"Conscienceless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anarchist had hurled from the pinnacle of a bedpost, urged him in excited, confidential tones to take time by the forelock and prepare for possible breach of promise suits. Brewster sat on the edge of the bed and listened to diabolical stories of how conscienceless females had fleeced innocent and even godly men of wealth. From the bathroom, between splashes, he retained Harrison by the year, month, day and hour, to stand ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... error when he says that Dorian Gray, having a 'cool, calculating, conscienceless character,' was inconsistent when he destroyed the picture of his own soul, on the ground that the picture did not become less hideous after he had done what, in his vanity, he had considered his first good action. Dorian Gray has not got a cool, calculating, conscienceless character at all. On ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... home, and it's little cause he has to stay here. They have put a new minister in his place. The Synod, the conscienceless villains, declared it vacant. Castlereagh, through his satellite Black, has corrupted them, too. He'll preach no more in the old meeting-house, nor sit over his bodes in the old manse. He's at the Widow Maclure's now, the woman whose husband ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... came upon Julian of Ephesus with immense rancor written on his face. The Maccabee was disturbed. It was not well that this conscienceless man should have discovered that they were traveling near this girl and her old servant. Much as the young man wished to loiter along the road to Jerusalem to keep her in sight while he could, ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... instrument for her will as in the two brothers preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating conflict with the Protestants and the Duke of Guise. At last, wearied and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless king quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old duke, as he entered the king's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins hidden ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... motion summed up your character by saying, that if you had not been so regardless of the welfare and wishes of others; so totally given up to self-gratification; so ignorant of all kinds of business, and so unwilling to learn; so extravagant in your habits, and so utterly conscienceless in regard to your debts; so neglectful of your promises and your duty; so heretical in your opinions, political and religious, and such a dreadful backslider from everything that you had promised to be when a baby, you would be a very nice sort of fellow, ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... Germany cannot win, that their own conquest is inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon their own conscienceless rulers—" ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... the lives and rights of others are held cheaply, contemptuously. The kind who, if another gets in his way, removes him ... but carefully, lest his own highly-valuable skin be put in jeopardy. If he could get some one else to do the dirty work, so much the better. Such conscienceless killers were, Hanlon ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... Yet that is the conscienceless misrepresentation with which Dr. Royce prepares the way for all that is to follow, deceives the reader at the very outset, predisposes him to believe the preposterous charge that I "appropriated" my main theory from the great idealist Hegel, arouses his indignation or mirth, as the ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... sorrowing may raise complaint against Winston Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, who, by conscienceless instructions which must bring him the curse of mankind, conjured up this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... developed into a supreme instance of the "unmoral" woman, the conscienceless egoist, morally colour-blind, vain, lewd, the intelligence quick and alert but having no influence whatever on conduct. One instance will suffice to show the sinister levity, the utter absence of all moral ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... that Mirabelle had a walkover. The guess itself was wrong, but the deduction from it was correct; and Henry was convulsed to think that Mr. Mix had shown his hand so early. And instead of gritting his teeth, and damning Mr. Mix for a conscienceless scoundrel, Henry put back his head and laughed until ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... found it necessary," Wingate remarked slowly, "to be prepared for all sorts of tricks when I am up against anybody as conscienceless as you. I don't want you here, Phipps. I didn't ask you to come and see me. I've nothing to ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had he arrived at a consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides, had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an ever-present consciousness of his impotence ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the Negro, the inevitable result of unbribled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man over the Negro, began to show itself in acts of conscienceless outlawry. During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body. Vested with unlimited power over his slave, to subject him to any ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... face instantly lighted. "I am the most conscienceless fortune hunter you ever met, but—I am hunting my ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... surprised at his hesitation. He did not understand it himself. For Edith Conyngham he felt only disgust, and for Sister Claire an amused contempt; but sparkling Colette, so clever, bright, and amiable, so charmingly conscienceless, so gracefully wicked, inspired him with pity almost. He could not crush the pretty reptile, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the peace we promised our dead or our living heroes," Mr. Stenson said slowly. "We set out to fight for democracy—your cause. That fight would be a failure if we allowed the proudest, the most autocratic, the most conscienceless despot who ever sat upon a throne to remain ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... right. I am his greatest jewel, and yet he would give me into the keeping of an utter stranger. I am being protected against that conscienceless varlet—Love! If love lays hands upon me—ah, my friend, you cannot possibly guess what a calamity ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the excommunication of property interests is inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in operation we are sure to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples. First, a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for the one responsive to public sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile popular action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the resourceful and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... employment to the laborer, which beautifies the neighborhood, and which enhances the value of the adjacent property. The object of taxation (as Mr. Harland asserts and as I believe) is to enrich the office-holding class, a class of loose morality, utterly heartless and utterly conscienceless, and I agree with Mr. Harland in the opinion that the time is not far distant when the honest people of this country will arise as one man and subvert the corrupt hand of politics which is now grinding us under the iron ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... the stage or read in the drawing-room. Of course they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and scoffing atheists. It was an ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... he does not understand the rudiments, and giving it at the dictation of party chiefs who themselves are controlled by the blind and brainless mechanism of the caucus! The people are the slaves of their representatives, the representatives of their chiefs, and the chiefs of a conscienceless machine! And that is the last word of governmental science! Oh, divine spirit of man, in what chains have you bound yourself, and call it liberty, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... a conscienceless liar, but I can't help liking him, and he'll always nest warm in the ashes of ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Working Men's Association. Nor is it necessary to consider the charges made against Marx—some of them time has already taken care of—that he was domineering, malicious, and ambitious, that his spirit was actuated by intrigue, and that, when he conceived a dislike for anyone, he was merciless and conscienceless in his warfare on that one. Incompatibility of temperament and of personality played its part in the battles between these two, but, even had there been no mutual dislike, the differences between their principles and tactics would have necessitated a battle ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... songbook babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sympathize with his aims, and his splendid determination awoke her admiration. Her idea of the Trust had changed, likewise, for it seemed to be a fair and dignified competitor. She had seen no signs of that conscienceless, grasping policy usually imputed to big business. In regard to Gordon alone, her first conviction had remained unchanged. He was, in truth, as evil as he had ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... this is one of his more serious undertakings, there will be a thousand carriages, many of them resplendent with gold and silver ornament in relief upon the woodwork, and drawn by horses or mules whose bridles are gleaming with gold. And, if the beautiful and conscienceless Poppaea is with him, there may be a Procession of some five hundred asses, whose it is to supply her with the milk in which she bathes for the preservation of ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... intimate that there is any higher rule of life than the Ten Commandments; only it is illuminating as showing the relationship between manners and morals, which is too often overlooked. The polished gentleman of sentimental fiction has so long served as the type of smooth and conscienceless depravity that urbanity of demeanor inspires distrust in ruder minds. On the other hand, the blunt, unpolished hero of melodrama and romantic fiction has lifted brusqueness and pushfulness to a pedestal not wholly merited. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... manifest. Either it was written by John the Apostle, or else the writer was a deliberate deceiver. There can be no such explanation of his personation of John as that which satisfies our minds in the case of Daniel and Ecclesiastes; the book is either the work of John, or it is a cunning and conscienceless fraud. And it seems to me that any one who will read the book will find it impossible to believe that it is an imposture. If any book of the ages bears in itself the witness to the truth it is the Fourth Gospel. It shines by its own light. Any of us could tell the difference between the sun in the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... a decent world in which to live. And the existence of the Prussian army and its conscienceless masters was incompatible with the free and peaceful life of the world. We entered the war for an ideal. That ideal was in the balance when Germany made ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... conscienceless agents of a new force in the development of the West, were bent upon Belding's ruin, and so far as his fortunes at Forlorn River were concerned, had almost accomplished it. One by one he lost points for which ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... intentions might not be in accord with the best interests of the city. A little later Haguenin printed editorials which referred to Cowperwood as "the wrecker," "the Philadelphia adventurer," "a conscienceless promoter," and the like. Aileen guessed instantly what the trouble was, but she was too disturbed as to her own position to make any comment. She could not resolve the threats and menaces of Cowperwood's envious world any more than ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... sought other exercise. Some distance away stood a house, and at the front gate was a man, and Romulus knew man to be the meanest and most cruel of all living things and the conscienceless taskmaster of weaker creatures. So Romulus avoided the house and struck out across the fields. Presently he came upon a very large thing which awed him. It was a live-oak, and the birds were singing in the foliage. But his persistent curiosity put a curb upon his ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... opera-box, or occupying the back seat of the barouche, is always a wholesome and moral one to me, as jolly a reminder as that of the Death's-head which figured in the repasts of Egyptian bon-vivants, a strange sardonic memorial of Vanity Fair. What? even battered, brazen, beautiful, conscienceless, heartless, Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her shame: even lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any fence which any man in England will take, and who drives her greys in the park, while her mother keeps a huckster's stall in ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... accumulates that British Cabinets continue to be towards our country as conscienceless as ever. They deceive frankly nations throughout the world as to their Irish policy, while withholding from us even the Act of Home Rule which in 1914 was placed on the Statute-book. The recent "Convention," ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... story so common that the public has come to look at its monotony instead of its pity. The old tale of an unhappy married life—made so by a brutal, conscienceless husband, a robber, a spendthrift, a moral coward and a bully, who failed to provide even the means of the barest existence. Yes, he had come down in the scale so low as to strike her. It happened only the day before—there was the bruise on one temple—she ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... of the air have not human feelings or motives. They are conscienceless. In this respect Peter Pan is an immortal fairy as well as an immortal child. While like a child he resents injustice in horrified silence, like a fairy he acts with no sense of responsibility. When he saves Wendy's brother ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... the sale of the Indians as slaves, it should be noted that the act was done under the cover of the law. The Indian was "fined" a certain sum for his drunkenness, and was then turned over to the tender mercies of the employer, who paid the fine. Thus "justice" was perverted to the vile ends of the conscienceless scoundrels who posed as "officers of ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... conscienceless in pursuit of desired ends, Pierre Lanier, unlike Paul, never permitted passion to interfere with ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... cease, nor pause, until the last vestige of the system by which men usurped power over the lives and liberties of their fellows through economic means was destroyed. Therefore not one outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, not a single ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... of the whole is," he observed, with unwonted emphasis, "that we never suspected Roland Yorke, knowing him as we did know him. It will be a caution to me as long as I live, never to go again by appearances. Careless, thoughtless, impulsive, conscienceless Roland Yorke! Of course! Who else would have been likely to help themselves to it? I wonder what scales were before ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... river yacht. I would rather a thousand times have paid the thirteen dollars myself and have taken him out to fight his last Armageddon and then have shot him on the lonely hills from which all other bulls had fled. These mean-souled, conscienceless moneymakers, who could not understand so brave, so fine a spirit, sold him to a Santa Rosa butcher! Shame on them, I say. I am sorry I ever revisited the Valley of the Seven Moons to hear such lamentable news. It made me unhappy then, makes me unhappy now. My only consolation is that ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... the chief barrier between Rome and Frederic Barbarossa, between Frederic II and Germany. Charles of Anjou was the latest and most efficient champion of the papal cause; and he lives in history as the forerunner of the conscienceless and shameless statesmanship of the Renaissance epoch. And yet, when we have allowed for the utility of these alliances, the question remains why radical communes, rebellious feudatories, and adventurers ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... Letty to her to be shown how to cut out a frock. But you needn't wait; you can go right through the flower-garden, and take the path over the fields into the woods." And, having concluded this bit of conscienceless and transparent management, the old lady remarked that she, herself, was going for a walk, and ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... act worthy of antiquity. Then, having reflected on all the human lives sacrificed by that same Manilof, as conscienceless as an earthquake or a volcano in eruption, who yet would not let others hurt an animal in his presence, he questioned the young girl ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... Happy Jack adjured crossly. He was thinking of all the water he had carried painstakingly in his hat, for the relief of this conscienceless young reprobate, and he was patently ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... little in the balance. There is the afterwards that is of far more moment—that justice, swift and sure, should put an end to the depredations and the menace to society that exists to-day in the person of one of the cleverest and most conscienceless fiends that ever plotted crime. Nor, in case you should have to take up the work where I leave off, would you be even then obliged to come into those shadows again. It is very strange, Jimmie. It is almost ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... King nodded, conscienceless now. The Prince scurried behind a big rock and reappeared at once with a willow branch from the end of which dangled a piece of thread. A bent pin occupied the chief end in view. He unceremoniously shoved the branch into the hands of his confederate, and then produced ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon |
