Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Barbaric   /bɑrbˈærɪk/  /bɑrbˈɛrɪk/   Listen
Barbaric

adjective
1.
Without civilizing influences.  Synonyms: barbarian, savage, uncivilised, uncivilized, wild.  "Barbaric practices" , "A savage people" , "Fighting is crude and uncivilized especially if the weapons are efficient" , "Wild tribes"
2.
Unrestrained and crudely rich.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Barbaric" Quotes from Famous Books



... her philtre? For what had she gone to the woods this morning? What mystery was contained in the white bag which she defended with such zeal? Dunham felt as if his brain were softening. It was the limit of absurdity to be connecting these semi-barbaric fantasies with this sane and charming girl. He saw how Edna had been confounded and annoyed. Submerged by the Idea, he could not at once lift his eyes to Sylvia, although it stirred him to believe that those bright drops he had ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... Deeps of Space Jerry Foster Hurtles to the Moon—Only to be Trapped by a Barbaric Race and Offered as a Living Sacrifice to Oong, their Loathsome, Hypnotic God. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... house was one of the best specimens to be found in California of the representative house of the half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there by Mexican men and women of degree in the early part of this century, under the rule of the Spanish and Mexican viceroys, when the laws of the Indies were still ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... engaged in exploring new regions; his time was occupied in noting the salient features of the scenery, the traits of the barbaric peoples, and especially closely observing and enumerating the stars. Astronomy was a passion with him, and he passed many nights without sleep, during both voyages to the southern hemisphere, in rapt contemplation of the glorious constellations. As he rightly observed in one of his ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... into the unroofed light and the sea air like a potentate, dragging a warm furred robe. She had fastened great hoops of gold in her ears, and they gave her peaked face a barbaric look. It was her policy to go in state to punishment. The little sovereign stalked with long steps and threw out ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... could not exactly agree with this extravagant estimate of the extent of Pesth, I could not deny that it was vastly superior to my idea of it. When one arrives there from the south-east, after many wanderings among semi-barbaric villages and little cities on the outskirts of civilization, he finds Pesth very impressive. The Hungarian shepherds and the boatmen who ply between the capital and tiny forts below fancy that it is the end of the world. They have vaguely heard of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... consequently, only rivulets from Platonic streams. And instances of excellence in philosophic attainments, similar to those among the Greeks, might have been enumerated among the moderns, if the hand of barbaric despotism had not compelled philosophy to retire into the deepest solitude, by demolishing her schools, and involving the human intellect in Cimmerian darkness. In our own country, however, though no one appears to have wholly devoted himself to the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... they not lose in happiness by thinking? If women must always labor under unjust economic conditions, receiving less pay for the same work than men, if women must always submit to the unjust social laws, based on the barbaric mosaic decree that the woman is to be stoned, and the man allowed to go free; if women must always see the children they have brought into the world with infinite pain and weariness, taken away from them to fight man-made battles over which ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... The body of legal rules and customs which obtained in England before the Norman conquest constitutes, with the Scandinavian laws, the most genuine expression of Teutonic legal thought. While the so-called "barbaric laws" (leges barbarorum) of the continent, not excepting those compiled in the territory now called Germany, were largely the product of Roman influence, the continuity of Roman life was almost completely broken ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... conceive what delightful nonsense this barbaric elucidation might suggest, if a carouse, or love, woman or drunkenness were defined in this vein; and he would weave in amusing attacks on earlier, less intrepid speakers, who, as Vilsing put it, reminded one of the bashful forget-me-not, inasmuch as you could read in the play of their features: ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... am peculiarly fond, and for which my active habits suit me.' This was probably said with some allusion to her sister, who was apt to be short of breath. 'But in the dances of the present day conversation is impossible, and I look upon any pursuit as barbaric which stops the "feast of reason and the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... Waltham, whom this vision of barbaric onset affected little in the crashing together of ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... pottery, a government that is a republic, a priesthood trained in complex ritual, a well stocked pantheon, a certain understanding of astronomy and psychic phenomena, he may withal be called barbarian, even as was Abraham on Moriah barbaric when the altar of his god called for sacrifice of his only son. But a people of such culture could not with truth be ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan

... aren't easily surprised by new things, I've noticed. They have had so few experiences to found impressions on, that I suppose they would think a fiery chariot nothing extraordinary, much less a motor-car. The costumes began to change from ordinary European dress to something with a hint of the barbaric in it. Here and there we would see a coarse-featured face as dark as that of a Mongolian, or would hear a few curious words which the Chauffeulier said were Slavic. The biting, alkaline names of the small Dalmatian towns through which ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... helmet, as if it were an incumbrance, and making his short sword flash through the air, Marcus rushed to his old companion's help, but too late to save him being hurled heavily to the ground, while, ready as he was to contend against ordinary weapons, this barbaric method of attack confused and puzzled him. One of his half-nude enemies made as if to flinch from a coming blow, and then sprang up, hurling something through the air, and in an instant the boy found himself entangled in the long cord of strips of hide, which was dragged tight above his arms and ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn

... sunsets with their splendour, and of the crowded streets at noon. The beauty of the East rose before her. He told her of many-coloured webs and of silken carpets, the glittering steel of armour damascened, and of barbaric, priceless gems. The splendour of the East blinded her eyes. He spoke of frankincense and myrrh and aloes, of heavy perfumes of the scent-merchants, and drowsy odours of the Syrian gardens. The fragrance of the East filled her nostrils. And all these ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity—not to say utility, and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, as unlike English: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... has interesting interviews with Tholuck and Julius Mueller; from Dresden he diverges to Herrnhut, where he witnesses the ordination of a Moravian missionary and takes part in a love-feast. At Prague, that wonderful city where the barbaric East begins, he finds his deepest interest stirred by the Jewish burying-ground and the hoary old synagogue. And so he passes on from city to city, and from land to land, by Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, to Innsbruck, thence over the Brenner to Trent and Venice, and by Bologna ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... their privileges; a class from whence all the art and letters and accomplishments of the time emanated, allied in blood as much with the low as the high, the aristocracy of intellect, and the pioneers of scientific and material progress. The model farming of the 13th century would be regarded as barbaric by our modern theorists; but such as it was, it was only to be met with on the demesne lands of the larger monasteries, and was a prodigious advance upon the petite culture of the open fields. The Priory at Norwich made ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... in a large chamber, its walls dazzling with barbaric decoration—figures of Ganessa, a favorite idol of the Marathas, of monstrous elephants, and peacocks with enormously expanded tails. The hall was so crowded that his first confusion was redoubled. A path was made through the throng as at a signal, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... there almost a beauty. There were churches, and dance-halls, and saloons—all radiating, so to say, a prosperous blackness. It was from these dance-halls that there came at night that droning and braying of barbaric music, as from some mysterious "heart of darkness," as one turned to sleep in one's civilised Nassau beds—a music that kept on and on into the inner ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... balmy air in preparation for future calls. Near the house cheery and fragrant flowers gladdened the pretty beds in which no weed was allowed to rear its vicious crest. There was, it is true, one ugly, uncivilized portion of the place, in which the primitive, the barbaric reigned supreme. As yet Randolph had not found time to attack this spot and bring it within the pale of garden orthodoxy. Secretly he had for a time been hoping that Constance would take it in hand, although he would have been ashamed to let her know he dreamed ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... harmless but well-armed half-Mahometan natives of the village. He saw the other competitors, whose 'exhibits,' as Miss McCabe called them, were securely stored in the George Washington—strange spoils of far-off mysterious forests, and unplumbed waters of the remotest isles. Occasionally a barbaric yap, or a weird yell or hoot, was wafted on the air at feeding time. Jenkins of All Souls (whom he knew a little) Logan did not meet on the beach; he, like Bude, tarried aboard ship. The other adventurers were civil but remote, and there was a jealous air of suspicion on every face save that of ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... mirrors, expensive furniture, the gaudy, tremendous oil paintings peculiar to such dives, prism chandeliers, and the like, had made their appearance. Later, as will be seen, these gambling dens presented an aspect of barbaric magnificence, unique and peculiar to the time and place. In 1849, however gorgeous the trappings might have appeared to men long deprived of such things, they were of small importance compared with the games themselves. At times the bets were enormous. Soule tells us that as high ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... vast land, aimed its first blow at the Genius of Communication,—the benign and potent means and method of American civilization and nationality. The great problem Watt and Fulton, Clinton and Morse so gloriously solved, a barbaric necessity thus reduces back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the bulletins whereby the most base of civic mutinies finds current record is that entitled, "Destruction of the Bridges"; and (melancholy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... seemed to mark the borders of the River of May as the site of the new colony; for here, around the Indian towns, the harvests of maize, beans, and pumpkins promised abundant food, while the river opened a ready way to the mines of gold and silver and the stores of barbaric wealth which glittered before the dreaming vision of the colonists. Yet, the better to content himself and his men, Laudonniere weighed anchor, and sailed for a time along the neighboring coasts. Returning, confirmed in his first impression, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... upon its victims, fascinated the observer, and awakened the bitter protests of those who held that an issue at war might be determined by civilized nations without recourse to engines of death and anguish more barbaric than any known to the red Indians, or the most savage tribes of Asia. Neither of these devices, nor for that matter the cognate one of fire spurted like a liquid from a hose upon a shrinking enemy, can be shown to have had any appreciable effect ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... This is what the honest Eugenists really mean, so far as they mean anything. They mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for conversion, but simply as a pabulum for experiment. That is the real, rude, barbaric sense behind this Eugenic legislation. The Eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any logical inquiry about what they want. They do not know what they want, except that they want your soul ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... extinguished name, Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear, That sound that crashes in the tyrant's ear— Kosciusko![285] On—on—on—the thirst of War Gasps for the gore of serfs and of their Czar. The half barbaric Moscow's minarets Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets! 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain—he saw thee—how? with spire And palace fuel ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... will see what a sensible idea this is. It means liberty, and you can't have real love without liberty. If we married, I am certain that in a year or two we should hate each other like the devil, and I believe you know that as well as I do. Marriage is out-grown—it's a barbaric survival and has a most damnable effect on character. If we are to be close chums and preserve our self-respect, we must steer ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... known, the rest of the Germans, thinking they could no longer trust the garrisons left in the islands, removed their relations, and their magazines, and their barbaric treasures, into the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... hinges which, by their careful workmanship and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance. Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a mixture—ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion: barbaric, Christian; ruinous and enduring things. The more recent houses had for the most part their dates marked above their doors. There were some of the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest were far older, and bore no ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... founded, His guns built and tested, His people trained. The Terranovans were as civilized as He could make them in one generation. They had literary societies, newsstands, stock markets, leisure and working classes, baseball leagues, armies.... They had had to give up their barbaric comfort, of course; so much the better. Life was real, life was ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight

... regret, the destructive passions of the thirteenth century. The architecture of the palaces thus destroyed in Florence contained examples of the most beautiful round-arched work that had been developed by the Norman schools; and was in some cases adorned with a barbaric splendour, and fitted into a majesty of strength which, so far as I can conjecture the effect of it from the few now existing traces, must have presented some of the most impressive aspects of street edifice ever existent ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... some are ornamented with plain acanthus leaves, others are carved with numerous small figures of men and animals, ideally uncouth and typical of the fantastic medley of Christian symbolism and the barbaric imagination that found a mystical relationship between the monsters of its own creation and the problems of the universe. The exterior of the church is not less interesting than the interior. The charming Romanesque apse, with its three narrow windows, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... half round and levelled as true as I could at the advancing black man. He rode, nearly naked, showing all his teeth and brandishing his assegai; the long white feathers stuck upright in his hair gave him a wild and terrifying barbaric aspect. It was difficult to preserve one's balance, keep the way on, and shoot, all at the same time; but, spurred by necessity, I somehow did it. I fired three shots in quick succession. My first bullet missed; ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... ponderous stockade, now fallen into sore decay, behind iron-bound doors secured by mighty wooden locks, and barred with balks of timber, sheltered beneath the frowning muzzles of half a dozen futile carronades, they reveled in obscene orgies and committed their barbaric atrocities under the name of Justice and Commerce. Here they amassed wealth for the parent companies in distant lands, and ruthlessly despoiled the wild ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... into the fire. Stepping to the mantel, he took from it a small metal casket, builded to hold jewels. What should be those gems of price which the metal box protected? Richard did not strike one as the man to nurse a weakness for barbaric adornment. A bathrobe is not a costume calculated to teach one the wearer's fineness. To say best, a bathrobe is but a savage thing. It is the garb most likely to obscure and set backward even a Walpole or a Chesterfield in any impression of gentility. In ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... made it popular; of foreign origin, it was in time partly Hellenized and in Athens took its place in the regular national worship; some of its foreign features were taken up in the mysteries. These latter, with their enthusiasm and their half-barbaric ceremonies, excited the contempt of most of the educated class.[2025] These cults were Asiatic—not Semitic—but probably a product of a non-Hellenic population of Asia Minor (Phrygia and other regions), developed during a period the history of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... husky intonation; her hands and arms, which were bare and of old ivory hue, were laden with barbaric jewelry, much of it tawdry silverware of the bazaars. Clearly she was a half-caste of some kind, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... tapestries, silversmiths' work, ostrich feathers, and the like. To either side the main street lay long narrow dark alleys, in which flared single lights, across which flitted mysterious long-robed figures, from which floated stray snatches of music either palpitatingly barbaric or ridiculously modern. There the authority of the straight, soldierly-looking Soudanese policemen ceased, and it was not safe to wander ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... of the Celestial Empire. There is a museum in Peking where, side by side with good Chinese art, may be seen the presents which Louis XIV made to the Emperor when he wished to impress him with the splendour of Le Roi Soleil. Compared to the Chinese things surrounding them, they were tawdry and barbaric. The fact that Britain has produced Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Hume, and all the other men who have adorned literature and the arts, does not make us superior to the Chinese. What makes us superior is Newton and Robert Boyle and their scientific successors. They make us ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... the reader with the triumphant campaign of Peter Stuyvesant in the haunted regions of those mountains, but that I hold all Indian conflicts to be mere barbaric brawls, unworthy of the pen which has recorded the classic war of Fort Christina; and as to these Helderberg commotions, they are among the flatulencies which from time to time afflict the bowels of this ancient province, as ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... Dorothea Dix, who for twenty years before the Civil War carried on perhaps the most remarkable investigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country by man or woman,—the one which required the most courage, endurance, and persistency,—her investigation of the then barbaric system for caring—or not caring—for the insane. State after state enacted new laws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this one woman. If there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry that women have never had an influence on legislation, this would be enough. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... end; and the general met his fate sword in hand, at the head of the last formed body of his troops, his personal valour and physical strength exciting the admiration even of the fearless enemy, so that in chivalrous respect they buried his body with barbaric honours. Mohammed Ahmed celebrated his victory with a salute of one hundred guns; and well he might, for the Soudan was now his, and his boast that, by God's grace and the favour of the Prophet, he was the master ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... an understanding of the style he was carrying before the public—the silvering on his own black velvet robe, the jewels in Lael's coronet bursting with light, the gorgeous finish of the sedans, the barbaric costuming of Nilo. They were not significant of his taste. Except for what they might bring him, he did not care for jewels. And as for Lael, he would have loved her for her name's sake, and her honest, untarnished Jewish blood. Let us believe ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... suffrages of the nobility, and their leaders in battle, as was inevitable with such a people, were chosen by reason of their personal prowess. The legal functions were exercised by the priesthood, and punishments were thus held to be sanctioned by the gods. Among this barbaric people the female sex was held as absolutely sacred, the functions of wife and mother being accounted among the highest possible to humanity, and we observe in ancient accounts of the race that typically Teutonic conception of the woman as seer or prophetess which so strongly colours ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... ourselves in a courtyard surrounded by a kind of verandah from which short passages led to different rooms. Down one of these passages we were conducted by the officer to an apartment, or rather a suite, consisting of a sitting and two bed-chambers, which were panelled, richly furnished in rather barbaric fashion, and well-lighted with ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

... coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... ears all the time, this cannon at our door likely to begin action any night and all the rest along the beach and on the way to London, and this is what we call rest! The world is upside down, all crazy, all murderous; but we've got to stop this barbaric ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... apathy which had succeeded the days of hysterical passion and convulsion still lingered; even the slow improvement that could be detected was marked by the languor of convalescence. The helplessness of a race, hitherto dependent upon certain barbaric conditions or political place and power, unskilled in invention, and suddenly confronted with the necessity of personal labor, was visible everywhere. Eyes that but three short years before had turned vindictively to the North, now gazed wistfully to that quarter for ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... strangers to the island, sat cross-legged on the turf. One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The other two had instruments fashioned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of bamboo and strings of gut—barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just escaped being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in some provoking ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... hypnotised by their lilting, and finds himself in a kind of sleep. That dreaming personality, with eyes half closed and poppy-decorated hair, could never live in the bondage of the city cage. The spirit must get free, and the longing for such freedom has been well called "a barbaric passion, a nostalgia for the life of the moor ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... give thanks to the imagination of your forefathers, my dear, that your doom is no worse. For I am going into a more barbaric limbo, into the Hell of a people who thought entirely too much about flames and pitchforks," says Jurgen, ruefully. "I tell you it is the deuce and all, to come of morbid ancestry." And he kissed Chloris, upon the brow. "My dear, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... transcontinental mail." In arguing you may propose for ourself either of two objectives: (1) to silence your opponent, (2) to refute, persuade, and win him over fairly. The achievement of the first end calls for bluster and perhaps a grim, barbaric strength; you must do as Johnson did according to Goldsmith's famous dictum—if your pistol misses fire, you must knock your adversary down with the butt end of it. This procedure, though inartistic to be sure, is in some contingencies the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... a complexion like coffee soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace that she charmed away all our will to ask for references. It was only her barbaric laughter and lawless eye that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent; ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... share of the funds is spent in the construction of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary excellence upon the chance ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... prey. He wore his leopard skin at first in response to a desire to parade a trophy of his prowess, for he had slain the leopard with his knife in a hand-to-hand combat. He saw that the skin was beautiful, which appealed to his barbaric sense of ornamentation, and when it stiffened and later commenced to decompose because of his having no knowledge of how to cure or tan it was with sorrow and regret that he discarded it. Later, when he chanced upon a lone, black warrior wearing the counterpart of it, soft and clinging and beautiful ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... longed to speak yet did not speak, and they knew thereby there was some reason for her keeping silence. Messer Folco looked long at Messer Simone dei Bardi as he stood there clearly visible in the mingled lights—large, almost monstrous, truculent, ugly, the embodiment of savage strength and barbaric appetites. Then Folco looked from Simone's bulk to his daughter, who stood there as cold and white and quiet as if she had been a stone image and not ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey, Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... haven't bamboozled the old gentleman famously, my name's not Jack Stretcher!" he exclaimed with a loud laugh, slapping his thigh; an action which was naturally supposed by his audience to mark the finale of his barbaric dances. ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... the administration of the dogmatists, was an absolute despotism. But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provencal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... gate was swung open to admit this barbaric procession, they entered the fort with stately tread and in grave silence, led by the mighty chief, who, with proudly lifted head and flashing eyes, looked every inch a forest king. Suddenly he started, uttered a deep ejaculation, and half turned as though to retreat. On either side of the street ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... God, and Mahomet is his prophet!" How admirably calculated such a war-cry would be for the circumstances of the seventh century. The simple sublimity of Oneness, as opposed to school-theology and catholic demons: the glitter of barbaric pomp, instead of tame observances: the flashing scimetar of ambition to supersede the cross: a turban aigretted with jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns. As human nature is, and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable (even if prophetic records ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... lovely, more lovely than in the mirror; for now he was getting the full effect of her splendid coloring, set off by the gown she wore, a thing of rich but somber shades, lit up by a semi-barbaric necklace of amber and gold, that hung almost to ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... follow the train of thought in it, it's a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books. "A library," I say to myself, "is a huge barbaric, mediaeval institution, where behind stone and glass a man's dearest friends in the world, the familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends and relatives ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... constructed of adobes; the church was open, and, entering the interior, I found the walls hung with coarse paintings and engravings of the saints, etc., etc. The chancel decorated with numerous images, and symbolical ornaments used by the priests in their worship. Gold-paper, and tinsel, in barbaric taste, are plastered without stint upon nearly every object that meets the eye, so that, when on festive occasions the church is lighted, it must ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... Nora ushered her companion was lighted from the top, and the walls, distempered in buff, had been decorated with stencils of Egyptian designs, the bright barbaric colors of which gave a very striking effect. There was a platform at the far end, where were placed rows of chairs for the distinguished visitors, and also pots of palms and ferns and geraniums ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... old Huguenot fort near it. Some companies of the First Regiment were drawn up in line under the trees, near the landing, to receive us. A fine, soldierly-looking set of men; their brilliant dress against the trees (they were then wearing red pantaloons) invested them with a semi-barbaric splendor. It was my good fortune to find among the officers an old friend,—and what it was to meet a friend from the North, in our isolated Southern life, no one can imagine who has not experienced the pleasure. Letters were an unspeakable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... substitute a fresher apprehension of Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and popular character (Urspruenglichkeit, Volksthuemlichkeit) of the Homeric poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... studying that frankly barbaric paraphernalia—the feather, the necklace, the coiled train—and wondering what noble kinsman had come to the rescue for the great occasion, and why Camilla should have looked so bored with her ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... two etchings, and a vase. A jeweler's window holds square blobs of emeralds, on velvet, and perhaps a gold mesh bag, sprawling limp and invertebrate, or a diamond and platinum la valliere, chastely barbaric. Past these windows, from Randolph to Twelfth surges the crowd: matinee girls, all white fox, and giggles and orchids; wise-eyed saleswomen from the smart specialty shops, dressed in next week's mode; art students, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... outside those log barriers that our eyes encountered scenes of the greatest interest,—a mingling of tawdry decoration and wild savagery, where fierce denizens of forest and plain made their barbaric show. ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... Cousin, Charles Twelfth's Grandfather; a great and mighty man, lion of the North in his time: Polish King was one John Casimir; chivalrous enough, and with clouds of forward Polish chivalry about him, glittering with barbaric gold. Frederick III., Danish King for the time being, he also was much involved in the thing. Fain would Friedrich Wilhelm have kept out of it, but he could not. Karl Gustav as good as forced him to join: he joined; fought along with Karl Gustav an illustrious Battle; "Battle of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... family in reduced circumstances. Mrs. Stevenson had a very feminine liking for jewels, but they had to be different from the ordinary sort to attract her, and she was much pleased to pick up in Mexico some pieces of the odd and barbaric designs ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... peace and good-will to all mankind, A new era seemed to dawn upon the world, marked by a desire to cultivate the arts, sciences, and literature; to develop industries, and improve social conditions. War was seen to be barbaric, demoralizing, and exhausting. Peace was hailed with an enthusiasm scarcely less than that which for twenty years had created military heroes. The Holy Alliance was not hypocritical. Although a political compact made under a religious pretext, it was formed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... lives to the taste of the insensitive or the sensual, then the whole thing becomes a tragedy of desecration. Society is full of such tragedies. Many of the laws and social regulations guiding the relationships of man and woman are relics of a barbaric age, when the brutal pride of an exclusive possession had its dominance in human relations, such as those of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, teachers and disciples. The vulgarity of it still persists in the social bond between ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... him it would be frightfully crude, and it is. And yet, Wiggie, it's impressive, in its way... nobody can miss the feeling. Such barbaric splendor! ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair

... and turtle-shell, and from the ends of their noses which were also pierced, projected horns of beads strung on stiff wire. Their ears were pierced and distended to accommodate wooden plugs and sticks, pipes, and all manner of barbaric ornaments. Their faces and bodies were tattooed or scarred in hideous designs. In their sickness they wore no clothing, not even loin-cloths, though they retained their shell armlets, their bead necklaces, and ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... moment we examine closely into Chinese slavery and servitude," declares Dr. Eitel, "from the standpoint of history and sociology, we find that slavery and servitude have, with the exception of the system of eunuchs, lost all barbaric and revolting features." (!) "As this organism has had its certain natural evolution, it will as certainly undergo in due time a natural dissolution, which in fact has at more than one point already set in. But no legislative or executive measures taken ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... her first experience of meeting soldiers in the mass, on their own ground, and the man who has faced death and dealt it out to others appeals irresistibly to the fundamental barbaric in women. To this fascination, Quita added the artist's reverence for the men who 'do things,' as opposed to the men who record or ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river, or on the plover-haunted barrens, and, entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a "shout," chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain. Writing down in the darkness, as I best could,—perhaps with my hand in the safe covert ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... a chorus of other cries from the circus bedlam, the roar of steam as it escaped through an open valve in the locomotive, and the shriek of the whistle which blew continually, we can get some idea of the wreck, as the gorgeous splendor of the barbaric show was piled ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... great part flocked to Paris to become idle courtiers. The means for carrying on the gigantic machinery of centralized administration, and for supporting the court in its follies, were wrung from the groaning peasantry with a cynical indifference like that with which tribute is extorted by barbaric chieftains from a conquered enemy. And thus came about that abominable state of things which a century since was abruptly ended by one of the fiercest convulsions of modern times. The prodigious superiority—in respect to national vitality—of a freely governed country over ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him, victory—success—must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies in man come to life again in war, and for war's ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... question allowed neither respite nor sleep—his brain, soul, and body fagged out at every hour, every moment of the day and night, until mind and body and soul must inevitably give way under anguish ten thousand times more unendurable than any physical torment invented by monsters in barbaric times. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... her emancipation was to be postponed. After all, it was what she had feared. She sat watching idly the Duchess's knitting needles. Lady Carey came sweeping in, wonderful in a black velvet gown and a display of jewels almost barbaric. ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... to rust, while the brain wears out; a game in which he may hurt some one else, is extremely likely to be hurt himself, and is certain to earn an appetite for dinner. If any one tells me that my views of amusement are barbaric or brutal, that no reasonable man ever wants to hurt any one else or to risk his own precious carcase, I accept the charge of brutality, merely remarking that it was the national love of hard knocks which made this little island famous, and I for one do not want to be ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... Alton, a better boat than the one that had brought me from La Salle to Bath; but all the conditions were the same. There was the same roistering and sprawling crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and its intemperate indulgence; the same barbaric hilarity of negroes, driven and cursed. And now many goatees, and much talk of politics, of Whigs ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... to these she thought less of those crude and barbaric ways of her ancestors that Rome had so vastly bettered than of their national independence and freedom from the galling yoke of Rome, and, as was natural, she cherished the memory of Boadicea, the warrior queen, and made a hero ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks

... contented cacklings of fat hens scratching for provender beneath the gnarled limbs of ancient apple trees whose trunks all were so neatly whitewashed up to the lowermost boughs. Looking upon the settlement where he lived, set as it was like a white-and-green jewel in a ring of lush barbaric beauty, his fancy showed him the vista of a spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by dooryards having fences of pointed painted pickets, and behind the pickets, peonies and hollyhocks encroaching upon prim flagged walks which led back to the white-panelled doors of small houses buried almost ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... when the lance is taken out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle, but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than increase the human horror. In the magnificent ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... an essay from an igloo, describing the awful privations of the writer and the primitive savagery of his surroundings on the Murman coast. It was to have wrung the sympathetic heart of the public and at the same time to have enthralled the student of barbaric life with its wealth of exotic detail. While embodying all the best-known newspaper cliches appropriated to these latitudes it was to have included others specially and laboriously prepared after a fascinating study ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various

... natural to the Roman people ever to forget their great art-works of antiquity; the influence of the "departed spirits" still "ruled them from their urns," as Byron truthfully expresses it. The artists of Greece and Rome based their compositions on the unvarying truth of nature; and though the barbaric mind might bear sway for awhile, it could not triumph but through ignorance. Rome is now the great art-teacher only because it is the conservator of its ancient relics; and they have had their influence undiminished from the days of Raffaelle and Michael ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... laden with the mysterious centuries as with half barbaric jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid, hieratic, constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini by the lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from Ferrara through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the endless marsh from ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... of the degree of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric, cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of ...
— Progress and History • Various

... stern, clad in the barbaric finery of his race, his body nearly nude, his legs and his little feet covered with bead-laden buckskin, his head surmounted with a horned war bonnet whose eagle plumes trailed down the pony's side almost to the ground, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... process of a society gradually going to pieces under the dissolving influence of its own vices which lasted almost without interruption till nothing was left for Rome except the fire and sword of barbaric invasions. She saw not only her glories but also her virtues "star by star expire." The old heroism, the old beliefs, the old manliness and simplicity, were dead and gone; they had been succeeded by prostration and superstition ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... phenomena of mores disordered by divorce from sober interests, and complicated by arbitrary dogmas of politics and religion, not forgetting the brutal and ignorant measures of selfish rulers. In the Merovingian kingdom barbaric and corrupt Roman mores were intermingled in a period of turmoil. In the Renaissance in Italy all the taboos were broken down, or had lost their sanctions, and vice and crime ran riot through social ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... queer, hectic gaiety about the place, as if every one present were making a desperate effort to eat, drink and be merry. People greeted Lady Cecily as she passed them and muttered, "'loa, Jimphy!" Henry had never been to a fashionable restaurant before, and the barbaric beauty of the scene fascinated him. The women were riotously dressed, and the colours of their garments mingled and merged like the colours of a sunset. There was a constant flow of people through the room, and the chatter of animated voices and bursts of laughter ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... being obvious were only dimly intelligible. In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, but their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to the productions of that barbaric bard, whose works were quite unknown in Riseholme. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems had been published, not of course in the hard business-like establishment of London, but at "Ye Sign of ye Daffodil," on the village green, where type ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... That would persuade us war has beauty in it!— Discern the troopers' mien; each with the air Of one who is himself a tragedy: The cuirassiers, steeled, mirroring the day; Red lancers, green chasseurs: behind the blue The red; the red before the green: A lingering-on till late in Christendom, Of the barbaric trick to terrorize The foe ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy



Words linked to "Barbaric" :   barbarity, savage, tasteless, noncivilised, uncivilised, uncivilized, wild, noncivilized



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com