"Mutilate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... widespread that freedom from it is the exception. It is painfully common to hear public speakers mutilate the king's English. If they do not actually murder it, as Curran once said, they often knock ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... blaze kindled by Tract Ninety (1841). 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 it. 'This No. Ninety of Tracts ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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
... every ear. Fear not, ye valiant men of Troy! fear not The son of Peleus. In a war of words I could, myself, cope even with the Gods; 450 But not with spears; there they excel us all. Nor shall Achilles full performance give To all his vaunts, but, if he some fulfil, Shall others leave mutilate in the midst. I will encounter him, though his hands be fire, 455 Though fire his hands, and his heart hammer'd steel. So spake he them exhorting. At his word Uprose the Trojan spears, thick intermixt ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the practice of scalping an enemy, generally indulged in by the Sioux, is a wanton desire cruelly to mutilate the foe. Such is not the case at all; he is prompted solely by the desire of procuring proof of his success, and he will take more chances to get a scalp than he would for any other object in life. Among the Sioux, and I believe most of the tribes of North America, for ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... 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 and stampede after some faith ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... members. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth, but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there, but this must be shown. It was a matter of life and death to us to show it. And I believed that it could be shown; ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a Tory and a Liberal Government? Do Trade Unionists desire the downfall of the existing Liberal Government? Would they really like to send a message of encouragement to the House of Lords—for that is what it comes to—to reject and mutilate Liberal and Radical legislation—and Labour legislation now before Parliament? Would they send such a message of encouragement to the House of Lords as this—"House of Lords, you were right in your estimate of public ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... throughout an army required some time, but not so 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 this meaning ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... ultimate hopelessness of idealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical application is local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions. There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do not mutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation of their souls, and we have lost confidence in the rack and the thumb-screw. But we need only transport ourselves to other lands and study other people's ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... I agree with the learned counsel that I was out of doors at one o'clock that morning. But if he will use me as HIS WITNESS in that matter, then he must not pick and choose and mutilate my testimony. Nay, let him take the whole truth, and not just so much as he can square with the indictment. Either believe me, that I was out of doors praying, or do not believe me that I was out of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... will permit me first to go to my room, I will find something which sorts better with a soldier than this churchman's gown. My buckskin, I was obliged to mutilate to make me ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 been so great as represented ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... by every man as a principal 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. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... wishing for anything, wishing for the success of the party he belongs to, should urge these desperate courses. He it was who proposed the fatal postponement of Schedule A, which led to such utter ruin and confusion, and now it is he who manages this Bill, and who ventures to mutilate the Ministerial measure in such a manner as will in all probability bring down all the wrath of the Commons on him and his Conservative majority. I am not at all sure but that the Government is content to exhibit its paltry numbers in the House of Lords, in order that the world may see how essentially ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... under side of the leaves we shall often see patches of its crimson eggs. Later the caterpillars use the plant as their main, if not exclusive, food store. They are the innocent culprits which nine times out of ten mutilate the foliage. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... does this go, that some 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 those types would be reproduced ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... wretch they found in the desert, across the Moroccan border, the man who ran away from Bel Abbes before we came? Yes, I saw the picture. Ghastly! And to think it's the women who mutilate men like that! But I shan't try to escape by way of Morocco. The danger I'll run is only from being caught and sent to the penal battalion—the awful 'Batt d'Aff.' It's a bad enough danger, for I might as well be dead as in prison—better, for I'd be out of misery. But I must run the ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 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 yield ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... a short 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 by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the initial cruelties, leaving the reader's imagination to fancy the 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 divinity was appeased, and ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... prayer; the same presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it should be otherwise anywhere—for, bretheren, in things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason." This dispatch, too, the House of Commons took care to mutilate before ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... 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 ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... paper in his language, in his native town, for the edification of his wife and his children. In what other country than in Germany is such a thing conceivable? Not in France, at all events. Now, if my readers want another document to show how customary it is in the German Army to mutilate the wounded, well, I will borrow one from the notebook of Private Paul Gloede of the Ninth Battalion of Pioneers, Ninth Corps, (Figs. 17 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... styling themselves worshippers of Satan, the God of Ugliness." Some of these men were suffering from the "visual derangement" of the insane, whilst "many of the pictures exhibited another form of mania. The system of this is an incontrollable desire to mutilate the human body." Sadism, as we know, played a prominent part in both the French and Russian revolutions. The most important point in all this is not that degenerates should be found to perpetrate these abominations, but what the circular describes as the "Machiavellian ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... is a danger and should be removed. Who knows what excuse he might take to use the knife on thee and me and the little ones of our households? Tobah! he is a wolf, not a man. And this one the Sarcar has sent among us to mutilate, kill, and rob us of our comforts and rights. Soon, he will take away the jhil from Panipara busti so that the people will be put to the labour of dragging water out of deep wells, and for the ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... 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
... enough to me," said Hinman, coming forward. "Mr. Vaughan no doubt tore them out 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
... 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 can ever persuade ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all these faults, so as neither to transpose words in such a manner that every one must see that it is done on purpose, nor cramming in unnecessary words, as if to fill up leaks, nor aiming at petty rhythm, so as to mutilate and emasculate his sentences, and who does not always stick to one kind of rhythm without any variation, such a man avoids nearly every fault. For we have said a good deal on the subject of perfections, to which these ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... cheat the faculty by slighting our opportunities and thus making their life work of inferior quality to that which they have a right to expect. By heedless exaggeration we may murder a reputation—mutilate an existence. We wrong each other by being less than our best. We are unscrupulous about breaking promises. Down town this afternoon at the corner of Main and Market Streets I saw a freshman waiting in ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... a case to be very cautious—to examine the texts, and to proceed carefully by induction. There is one class of narratives especially, to which this principle must necessarily be applied. Such are narratives of supernatural events. To seek to explain these, or to reduce them to legends, is not to mutilate facts in the name of theory; it is to make the observation of facts our groundwork. None of the miracles with which the old histories are filled took place under scientific conditions. Observation, which has never once been falsified, teaches us ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... 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 ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... international 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 ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... perspective Shakspeare is the greatest master I know: a single word frequently opens to view an almost interminable vista of antecedent states of mind. Confined within the narrow limits of time, the poet is in many subjects obliged to mutilate the action, by beginning close to the last decisive stroke, or else he is under the necessity of unsuitably hurrying on its progress: on either supposition he must reduce within petty dimensions the grand picture of a strong ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... own safety. GUIDO drives the DUKE back. GUIDO is careless of defence, and desirous only to kill. The DUKE is wounded, and falls with a cry at the foot of the shrine. GUIDO utters a sort of strangled growl. He raises his dagger, intending to hack at and mutilate his antagonist, who is now unconscious. As GUIDO stoops, GRACIOSA, from behind him, ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... and clean 'em out. I hate them, for I was too long getting where I am now, and I want to stay. But I don't make the mistake of ignoring them, and I rather like having a squint at them at close quarters. Kirkpatrick has taken us to several socialist meetings...we borrow the servants' coats and mutilate our oldest hats....Socialism seems to me rather more endurable than the socialists, and of these Kirkpatrick is about the sanest I have heard. They rant and froth, contradict themselves and one another, wander from the point ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... 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
... 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 ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... course, another spur to industry. Every land is not so blessed." Many quotations from this able state paper have already been made in the preceding pages, though it is so brilliant a piece of work that to quote is only to mutilate. Its argument, denunciation, humor, and satire are interwoven in a masterly combination. The renowned "sketch in the lapidary style," prepared for the gravestone of Thomas and Richard Penn, with the introductory ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... 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 sentence beyond ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... the first time printed. The Editor does not at all like 'Extracts,' and must be permitted to regret that what in his judgment was an antiquated and mistaken idea of biography led the excellent as learned Bishop of Lincoln to abridge and mutilate so very many—the places not always marked. On this and the principle and motif which approve and vindicate the publication of the Letters of every really potential intellect such as WORDSWORTH'S, the accomplished daughter of SARA COLERIDGE has remarked: 'A book composed ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... be amended for the third time, she did not seem able to realize that their public wouldn't stand unions libres when not served up with a moral purpose—that no artistic apology for them would do. In the end, therefore, Rattray was obliged to mutilate the article himself, and to neutralize it here and there. He was justified in taking the trouble, for it was matter they wanted, on account of some expensive drawings of the locality that had been in hand a long time. Even then the editor-in-chief ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... hardly to be credited, yet is true, that in the anxiety of the Northern merchant to conciliate his Southern customer, a publisher was found ready thus to mutilate Scheffer's picture. He intended his edition for use in the Southern States undoubtedly, but copies fell into the hands of those who believed literally in a gospel which was to preach liberty ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... as soft to the touch as rabbit's fur. Therefore, it is imperative that one of us must cut the other's throat. The deduction is perfectly logical. Yet I do not know that my love for her is any greater than my hatred. I rage against her patient tolerance of me, and I am often tempted to disfigure, mutilate, even to destroy this colourful, stupid woman, who makes me wofully ridiculous in my own eyes. I shall be happier when death has taken the woman who ventures to deal ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Keeper's suggestion for the bringing in of this older coin, I must ask you if this plan can escape that selfish impulse of the human mind which seeketh for personal gain? For, look you, short as would be the time proposed, it taketh but still shorter time to mutilate a coin; and it doth seem to me that, under the plan of my Lord Keeper, we should see the old currency of England mutilated in a night. Sir, I should opine in the contrary of this plan, and would base my decision upon certain principles ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... 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
... he chopped with the spade, others he tore and ripped with his teeth and nails. Sometimes he tore the mouth open and rent the face back to the ears, he opened the stomachs, and pulled off the limbs. Although he dug up the bodies of several men he felt no inclination to mutilate them, whereas he delighted in rending female corpses. He was sentenced to a ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Cornwall are as strong to-day as ever they were in the past, and there seems little reason to doubt that the good condition of wells, cromlechs, and other antiquities in the county, is due to the widespread traditions that dreadful harm will befall those who disturb or mutilate ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... misfortune of his life—his marriage—gave them their 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
... themselves[14] or their children. The criminal might be enslaved. In early pagan times the slave had no rights. He was a chattel disposable according to the will of his master who had jus vitae necisque, who could slay, mutilate, scourge at pleasure.[15] In the course of time this extreme power was restrained. Hadrian forbade the killing of slaves, Marius allowed the slave to lay an information against his master. The prefect at Rome and the presidents of the provinces took cognizance of crimes against the slave; and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... adventure 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
... myths, 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
... destruction was accomplished on either side, however. Occasionally a stray bullet would carry off one of our men in his sleep. Sometimes these naked savages would stealthily creep in upon our sentries and with their sharp knives would overpower them and mutilate them in ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... "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 structure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... among savages of the Zulu and kindred races, for reasons of superstition, to rip open and mutilate the bodies of enemies killed in war, but on this occasion the Matabele general, having surveyed the dead, issued an order: 'Let them be,' he said; 'they were men who died like men, men whose fathers ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... to check. Then Eglamore ran him through the chest and gave vent to a strangled, growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword free and grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again and again. He meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash and mutilate that haughty mask of infamy, but Graciosa clutched his ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... only I cannot behold a Beggar without relieving his Necessities with my Purse, 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 as ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... be assured that, with such mighty enemies, we can do nothing by halves. We cannot afford to retract, mutilate, or moderate our original determination. He who swerves from the straight road at the beginning is lost; he who stumbles at the first step is apt to fall down the whole staircase. If, on account of imaginable necessity, we ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the operation of castration as he would have done upon a colt. The boy recovered from the operation, and was of course effectually cured of his vile habit. The remedy was efficient, though scarcely justifiable. Even a father has no right thus to mutilate his own son, though we must confess that the lad's chances for becoming a useful man are fully as good as they would have been had he continued his course ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... do 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 ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... he been able, but he had no voice, though this did not prevent his humming now 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 of The Marseillaise. The Emperor also whistled sometimes, but very rarely; and the air, 'Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre', whistled by his Majesty was an unerring announcement ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... here, Dan, any self-respecting murderer would have taken care to mutilate the body to such a degree that nobody could recognise it—and here we come and identify it first go! (DAN folds his arms and looks thoughtful.) Call that ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... you retain the 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
... standard of right is conquest? In the second place, kindness is regarded as weakness by the Indian. Why should it not be, when his only god is victory? In the third place, the lust of blood, to kill, to butcher, to mutilate, still surged as hot in their veins as on the night when they had attempted to scale our walls. And again I ask why not, when the law of their life was to kill or to be killed? These questions I put to you ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... death, 'twas thine to choose Thy way at will, each shape to use; In 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 wild swan drains Each milk-drop ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... brethren, the Cross of Christ is a commandment. For we miserably mutilate it, and sinfully as well as foolishly limit its application and its power, if we recognise it only—I was going to say mainly—as being the ground of our hope and of what we call our salvation, and do not recognise it as being the obligatory example of our lives, which we are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... the matter?" inquired Colomba. They all drew near to the horse, and at the sight of the creature's bleeding head and split ear there was a general outcry of surprise and indignation. My readers must know that among the Corsicans to mutilate an enemy's horse is at once a vengeance, a challenge, and a mortal threat. "Nothing but a bullet-wound can expiate such ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... French. The 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
... 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 ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... the very 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 ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... find Congreve letters. Not a single letter to or from Congreve was to be found, perhaps because the gossip to the effect that Mary was the natural daughter of Congreve had caused the family to destroy or mutilate documents bearing his name. Congreve's copy of Terence (Number 595 in the list) is a good illustration. On the title page the signature "Will: Congreve" was once entirely blotted out by the same ink ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... God might think of all this work if there were any truth in old faiths. A pretty mess we mortals made of life! I might almost have laughed at the irony of it all, except that my laughter would have choked in my throat and turned me sick. They were beasts, and worse than beasts, to maim and mutilate each other like this, having no real hatred in their hearts for each other, but only a stupid perplexity that they should be hurled in masses against each other's ranks, to slash and shoot and burn in obedience to orders by people who were their greatest ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... 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 leave them ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... 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 ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... your institutions are founded on reason and nature, judge," I continued, "that you would be more disposed ta cultivate this member than to mutilate it; and this the more especially, as I understand all monikins believe it to be the very ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ELY JELLIFFE, New York: Dr. MacCurdy's paper fascinated me a great deal. There is so much material that one is in a maze. I am sorry, moreover, that he had to mutilate his conclusions by being forced by lack of time to condense them. It strikes me he gives us a very important contribution to the mechanism of the cure of some psychoses. That mechanism of cure, may be stated as follows: How can one take the split off libido which results from the analytic ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Collins states that he knew of an instance in India in which a horse lay down, deliberately exposing his anus, and allowing the crows to pick and eat his whole rectum. In temporary insanity, in fury, or in grief, the lower animals have been noticed by naturalists to mutilate themselves. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... language 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 on ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... from the control of Parliament, they displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age. The government was able through their instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without restraint. A separate council which sate at York, under the presidency of Wentworth, was armed, in defiance of law, by a pure act of prerogative, with almost boundless power over the northern counties. All these ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... treats of the choice of a profession, I implore you to insert something to this effect: "If your vocation leads you to be a publisher or editor of any work, moral, political, or historical, it matters not which, do not consider yourself at liberty to mutilate an author without his previous knowledge, and above all, one who is tenacious of the inviolability of his text more from conscience than self-love. If you mutilate him on your own responsibility, which is tolerably bold, do not believe that you are permitted to ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the line from which I had strayed. Heaps of dead and spectacles of murder were continually 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 submission, and were ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... the 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 ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... 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
... 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. When his army moved it moved solid. Cavalry, artillery, wagon train, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... was an age of the most enormous wealth existing side by side with the most abject poverty. Around the splendid palaces wandered hundreds of mendicants, who made of their mendicity a horrible trade, and even went so far as to steal or mutilate infants in order to move compassion by their hideous maladies. This class was increased by the exposure of children, and by that overgrown accumulation of landed property which drove the poor from their native fields. It was increased also by the ambitious attempt of people whose means were ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... interference with property rights. We see that even to-day men are very tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as sacred—however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve, suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required more than half a century to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... it be well weighed and, if found beneficial, cautiously adopted. Every patriot will rejoice to see its authority so exerted as to advance the prosperity and honor of the nation, whilst he will watch with jealousy any attempt to mutilate this charter of our liberties or pervert its powers to acts of aggression or injustice. Thus shall conservatism and progress blend their harmonious action in preserving the form and spirit of the Constitution and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the will of 1200 individuals for that of the people, "our representatives have failed to treat us with respect." This is not the first time, and it is not to be the last. Often do they exceed their mandate, they disarm, mutilate, and gag their legitimate sovereign and they pass decrees against the people in the people's name. Such is their martial law, specially devised for "suppressing the uprising of citizens", that is to say, the only means ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... during two or three evenings by the fireside, enables man to journey through the Dark Continent without the dangers of fever, without experiencing the pain from the lion leaping out of the thicket to mutilate the arm of Livingstone. With a book we tramp over the mountains of two continents without once suffering the heavy fall over the precipice that weakened Humboldt. Books enable us to visit climes, cities, civilizations ancient ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... more? Do you care to hear how I killed her; how I stabbed her in her sleep, lowered her through the window, and came down with the jewel-chest in my arms? I had to mutilate the corpse; the weight would have been too great for me at once. As it was, I made three journeys before I had disposed of all, and thrown everything, including the ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... each renewed 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 in ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... 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. Despise, contemn, scorn, disdain. Despondency, despair, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... name for an ass-ass-inating rouutine which has niver varied a hair since scholastic midicine, the silliest and didliest of all the hundred forms of Quackery, first rose—unlike Seeince, Art, Religion, and all true Suns—in the West; to wound the sick; to weaken the weak; and mutilate the hurt; and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... The effect of these dances is marvellous. By a contagious shout they excite each other. They reach a frenzy which communicates itself with hypnotic effect to the whole dancing circle. At times men tear their hair, cut their flesh or even mutilate their limbs for life. The "tom-tom," or Indian drum, adds to the power of monotonous rhythm and to the spirit of excitement ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... such trickster's arts, calling like wizards upon their familiar spirit, you would shout at them,—you would stamp your feet at them. For instance I would ask them what right they have to rend and mutilate the body of the Bible. They would answer that they do not cut out true Scriptures, but prune away supposititious accretions. By authority of what judge? By the Holy Ghost. This is the answer prescribed by Calvin (Instit. lib. I, c. 7), for escaping this judgment of the Church ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... days of France the fair, when no one dared question the divine right of the sovereign, or the purity of the church,—when the rights of the feudal seigneurs were unchallenged, and they could head or hang, mutilate or quarter their vassals at their pleasure,—when freedom was a word as unmeaning as it is now tinder his sacred majesty, Napoleon the Third, there came to the capital, from Touraine, an artizan, named Anseau, who was as cunning in his trade of goldsmith as Benvenuto Cellini, ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... 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, and their helpless ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... 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 now, in the background, was visible ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... were called Comprachicos. They bought children, and understood how to mutilate and deform them, thus making them valuable for exhibition at fairs. But an act of parliament had just been passed to destroy the trade of the Comprachicos. Hence this flight from Portland, and the forsaking of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 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 him first. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... blossoms, the inscription says: "Whoever cuts a single branch of this tree shall forfeit a finger therefor." Would that such laws could be enforced nowadays against those who wantonly destroy flowers and mutilate objects of art! ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... horrible and hideous— It jars upon my sense fastidious, My "noble instincts," to decline To actions that are not divine. So, when I mutilate your pictures, So far from meriting your strictures, Compassion rather is my due For doing what I hate to do. It grieves my super-saintly soul Even to smash a china bowl; To carry off expensive clocks My tender conscience sears and shocks; I really don't enjoy at all Hacking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... and burned me in the fire to teach me that the spirit is born with the body. That is the power that overwhelms me.' While the priest was saying that, his eyes became as blood, and he vomited all his flesh. I saw him mutilate himself, rend himself with his teeth and fall on the ground. Seized with terror I awoke, and I began to ponder and ask myself if this indeed was the nature and the composition of the water. And I congratulated ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... that his own pride and selfishness had destroyed the faculty by which he could see God. The blind are not more oblivious to color than he was to those divine qualities which are designed to win and enchain the heart. A man may sadly mutilate his own soul. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... 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 and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
