"Atrocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alike in practice and speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been commended in its full loveliness and nobility. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... was made to set the house of Miss Crandall on fire, but without effect. The question of her duty to risk the lives of her pupils against this mode of attack was then considered, and upon consultation with friends it was concluded to hold on and bear a little longer, with the hope that this atrocity of attempting to fire the house, and thus expose the lives and property of her neighbors, would frighten the instigators of the persecution, and cause some restraint on the 'baser sort.' But a few nights afterward, about 12 o'clock, being the night ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... of its author. Gladstone has characterized it as the greatest forensic effort in the English language, not excluding the masterpieces of Erskine. It is a plea for the life of a brutalized negro who butchered a whole family under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. The deed was without excuse or palliation, save in the insanity of the perpetrator, of which Seward became convinced, and volunteered as counsel amid the surprise, imprecations, and threats of the Auburn community, where the case was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and of interest in my behalf. I refer now to those remorseless men who came first and tore up the beautiful lawn and cut away the roots of trees and digged a deep, long pit in which to lay sewer pipes; who came again and committed another similar atrocity under plea of laying a water-pipe; who came still again and for the third time abused and seared and seamed and blighted that lawn for the alleged purpose of laying a gas-pipe! O civilization! what crimes are committed in ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... her had taught to respect and share in her devotion, must have afforded many picturesque and striking scenes, though unfortunately there was no modern observer there to be interested and amused, but only Theodoric standing by, himself very hot upon the atrocity of a miscalculated Easter, and perhaps helping his royal mistress here and there with an argument. Naturally his story is especially full upon the religious side of Margaret's life—her much prayer, her humility and reverence during the services of the Church, an intent and silent listener ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... moment, he had been so bewitched by the charms of the siren, that he had bound himself by the fatal oath, scarce knowing what he swore, which linked him to the fortunes of the villain father. Slightly he touched on that atrocity of Catiline, by telling which aloud he dared not sully her pure ears. He then related clearly and succinctly the murder of the cutler Volero, his recognition of the murderer, the forced deception which he had used reluctantly toward ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... has been appropriated, is made use of by the dealers in human beings as a place of deposit and market; and thus you, in common with your fellow citizens, are made indirect participators in a traffic equal in atrocity to that foreign trade, the suppression of which, to use the words of your President in his late message, 'is required by the public honor, and the promptings ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... extent, for they were but tools. The men who are really chargeable with treason against the United States Government, and with the death of Mr. Gorsuch, an estimable citizen of Maryland, are unquestionably white, with hearts black enough to incite them to the commission of any crime equal in atrocity to that committed in Lancaster county. Pennsylvania has now but one course to pursue, and that is to aid, and warmly aid, the United States in bringing to condign punishment, every man engaged in the riot. She owes it to herself and to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his beard and looking out of the window, "that when we broke up rather hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and what he will do it is doubtful whether even the President knows; ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... sycophants, and favourites; then, an old woman, garbed in male attire, having an infirmity of purpose only too prone to be blown about by every wind of doctrine, alternating helplessly between tenderness and truculence, the charity of a Fry and the tragic atrocity of Medea. After this dismal ruler, Trinidad, by the grace of the Colonial Office, was subjected to the manipulation of an unctuous dandy. This successor of Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not oppose high-placed official malfeasants, but ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... crime was ever in her thoughts; it rose before her in all its horror and atrocity. She knew that she was lying upon her bed, at Courtornieu; and yet it seemed as if she was there in Chanlouineau's house, pouring out poison, then watching its effects, concealed in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all this infectious train of outrages against a patient people—one that presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries over seas in which to-day a Credit Mobilier, a Pacific Railroad atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square or the Place de la Concorde howl ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that such a devilish thing as the death-punishment should still be, and that governments should keep on surpassing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruelest murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever visited that church in remembrance of the fact that his people came from the same parish; if he saw the mortal relic which held me in such fascination that I could scarcely leave ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... pamphlet were immediately withdrawn, I should return to Salt Lake City and publicly denounce such methods. It was withdrawn, but the damage was done, I was defeated, as I deserved to be—though I was the innocent victim of the atrocity—and Mr. Rawlins was elected. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... evident relish), nothing more mysterious, or more awful, has ever been known, than the recent tragedy at Catheron Royals. In the annals of our town, of our county, of our country we may almost say, it stands unparalleled in its atrocity. A young and lovely lady, wedded little better than a year, holding the very highest position in society, in the sacred privacy of her own household, surrounded by faithful servants, is struck down by the dagger of the assassin. Her youth, her beauty, the sanctity ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... people of this country; their countenances bore the expression of the strongest enmity as we walked along their line, and we frequently heard them mutter among themselves, in the most emphatic manner, Sacre Dieu, voila des Anglois!—Whatever the atrocity of their conduct, however, might have been, to the people of their own, as well as every other country, it was impossible not to feel the strongest emotion at the sight of the veteran soldiers whose exploits had so long rivetted the attention of all ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Of this atrocity an American officer, a Major McFarland, writes:—"The militia and Indians plundered and burnt every thing. The whole population is against us; not a foraging party but is fired on, and not infrequently returns with missing numbers. This state ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... was greater than any he could feel in her. Not that he thought her capable of committing an atrocity; but, turn it over as he would, there was something ominous in the way she reserved her option. As she took his hand she felt a great respect for him; she knew how much he cared for her and she thought him magnanimous. They stood so for a moment, looking at each ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... usual, had been the real authors of this new atrocity, but Figgins felt convinced that the guilt lay at the door of Mole, on whom he ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... Suddenly the atrocity of the situation dawned upon him. He had heard of such things, of the ghouls who haunt the scenes of great disaster, preying upon the bodies of the dead—robbing ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... and finding him seated at the door of his house, without noise or warning, he struck off his head with a sword at one blow; then carrying the bleeding head to the governor, and claiming the reward of such transcendent atrocity, he was appointed to the vacant office. The sultan being afterwards in want of an expert headsman, sent for him to Sockatoo, where, a short time after his arrival, he had to officiate at the execution of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... coarse oozings of the glacier heights that thro' the crevices come foaming down, And turned to rest me in the herdsmen's cots, Where I was host and guest, until I gain'd The cheerful homes and social haunts of men. Already through these distant vales had spread The rumour of this last atrocity; And wheresoe'er I went, at every door, Kind words saluted me and gentle looks. I found these simple spirits all in arms Against our ruler's tyrannous encroachments. For as their Alps through each succeeding ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... of the offence. Although it is more than questionable how far such evidence would weigh against the white man's oath; but for the purpose of obtaining redress for a wrong, or of punishing the cruelty, or the atrocity of the European [Note 115 at end of para.], no amount of native evidence would be of the least avail. Reverse the case, and the sole unsupported testimony of a single witness, will be quite sufficient to convict even unto death, as ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... which it had been her misfortune to live, had not decreased. The sights and sounds of pain and punishment surrounded her. She could not look out of her windows without a shudder. She dreaded each evening when her husband returned, lest he should blurt out some new atrocity. She feared to ask him in the morning whither he was going, lest he should thrill her with the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of all the persons mentioned by the narrator have been printed in full, except those of Capt. I—— and his wife, and that of Mr. D——, to whom conduct of peculiar atrocity is ascribed. These three individuals are now gone to answer at a far more awful tribunal than that of public opinion, for the deeds of which their former bondwoman accuses them; and to hold them up more openly to human reprobation could ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... of violence. Perhaps he had caught the fugitive, and in his rage and vindictive fury had harmed her. That he was fierce enough for any atrocity she well knew; and the thought that he had killed her, and had fled, came swift as lightning ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... outside of Paris, fell an unresisting prey to the cupidity of an insubordinate soldiery. Rarely had so tempting a prize fallen into the hands of a conquering army; rarely were the exactions of war more remorsely inflicted.[178] But the barbarities of a licentious army were exceeded in atrocity by the cooler deliberations of the Norman parliament. That supreme court, always inimical to the Protestants, had retired to the neighboring city of Louviers, in order to maintain itself free from Huguenot influence. It now returned to Rouen and exercised a sanguinary ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... oppression, such as we of this generation have beheld in the double conquest of Paris by insulted and outraged Christendom. But nothing of all this will be found in Thucydides—he is as cool as a cucumber upon every act of atrocity; whether it be the bloody abuse of power, or the bloody retribution from the worm that, being trampled on too long, turns at last to sting and to exterminate—all alike he enters in his daybook and his ledger, posts them up to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... men, women and children, twenty thousand of them, penned like rats in a trap, without possibility of escape. Says one correspondent, describing that horror: "Words cannot depict the plight of the unhappy victims of this crowning German atrocity. Incendiary shells fired the hospital, and by the glare of a hundred fires the wounded were carried to a shelter of cellars where the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... in their way, they were amusing monsters too; Lovelace is a lady's villain, as Grandison is a lady's hero; he is designed by a person inexperienced even in the observation of vice. Indeed, he would exaggerate the charm a good deal more than the atrocity. We must also admit that when the old printer was put upon his mettle he could be very lively indeed. Lovelace, like everybody else, is at times unmercifully prolix; he never leaves us to guess any detail for ourselves; but he is spirited, eloquent, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... I exclaimed aloud, "nothing short of it." Why, such glaring wholesale hypocrisy had not been committed since Satan first introduced the vice into Paradise. What atrocity, what barefaced blasphemy! It was the part of a Christian and a friend to attribute the extravagant proceedings of the baron to absolute insanity, and to nothing else; and I did so accordingly, alarmed for the safety ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... embarrassments now surrounded M. Roland. He could not abandon power without abandoning himself and his supporters in the Assembly to the guillotine; and while continuing in power, he was compelled to witness deeds of atrocity from which not only his soul revolted, but to which it was necessary for him apparently to give his sanction. His cheek grew pale and wan with care. He could neither eat nor sleep. The Republic had proved an utter failure, and France was but a tempest-tossed ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... rebellion had been in agitation so late as 1752. LOCKHART. He was executed on June 7, 1753. Gent. Mag. xxiii. 292. Lord Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 109) says:—'I regard his execution as a wanton atrocity.' Horace Walpole, however, inclined to the belief that Cameron was engaged in a new scheme of rebellion. Walpole's Memoirs ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Mexico were ill-treated he would execute two thousand Spaniards and send him their heads. Drake never wasted thought about reprisals or made frothy apologetic speeches as to what would happen to those with whom he was at religious war if they molested his fellow-countrymen. He met atrocity with atrocity. He believed it to be his mission to avenge the burning of British seamen and the Spanish and Popish attempts on the life of his virgin sovereign. That he knew her to be an audacious flirt, an insufferable miser, and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... upon, and besides the wounding of the sheriff, two men were killed outright, to-wit, one James Mattox and one Leon Smyers, and the same were left there. The sheriff managed to make his escape, albeit he was followed and repeatedly fired upon. And be it known that the report now reaches here that the atrocity did not cease with the firing on of the sheriff's posse, but that a sharp fight afterward took place between negroes and white men near by; and we are now informed that a strong force of negroes, at the instance of one Mayo, is now gathering in the southwestern ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... meeting of these hostile tribes had thus ended more amicably than King George and his party could have expected, it was easily to be perceived that the Ngapuhis were determined on executing some atrocity or depredations before their return; they accordingly pretended to recollect some old offence committed by the English settlers at the other end of the beach. They proceeded thither, and first attacked and broke open the house of a blacksmith, and carried off every article ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... sorrow into rage, follow Brutus as their leader, who from that time ceased not to solicit them to abolish the regal power. They carry Lucretia's body from her own house, and convey it into the forum; and assemble a number of persons by the strangeness and atrocity of the extraordinary occurrence, as usually happens. They complain, each for himself, of the royal villany and violence. Both the grief of the father moves them, as also Brutus, the reprover of their tears ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... humiliate us in the most abominable way. The whole family have sworn to make us blush publicly. Publicly blush! They have written to Mama to come and speak out. Now will you attend to me, Caroline? You do not credit such atrocity? I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... they are accredited have to pay them, under ordinary circumstances, certain sums monthly, to prevent their inventing or exaggerating cases of abuse of power or neglect of duty on their part; but, when they happen to be really guilty of great acts of atrocity, or great neglect of duty, they are required to pay extraordinary sums, not only to the news-writers, who are especially accredited to them, but to all others who happen to be in the neighbourhood at the time. There ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... correspond with the prevalence of the disease and we have a condition that is tremendously significant, a condition that is really a pressing economic issue. A constipated woman is an anti-eugenist—a eugenic atrocity. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... and the sentence of death pronounced by the court-martial, and confirmed by your Grace, was not executed; and I, having done all I could to bring the murtherer of my unfortunate brothers to condign punishment, was satisfied to pursue him no further, tho' the atrocity of the crime committed against the law of nations would have affoarded me ground to have prosecuted him in any country where he could have been found. But to my surprize and sorrow, I have of late been informed that Lieutenant ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... affidavit agreement might have some colour of decency. The ancient Act discovered by the ardent MacAdam has rendered null and void this proposed fraternal reciprocity, and the order to conceal every hoof and horn pending discovery of the right answer to this last atrocity has been punctually obeyed, the local papers slanging landlord and agent, but seemingly unable to find the proper countermine. No end of details and of incident might be given, but no substantial increase could be made ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Imperial establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... speech, in each session, in which he went over the political issues of the two parties in a violent and extreme fashion. He would give us the whole history of the year and point out the imperfections and weakness and atrocity of the party in power in a most unsparing fashion. This speech he would frank home to Missouri. He seemed to think his duty as a Democratic politician was done, and he would betake himself to statesmanship the rest of the year. I think he has of late discontinued that practice. I do not want ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the Indian coast. He reached Calicut on October 29th, and immediately bombarded the city, seizing the inoffensive native fishermen in the port, eight hundred of whom he massacred in cold blood under circumstances of brutal atrocity. In 1503 he again left for Europe, after establishing a factory at Cochin. In consequence of his violence a war ensued between Cochin and Calicut. In 1504 Lopo Soares came out with a fleet of fourteen caravels, and proclaimed a blockade of the port of Cochin, in spite of the fact that ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... heavy rifles, slung over their shoulders by leather bands, and behind their saddles were their ponchos, which did duty both as overcoats and beds. Taken altogether, they were a hard-looking set, and seemed capable of any atrocity. The man who had charge of Frank was particularly noticeable in this respect, and our hero thought that all he needed were the leggins, and high-pointed hat, to make him a first-class brigand. This man kept a sharp eye upon his prisoner, and scowled at him, as if ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... and I take it that but for the invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time to provide ornaments for ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... people, the views of the whole of the opposition orators coincided. The Duke of Richmond said, that our employment of them would call down the vengeance of Heaven; and he argued, that our soldiers, acting with them, would become as ferocious as the Indians, and ready to commit any atrocity, or to make any attack on the liberties of the country that ministers might command! The unpleasant task of defending the employment of wild Indians fell upon Lord Suffolk, one of the secretaries of state, and he contended that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... upon the Government of the Two Sicilies are of a peculiar nature. The injuries on which they are founded are not denied, nor are the atrocity and perfidy under which those injuries were perpetrated attempted to be extenuated. The sole ground on which indemnity has been refused is the alleged illegality of the tenure by which the monarch who made the seizures held his ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... read the signature. The name "Comtesse Flore de Brambourg" made him shudder. He foresaw some new atrocity on ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... a rich and powerful country, we were not able to procure any provisions. The natives refused to sell, and their general behavior assured me of their capability of any atrocity had they been prompted to attack us by the Turks. Fortunately we had a good supply of meal that had been prepared for the journey prior to our departure from Gondokoro; thus we could not starve. I also had a sack of corn for the animals, a necessary precaution, as at this season ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... There's a beastly draught. The noise you heard was that window which possibly hasn't been opened for a century or two, groaning in pain at being forced into action again! Can't sleep in this beastly room—haven't closed my eyes yet—and when I did get out of that Victorian atrocity over there and take to the sofa by the window, why, the first thing I saw were those flames flickering out across the horizon like signal-fires, or something! I've been watching them for the past twenty ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... to the street but wide side yards separated it from its newer neighbors. It was pretentiously ugly with its mansard roof, intricate porches, balconies and bay windows that had evidently been added after the original architectural atrocity had been committed. At her first glance as the pert and frilly maid opened the door it seemed as though the whole house were filled with innumerable elaborate draperies and fat-framed paintings and much stuffed furniture. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... number of pages devoted to one head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circumlocution to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity, he little knew what ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... moved along for a time with no train in sight ahead of us, we came upon Mr. Wood in a most pitiable plight, the result of an attack and slaughter, not differing greatly from the Holloway case, and its parallel in atrocity. ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... girls, in proportion as they are keener students, more submissive pupils, and are given to studying their lessons at recess-time, instead of shouting and racing in the open air. They are also easily coerced into devoting Wednesday and Saturday afternoons to the added atrocity of music-lessons, and in general, but for the recent blessed innovation of skating, would undoubtedly submit to having every atom of air and exercise eliminated from their lives. It is rare to find an American mother who habitually ranks physical vigor first, in rearing her daughters, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... "Life of Washington" must ever stand as the true type. The author is so fearful that he will not think well of his subject that he conceals every attribute of our common humanity, and gives us a being almost devoid of eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions. Next to Weems, in point of literary atrocity, comes John S. C. Abbott, whose life of Napoleon is a splendid concealment of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... of that ignominious death were suffered by Jesus in all their atrocity. For a moment, according to certain narratives, his heart failed him; a cloud hid from him the face of his Father; he endured an agony of despair more acute a thousand times than all his torments. But his divine instinct again ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... status, the usual frailties of human nature described by Hooker as "stains and blemishes that will remain till the end of the world, what form of government, soever, may take place, they grow out of man's nature." But in this event the stains and blemishes were effaced by a common atrocity. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... this extraordinary success with five hundred white troops and about the same number of Indians, led by Colonel Procter, whom Brock had placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg. Procter's name is infamous in the annals of the war. The worst traditions of Indian atrocity, uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster about his memory. He was later promoted in rank instead of being degraded, a costly blunder which England came to regret and at last redeemed. A notoriously incompetent officer, ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... of William's tyranny and atrocity, the spot where his children met their untimely end, and where may be seen the tumuli erected over the remains of the Britons who fell ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... a foul misdemeanor, as to condemn and sentence a peer of the realm for a capital offence, without giving him a solemn and public trial. Now, my dear master, has your clear understanding been so misled as to make you suppose their misdoings ever reached such atrocity, or that they would unwisely give ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... subject of dispute, entirely to Mackenzie; and the hard terms to which Glengarry was obliged to submit in the private quarrel seem to have formed the only punishment inflicted on this clan for the cold-blooded atrocity displayed in the memorable raid on Kilchrist." [Gregory, ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... his place in the House of Commons: 'In Rome there is a French garrison; under its shelter there exists a committee of 200, whose practice is to organise a band of murderers, the scum and dross of every nation, and send them into the Neapolitan territory to commit every atrocity!' As a criticism the words are not less strong; but the public defiance of Napoleon, and the threat with which it was accompanied, dictated one plain duty to the Italian Government if they meant to keep the peace—the arrest of Garibaldi and his ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... was beaten. It made her sick. She felt that she must go out of this school, this torture-place. And she hated the schoolmaster, thoroughly and finally. The brute, had he no shame? He should never be allowed to continue the atrocity of this bullying cruelty. Then Hill came crawling back, blubbering piteously. There was something desolate about this blubbering that nearly broke her heart. For after all, if she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never have happened, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... them it is our sacred duty to preserve it. Who shall assign limits to the achievements of free minds and free hands under the protection of this glorious Union? No treason to mankind since the organization of society would be equal in atrocity to that of him who would lift his hand to destroy it. He would overthrow the noblest structure of human wisdom, which protects himself and his fellow-man. He would stop the progress of free government ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... had committed the hell-black deed. While the slaves generally were panic-struck, and howling with alarm, the murderer himself was calm and collected, and appeared as though nothing unusual had happened. The atrocity roused my old master, and he spoke out, in reprobation of it; but the whole thing proved to be less than a nine days' wonder. Both Col. Lloyd and my old master arraigned Gore for his cruelty in ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... country south of Recife fell once more into the hands of the Portuguese. During this period the bitterness between the two armies was still further accentuated by the massacre of Portuguese by the Tapuya Indians at Cunhau. This atrocity, as a matter of fact, was perpetrated on the initiative of the Indians alone, but at the time the Dutch—unjustly, as it turned out—were blamed for it. This circumstance induced retaliation, and eventually caused many barbarous acts to be done on ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... etc., exclusive of those in which the English Government was engaged, 116; Irish gentlemen of family killed in battle, 102; murdered, 168—many of them with circumstances of great atrocity; and during this period, on the other hand, there is no allusion to the enactment of any law, the judicial decision of any controversy, the founding of any town, monastery or church; and all this is recorded ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... together, form a picture of the life of captured French civilians behind the German lines. I have carefully avoided glaring atrocities. Atrocities are as a rule isolated instances, due to isolated causes. They occur, but they are not typical of the situation. The real Hun atrocity is the attitude towards life which calls chivalry sentiment, fair-play a waste of opportunity and ruthlessness strength. This attitude is all summed up in the one word Prussianism. The repatries have ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... years ago in England, by the circumstances attending the defence of Courvoisier, indicted for the murder of Lord William Russell. The crime was one of great atrocity. It came out after his conviction, that during the trial he had confessed his guilt to his counsel, of whom the eminent barrister Charles Phillips, Esq., was one. Mr. Phillips was accused of having endeavored, ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... in very poor English such an account of the dangers of that awful road up the hill that I feel no Fort would repay me for its terrors. Do say what you feel, Miss Loring. Mr. Clifden can lunch with the officers at Nowshera and come any time. I know I am an atrocity." ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... was begun on grounds independent of foreign disturbances. But no man can read the annals of the French war, without a conviction, that one of its providential purposes was the punishment of the three monarchies which had perpetrated this atrocity. Within a brief period from the first ruin of Polish independence, the French armies began those sweeping conquests which were destined especially to ravage Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The punishment seemed even to bear something like a proportion to the degree of guilt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of the atrocity committed by the Grimaldi, in firing the house and leaving their enemy to perish in the ruins, the kinsmen of Orso Paolo assemble and rush to Monte d'Olmo, threatening vengeance on the perpetrators. The Grimaldi ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of a malignant and envious minister—a snake in the grass—a fly in the ointment of Prince Ahmad's beatitude! And to think of the old witch gaining access to the fairy palace— it was nothing less than an atrocity! And the tasks which she induces the king to set Prince Ahmad to perform—but they are all accomplished for him by his fairy bride. The only thing to regret—the fatal blemish in the tale—is the slaughter of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Meanwhile the experts intrigue; one partial plan after another gets itself accepted, this and that ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, and architects infamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, some vulgarity of the Automobile Club type, some Buckingham Palace atrocity, some Regent Street stupidity, some such cramped and thwarted thing as that new arch which gives upon Charing Cross is added to the confusion. I do not see any reason to suppose that this continuous muddle of partial ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... too Diderot is always ready to turn from his subject for a moral aside. Even the modern reader will forgive the discursive apostrophe addressed to the judges of the unfortunate Calas, the almost lyric denunciation of an atrocity that struck such deep dismay into the hearts of all the brethren of the Encyclopaedia.[44] But Diderot's asides are usually in less tragic matter. A picture of Michael Van Loo's reminds him that Van Loo had once a friend in Spain. This friend took it into his head to equip a vessel ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... was but one, yourself; and that you were merely undergoing temporary imprisonment as a result of your being captured in arms, so to speak, against the Korean Government; and it was not until I entered this chamber and saw—what I saw—that I dreamed of the occurrence of any such atrocity as has been practised on you. Again I offer you ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... career, he perceived distinctly a dark figure on his right hand, keeping pace with himself. Upon that the superstitious, of course, supposed that some fiend had revealed himself, and associated his superfluous presence with the dark atrocity. Symons was not a philosopher, but my opinion is, that he was too much so to tolerate that hypothesis, since, if there was one man in all Europe that needed no tempter to evil on that evening, it was precisely Mr. Symons, as nobody knew better than ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... often indirectly proposed to me their daughters; and if there was anyone more virulent than the rest, I hardly need say that it was Lady Maelstrom, who nearly killed her job horses in driving about from one acquaintance to another, to represent my unheard-of atrocity in presuming to deceive my betters. Harcourt, who had agreed to live with me—Harcourt, who had praised my magnanimity in making the disclosure—even Harcourt fell off; and about a fortnight after I had arrived in town, told me that not finding the lodgings so convenient as his former abode, he ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... toothpick habit! Let no one ever tell me that that atrocity is American! Here it goes with every course, and without the pretended decency of holding one's serviette before one's mouth, which, in my opinion, is a mere affectation, and ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... three pints of blood found there by the surgeons. The details of this savage murder have been too fully given in all the papers to need repetition here. Suffice it to say, that to any one viewing the body as we thus happened to do, the atrocity of this heartless treason against society and the injured dead becomes yet more striking; it seeming wonderful that the piteousness of the sight—the mute pleading of that mouth full of cloated blood—the arousing ocular evidence of the unprovoked assassin's cruelty—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... by this atrocity having been appeased by the princess, who possessed the most consummate skill in the art of persuasion, there was offered on the tower a burnt sacrifice to the infernal deities, the main ingredients of which were mummies, rhinoceros' horns, oil of the most venomous ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... As the atrocity presented itself to Mr. Bumble's mind in full force, he struck the counter sharply with his cane, and became flushed ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... it. I could not believe that any man could be so void of mercy, or any woman so lost to every instinct of decency, as to plan, and then coolly carry out to the end, a crime so unheard of in its atrocity. There must be some other explanation of the facts before us. Why, the date in the ring is enough. If that speaks true, the marriage between Edwin Urquhart and the gentle Honora was but a day old, and even the worst of men take time to weary of their wives ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... by seeing no less a person than the Hon. Timothy Tickels, of South street, in familiar and friendly conversation with Mr. Goldworthy and Miss Alice. Mr. Tickels himself started and turned pale on beholding the maid whom he had attempted to dishonor under circumstances of such peculiar atrocity; however, he quickly recovered himself, and bowed low as Mr. Goldworthy presented her to ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... how they were all imprisoned for a year and a half, racked again and again, and at last adjudged to receive publicly, on Good Friday, 1575, some three hundred, some one hundred stripes, and to serve in the galleys for six or ten years each; while as the crowning atrocity of the Moloch sacrifice, three of them were burnt alive ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years. In charging the jury, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. The extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. But the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. The bibliography ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... overcome. Not that he had begun to make love to Beatrice, or committed himself by the utterance of any opinion as to the propriety of clerical marriages; but he daily became looser about his peculiar tenets, raved less immoderately than heretofore as to the atrocity of the Greshamsbury church pews, and was observed to take some opportunities of conversing alone with Beatrice. Beatrice had always denied the imputation—this had usually been made by Mary in their happy days—with vehement asseverations of anger; and Miss Gushing had tittered, and expressed ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... that, in recommending that any action taken by privateers against British vessels should be treated as an act of piracy, Sir George Baden-Powell is advocating an inadmissible atrocity, which derives no countenance from the view theoretically maintained by the United States, at the outset of the Civil War, of the illegality of commissions granted by the Southern Confederation. His recommendation that our ports should be "closed" to privateers is not very intelligible. Privateers ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... piece of information he closed with a double-jointed oath of remarkable atrocity, and, having done so, would have recommenced the performance of acrobatic feats had I not stopped him by asking the reason of his action. He looked at me ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... sentinel informed us that an Indian was about to kill his wife near the fort; we went down to the house of our interpreter where we found the parties, and after forbidding any violence, inquired into the cause of his intending to commit such as atrocity. It appeared that some days ago a quarrel had taken place between him and his wife, in consequence of which she had taken refuge in the house where the two squaws of our interpreter lived: by running away she forfeited her life, which ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... on behalf of the Government. This was taken as an example of the determination of the Crown to silence the voice of the people with the weapons of Scotch mercenaries. Pamphlets, speeches, sermons, all were employed to stimulate the general agitation and to brand with atrocity the conduct of the Ministry. The tombstone erected over the murdered man Allan chronicled his inhuman murder "by Scottish detachments from the Army," and quoted from Proverbs the words, "Take away the wicked from before ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... remuneration. In proof whereof of this alliance, and as a token of amity and goodwill, Parker (the trader) presented him with a small tin of ship biscuit, four dynamite cartridges, a dozen boxes of matches and a bottle of a villainous German liquor called 'Corn Schnapps.' Then the atrocity stood up and embraced me, and asked me to show him my firearms. His fierce eyes gleamed with pleasure as he turned them about in his filthy paws, and he was especially pleased with the size of a Sharp's rifle cartridge and bullet which would, he grinned, 'make big fellow ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... volunteers in Poydras Street. His presenting himself at their rendezvous, getting enrolled in the corps, and offering as a candidate for the captaincy, were all done under instructions, and with a design which, for wickedness and cold-blooded atrocity, was worthy of Satan himself. Had he succeeded in becoming the leader of this ill-fated band, for them the upshot might have been no worse; though it would not have been better; since it was his intention to betray them to the ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... Capital can be no disgrace. Nearly every Capital there was in possession of its enemy some often and long. But diabolical as they paint that enemy, he burnt neither public edifices nor private dwellings. It was reserved for England to show that Bonaparte, in atrocity, was an infant to their ministers and their generals. They are taking his place in the eyes of Europe, and have turned into our channel all its good will. This will be worth the million of dollars the repairs of their conflagrations will cost us. I hope ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... cousin, in one of his devil's raids, tore a baby from its mother's breast by the leg, dashed its brains out against a tree, and then—I daren't tell a woman what happened." [Note: Tom was confusing Touan with Michael Howe. The latter actually did commit this frightful atrocity; but I never heard that the former actually combined the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... statute requiring the death penalty to be inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [Footnote: Hence also the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute" by decapitation and the addition of "electro"] and the idea had its origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently than now. The "death current" ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... now, from sich atrocity and impudence!" laying down the cloaks and bundles, and facing the Indian, with an appearance of great indignation—"Did a body ever hear sich a liar! Why, Misther Ould Nick, Madam Willoughby wouldn't let the likes of ye touch the ind of her garments. You wouldn't get the liberty to ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... no one but a parent, and I will add, an affectionate parent, can possibly form an idea of, I address you on the subject of the act of atrocity committed by that perjured villain, Mannion. You will find that I and my innocent daughter have been, like you, victims of the most devilish deceit that ever was practised on ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... perhaps, a little excited by the wine and spirits they had swallowed; else a casual quarrel between two young men, at tennis, could not have driven them to such extremes. But certain it is that, from one at first arising to address the party on the atrocity of the offence, both in a moral and political point of view, on a sudden there were six on their feet, at the same time, expatiating on it; and, in a very short time thereafter, everyone in the room was up talking with the utmost vociferation, all on ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... this atrocity the editor is not responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of Shelley with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... inquisitorial principle which reigned more openly in other countries. In the majority of cases, the monitory, which had, as a fact, been instituted in order to encourage informers in the name of religion, was a marvel of ridiculous atrocity; it frequently set forth the crime and all the imaginary circumstances the plaintiffs were eager to prove; it was, in short, the publication of a ready-made case, which gave the first knave that came a chance of earning some money by making a lying deposition in favour of the highest bidder. The ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... China," cried the lad further, "but there's no child labor there; they try to reform the 'unspeakable Turk' but there's no atrocity upon the children there; they call the heathen lost, though in the worst an' wildes' tribes the children have a home an' lovin', if savage care; Russia cries shame on what goes on in our fact'ries here, an' even an Indian chief that they were ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and the women were splendid." How often one has read that in these days of atrocity at sea! We were to realize it now; the women were indeed splendid. There was no crying or screaming or hysteria, or wild inquiries. They were perfectly calm and collected: none of them showed the least fear, even under fire. The women took the matter as coolly ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... if they were hung, canonised them as martyrs. They attempted to prostitute the law to their own base standard of political morality. They assiduously laboured to render life valueless in Ireland and property worthless, whilst no deed was too cowardly, no atrocity too barbarous, for them to praise. They alone in modern times warred against women and children. Animals were the dumb victims of the inhuman ferocity they in no way tried to check, and they effectively taught the receptive Irish millions ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... every sense was absorbed in listening to the villainous plot that Lord Vincent was unfolding to his companion. It was the very same plot that he had communicated to his valet, the atrocity of which had shocked even that cut-throat. It did not shock Faustina, however. She listened with avidity. She co-operated with zeal. She suggested such modifications and improvements for securing the success of the conspiracy, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... you? It may be as you say, but how is one to tell? When one has been deceived like that, one is apt to be suspicious, Miss Carbury.' Here was one who had spent his life in lying to the world, and who was in his very heart shocked at the atrocity of a man who had lied to him! 'You are not plotting another journey to Liverpool;—are you?' To this Hetta could make no answer. The insult was too much, but alone, unsupported, she did not know how to give ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... those islands proved to ships trading on the north-west coast of America rendered it absolutely necessary, that the inhabitants should be made to understand that we never would nor could pass unnoticed an act of such atrocity. With this view Captain Vancouver had demanded of the chief of Whahoo the murderers of Mr. Hergest and his unfortunate companions. It was not supposed that the people sacrificed were the actual perpetrators of these murders; but that an equal number of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... many acts of shame—there are many ordinances of monarchs, and laws which have become a byword and a hissing to the nations. But when we consider the country and the age, I ask fearlessly, what act of shame, what ordinance of monarch, what law, can compare in atrocity with this enactment of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... will perceive that this relates to the atrocity committed by the Infant Don Juan of Castille, who, while in revolt against his brother, Sancho IV., appeared before the city of Tarifa with an army, chiefly composed of Mahometans; finding the infant son of the governor, Don Alonzo Perez de Guzman, at nurse in a neighbouring village, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... fit for majors in the army, and royal dukes, and that sort of people; the mere walking is bad enough, but embarrassing one's arms moreover, with a gun, and one's legs with turnip tops, exposing oneself to the mercy of bad shots and the atrocity of good, seems to me only a state of painful fatigue, enlivened by the probability of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crime, the black audacity of which went far beyond that dark-lantern enterprise of Treasury gold upon which London Bill was so patiently employed. The design possessed the simplicity, too, which is a ruling feature of your staggering atrocity. The gold would be going aboard the Zulu Queen on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. With the first blue streaks of dawn on Monday, May thirtieth, say at four o'clock, the Zulu Queen, thinking on escape, must up anchor and go steaming down ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Burley might have in rendering the breach between the presbyterians and the government irreconcilable, by putting the young nobleman to death, it was by no means that of the moderate party to permit such an act of atrocity. And it is but doing justice to Mr Poundtext to add, that, like most of his own persuasion, he was decidedly adverse to any such acts of unnecessary violence; besides, that his own present feelings ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... its inhabitants, with the exception of Pietro Rasiglia's wife, whom her husband flung from the battlements. Corrado then butchered the men, women, and children of the Rasiglia clan, to the number of three hundred persons, accomplishing his vengeance with details of atrocity too infernal to be dwelt on in these pages. It is recorded that thirty-six asses laden with their mangled limbs paraded the streets of Foligno as a terror-striking spectacle for the inhabitants. He then ruled the city by violence, until the warlike ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... have tried our Father in heaven? Not without reason does He ask, "If I be a father, where is mine honour? if I be a master, where is my fear?" And who that thinks of his sins, their guilt, their number, and, as committed against infinite love and tender mercy, their unspeakable atrocity, but will acknowledge the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the English Legation, a bulging, three-storied, red brick, dormer-roofed atrocity, standing a few feet in from the sidewalk; ugly as original sin, externally as repellent as the sidewalk and the narrow little drive under ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... policy of "reconcentration" adopted by General Weyler, had discredited the Spanish cause. The ancient tradition of Spain's cruelty to her colonies predisposed the American people to credit reports of atrocity. The administration was apparently anxious to perform its duties as a friendly power, but this was rendered more and more difficult owing to the growing popular demand for intervention. On the 15th of February, 1898, the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbor. Although ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... look to him as the Great Prophet and Leader, by whom Policy is at length to be moulded into Justice; and are ready to catch his inspiration before he has uttered a word. Kossuth undoubtedly is a mighty Orator; but no one is better aware than he, that the cogency of his arguments is due to the atrocity of our common enemies, and the enthusiasm which he kindles to the preparations of the ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... length they become possessed of the tale in all its diabolical atrocity, all its completeness, their anger, already excited, become almost ungovernable; and it is as much as their captain can do to restrain them from at once starting in pursuit. Some fling their spits in the fire with the meat upon them still untouched; others ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... useless, and that he, a chief's son, was only losing dignity by talking to the man, whom he recognised now as being the sultan's most unscrupulous follower, the scoundrel who did any piece of dirty work or atrocity. This was the man who, at his master's wish, dragged away any poor girl from her home to be the sultan's slave; who seized without scruple on gold, tin, rice, or any other produce of the country, in his master's name, and for his use. His hands ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... be my duty to prevent it. We Germans had no longer any reason for war. We had what we needed. To fight for more, from a lust of conquest and for the annexation of countries which were not necessary for us, always appeared to me like an atrocity; I am tempted to say like a Bonapartistic and foreign atrocity, alien to the Germanic sense ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... rapine, desolation and atrocity, perpetrated upon a high-spirited and generous people, cannot conduce to the best moral condition. Left in poverty and galled by outrage, wrongs will be resorted to which otherwise would be foreign to a natural disposition. ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... which they mounted, and still fought manfully. Nevertheless, they were finally taken, and one of them slain, and the son of the queen, pierced in two places; when they were taken to the admiral's ship they showed no less ferociousness and atrocity of mien, than if they had been lions of Libya who felt themselves taken in the net. And such were they that no man could have even looked upon them without his heart trembling with horror, so greatly was their look ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... whom fanaticism had extinguished all reason and charity, that the Roman Catholic was regarded as a man the very tenderness of whose conscience might make him a false witness, an incendiary, or a murderer, as a man who, where his Church was concerned, shrank from no atrocity and could be bound by no oath. If there were in that age two persons inclined by their judgment and by their temper to toleration, those persons were Tillotson and Locke. Yet Tillotson, whose indulgence for various kinds ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Silesia and Breslau; and the Queen and her generals, thus obtaining a respite from this able and enterprising robber, were enabled to direct, and successfully direct, their efforts against the remaining hosts of plunderers that had assailed her. France, that with perfidy and atrocity had summoned every surrounding power to the destruction of the house of Austria, in the moment of the helplessness and inexperience of the new sovereign—France was at least, if Frederick was not, defeated, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... most repulsive kind were not perpetrated on innocent and helpless people. In Asia Minor the fanatical spirit raged with more ferocity than in European Turkey. At Smyrna a general massacre of the Christians took place under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, and fifteen thousand were obliged to flee to the islands of the Archipelago to save their lives. The Island of Cyprus, which once had a population of more than a million, reduced at the breaking ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... this humiliating capture and the fear that it might at any moment be repeated, probably with circumstances of greater atrocity, were the dominant emotions in the hearts of the Roman Senate and people during the twenty-one years which we are now rapidly surveying. It was doubtless these feelings which induced them to submit more ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... a great crowd, which becomes excited at the slightest provocation. It is easy to see from an ordinary walk in this Hongkong street how panic or rage may convert the stolid Chinese into a deadly maniac, who will stop at no outburst of violence, no atrocity, that will serve to wreak his hatred of ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... I am no more able to answer than yourself. There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them—and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply. It is clear that Kidd—if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not—it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor. But this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... all the rest being now in the road. This small ship they took, sending all me men on shore unhurt; but it they had known what had been done to the English captives, I believe they would have taken vengeance, as many an innocent soul afterwards paid for the atrocity of the Spanish ensign. The ship now taken by the English, was the same which had been formerly confiscated at Tercera, and was sold to the Spaniards that then came from the Indies, who sailed in her to San Lucar; where it also ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... build futures they can believe in. Sergeant Jennifer Rodgers is a police officer in Oklahoma City. Like Richard Dean, she helped to pull her fellow citizens out of the rubble and deal with that awful tragedy. She reminds us that in their response to that atrocity the people of Oklahoma City lifted all of us with their basic sense of decency ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... incidents ever depicted by him in the whole range of his voluminous contributions to imaginative literature. The passages selected to this end from his famous story of Oliver Twist were those relating more particularly to the Murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes. A ghastlier atrocity than that murder could hardly be imagined. In the book itself, as will be remembered, the crime is painted as with a brush dipped in blood rather than pigment. The infamous deed is there described in language worthy of one of the greatest realists in fictitious narrative. Henri de Balzac, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging. Mr. DOUGLASS states that in neither of these instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial investigation. The Baltimore American, of March 17, 1845, relates a similar case of atrocity, perpetrated with similar impunity—as follows:—"Shooting a slave.—We learn, upon the authority of a letter from Charles county, Maryland, received by a gentleman of this city, that a young man, named Matthews, a nephew of General ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... although the dog I have in my mind at the present writing attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no one ventured to exclusively claim him; while, after the perpetration of any canine atrocity, everybody repudiated ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... different parties, with the singular and providential manner in which their crimes brought about their own punishment. No foreign interposition was necessary, no avenging angel was required to vindicate the justice of divine administration. They fell the victims of their own atrocity, of the passions which they themselves had let loose, of the injustice of which they had given the first example to others The Constitutionalists overthrew the ancient monarchy, and formed a limited government; but their imprudence in raising popular ambition paved the way ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... cry of horror at the atrocity of the deed; not from any of the officers who were present, but from the soldiers, who were not used to warfare ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... driven to the wall; and having at the same time made what he thought good preparations, a war broke out at last. And how did it break out? This Cossim Ali Khan signalized his first acts of hostility by an atrocity committed against the faith of treaties, against the rules of war, against every principle of honor. This intended murderer of his father-in-law, whom Mr. Hastings had assisted to raise to the throne of Bengal, well knowing his character and his disposition, ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... three hundred; and her chastity and virtue for four hundred dollars more. And this, too, in a city thronged with churches, whose tall spires look like so many signals pointing to heaven, and whose ministers preach that slavery is a God-ordained institution! What words can tell the inhumanity, the atrocity, and the immorality of that doctrine which, from exalted office, commends such a crime to the favour of enlightened and Christian people? What indignation from all the world is not due to the government and people who put forth all their strength and power to keep in existence such an institution? ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... feel that it became his station as a ruling monarch to have a foreign house with foreign furniture. Of course he never intended to live in it, but other kings had useless palaces and why shouldn't he? Therefore, a Russian atrocity of red brick was erected a half mile or so from his other dwellings. The furnishing became a matter of moment, and Mr. Lucander, who was temporarily in the employ of the Mongolian Government, was intrusted ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... here that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their conditions. In Sangre y Arena his affair is with the cherished atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned torrero whose career it celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to his death, weakened by years ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... abolition of the punishment of death presented to Adrien Duport an opportunity to pronounce in favour of the abolition one of those orations which survive time, and which protest, in the name of reason and philosophy, against the blindness and atrocity of criminal legislation. He demonstrated with the most profound logic that society, by reserving to itself the right of homicide, justifies it to a certain extent in the murderer, and that the means most efficacious for preventing murder and making it infamous was to evince its own horror of the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... My feelings have been clamouring for many years against my cowardly better judgment. I believe some day they will break loose and throw me, as from a catapult, even up against the stone wall of atrocity we ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... party at this time was Lucius Sergius Catiline, an aristocrat, who, during the proscription, behaved with fiendish atrocity towards those of the opposite party, torturing and killing men with the utmost recklessness. His early years had been passed in undisguised debaucheries and unrestrained vice, but in spite of all his acts, he made political ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... was so diabolical, that, when first announced, it was treated as a caprice of certain hot spirits, irritated by the declamations of the Abolitionists. But it is idle to refer to transient heat thoughts which bear all the signs of cool atrocity; and needless to seek for the causes of actions in extraneous sources, when they are plainly but steps in the development of principles already known. Slave-breeding and Slavery-extension are necessities of the system. Like Romulus and Remus, "they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... its centre, and sent a thrill of horror to the heart of that empire, followed by a fierce thirst for vengeance. For the Indian mutiny had broken out, the horrors of Cawnpore had been enacted, the stories of sepoy atrocity had been told by every English fireside, and the whole nation had roused itself to send forth armies for vengeance and for punishment. Dread stories were these for the quiet circle at Chetwynde Castle; yet they had been spared its ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Europe. Hannah More wrote for the lower classes, and in a style of great clearness and simplicity. Her admirable dialogue, called "Village Politics," by Will Chip, a country carpenter, exposed the folly and atrocity of the revolutionary doctrines then in vogue. Its circulation was immense. The Government purchased several thousand copies for distribution. It was translated into French and Italian. Similar in spirit ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... loved her; or if, again, though loving him she had stood upon her rights—in any of those events he might have done it. But to leave her whom he did love, and who had said to him so generously: "I will not hamper you—go to her"—would be a black atrocity. Every memory, from their boy-and-girl lovering to the desperate clinging of her arms these last two nights—memory with its innumerable tentacles, the invincible strength of its countless threads, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... seer Keith's brain with fire, and he sprang to his feet, hands clinched and eyes blazing. He could have believed this of Indians, it was according to their nature, their method of warfare; but the cowardliness of it, the atrocity of the act, as perpetrated by men of his own race, instantly aroused within him a desire for vengeance. He wanted to run the fellows down, to discover their identity. Without thinking of personal danger, he ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... almost superfluous to relate, experienced the fate of Bagnorea. Nothing comparable in point of atrocity had occurred since the invasion of Italy by the barbarians. In justice to Garibaldi, it must be said that he rebuked publicly by an order of the day, dated 28th October, the "shameful excess" of his fellow-adventurers, and proceeded to expurgate their ranks. But he could not hinder ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... an atrocity of the Princess of Wales. She employed him to convey letters to her daughter while she used to ride in Windsor Park, which he contrived to deliver, and occasionally to converse with her; and on one occasion, at Kensington, the Princess ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... I ask again, can such things be tolerated in the country of sunshine and gladness, of freedom and justice? In another country we know Judge Lynch would preside at their trial. And we here shall shew these two that such an atrocity will not be permitted here solely because a girl has shewn one man that she can like him better than another, with whom she has become entangled. I ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang |
