"Rapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough to support them,) tends to render man selfish upon principle, and extinguishes all genuine public spirit, that is, all real regard to the interests and good order of society; substituting in its place, the vile ambition and rapacity of the demagogue, which, however, assumes the name of patriotism. This contrast between the temperance and sobriety of these Bedouin or primitive Arabs, and the luxury and dissipation of civilised life, was the more remarkable, when ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... further depressed by the rapacity of the railroads and the other intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, mortgages with high interest rates, and an inequitable system of taxation formed the burden of the farmer's complaint during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. These ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... relates that—"In Prussia, Livonia, and Lithuania, although the inhabitants suffer considerably from the rapacity of wolves throughout the year, in that these animals rend their cattle, which are scattered in great numbers through the woods, whenever they stray in the very least, yet this is not regarded by them as such a serious matter as what they endure ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... primitive man exhibits the same tendencies as his more civilised neighbour, and his animal passions are indulged without control of reason or consideration for others. Indeed, Hobbes's view of early society as a state of war and rapacity is much truer to fact than Rousseau's. The noble savage is simply a fiction of the imagination, an abstraction obtained by withdrawing him from all social environment. But even could we conceive of a human being kept from infancy in ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the splendour of the scales in the one answering to the brilliant plates in the other,—the luminous reservoirs of the fire-flies,—the phosphorescence and electricity of many fishes,—the same analogs of moral qualities, in their rapacity, boldness, modes of seizing their prey by surprise,—their gills, as presenting the intermediate state between the spiracula of the grade next below, and the lungs of the step next above, both extremes of which seem combined in the structure ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... heated with exaggerated notions of the exhaustless wealth of the Indies. Its precise position among birds has not been finally assigned. It appears to have been incapable of flight, to have had a vulture's head, and the foot of a common fowl. It is conjectured that the race was extinguished by the rapacity of the first settlers in the Mauritius, who, finding the dodo excellent eating and an easy prey, demolished every specimen of the species. Near these wrecks of the dodo, and in the same case, is the New Zealand wingless bird, now almost extinct, but to scientific men an interesting link between ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... remains, the powers of the prince are, as they were in most of the rude monarchies of Europe, extremely precarious, and depend chiefly on his personal character: where, on the contrary, the powers of the prince are above the control of his people, they are likewise above the restrictions of justice. Rapacity and terror become the predominant motives of conduct, and form the character of the only parties into which mankind are divided; that of the oppressor, and ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... at the second custom-house, though the officers eyed our ornaments with a confiscating rapacity. For my part I took my revenge, by showing off the only ornament I had to the utmost. A—— had made me a present of a sapphire-ring, and this I flourished in all sorts of ways, as it might be in open defiance. One fellow had an extreme longing for a pretty ferroniere, and ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pleased with the modesty and intelligence of the young gentleman's answers. George ascribed the failure of the expedition to the panic and surprise certainly, but more especially to the delays occasioned by the rapacity, selfishness, and unfair dealing of the people of the colonies towards the King's troops who were come to defend them. "Could we have moved, sir, a month sooner, the fort was certainly ours, and the little army had never been defeated," ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora of the jungle. Some ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... disturbed at Mabel's insistence upon the financial possibilities of literature, but in this she was only a child of her time. The point worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity with which she utilized literature to further her ambition. She was identifying herself with literature and so fortifying her position. She was really far better fitted to be the wife ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... whose rapacity was none of the least comprehensive, would have acceded even to these glowing terms, had he been a perfectly free agent, is very doubtful; but as he recollected that, in the event of his refusal, it was in the power of his new acquaintance to give him up to justice immediately (and more unlikely ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... competition, but in this, that on one side there is too little competition.(580) The opposing principle of competition is always monopoly, that is, as John Stuart Mill says, the taxation of industry in the interest of indolence and even rapacity; and protection against competition is synonymous with a dispensation from the necessity to be as industrious and clever ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... of the Indians may be imagined when the measures they took to free themselves are taken into consideration, for in the end they adopted the plan of committing suicide as the only means of cheating the rapacity of their white oppressors. Native families, and even entire villages, found gloomy consolation in a self-sought death. Even in this they were not invariably successful. Perhaps never has the irony of fate been more strongly illustrated ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... only a pest, but a terror. Cattle in hundreds are destroyed by these great predatory animals; even full-grown horses are killed and dragged away by them! But is this all? Are the people themselves left unmolested? No. On the contrary, great numbers of human beings every year fall victims to the rapacity of the jaguars. Settlements attempted on the edge of the great Montana—in the very country where our young hunters had now arrived—have, after a time, been abandoned from this cause alone. It is a well-known fact, that ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... secured by the motives to ordinary integrity. I do not hesitate to say that that state which lays its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ascertained that within a few years after the conquest of Mexico, Yucatan and Central America were overrun by military adventurers whose rapacity and violence drove the harmless and timid Village Indians from their pueblos into the forests; thus destroying in a few years a higher culture than the Spaniards were able to substitute in its place. Nothing can be plainer, I think, than this ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... 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 bullet or bayonet ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... middle of the fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of high-handed rapacity—the crudest possible assertion of the right of the stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he enjoyed in Europe, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... nest was not to be seen, but here the trees are all covered with them. Amongst the various smaller ones, we came upon a huge vulture's nest on a very small tholukh, which seemed to bend and look unhappy beneath the weight of this den of rapacity and violence. There are hereabouts no rocks for the eagles to build upon. We halted amidst abundance of herbage and small trees, which afforded a little shelter ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... of peace, of law, and of freedom.' Nor was this astonishing: the name of the Commonwealth, a greater than Macaulay remarks, 'was grown infinitely odious: it was associated with the tyranny of ten years, the selfish rapacity of the Rump, the hypocritical despotism of Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... after a fair commencement, to a pernicious termination, all became robbers and plunderers; some set their affections on houses, others on lands; his victorious troops knew neither restraint nor moderation, but inflicted on the citizens disgraceful and inhuman outrages. Their rapacity was increased by the circumstance that Sulla, in order to secure the attachment of the forces which he had commanded in Asia, had treated them, contrary to the practise of our ancestors, with extraordinary indulgence and exemption from discipline; and pleasant and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... of the imagination to appreciate the rage Frontenac must have felt when, on returning to Canada, he saw before his eyes the effects of La Barre's rapacity and Denonville's perfidy, of which the massacres of Lachine and La Chesnaye furnished the most ghastly proofs. But in these two cases the element of tragedy was so strong as to efface the mood of exasperation. ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... already cited in the body of the work a few may be added here. The Liburnians helped Octavius Augustus in the naval battle of Actium; and, when he became emperor, he did much for Dalmatia, in return for the assistance rendered. Yet the rebellions continued, mainly owing to the rapacity of the governors sent from Rome, as is proved by the answer of Batone to Tiberius, reported by Dion Cassius. He asked the reason for the frequent rebellions in town and country, and the implacable hatred ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs been turned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion to draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of law, had obstructed the progress of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by the rapacity of the corregidor of Tuita, who had laid three repartimientos on the Indians in a single year, seized the tyrannical wretch and strangled him with his own hands. Then, taking the name of his ancestor, Tupac-Amaru, he proclaimed himself the chief of all those who were ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... judgment, and skillfully reminded by Frau Rueckenau of the bear's and the wolf's rapacity, consented at last to give Reynard a second hearing. The fox now minutely described the treasures he sent to court,—a magic ring for the king, and a comb and mirror for the queen. Not only was the fable ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... taken to the shore, was immediately seized on by several, and its death hastened by their blows. The "Beagle" was at the Falklands only during the summer, but the officers of the "Adventure," who were there in the winter, mention many extraordinary instances of the boldness and rapacity of these birds. They actually pounced on a dog that was lying fast asleep close by one of the party; and the sportsmen had difficulty in preventing the wounded geese from being seized before their eyes. It is said that several together (in this respect resembling the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... imposes on appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained by a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in catering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling inability to recognize it or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe, than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy: but the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit, of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot, perhaps, be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... WRETCH WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a higher, a more ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... weak, and therefore succumb to the dictation of the rude masses. And what keeps up this singular action, but the constantly-recurring elections, the incessant balloting and voting, the necessity which every man feels hourly of saving his substance or his life from the devouring rapacity of those who think that all should ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... led to hopes, and reports were whispered about the town that I was the bearer of the news of the disgrace of the tyrant. But his vengeance speedily fell on the principal inhabitants, for such as had hitherto escaped his rapacity were seized and stripped of their property, on the plea that they had spread ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... pilgrim may tremble a little to undertake the journey; and those who do so venture will, probably, be composed of the poorest of the Christian community,—men who, bringing with them neither gold, nor silver, nor precious offerings, will have little to fear from the rapacity of the brigands. Hence arise two consequences: on the one hand, the rich—whom, Heaven knows, and the Gospel has, indeed, expressly declared, have the most need of a remission of sins—will be deprived of this glorious occasion for absolution; and, on the other hand, the coffers of the Church will ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. In the pursuit he fearlessly braves the arrow of the Indian and the distempers of the forest; he is unimpressed ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... year 1728, an opinion was entertained that much cruelty and rapacity were exercised by the keepers of the great prisons in London. It was known that they had almost unlimited power in their hands, that they were not subject to regular inspection, and that it was scarcely possible to bring them to justice for their treatment of those committed to their charge. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... now exposed to the rapacity of the Roman generals who really governed the country. Crassus plundered all that Pompey spared. He took from the temple ten thousand talents—about ten million dollars when gold and silver had vastly greater value than in our times. These vast sums had ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... that the little he had saved was almost expended; but that as soon as assistance should arrive from his countrymen, every article should be paid for. All his arguments and promises were thrown away upon the natives, whose rapacity knew no bounds; they would give nothing without payment, and their charges ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... your capacity is equal to any service; but I must express my doubts of your firmness and activity, and above all of your recollection of my instructions, and of their importance. My conduct in the late arrangements will be arraigned with all the rancor of disappointed rapacity, and my reputation and influence will suffer a mortal wound from the failure of them. They have already failed in a degree, since no part of them has yet taken place, but the removal of our forces from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... when you inherited the money in your turn, she was ready with her plot to rob you. We know how she carried that plot through to the end; and we know that nothing but your death is wanted, at this moment, to crown her rapacity and her deception with success. We are sure of these things. We are sure that she is young, bold, and clever—that she has neither doubts, scruples, nor pity—and that she possesses the personal qualities which men in general (quite incomprehensibly to me!) are weak enough to admire. These ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... this district. The Emir Djahdjah resides at Baalbec, and keeps there about 200 Metaweli horsemen, whom he equips and feeds out of his own purse. He is well remembered by several Europeans, especially English travellers, for his rapacity, and inhospitable behaviour. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... themselves, should exercise the most base and abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;—in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in all the histories ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... mountains, near the Killeries, I heard many particulars of the eagle's habit and history from a grey-haired peasant who had passed a long life in these wilds. The scarcity of hares, which here were once abundant, he attributed to the rapacity of those birds; and he affirmed, that when in pursuit of these animals, the eagle evinced a degree of intelligence that appeared extraordinary. They coursed the hares, he said, with great judgment and certain success; one bird was the active follower, while the other remained ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... provision for victualling the fleet on a sufficient and even liberal scale; and, notwithstanding slender pecuniary resources, repeatedly increased the money assigned to it, on cause being shown. In his eagerness to make Queen Elizabeth a monster of treacherous rapacity, Froude has completely overreached himself, He says that 'she permitted some miserable scoundrel to lay a plan before her for saving expense, by cutting down the seamen's diet.' The 'miserable scoundrel' had submitted a proposal ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... to the German nobility, speaking of the pope, "He is a shepherd: yes, so far as you have money, and no farther." The above passage from Bunyan is altogether in the manner of Luther when describing the rapacity and avarice of Rome. hath removed them. And these seeds has antichrist sown where the kingdom of Christ should stand.] as the pedlar cries, "broken or whole," is the sinews of their religion; and ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... state were irregular, it was, or at least seemed to be, for the interest of the crown to obtain from each province as much as it could anyhow pay. When the state dues were once fixed, as the crown gained nothing by the rapacity of its officers, but rather lost, since the province became exhausted, it was interested in checking greed, and seeing that the provinces were administered by wise and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... than the suppression of all the higher qualities of a statesman, the disappearance of every sign of patriotism other than an ignorant hatred of foreign countries, the complete subversion of public spirit by private rapacity. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and bloodshed, that have so often attended expeditions sent nominally for civilization, but really for conquest. Here, at least, was one record of missionary endeavor that came to full fruition and flower, and knew no fear or despair, until it attracted the attention of the ruthless rapacity and greed of the Mexican governmental authority crouching behind the project of secularization. The enforced withdrawal of the paternal hand before the Indian had learned to stand and walk alone, coupled ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... terrible," the Colonel thundered. "A country that buys peace at the price of dishonor is no better than a frump who sells her soul for gewgaws and furbalows! When posterity shall read of how the diseased mind of a single lunatic has stabbed history's richest pages with a sword of murder, rapacity and lust, it will turn a lip of contempt toward every nation that stood upon a vacuous neutrality. To hell with neutrality, when a ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... of commerce and of territory. The latter leads to the violation of treaties, encroachments upon feeble neighbors, and rapacity toward their wards whose lands are coveted. Republics are, in this, as rapacious and unprincipled as Despots, never learning from history that inordinate expansion by rapine and fraud has its inevitable consequences in dismemberment ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Germains, whose right to the throne was undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes of our ancient English ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is trying ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of a young man, thoughtless, extravagant, and licentious; and, in colours equally impressive, paints the destructive consequences of his conduct. The first print most forcibly contrasts two opposite passions; the unthinking negligence of youth, and the sordid avaricious rapacity of age. It brings into one point of view what Mr. Pope so exquisitely describes in his Epistle to ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... his fellow-mortals. It was the pride of intellect and a belief that man showed himself best by following the judgements of the reason. His disgust with people was born of their unreasonable selfishness, their instinctive greed and rapacity, their blind stupidity, all which resulted for them in so much injustice. Had they been reasonable, he would have argued, they would have been better and happier. The sentiments and the passions were impulsive, and therefore unreasonable. Swift seemed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... rapacity had been the cause of the detention, acted as examiner. He pulled one article after another out of the trunk, and at length—horror of horrors!—held up the missing watch with a look of triumph ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, and thought himself pathetically in the right. The ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must be ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... deal higher than the older, or western crypt. Before the Reformation the high altar was richly embellished with all kinds of precious and sacred ornaments and vessels: while beneath it, in a vault, were stored a priceless collection of gold and silver vessels: such of these as escaped the rapacity of Henry VIII. were destroyed by the bigotry of the Puritan zealots: the latter made havoc of the reredos which had been erected behind the high altar, probably during the fourteenth century, and ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... dangerous. What if she were an English man-of-war disguised? Some even pretended to recognize in her positively one of the lighter frigates of Rowley's squadron. Night had fallen whilst they squabbled, and their flotilla hung under the land, the men in a conflict of rapacity and fear, arguing among themselves as to the ship's character, but all unanimously goading Manuel—since he would call himself their only Capataz—to go boldly ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Mexico; the attempt by means of the Wilmot proviso to check the growing territorial-greed and rapacity of the Slave-power; and the acquisition by the United States, of California and New Mexico, under the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... universal. It yields the land owner a certainty, endangered only by the death, sickness, or desertion of the negro tenant; but it throws the latter upon his own responsibility, and frequently makes him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity of the white man. The rent of land, on a money basis, varies from six to ten dollars an acre per year, while the same land can be bought in large quantities all the way from fifteen to thirty dollars per acre, according to location, clearing, improvement, richness, etc. When paid in product, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... drawn from the Magazine—he has not stopped here, he has descended much lower—& defrauded the old Veteran Soldiers who have bled for their Country in many a well fought field—for more than five Campaigns among others an old Sergeant of mine has felt his rapacity by the Industry of this man's wife they had accumulated something handsome to support them in their advanced age—which coming to the knowledge of this cruel Spoiler—he borrowed 4500 dollars from the poor Credulous Woman & left her ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... vanities of life employed much money in ornaments composed of the precious metals. It was a sign that the merchant could not obtain a profit for the capital, which, for the sake of security, he invested in this inert form. It was a proof that the noblemen or gentlemen feared the rapacity of power, when they put their wealth into forms the most portable and the most capable of being hidden; and it showed the uncertainty of credit, when a man of judgment preferred the actual possession of a mass of a silver to the convenience of a goldsmith's or a banker's receipt. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... aristocracy, he may be said so far to have taken the part of a democrat; but he had done so only so far as he had found himself bound by a sense of duty to put a stop to corruption. The venality of the judges and the rapacity of governors had been fit objects for his eloquence; but I deny that he can be fairly charged with having tampered with democracy because he had thus used his eloquence on behalf of ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... from $50 to $60, according to its quality. In Unyanyembe it is about $1-10 per pound, but in Manyuema, it may be purchased for from half a cent to 14 cent's worth of copper per pound of ivory. The Arabs, however, have the knack of spoiling markets by their rapacity and cruelty. With muskets, a small party of Arabs is invincible against such people as those of Manyuema, who, until lately, never heard the sound of a gun. The discharge of a musket inspires mortal terror in them, and it is almost impossible to induce them ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... character of the converted natives, I express most unequivocally my persuasion that it has been improved, in comparison with the original disposition, by their acquaintance with the truths of the Gospel. Their haughty self-will, their rapacity, furiousness, and sanguinary inclination have been softened—I may even say, eradicated; and their superstitious opinions have given place, in many instances, to a correct apprehension of the spiritual tendencies of the Gospel. ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... the wickedness of Jerusalem and Samaria, though the weight of his censure seems to rest upon the Judean capital. His strain is an echo of the outcry of Amos and Hosea; it is the same intense indignation against the violence and rapacity of the rich, against corrupt judges, false prophets, rascally traders, treacherous friends. For all these sins condign punishment is threatened; and yet, after these retributive woes are past, there is promise of a better day. The great Messianic hope here begins to find clear utterance; the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... keen and quick a relish for peace as husbandry and a country life, which leave in men all that kind of courage that makes them ready to fight in defense of their own, while it destroys the license that breaks out into acts of injustice and rapacity. Numa, therefore, hoping agriculture would be a sort of charm to captivate the affections of his people to peace, and viewing it rather as a means to moral than to economical profit, divided all the lands ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... rapacity of the old Scandinavian race Still visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organization displayed by them from the beginning in the seizure, survey, and distribution of land—in the building ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... on such a footing as this it is always ill with the community at large. The Hurons were among the most despicable of the Indians in their manners. They were hideous gluttons, gorging themselves when occasion offered with the rapacity of vultures. Gambling and theft flourished among them. Except, indeed, for the tradition of courage in fight and of endurance under pain we can find scarcely anything in them ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... Melville, growing pale in spite of himself, for he knew from report the desperate character of his guests, "that means, I suppose, that you will kill me unless I satisfy your rapacity." ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the Indian-traders—to whose generosity so many of the captives, taken by the natives in those early times, were indebted for their ransom. But—notwithstanding occasional acts of charity—their unscrupulous rapacity, and, particularly, their introduction of spirituous liquors among the savages, furnish good reason to doubt, whether, on the whole, they did anything to advance the civilization of the lands and people they visited. And, as we shall have occasion to ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... enormously disproportionate balance, and administer to the wants of the community? Can we wonder that the powers of native production should be so bound down, and territorial revenue so comparatively diminutive, when exchanges are so hampered by fiscal and protective rapacity? Canga Arguelles, the first Spanish financier and statistician of his day, calculated the territorial revenue of Spain at 8,572,220,592 reals, say, in sterling, L.85,722,200; whilst he asserts, with better cultivation, population ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Davis to the rapacity of that rascally attorney?" generously exclaimed Sir George Templemore. "I would prefer paying the port-charges myself, run into the handiest French port, and let ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... maintained. The all-searching eye of the French revolution looks to every part of Europe, and every quarter of the world, in which can be found an object either of acquisition or plunder. Nothing is too great for the temerity of its ambition, nothing too small or insignificant for the grasp of its rapacity. From hence Buonaparte and his army proceeded to Egypt. The attack was made, pretences were held out to the natives of that country in the name of the French King, whom they had murdered; they pretended to have the approbation of the grand seignior, whose territories ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... seize this opportunity of insinuation: while, on one hand, their ministers and emissaries in Holland exaggerated the indignities and injuries which the states had sustained from the insolence and rapacity of the English; they, on the other hand, flattered and cajoled them with little advantages in trade, and formal professions of respect.—Such was the memorial delivered by the count d'Affry, intimating that the empress-queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... his own, whenever Joe had been the first to go out into the town. The innumerable straits to which he reduced that unlucky chum, who had actually to deposit a dinner-suit at an hotel to save it from Atlee's rapacity, had amused Walpole; but then these things were all done in the spirit of the honest familiarity that prevailed between them—the tie of true camaraderie that neither suggested a thought of obligation on one side nor of painful inferiority on the other. Here it was totally different. These ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... statesmanlike instinct the new king perceived that the cause of the past failure of the Goths lay in the alienated affections of the people of Italy. The greater misgovernment of the Emperor's servants, the coldly calculating rapacity of Alexander the Scissors, and the arrogant injustice of the generals, terrible only to the weak, had given him a chance of winning back the love of the Italian people and of restoring that happy state of things which prevailed after the downfall of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... difficulty, shelter from the tempest in the same bay. The masters of the carracks espied the bark, and found out to whom she belonged: the fame of Landolfo and his vast wealth had already reached them, and had excited their natural cupidity and rapacity. They therefore determined to capture the bark, which lay without means of escape. Part of their men, well armed with cross-bows and other weapons, they accordingly sent ashore, so posting them that no one could leave the bark without being exposed to the bolts; the rest took ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... national establishment, to which in the sequel his diligence and acuteness were of the highest service. From his Papers, still extant (says Lord Braybrooke), we gather that he never lost sight of the public good; that he spared no pains to check the rapacity of contractors, by whom the naval stores were then supplied; that he studied order and economy in the dockyards, advocated the promotion of old-established officers in the Navy; and resisted to the utmost the infamous system of selling places, then most unblushingly ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... have they been addressed with such intelligence and tact. The few who have not approached them with sordid rapacity, but from love to them, as men, and souls to be redeemed, have most frequently been persons intellectually too narrow, too straightly bound in sects or opinions, to throw themselves into the character or position of ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... tenants, and finally by my own. The ever-memorable and eventful battles of the 16th to the 19th of October began exactly upon and between my two estates of Stoermthal and Liebertwolkwitz. All that the oppressive imposts, contributions, and quarterings, as well as the rapacity of the yet unvanquished French, had spared, became on these tremendous days a prey to the flames, or was plundered by those who called themselves allies of our king, but whom the country itself acknowledged as such only through compulsion. Whoever could save his life with the clothes ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... the worth of the medicine by the Pole's rapacity. Surely nothing less than the greatest of medicines could enable a man in the shadow of death to stand up and ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... injuries, made yet more injurious by contempt, they have now determined to endure them no longer. They have already seen essays, for which a very large price is paid, transferred, with the most shameless rapacity, into the weekly or monthly compilations, and their right, at least for the present, alienated from them, before they could themselves be said to enjoy it. But they would not willingly be thought to want tenderness, even for men by whom no tenderness ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... economy, and methods by which it can be secured. Can we be equally confident that much has been done by the Government to carry out the advice that has been given by this Committee? The Treasury is frequently blamed for its inability to check the rapacity and extravagance of the spending Departments. It is very likely that the Treasury might have done more if it had not been led by its own desire for a short-sighted economy into economising on its own staff, the activity and efficiency of ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... safely be uttered, were by no means strong enough for Thomas Newcome. "'Sharp practice! exceedingly alive to his own interests—reported violence of temper and tenacity of money'—say swindling at once, sir—say falsehood and rapacity—say cruelty and avarice," cries the Colonel. "I believe, upon my honour and conscience, that unfortunate young man to be guilty of every ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and kitchen knives, wild eyed and angry hearted as lionesses robbed of their cubs. From the deep glens and deeper woods of the country of Retz they poured. They disgorged from the caves of the earth whither the greed and rapacity of their terrible ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... Sir Stadtholder, so long as God and the Elector please," said Burgsdorf slowly. "Many an one falls, and under the table, too, although he may not be drunk with wine, but with pride and ambition, avarice and rapacity." ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... commanded them, upon their allegiance, that they should not tell to any man that he had seen this book." Fox's Book of Martyrs; vol. ii., p. 280: edit. 1641. Sir Thomas More answered this work (which depicted, in frightful colours, the rapacity of the Roman Catholic clergy), in 1529; see my edition of the latter's Utopia; vol. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... that I began to look over Woodruff's legislative program in advance, I was amazed at the rapacity of my clients, rapacious though I knew them to be. I had been thinking that the independent newspapers—there were a few such, but of small circulation and influence—were malignant in their attacks upon my "friends." In fact, as I soon saw, they had ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... State of New York and form a State by themselves, leaving the rest of your State without a seaport, too contemptible to make treaties, with only a small and possibly rebellious militia to protect her northern boundaries from the certain rapacity of Great Britain, with the scorn and dislike of the Union, and with no hope of assistance from the Federal Government, which is assured, remember, no matter what ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... statesman; yet failed so much in the conduct of domestick affairs, that, in the most lucrative post to which a great and wealthy kingdom could advance him, he felt all the miseries of distressful poverty, and committed all the crimes to which poverty incites. Such were at once his negligence and rapacity, that, as it is said, he would gain by unworthy practices that money, which, when so acquired, his servants might steal from one end of the table, while he sat studious and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... choice, others through weakness, and it is not the weak who are the least guilty. The apathy of the majority, the timorousness of the well-meaning, the selfishness and scepticism of listless rulers, the ignorance or cynicism of the press, the rapacity of profiteers, the faint-hearted servility of the thinkers who make themselves the apostles of devastating prejudices which it should be their mission to uproot; the ruthless pride of intellectuals ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... "Such impatience—such undisguised rapacity—is indecent and revolting," Beaumaroy remarked. He seemed to be in the highest spirits. "I wonder if ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... drove him from the kingdom, and soon reduced the whole under the subjection of Philip. Entering Lisbon he seized an immense treasure, and suffered his soldiers, with their accustomed violence and rapacity, to sack the suburbs and vicinity. It is reported that Alva, being requested to give an account of the money expended on that occasion, sternly replied, "If the king asks me for an account, I will make ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a sin- gularly villanous set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of high-handed rapacity, - the crudest possible assertion of the right of the stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his life, made his way out of France, and, betak- ing himself to Italy, offered his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he enjoyed in Europe, and ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... in Deut.) enumerates nine daughters of covetousness; which are "lying, fraud, theft, perjury, greed of filthy lucre, false witnessing, violence, inhumanity, rapacity." Therefore the former reckoning of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... inquisition is of little use to the prisoner, for a suspicion only is deemed sufficient cause of condemnation, and the greater his wealth the greater his danger. The principal part of the inquisitors' cruelties is owing to their rapacity: they destroy the life to possess the property; and, under the pretence of zeal, plunder each ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... proofs of the view and purpose of the author; such traits are the key with the leather strap that verified the judgment of Sancho's kinsmen. To what purpose should a Frenchman, writing in the time of Louis XIV., censure the rapacity of innkeepers, and the wretchedness of their extorted accommodation, when France, from the time of Chaucer to the present hour, has been famous for the civility of the one and the convenience of the other? To what purpose, if the French government were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... their desertion must be imputed to their landlords, may be reasonably concluded, because some Lairds of more prudence and less rapacity have kept their vassals undiminished. From Raasa only one man had been seduced, and at Col there was no ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... his life. His office put him in the way to amass riches, and for that reason there was not one perhaps of all the servants of the Emperor who performed with more exactness the affairs entrusted to him. He had many times incurred the displeasure of Aurelian, and his just rebuke for acts of rapacity and extortion, by which, never the empire, but his own fortune was profited; but, so deep and raging was his thirst of gold, that it had no other effect than to restrain for a season a passion which was destined, in its further indulgence, to destroy both ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... colleagues—even then, on the next meeting of the assembly, he made a solemn appeal to them to desist, and at last accused Alkibiades of involving the city in a terrible war in a remote country merely to serve his own ambition and rapacity. However, he gained nothing by this speech, for the Athenians thought that he would be the best man to command the expedition because of his experience in war, and that his caution would serve as a salutary ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... person, however, can view without sorrow the abuses which rose out of thus formalising sublime instincts and disinterested movements of passion, and perverting them into means of gratifying the ambition and rapacity of the priesthood. But, while we deplore and are indignant at these abuses, it would be a great mistake if we imputed the origin of the offices to prospective selfishness on the part of the monks and clergy; they were at first sincere in their sympathy, and in their ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... workmanship: the shrine, which was placed upon the mausoleum, glittered with gold and silver and precious stones. To complete the whole, the effigy of the king had been added to the tomb, at some period subsequent to its original erection.—A monument like this naturally excited the rapacity of a lawless banditti, unrestrained by civil or military force, and inveterate against every thing that might be regarded as connected with the Catholic worship.—The Calvinists were masters of Caen, and, incited by the information of what had taken place at Rouen, they resolved ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey to destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with the new condition brought by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurably his inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed, survives and multiplies, exactly because ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... all wealthy and independent, and much inclined to close alliance with England, whence they obtained their wool, while their counts were equally devoted to France. Just as Count Louis II. had, for his lawless rapacity, been driven out of Ghent by Jacob van Arteveldt, so his son, Louis III., was expelled by Philip van Arteveldt, son to Jacob. Charles had been disgusted by Louis's coarse violence, and would not help him; but after the old king's death, Philip of Burgundy used his influence in the council ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the instruments by which the limbs of the state are to be amputated, for replacement by the inventions of the revolutionary mechanists. Those are the keys by which the locks of cabinets and councils are henceforth to be opened, and the secrets of national wealth laid bare to the rapacity of the rabble." After this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... to the acquisition of liberty, is, in itself, sufficient to arouse the energies of the slave; but, when the consciousness of numerical power unites with the desire of vengeance, arising from long oppression, the influence of example only, can be wanting to enkindle the exterminating rapacity ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... all more clearly since this bit of Colonial experience," she said. "Our work in the world is marked out for us; we have no choice, unless we turn cowards. Of course we shall be hated by other countries, more and more. We shall be accused of rapacity, and arrogance, and everything else that's disagreeable in a large way; we can't help that. If we enrich ourselves, that is a legitimate reward for the task we perform. England means liberty and enlightenment; let England spread to the ends of the earth! We mustn't ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... people. And in those popish ages, that expenditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would have been far more than adequate to this beneficent purpose. Think of the boundless cost for supporting the magnificence and satiating the rapacity of the hierarchy, from its triple-crowned head, down through all the orders branded with a consecration under that head to maintain the delusion and share the spoil. Recollect the immense system of policy for ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... for a moment, the destruction that has befallen all around you; the convent that once housed S. Bernardino of Siena, now noisy with conscripts, the library housed in another convent, Dominican once, that like this has become a museum and public monument of vandalism and rapacity. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... to follow Joan wherever she would lead them, and it is not improbable that such a crusade as she dreamt of, had it been possible, in which the two nations, so closely connected by religious feeling, and so closely united by position, but so long enemies owing to the rapacity and greed of their kings, might have again placed the cross on the battlements of the Holy City, under the leadership of her whom her countrymen rightly called ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... each was called upon only to pay his fifteenth to the king's treasury they were contented enough, but now they are called upon for a tenth as well as a fifteenth, and often this is greatly exceeded by the rapacity of the tax-collectors. Other burdens are put upon them, and altogether men are becoming desperate. Then, too, the cessation of the wars with France has brought back to the country numbers of disbanded soldiers ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... real representatives of the English power. Cressingham was a pompous ecclesiastic, who appropriated to his own uses the money set aside for the fortification of Berwick, and was odious to the Scots for his rapacity and incompetence. Ormesby was a pedantic lawyer, rigid in carrying out the king's orders but stiff and unsympathetic in dealing with the Scots. Under such rulers Scotland was neither subdued nor conciliated. No real effort ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... other method had been tried. Starting with the squires, if I may use the term, and those well-to-do people who ought to have been among the most law-abiding members of the community—we find them setting an example of violence and rapacity, bad to read of. One of the most common causes of offence was when the lord of the manor attempted to invade the rights of the tenants of the manor by setting up a fold on the heath, or Bruary as it was called. What the lord was inclined to do, that the tenants would try to do also, as when ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... commanded by Captain Rodrigo de Carvajal direct for Panama, with letters from Gonzalo to some of the principal inhabitants of that city urging them to favour his designs. In these letters, he pretended that he was exceedingly displeased on hearing of the violence and rapacity with which Bachicao had conducted himself towards the inhabitants of Panama, in direct contradiction to his orders, which were to land the Doctor Texada without doing injury to any one. He informed them that Hinojosa ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... know, we won't suppose so.' And I cannot help avowing that this was the first occasion on which I really did justice to the clear head, and the plain, patient, practical good sense, of my old schoolfellow. 'Then,' said Traddles, 'you must prepare to disgorge all that your rapacity has become possessed of, and to make restoration to the last farthing. All the partnership books and papers must remain in our possession; all your books and papers; all money accounts and securities, of both kinds. In ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... opportunity to become unpopular. From one of his latest letters in Elizabeth's reign we gather that the tavern-keepers throughout the country considered Raleigh at fault for a tax which was really insisted on by the Queen's rapacity. He prays Cecil to induce Elizabeth to remit it, for, he says, 'I cannot live, nor show my face out of my doors, without it, nor dare ride through the towns where these taverners dwell.' This is the only passage which I can find ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... to avoid the native towns and villages, so at the first we engaged a guide who knew enough of coast Spanish to understand our wants and be our interpreter to his friends. We found that the Indians hated the Spaniards and dreaded their rapacity and cruelty. As Englishmen and foes of Spain, we always got a welcome; and Oxenham had wit enough to be kind, courteous, and generous, and so win a welcome for us for our own sakes. Our voyage down the river was a sort of triumphal progress, and we made ten thousand faithful allies. At ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... before the accession of Charles had been extensive and formidable, but had been small indeed when compared with that which they now usurped. Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate, and freed 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 sat at York, under the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... sacerdotal order, the consular dignity, the government of provinces, and even the cabinet of the prince, were seized by that execrable race as their lawful prey; where nothing was sacred, nothing safe from the hand of rapacity; where slaves were suborned, or by their own malevolence excited against their masters; where freemen betrayed their patrons, and he who had lived without an enemy died by ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper |
