my eyes began slowly to open, and my heart—at least, what little of that article I ever had—turned sick with horror within me at what I had done. The awful things I saw, the fearful ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming

... that the danger of each individual had increased with the despotism of the military order, since princes who tremble on the throne will guard their safety by the instant sacrifice of every obnoxious subject. The emperor expiated on the mischiefs of a lawless caprice, which the soldiers could only gratify at the expense of their own blood; as their seditious elections had so frequently been followed by civil wars, which consumed the flower of the legions either in the field of battle, or in the cruel abuse of victory. He painted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... Master, rising to his knees. Then, in Andrew's ear: "When I rush, lad, follow!" For he thought, when the moon rose, to jump in on the great dog, and, surprising him as he lay gorged and unsuspicious, to deal him one terrible swashing blow, and end forever the lawless doings ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... of Jumburu stands on the edge of the bush country, where the lawless men of all nations dwell. This territory is filled with fierce communities, banded together against a common enemy—the law. They call this land the B'wigini, which means "the Nationless," and Jumburu's importance lies in the fact that it is the outpost ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... Germany, because they have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honor. The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified indorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare, adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... been expelled from Yale, who had engaged in many a bitter controversy, who had suffered abuse from newspapers, and who in every case was inclined to consider his opponents as blockheads. No matter in what society he found himself, in imagination he was always back in the free but lawless atmosphere of the frontier village in which his youth was spent. Hence he was well fitted to take the point of view of Natty Bumppo (in The Pioneers), who looked with hostile eyes upon the greed and waste of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... continuance, and so she should forebear leaving him no loophole for escape. Louise Chandler Moulton enjoins one thing on women which they would do well to recollect, and that is, "if they want a man to stay with them to make it evidently and entirely easy for him to get away. There is something lawless and rebellious in even the best of men; they hate doing things because ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... ascendency incompatible with free institutions. To my mind, Alcibiades is the worst man in Grecian history, and not only personally disgraced by the worst vices, but his influence was disastrous on his country. Athens owed her political degradation more to him than any other man. He was insolent, lawless, extravagant, and unscrupulous, from his first appearance in public life. He incited the Sicilian expedition, and caused it to end disastrously by sending Gylippus to Syracuse. He originated the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... magistrate, drily. "Pray, being, as you say, under coercion and fear of the lawless multitude, and compelled to accompany them through scenes disagreeable to all men of humanity, and more especially irreconcilable to the profession of a minister, did you not attempt to struggle, resist, or escape ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... where they had been a moment before. Wash Gibbs was easily distinguished by his gigantic form, and with him were ten others, riding two and two, several of whom were known to Young Matt as the most lawless characters in the country. All were fired by drink and were laughing and talking, with now and then a burst of song, or ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright

... friendship for them all, our desire to pursue ourselves the path of peace, as the only one leading surely to prosperity, and our wish to preserve the morals of our citizens from being vitiated by courses of lawless plunder and murder, may assure you that our proceedings, in this respect, will be with good faith, fervor, and vigilance. Instructions are consequently given to the proper law officer, to institute such proceedings as the laws will justify, for ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... weapon, was a gift to Barbara from her "uncles," Texas and Pat; and though ornamental was not for ornament. The girl often went alone, as she was going to-day, for a long ride out on the Mesa, and the country still harbored many wild and lawless characters. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... John Gough, who had brought Mrs Reichardt to the island. He looked older, but I recognised him in a moment, and so did my companion. Her admonitory "Hush!" kept me from betraying the place of our concealment—so great was my astonishment, having long believed him and all his lawless associates to have been ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat

... order maintaineth itself by following the profession prescribed for it. And when these callings are properly pursued, the world is maintained with ease. If, however, people do not righteously lead their lives, the world becometh lawless, in consequence of the want of Vedic merit and government. And if people do not resort to (their) prescribed vocations, they perish, but by regularly following the three professions, they bring about religion. The religion of the Brahmanas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... shrewd and well-informed, and yet so ignorant. What did it mean that citizens of Missouri should go over in force and vote in the Territory of Kansas? We had heard something of this in Illinois, but supposed it was something done by that turbulent and somewhat lawless element that gathers along the borders of civilization; but now it was apparent that this movement was under control of leading citizens of Missouri, and had been participated in by conscientious men, members of the various churches of Missouri, who would ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... hand, please," said Sophie as soon as they were safe among the beech boles and the lawless hollies. "D'you remember the old maid in 'Providence and the Guitar' who heard the Commissary swear, and hardly reckoned herself a maiden lady afterward? Because I'm a relative of hers. Lady ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... of spirited pictures as of Gillray's caricatures. They are highly coloured, fantastic, horribly human and yet, somehow, grotesque. Everything is elongated, widened, magnified, exaggerated. The difficulty is, to my mind, to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously wholesome-minded and manly. I can only humbly say that it is my belief, confirmed by experience, that boys of so unconventional and daring a type would not be content ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... selfsame day that the Earl Rivers, Grey, and others, were (without trial of law, of offence given) by Hastings' advice executed at Pomfret: I say Hastings himself in the same day, and (as I take it) in the same hour, in the same lawless manner had his head stricken off in the Tower of London. But Buckingham lived a while longer; and with an eloquent oration persuaded the Londoners to elect Richard for their king. And having received the Earldom of Hereford for reward, besides the high hope of marrying his daughter to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... beings as care-free in bondage as were the negroes of the ante-bellum days. Judge the Southern owner by the rule and not the exception. As well judge a town by its halt, maimed, blind, diseased and lawless citizens, as the slave owners by occasional acts of oppression to be found on the plantations. But it was the "Down east" Yankee overseer who was cruel—not the master. It was the African in New ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... and most glorious of all causes, supporting the rights and Constitution of their country. Those, therefore, who have been under the unhappy necessity of submitting to the mandates of Congress and Committees—those lawless, usurped, and arbitrary tribunals—will have an opportunity, (by joining the King's Army) to restore peace and tranquility to this distracted land—to open again the glorious streams of commerce—to partake of the blessings ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... shadow, a mockery. To say that in the Papal States Justice is not,—that it is a negation,—is only to state half the truth. Were that all, thankful indeed would the Romans be. But, alas! in the seat of Justice there sits a stern, irresponsible, lawless power, before which virtue is confounded and dumb, and wickedness only ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... Yet he left nothing for destiny to accomplish. He ever sought to make provision for all conceivable contingencies. These measures were completely successful. Though Paris was in a delirium of excitement, there were outbreaks of lawless violence. Neither Monarchist, Republican, nor Jacobin knew what Napoleon intended to do. All were conscious that he would do something. It was known that the Jacobin party in the Council of Five Hundred on the ensuing day, would make a desperate effort at resistance. Sieyes, perfectly ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott

... that brought him barefooted and penniless to Arizona in those days long gone when he was only a boy and Arizona a strong man's country. It was this side of him that brought him triumphantly through those hard years of the Indian troubles, and in those wild and lawless times made him respected and feared by the evildoers and trusted and followed by those of his kind who, out of the hardships and dangers of those turbulent days, made the Arizona of to-day. It was this side, too, that finally made the barefoot, ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... different from that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be said about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing at all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a free life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by lawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal and social ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of honour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of his house for generations, or else the newly made enemy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... these disorderly times was favourable to deeds of violence. Monthault formed the project of carrying off his mistress by force, and securing her in his parental castle; and disbanded soldiers were easily found, alike daring and lawless, to ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... near by, and provided by his government, lived the British interpreter, a Scotchman named Milne. Walter H. Medhurst, the British Consul, and his interpreter were descendants of early English missionaries. We found Foo Chow to be a somewhat lawless city. Many of its inhabitants were mountaineers from the surrounding region who had become pretty well starved out and had found their way into the city. As a result of their early training, they gave ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... woman. "She runs with them instead of away from them. When I saw them back there they had all taken hands and were leaping in a circle around her. She was jumping and dancing in the center as wild and lawless as they, and just as high, too. . . . But it's a pity she isn't with her mother all the same, going on decent errands in the village. Only of course it's not her fault, poor child! She daren't go ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot

... many the unachieved ambition of their lives. I myself had hoped rather than expected ever to reach this "Ultima Thule" of the East: and when I found that I really could do so now, had I but courage to trust myself for a thousand miles' voyage in a Bugis prau, and for six or seven months among lawless traders and ferocious savages, I felt somewhat as I did when, a schoolboy, I was for the first time allowed to travel outside the stage-coach, to visit that scene of all that is strange and new ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... of their own writers has said with a great deal of truth, that the gentry of France rush into Paris to escape from ennui, as, in the noble days of chivalry, the defenceless inhabitants of the champaign fled into the castles, at theapproach of some plundering knight, or lawless Baron; forsaking the inspired twilight of their native groves, for the luxurious shades of the royal gardens. What do you ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... a Yankee, as he proudly told Bob, "born and raised in New Hampshire," and his shrewd common sense and dry humor stood him in good stead in the rather lawless environment of Chassada. He was well acquainted with the unlovely characteristics of the five who had chased Bob, and when he heard the whole story he promised to look up the Chinaman and see what he could ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson

... Theudas and Judas of Galilee, mentioned by Gamaliel, were but specimens of the bandit leaders who broke into revolt and harried the country districts for the maintenance of their followers. Greed, peculation, and lawless violence, had ample and undisputed opportunity to despoil the national glory and corrupt the heart of ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... that at the moment of Kosciuszko's rebuff at the hands of his Tekla's father, who was after all nobody more than an ordinary landowner, the rejected suitor had several thousand soldiers under his command, and in days when wild and lawless acts were not unknown, and not difficult of execution in a country where conditions were unsettled and communications long, it would have been easy enough for him to have carried his way by sheer force. But outrage ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner

... warned, "that you may full into the hands of lawless bands of deserters from both armies who are even now pillaging and burning. You can at least, if you must, force your assailants to kill you. If you cannot remain undisturbed in your own land make for the coast of Florida and take a ship ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition inflamed by prejudice and partisanry has led to injustice and delusion. Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an incident—in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons and it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... the islands; and, indeed, it grew daily more plain to him that he had but to ask to have. But Jack, not a little to his own astonishment, and stirred by undreamed-of instincts and undreamed-of scruples, put the idea from him with a hesitation he could hardly explain to himself. In his wicked and lawless past he had known every kind of woman but a good woman; he had seen, in a thousand water-side dives, every variety of feminine degradation and feminine shame, and had sounded in his time all the squalid depths ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... together with Antoine de Chabannes, Lord of Dammartin, the Batard de Bourbon, and others; Villandras led a troop of those terrible men, who boasted of the name of Ecorcheurs. It was true that, in the lawless period when the destitute Roi de Bourges had neither money nor power, they had done great service to his cause—as a troop of trained wolves might have done—ravaging and destroying all they came near; but the end once accomplished, the great desire of all ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... attack the city of Bruni, in consequence of the Bruni government having entered into a treaty with her majesty's government for the discouragement and suppression of piracy. This fact speaks volumes; an old-established and recognized Malay government is to be attacked by a lawless adventurer, who has seized on a portion of its territory, and lives by piracy, for venturing to treat with a foreign power for the best purposes. If any further proof of piracy were requisite, it would readily ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel

... a peculiar dress, that there should be a peculiar luxury and variety in the dressing and serving of their viands, and that they should meet with no denial in the pursuit of their amours, however lawless. These habits having given rise in the one case to envy and offence and in the other to an outburst of hatred and passionate resentment, the kingship changed into a tyranny; the first steps towards its overthrow were taken by the subjects, and conspiracies began to be formed. These conspiracies ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... could he count? On nobody unless he paid their hire. None among the lawless men who haunted his backwoods "hotel" at Star Pond would lift a finger to help him. Almost any among them would have robbed him, — murdered him, probably, — if it were known that the jewels were hidden ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers were turned loose to loot the fort. The Indians fled, among them Moses Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year. She could not revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of starvation outside the walls. Matonabbee had been absent when the French came. He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life in ruins. The English whom he thought invincible were defeated ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... danger in the South which should be guarded against is that the whole white South, including the wise, conservative, law-abiding element, may find itself represented before the bar of public opinion by the mob or lawless element, which gives expression to its feelings and tendency in a manner that advertises the South throughout the world; while too often those who have no sympathy with such disregard of law are either silent, or fail to ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... the reform and extension of the University of Pavia. During the troubled times that followed Galeazzo Sforza's death, this ancient University had sunk to a very low ebb. The professors remained unpaid, and in many cases ceased to lecture, the buildings were small and inconvenient and the students lawless and riotous. Lodovico set himself with a stern hand to repress abuses on the one side, while on the other he grudged neither time nor money in promoting the cause of learning. A letter which he addressed ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... she made out, somewhere between the Danube and the Oder; he spoke familiarly of the frontier of Silesia. He had studied in Munich and Vienna, and some of his things—sumptuous, highly-charged, over-luscious—showed clearly enough the influence of Makart and the lawless vicinity of gipsy Hungary. He had crossed to America with his family five years before; they were still in New Jersey. "They came half-way," he declared; "and I have come all the way—an adventurer in a ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... 'You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in danger of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.' That meant, 'My turning aside to you originally was the blameable thing.' It might mean, 'My love of you sets my ideas of duty ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... disposed, then, not to accept the thought of any odious personal relationship of the kind which had suggested itself to him when he wrote the letter referred to. That the girl had something of the feral nature, her wild, lawless rambles in forbidden and blasted regions of The Mountain at all hours, her familiarity with the lonely haunts where any other human foot was so rarely seen, proved clearly enough. But the more he thought of all her strange instincts and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... Antoine, as "Popincourt." Here, however, not only the benches, but the building itself was burned, and several adjacent houses were involved in the conflagration. Having accomplished these outrages and encouraged the people to imitate his lawless example, the aged constable returned to the city. He had well earned the contemptuous name which the Huguenots henceforth gave him of "Le Capitaine Brulebanc."[71] If the triumvirate succeeded, it was plain that all liberty of worship ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... between two powers of a brilliant woman's nature. Sometimes you are sure the lawless, the vagabond, and the intriguing side will win. ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn

... woman begins to excuse her lawless conduct on the ground of her "artistic temperament," there are no depths to which she may ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... once saw the driver use one as a stick to belabor the lazy animal with, and then leave it, with two or three other loaves, at the opposite house, where a pretty Armenian, that I afterward saw taking the air on the roof with her bright-eyed little girl, perhaps had it for her breakfast!); the fierce, lawless Turkish soldiers stalking along, their officers mounted, and looking much better in their baggy trousers and frock-coats on their fine horses than on foot; Greek and Armenian ladies in gay European costumes; veiled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... Thus the lower moral tone of Arianism and especially its denial of the Lord's divinity were enough to secure it a fair amount of Jewish support as against the Nicenes. At Alexandria, for example, the Jews were always ready for lawless outrage at the call of every ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin

... wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill. On one morning seven men were hanged and a woman burned for clipping; But all was vain. The gains were such as to lawless spirits seemed more than proportioned to the risks. Some clippers were said to have made great fortunes. One in particular offered six thousand pounds for a pardon. His bribe was indeed rejected; but the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... permitted the vision of a face to deter him. He should have taken the things from the safe and vanished. It had not been, a matter of compunction. And yet . . . Ah, he was human, whatever his dream might be; and he loved this American girl with all his heart and mind. It was not lawless love, but it was ruthless. When the time was ripe he would speak. Only a little while now to wait. The course had smoothed out, the sailing was easy. The man in the chimney no longer bothered him. Whoever and whatever he was, he had not shot his ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... thir infant Males: Till by two brethren (those two brethren call Moses and Aaron) sent from God to claime 170 His people from enthralment, they return With glory and spoile back to thir promis'd Land. But first the lawless Tyrant, who denies To know thir God, or message to regard, Must be compelld by Signes and Judgements dire; To blood unshed the Rivers must be turnd, Frogs, Lice and Flies must all his Palace fill With loath'd intrusion, and fill all the land; His ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... little grove and was gazing fiercely at the two lighted windows of the "shanty." He was thinking of Barry Lapelle as he muttered the words, thinking of the foul luck that seemed almost certain to deliver Viola into his soiled and lawless hands. The fierceness of his gaze was due to the knowledge that Lapelle was now inside Trentman's notorious shanty and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... as the widow had been known in her maiden days, was one of the three lovely daughters of Lord Irnham, in later years Earl of Carhampton, and a member of a family noted for the beauty of its women, and the wild, lawless living of its men. Her brother, Colonel Luttrell, was the most reckless swashbuckler and the deadliest duellist of his time—a man whose morals were as low as his temper and courage ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... of the simplest doctrines of natural religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were reserved for auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of a captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... wrong, opposed this extension of popular rights. In 1771 he wrote the Prime Minister, Lord North: "It is highly necessary that this strange and lawless method of publishing debates in the papers should be put a stop to. But is not the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants before; as it can fine, as well as imprison, and has broader shoulders to support the odium ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... that what were called the authorities of the town had become alarmed, and were stirring, but they found themselves in such a frightful minority, that it became out of the question for them to interfere with any effect to stop the lawless proceedings of the rioters, so that the infuriated populace had it all their own way, and in a straggling, disorderly-looking kind of procession they moved off, vowing vengeance as they went against ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... did it seem that the vessel in question could belong to the lawless class of craft to which we have referred; for, although she had what may be styled a wicked aspect, and was evidently adapted for swift sailing, neither large guns nor small arms of any kind ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... to further questions, however, it was stated that the prince frequently formed one of the party which indulged in these illegal practices; that he was as lawless and desperate as the worst of them; and that he was known to boast among his boon companions of his exploits as a common highwayman, and to exhibit proudly the plunder he had ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... chilling effect upon the imagination of a modern reader. It does not assist the conception of the cosmical system which we accept in the earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems more at home in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, or in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to have adopted it from the Turk. If Milton's intention were to reproduce Jacob's ladder, he should, like Dante (Parad, xxi. 25), have made it the means of communication ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called now to die for any worthy cause, her race would have been ennobled by a second ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... judgment anticipated by the imagination or the heart; but that, on the other hand, it must keep strictly to its position as an instrument to an end out of itself. For if it once emancipates itself from the yoke of feeling, it soon becomes altogether lawless, and disperses its efforts in every direction in the satisfaction of a vain curiosity. The intelligence, as the scholastic theologians said, is in itself, or when left to itself, a source of anarchy and confusion; it must be, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... doubt the very reason why the wicked incite and cheer themselves on to commit lawless acts, for crime shows them a fruit visible and ripe at once, but a punishment late, and long subsequent ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... schooners, being light and handy craft, are generally used by pirates and smugglers in the prosecution of their lawless pursuits, and many a deed of bloodshed and horror has been done on board ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... at night to boil his pot; Yet all the plain, he fancies, to the stone That stands beside the poplars, is his own. But who can talk of property in lands Exposed to ceaseless risk of changing hands, Whose owner purchase, favour, lawless power, And lastly death, may alter in an hour? So, with heirs following heirs like waves at sea, And no such thing as perpetuity, What good are farmsteads, granaries, pasture-grounds That stretch long leagues beyond ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... had not been for the lawless tyranny of your Government, Don Pepe, many an outlaw now with Hernandez would be living peaceably and happy by the honest work of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... Did but the lawless angels see that door They would fall, slain by everlasting peace; And when such angels knock upon our doors Who goes with them must drive through the ...
— The Land Of Heart's Desire (Little Blue Book#335) • W.B. Yeats

... consequence, that her Miquelets and soldiers became tolerably conversant with the languages of those countries; and, in course of time, returning to their native land, not a few, especially of the former class, a brave and intrepid, but always a lawless and dissolute species of soldiery, either fell in or returned to evil society, and introduced words which they had learnt abroad into the robber phraseology; whilst returned galley- slaves from Algiers, Tunis, and Tetuan, added to its motley variety of words from ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... excellent thing to have actually been done; and, after all, to be more elated on his cruelties than his kindnesses, by the blood he hath spilt than by the benefits he had conferred; and to acknowledge less obligation to a well-informed and well-intentioned progenitor than to a lawless and ferocious barbarian. Would stocks and stumps, if they could utter words, utter such gross stupidity? Would the apple boast of his crab origin, or the peach of his prune? Hardly any man is ashamed of being inferior to his ancestors, although it is the very thing at which the ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... all these multiplied means of defence, the Tower was once surprised by a mob in 1381, on which occasion Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, whom they found in the chapel, were dragged to instant execution by these lawless miscreants, but it is possible that the way was paved by some treachery on the part of those ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... buildings of every description were generally spared, even by the most ruthless marauders; and, had this not been the case, those possessing sufficient valuable property to attract the cupidity of the lawless were far more likely to provide an inconspicuous hiding place for their wealth than to advertise its possession by erecting a tower which, from every direction, was invariably the most conspicuous feature of the landscape. That the towers were not intended ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.

... with 'enticeth'? It may be that the enticement of his victim into a place suitable for robbing or murder is meant, but more probably there is here the same combination of force and craft as in chapter i. 10-14. Criminals have a wicked delight in tempting innocent people to join their gangs. A lawless desperado is a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... be kept so high as to furnish a motive to its evasion, too strong to be counteracted by ordinary means of prevention; and especially no commodity should be taxed so highly as to raise up a class of lawless characters—smugglers, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... transported to Nova Scotia; they were known by the name of Maroons in the island, and still termed so, on their landing at Halifax. Their story is replete with interest: during their brief stay in Nova Scotia they gave incredible trouble from their lawless and licentious habits, in addition to costing the government no less a sum than ten thousand pounds a year. Their idleness and gross conduct at last determined the government to send them, as the others, to Sierra Leone, which was accordingly done in the year ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... both sad and fierce to see what hold their lawless enterprise took upon the youth of the city. Not that any great number were drawn into the movement, least of all Narcisse; but it captivated their interest and sympathy, and heightened the general unrest, when calmness was what every thoughtful man saw to ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... The lawless and the rough soon had it all their own way, and the peaceable citizen who would have liked to get wife and children safely out of the crowd found it well-nigh impossible to make ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... of a lawless race, and the Law it standeth thus: He comes of a race that have never a Law, and he never has ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... then, and at a cost inconceivably trifling, the peace of society is maintained in cases which no law, no severity of police, ever could effectually reach. Brutal strength would reign paramount in the walks of public life; brutal intoxication would follow out its lawless impulses, were it not for the fear which now is always in the rear—the fear of being summoned to a strict summary account, liable to the most perilous consequences. This is not open to denial: the actual ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... Buddhism, one hundred and fifty years afterwards; and imply that the first event was but a pre-ordained precursor of the second.[1] The Singhalese narrative, however, admits that Wijayo was but a "lawless adventurer," who being expelled from his own country, was refused a settlement on the coast of India before he attempted Ceylon, which had previously attracted the attention of other adventurers. This story is ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent



Words linked to "Lawless" :   lawlessness, anarchic, uncontrolled, wide-open, unlawful



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