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Vicious   Listen
adjective
Vicious  adj.  
1.
Characterized by vice or defects; defective; faulty; imperfect. "Though I perchance am vicious in my guess." "The title of these lords was vicious in its origin." "A charge against Bentley of vicious reasoning."
2.
Addicted to vice; corrupt in principles or conduct; depraved; wicked; as, vicious children; vicious examples; vicious conduct. "Who... heard this heavy curse, Servant of servants, on his vicious race."
3.
Wanting purity; foul; bad; noxious; as, vicious air, water, etc.
4.
Not correct or pure; corrupt; as, vicious language; vicious idioms.
5.
Not well tamed or broken; given to bad tricks; unruly; refractory; as, a vicious horse.
6.
Bitter; spiteful; malignant. (Colloq.)
Synonyms: Corrupt; faulty; wicked; depraved.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vicious" Quotes from Famous Books



... mania, and lots of them die of drink; which shows it is intended in some climates for men to work. Octavia says it takes centuries of wielding battle-axes and commanding vassals to give the consciousness of superiority which enables people to be idle without being vicious; but Tom says it is because they don't hunt and shoot, and go to the bench, and attend to their estates and county business; so instead they have to go crazy over fast motoring or flying machines, ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... carnally minded is Death." To be carnally minded, translated into the language of science, is to be limited in one's correspondences to the environment of the natural man. It is no necessary part of the conception that the mind should be either purposely irreligious, or directly vicious. The mind of the flesh, {phronema tes sarkos}, by its very nature, limited capacity, and time-ward tendency, is {thanatos}, Death. This earthly mind may be of noble caliber, enriched by culture, high toned, virtuous and pure. But if it know not God? What though its correspondences reach ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... the ability or good fortune to get ahead, nor are they guaranteed a permanent place in their own native group unless they are competent to keep their footing. There is no surety to keep the independent tradesman from failing in business or the careless youth from falling into intemperate or vicious habits; many hazards must be crossed and hindrances overcome before an assured position is secured in the community, but the opportunities are far better than for the handicapped ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... one day to Mrs. Betty, when the subject of conversation had turned to Mrs. Burke's son and heir, "Nickey means to be a good boy, but he's as restless as a kitten on a hot Johnny-cake. He isn't a bit vicious, but he do run his heels down at the corners, and he's awful wearin' on his pants-bottoms and keeps me patchin' and mendin' most of the time—'contributing to the end in view,' as Abraham Lincoln said. ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... the chevalier, "I owe to you the life I hold dearest in the world. All my own life shall be devoted to giving you proofs of my gratitude and esteem. Bernard, we are both of us victims of a vicious family. The wrong that has been done you shall be repaired. They have deprived you of education, but your soul has remained pure. Bernard, you will restore the honour of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... can throw Round all that's vicious, weak, and low, Such magic lights, such rainbows dyes As ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... of your city, Philadelphia, and the spirit of rancor, malice, and hatred that breathes in the newspapers. For I learn from those papers that State is divided into parties, that each party ascribes all the public operations of the other to vicious motives, that they do not even suspect one another of the smallest degree of honesty, that the anti-Federalists are such merely from the fear of losing power, places, or emoluments, which they have in possession or expectation; that the Federalists are a set of conspirators, who aim ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... from its stem with a vicious blow of her crop, then, with eyes fixed upon the fallen flower, broke the awkward ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... have ye seen how nobly changed? This work of his is great and wonderful. His very face with change of heart is changed. The world will not believe a man repents: And this wise world of ours is mainly right. Full seldom doth a man repent, or use Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch Of blood and custom wholly out of him, And make all clean, and plant himself afresh. Edyrn has done it, weeding all his heart As I will weed this land before I go. I, therefore, made him ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... riding an exceedingly vicious beast," said these men. "She was always taking fright ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... and smooth, in which the white rocks are reflected with the utmost distinctness. In the crevices hang numerous beehives, whose inmates one has to be careful not to disturb, for on the bank are the graves of two Englishmen who, having incautiously aroused the vicious little creatures, were attacked and drowned in diving under the water to escape ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... according to your own statement they keep by themselves, and but little is known of them. Tell me, did those who suffered yesterday seem like this? Did that old man look as though he had passed his life in vicious scenes? Did those fair young girls sing lewd songs as they ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous

... probably injured Louis XVI. more than any other was his familiarity with the locksmith, Gamin. Innocent as was the motive whence it arose, this low connection lessened him more with the whole nation than if he had been the most vicious of Princes. How careful Sovereigns ought to be, with respect to the attention they bestow on men in humble life; especially those whose principles may have been demoralized by the meanness of the associations consequent upon their occupation, and whose low origin may have denied them opportunities ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... lowest by ties that centred in the hand of God. No man, he said, sinned or suffered to himself alone; his error and his pain darkened and afflicted men who never heard of his name. If a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible. The gospel—Christ—God, so far as men had imagined him,—was but a lesson, a type, a witness from everlasting to everlasting ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... this[187]. "If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing. The sacred writers (he observed) related the vicious as well as the virtuous actions of men; which had this moral effect, that it kept mankind from despair, into which otherwise they would naturally fall, were they not supported by the recollection that others had offended like themselves, and by penitence and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... quavering, artificial laugh. She tossed her head again, with an obvious attempt at defiance. "Oh, it takes more than a pink ticket to down me! Anyhow, I'm sick of this place, sick of the people. I hate them." With a vicious fling of her shoulders she swept on to a seat as far from them as ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... vicious swing of Grom's flint-headed club found its mark, the battle would have been over. But the Black Chief, for all his bulk, was quick as an eel. He bowed himself to the earth, so that the stroke whistled idly over him, and in the next second he swung a vicious, short blow upwards. It was well-aimed, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... he never cared less about writing or grammar than just then. It said in effect: "Ef you'll jes pull the plug out of the pipe about eight inches from the top you'll get all the water you want." Up they started for the top of the hill, and examining the pipe, found the plug which some vicious tramp had inserted. Not a very big plug—just big enough to fill the pipe. It is surprising how large a reservoir of water can be held back by how small a plug. Out came the plug; down came the water freely; by and by back ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon

... no cure, except the abolition of government. Government means that kind of thing. Look at it! Here we enthrone the hungry, vicious, uneducated mob of incapables, and then wonder why they steal, and gorge and riot like satyrs. The wonder is they don't scrape the paint ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... 1199 to 1216, was clever and vivacious, but the most vicious, profane, false, short-sighted, tyrannical, and unscrupulous of English monarchs; the son of Henry II., he married Hawisa of Gloucester, and succeeded his brother Richard I., being Richard's nominee, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... insisted most earnestly upon the difference which exists between a vice and sin, reproving those who spoke of a person who had committed one or more grave faults as vicious. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... hanging around; and the minute they're gone, well, you never saw anything like it, the way they will fight for the loot. Charley's got a whole room filled up with bedding, and stoves and tables and chairs; and George—he's vicious—he takes nearly everything and piles it up down in his warehouse. It ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... usually been the leaders of attack, content if, like the foulness of the earth, they may attract to themselves notice by their noisomeness, or, like its insects, exalt themselves by virulence into visibility. While, however, the envy of the vicious, and the insolence of the ignorant, are occasionally shown in their nakedness by futile efforts to degrade the dead, it is worthy of consideration whether they may not more frequently escape detection in successful efforts to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... composition goes on. Four full pages there are; but you see how they were gained,—by a vicious style, wholly false to a frank-spoken girl like Sarah. She expanded into what fills sixteen lines on this page what, as she expressed it in ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale

... in that state of doubt and uncertainty which Descartes considers essential to the search for truth. It is a state which cannot continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious tendencies and an idle heart can keep us in that state. My heart was not so corrupt as to delight in it, and there is nothing which so maintains the habit of thinking as being better pleased with oneself ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... the particular nation, to be permanently disposable for action, might prove redundantly effective, when pointed against a few personal authors of war, so presumably weak, and so flexible to any stern counter-volition as those must be supposed, whose wars argued so much of vicious levity. The inference is unexceptionable: it is the premises that are unsound. Anecdotes of war as having emanated from a lady's tea-table or toilette, would authorize such inference as to the facilities of controlling them. But the anecdotes themselves are false, or false substantially. All anecdotes, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... who were as polite as if they had been with fashionable ladies, rather intimidated their neighbors, but Baron von Kelweinstein gave the reins to all his vicious propensities, beamed, made obscene remarks, and seemed on fire with his crown of red hair. He paid them compliments in French from the other side of the Rhine, and sputtered out gallant remarks, only fit for a low pot-house, from ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... tentatively, forming a mind picture of the vicious reptilian danger which the colonists tried to kill on sight whenever and wherever encountered. His hand went to the knife at his belt. One met with weapons only that hissing hatred motivated by a brainless ferocity which did not ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... bitterly against cabinet councils, as a novelty in the British system of government by which the privy-council was jostled out of its province. They complained that all the grievances of the nation proceeded from the vicious principles of the ministry: they observed, that he who opposed the establishment could not be expected to support it with zeal. The earl of Nottingham was mentioned by name, and the house resolved that his majesty should be advised to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... by which the blind greed of human nature might be controlled and regulated. It is this ambiguous origin of the institution which explains how the Fathers could hold that private property was not natural, that it grew out of men's vicious and sinful desires, and at the same time that it was ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... said the men were very down-hearted and in vicious spirits. They were ready to bite at the first hand in reach, after the manner of ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... 'appily married and retired from the stage. It's wuss than the circus, my lad. The temptations are greater and there ain't so much honor among the people you're thrown with. The stage is surrounded by a pack of wolves just as vicious as Bob Grand ever was, and a girl's got to be mighty spry to ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... cannot, nor I will not hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... between us. No, no, you will do bear-leader to the youngster, and keep Sher Singh and the Rani from scratching each other's eyes out, and I'll knock down some more robber castles in Darwan, and demand your help when I stir up a more vicious hornets' nest than ordinary. By the bye, when there was mortar and all kinds of mess about, I took the opportunity of bringing up a little more gold from the treasury—ten thousand rupees' worth or so, as nearly as I could guess—and building ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... virtue, religion, or conscience, as if all those were utterly extinct in the world; and of all the actions, however brave an outward show they make, he always throws the cause and motive upon some vicious occasion, or some prospect of profit. It is impossible to imagine but that, amongst such an infinite number of actions as he makes mention of, there must be some one produced by the way of reason. No corruption ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... the year 1888, McNair met with a very serious horse accident, one, indeed, that might with complete natural sequence have terminated his life on the spot. The vicious horse of a friend he was riding to tame the brute (for he was a skilful horseman as well as good at sports), reared and fell over on him. By the display of personal alacrity he managed to avoid vital injuries, but sufficient ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard

... interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it together would everywhere be loosened, and a narrow, insulated, local feeling and policy would be proportionately increased.[12] Such was Burke's Imperialism, as evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the root of a frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But the idea expressed by Burke—the spirit of his whole argument—went far beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as happened in one instance, by a Colony. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... held in high renown, Ere made the common brothels of the town. There virgins honourable vows received, But chaste, as maids in monasteries, lived. The king himself, to nuptial rites a slave, No bad example to his poets gave; And they, not bad, but in a vicious age, Had not, to please the prince, debauched the stage. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... their lives. Injudicious suppressions of amusements that are not wholly good, but which afford keen enjoyment to great masses, seldom fail to give an impulse to other pleasures more secret and probably more vicious. Injudicious charities, or an extravagant and too indulgent poor law administration, inevitably discourage industry and thrift, and usually increase the poverty they were intended to cure. The parent who shrinks from inflicting any ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... you harm. He has done me harm, and yet he never gave me such a warning. He only went for me when I ran for office. As soon as the elections were over, he left me in peace. He's eminently practical, and rather good-natured. There's no small vicious malice or hate in him; but he's overbearing and loves a fight. Is it worth your while to make an enemy of him? We're sure ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris

... vultures at Dingaan's kraal? I never told you because I was sure you knew; also because if you didn't know it was better that you should not know, for if you had known, those Pongo skellums (that is, vicious ones) might have come to know also. ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... swearing, he says—'I wished, with all my heart, that I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing.'[18] In his numerous confessions, he never expresses pain at having, by his vicious conduct, occasioned grief to his father or mother. From this it may be inferred, that neither his father's example nor precept had checked this wretched propensity to swearing, and that he owed nothing ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... but he promised to do it—in time—when a good opportunity offered. Meanwhile, of course, he wanted to build it up, to increase the circulation—and to do that he had to keep on in the same way—he made that clear to me. I saw that we were in a vicious circle. The paper, to sell well, had to be made more and more detestable and disgraceful. At first I rebelled—but somehow—I can't tell you how it was—after that first concession the ground seemed to give under me: with every struggle I sank deeper. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... extracts made by M. de Praun fell by some chance into the hands of Count de Veltheim, under whose direction they were published at Strasburg, in 1789, with no other alterations than the correction of the obsolete and vicious orthography of ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans

... surrendering to the British Admiral, an officer ran a lance through the boy's body. The poor boy was just able to get back, and died immediately, close to where Drake was. The Spaniards had allowed their vicious pride to incite them to commit murder and to insult the British Admiral, who promptly avenged both deeds by having two friars taken to the place where the boy had been stabbed, and there hanged. "El Draque" sent a further note to the governor informing him that unless ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... the city next day—Salama rowing, and little Kahdra lazily paddling at the bow—a wonderful city, with its narrow ways begrimed with the dirt of ages, and its balconied houses looking as if disease and sin had soaked into them and given them a vicious tottering beauty, horrible and yet lovely too. We saw the swarming life of the bazaar, the white turbans coming and going, diversified by the rose and yellow Hindu turbans, and the caste-marks, orange and red, ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck

... character, had seemed to filter themselves free from every golden grain in passing through the mechanism of Randal's intellect, and came forth at last into egotism clear and unalloyed. Nevertheless, it is a strange truth that, to a man of cultivated mind, however perverted and vicious, there are vouchsafed gleams of brighter sentiments, irregular perceptions of moral beauty, denied to the brutal unreasoning wickedness of uneducated villany—which, perhaps ultimately serve as his punishment—according to the old thought of the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... the Wizard, and Jim quickly freed himself from his unseen tormenters by a few vicious kicks and then obeyed. As soon as he trotted out upon the surface of the river he found himself safe from pursuit, and Zeb was already running ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... notice of good-humored satire pointed at it by Cowper. [Footnote: "The Inestimable Estimate of Brown."] And the possibility of such exceeding folly in a man otherwise of good sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... (August 26, 1813) the Allies were encamped on the left bank of the Elbe. Their forces were posted on the heights, but the position was cut transversely by a deep ravine, so that the left wing was isolated from the centre and right. This vicious disposition did not escape the penetrating eye of Napoleon, who attacked their isolated wing with superior forces and routed it completely, with the capture of 10,000 prisoners, before any assistance could arrive. The task of creating lateral communications, ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous

... done nothing to battle with the mightiest modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to their deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and their improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some spectacle of piercing misery caused by Drink (as nearly all English misery is) I simply choked down the tendency to ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... lecture of this course, I remarked to you, gentlemen, that the scope of Medical Jurisprudence is much wider than that of Medical Law. It embraces many subjects of which human laws take no cognizance, and in particular such vicious actions as do not violate the rights of others, but are injurious to those only who practise them. They undermine the health and shorten the lives of the guilty parties, and bring in their train diseases the most destructive and often ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only an accidental Possession and Life-rent, what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep-down ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... the mind and the object. I suspect that the view is fostered by the dislike of relations, and that it is felt the mind could not know objects unless there were something "in" the mind which could be called the state of knowing the object. Such a view, however, leads at once to a vicious endless regress, since the relation of idea to object will have to be explained by supposing that the idea itself has an idea of the object, and so on ad infinitum. I therefore see no reason to believe that, when we are acquainted with an object, there ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... or the harvests were bad. The most one can do is to attribute such unreasoning and unwarranted cruelty to the ignorance and the coarseness which had been bred in undisciplined lives. Out of that seething, vicious mob there was only one man who had a scrap of humanity, and even he could not prevent his fellows from one of the worst crimes in the long ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton

... in staff duties marred to some extent the Confederate success. "A vicious usage," according to Dabney, "obtained at this time in the Southern armies." This was the custom of temporarily attaching to the staff of a general commanding a division or an army a company of cavalry to do the work of orderlies. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... glass; for this exertion of cunning is only an instinct of nature to enable them to obtain indirectly a little of that power of which they are unjustly denied a share; for, if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... Gudel had found him dying of hunger, and had rescued him. Soon he and Roulante were on excellent terms; both were thoroughly vicious. This liaison was furthermore cemented by a common hatred, and now they wanted to kill Gudel and Fanfar. They wished to keep Caillette that they might torture her as ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina

... adamantine. What was good enough for a native, he argued, was good enough for a vicious old alien. A stomach-pump in prison! What more? They would be wanting fried ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... brought me into collision with my teacher. I got many a cuff on the side of the head, and many a "palmy" on my hands with a thick strap of hard leather, which did not give me very inviting views as to the pleasures of learning. The master was vicious and vindictive. I think it a cowardly way to deal with a little boy in so cruel a manner, and to send him home with his back and fingers tingling and sometimes bleeding, because he cannot learn so quickly as ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... wanted to know, I presume," said Captain Chester, signing his name with a vicious dab of the pen and bringing his fist down with a thump on the blotting-pad, while he wheeled around in his chair and looked squarely up into the ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King

... incapability of perceiving beauty, it becomes savage or barbarous; and that there are many stages of progress to be found in it even in its best times, much truly savage grotesque occurring in the fine Gothic periods, mingled with the other forms of the ignoble grotesque resulting from vicious inclinations or base sportiveness. Nothing is more mysterious in the history of the human mind, than the manner in which gross and ludicrous images are mingled with the most solemn subjects in the work of the middle ages, whether of sculpture or illumination; and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... phrase had a damping effect. We were not "to rely on the champagne," as it was "not nourishment, but stimulus." She must be got to take food regularly, said Dr. Nash, however small the quantity. This seemed to suggest that she had fallen back on that vicious practice of starvation. But "my mother" was constantly talking with "mother" about old times, and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... from him. To her, he appeared ugly and loathsome. His smile was a vicious leer, and his voice ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... right when she talked of her friend Maria's principles. Dobbs Broughton had been so far lucky in that jump in the dark which he had made in taking a wife to himself, that he had not fallen upon a really vicious woman, or upon a woman of strong feeling. If it had come to be the lot of Mrs Dobbs Broughton to have six hours' work to do every day of her life, I think that the work would have been done badly, but that it would have kept her free from all ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... of wood called a column, and then fixed promiscuously to the outside of an ordinary house, is to my eye the vilest of architectural pretenses. Little turrets are better than this, or even brown battlements made of mortar. Except in America I do not remember to have seen these vicious bits of white timber—timber painted white— plastered on to the fronts and sides of ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... man had had for a wife one of those natures, anomalously vicious, which would almost tempt a metaphysical lover of our species to doubt whether the human form be, in all cases, conclusive evidence of humanity, whether, sometimes, it may not be a kind of unpledged and indifferent tabernacle, and whether, once for all to crush the saying ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... personally reprehensible in the vagrancy of these vagrants. Their histories show that, starting with the long hours and dreary winters of the farms they ran away from, through their character-debasing experience with irregular industrial labor, on to the vicious economic life of the winter unemployed, their training predetermined but one outcome. Nurture has triumphed over nature; the environment has produced its type. Difficult though the organization of these people may be, a coincidence ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... vicious emphasis. 'There—would you believe it? If you put a dirty little chit of a nurse-girl on board wages, it would come to more than that. And he just bought three houses in Millgate, and as rich as anything! Oh, it's shameful, I ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... ugliest person in Judaea. No! he is no friend of ours, this foxy-haired Judas Iscariot," the bad would say, thereby surprising the good people, in whose opinion there was not much difference between him and all other vicious people in Judaea. They would recount further that he had long ago deserted his wife, who was living in poverty and misery, striving to eke out a living from the unfruitful patch of land which constituted ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... did remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down, too, and burned them slowly and stood over the smoldering mass and inhaled the fumes and the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... to defend a system which is obnoxious to every Liberal principle. I would ask you to remember some words in Mr. Ruskin's chapter on "The Future of England," in his Crown of Wild Olive, which are very applicable to the situation:—"In Ireland, especially, a vicious system has been so long maintained that it has become impossible to give due support to the cause of order without seeming to countenance injury." The bodies which would deal with education, with private Bills, with provisional order Bills, and with appeals from ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... more rattled than ever; and Heady determined to do or die. He saw one of the Palatines running forward and looking backward to receive the ball on a long pass, and he gave him a vicious body-check. He knew it was a foul at the time, but he thought the referee was not looking. His punishment was fittingly double, for not only did the referee see and declare the foul, but the big Palatine came with such impetus that he knocked Heady galley-west. ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... slight attention. While the good clergyman warned his hearers of the terrible reckoning which must eventually come from neglect by the upper classes of the thousands born month after month in squalor and reared amid sordid, vicious surroundings, the girl's eyes rarely wandered from the two men in front of her. It was uplifting, conducive to healthful, normal emotions to look at them, and such emotions ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... and ferocity of Shu[u]zen's tone sent a thrill through those present—"Vicious jade! This is a sample of Kiku's hatred to this Shu[u]zen, through him of her disloyalty to the revered House. What explanation can be offered? What expiation?" Slowly and in despair O'Kiku raised her head. She caught the triumphant glance passed ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... and capital, The Revolution also pioneered fearlessly, asking for shorter hours and lower wages for workers, as it pointed out labor's valuable contribution to the development of the country. It also called attention to the vicious contrasts in large cities, where many lived in tumbledown tenements in abject poverty while the few, with more wealth than they knew what to do with, spent ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... I bolted off to Munich, And within the year, Underneath my German tunic Stowed whole butts of beer; For I drank like fifty fishes, Drank till all was blue, For whenever I was vicious I ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... the well-meaning moralist of unbalanced mind, the parlor critic who condemns others but has no power himself to do good and but little power to do ill—all these were as alien to Lincoln as the vicious and unpatriotic themselves. His life teaches our people that they must act with wisdom, because otherwise adherence to right will be mere sound and fury without substance; and that they must also act high-mindedly, or else what seems to be wisdom will in the end turn out to be ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... travellers. They lacked the grotesque jollity of the Ladakhis of Western Tibet, their cousins in creed and race, and I met nothing of the manly friendliness which marked the people of Mongolia whom I had to do with later. Never have I seen men of more vicious expression than some I met in my strolls about Tachienlu, and I could well believe the stories told of the ferocity shown by the lamas along the frontier. Very likely the people are better than their priests, but if so, their looks belie them. There is rarely a man—or a people—so low ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... of the nation or what political ills may be connected with farm mortgages, but how to make use of these necessary and beneficent agencies for the acquirement of a farm. A system of tenancy which leads to absent landlordism and a permanent tenant class is thoroughly vicious, while a practice which enables a man to become, within a reasonable period, a land-owning farmer is a thoroughly approvable and, indeed, necessary ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt

... up the sheet of blank paper with a vicious dab and went back to her work, crumpling it. Passing the hat-tree, she was tempted to grab the Morrison's coat and waistcoat and run into the mill with them, dodging Mac Tavish and his paper-weights in spite of what she knew of his threats ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... youth the way to well-doing,— by precept, by example, and by habit at an early age. Precept, without example and habit, has but little weight, yet how can a child have either of these, if the parents are encouraged and assisted in living a vicious life? Nations and ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... being expanded to twenty-four articles (in place of the original twenty-one largely because discussion had shown the necessity of breaking up into smaller units some of the original articles). Most significant, however, is the fact that Group V (which in its original form was a more vicious assault on Chinese sovereignty than the Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia of June, 1914), was so remodelled as to convey a very different meaning, the group heading disappearing entirely and an innocent-looking exchange of notes being asked for. It ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... rebel dynasty, and enabled it to wield the influence and authority of the whole people of the seceding States, with some few remarkable exceptions. To break up this combination will do more than merely defeat a hostile power: it will, in effect, annihilate the whole vicious organization, and leave its elements free to engage in other combinations, more in accordance with right, and better calculated to secure success and prosperity. It is not unreasonable to anticipate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... instruction of the working-classes during the last twenty-five years, have been unprecedented in any former period of our history. What have been the results? Has crime declined in proportion to the spread of education? Are the best instructed classes the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the Tempter? So far from it, the consequences, hitherto at least, have been melancholy and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... viii. should have been followed by a revival of the same coalition within a short time. If, however, there was such a revival, it may remind us of the conditions of all warfare for God and goodness, either in our own lives or in the world. Sins and vicious institutions, once defeated, have a terrible power of swift recovery. The thorns cut down sprout fast again. Let no man say, 'I have extirpated that sin from my nature,' for, if he does, it will surprise him when he is lulled ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the utterances of representative men were sometimes directly contradictory. On January 20, 1827, for instance, Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, speaking in the hall of the House of Representatives at the annual meeting of the Society, said: "Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored. It is the inevitable result of their moral, political, and civil degradation. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites." Just a moment later he said: "Every emigrant to Africa is ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... state to you, Susan, that my parentage is as obscure as it well can be; and secondly, that the early part of my life was as vicious. I may, indeed, extenuate it when I enter into an explanation, and with great justice: but I have now only stated the facts generally. If you wish me to enter into particulars, much as I shall blush at the exposure, and painful as the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... which the affair had taken. It was for the most part composed of the worst element of the population, who, without any grievance of their own, real or imagined, had gathered together from the very force of their vicious inclinations and ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church

... worldling left the window, took a chair exactly opposite to mine, and looked at me steadily, with a hard and vicious smile. ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... angels, from the point of view of a scholar who had read the Iliad. I declare that I think that the passages where God the Father speaks, discusses the situation of affairs, and arranges matters with the Saviour, are some of the most profane and vicious passages in English literature. I do not want to be profane myself, because it is a disgusting fault; but the passage where the scheme of Redemption is arranged, where God enquires whether any of the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... professed. We seem therefore to be driven to absolute despair, for we have no other materials to work upon but those out of which God has been pleased to form the inhabitants of this island. If these be radically and essentially vicious, all that can be said is that those men are very unhappy to whose fortune or duty it falls to administer the affairs of this untoward people. I hear it indeed sometimes asserted that a steady perseverance in the present measures, and ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... what is amiss in it. I view in the same light the innovations making here. The new organization of the judiciary department is undoubtedly for the better. The reformation of the criminal code is an immense step taken towards good. The composition of the Plenary court is indeed vicious in the extreme; but the basis of that court may be retained, and its composition changed. Make of it a representative of the people, by composing it of members sent from the Provincial Assemblies, and it becomes a valuable member of the constitution. But it is ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... minutes beating about with the smoking torches cleared the scene of the vicious little insects, those not stupefied by the smoke beating a hasty retreat back to their home in the hollow log which bruin had tried ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... reincarnated fiends when the other women shrank back in fear, and said nothing to Mr. Bentley or Hodder until the incident was past. It was terrible indeed to behold this woman revert—almost in the twinkling of an eye—to a vicious wretch crazed for drink, to feel that the struggle had to be fought all over again. Unable to awe Sally Drover's spirit, she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... in his vicious pleasures, and went reeking from his debaucheries to obtain absolution from his confessors, the persecution of the Protestants went on as before. Nor was it until public opinion (such as it was) was brought to bear upon the hideous incongruity ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... defeat and capture by the foe and his subsequent liberation by the illustrious sons of Pandu by force of arms, it seemeth to me that the entry into Hastinapura of the proud, wicked, boastful, vicious, insolent, and wretched Duryodhana, engaged in insulting the sons of Pandu and bragging of his own superiority, must have been exceedingly difficult. Describe to me in detail, O Vaisampayana, the entry into the capital, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... A vicious boy let loose in a camp for half an hour, with a good sharp knife in his possession, can do a tremendous amount of destruction. Why, he might begin by cutting the bags that held their sugar, so that every bit of it mixed ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren

... left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign Government. The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance—and some of those ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson

... was the chorus, as Fresno, with a vicious jab of his spurs and a jerk of the head, brought the animal ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... the young ensign, Captain Dunlop, as he shouted his warning, had turned his horse to the left, so as to cut off the boar when he turned, and he was now so close that the boar, in passing, had only time to give a vicious blow at the fallen man, which laid his arm open from his shoulder to ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... was composed with due regard to the proprieties: here you have no vicious intrigues, no love affair, no supposititious child, no getting money on false pretences, no young spark setting a wench ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... think. Young people's pranks! Youth, let the moderns say what they will, is inclined to vice and to vicious actions. Senor de Rey, who is a person of great endowments, could not be altogether perfect—why should it be wondered at that those pretty girls should have captivated him, and, after getting his money out of him, should have made him the accomplice of their shameless and criminal insults to ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... concern; Hunter, it is said, could manage to get the body of any person he wanted, were it that of giant, dwarf, hunchback or lord, but later, when the number of students increased very rapidly, the trade of "resurrection man'' became commoner, and attracted the lowest dregs of the vicious classes. It is computed that in 1828 about 200 people were engaged in it in London alone, though only a few gained their entire livelihood by it. In the first half of the 18th century, and for some time afterwards, the few dissections which were undertaken were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... But I enjoyed my life. I don't suppose anyone ever enjoyed life more. Every day of my former existence gave the lie to the good people who tell you that to be happy you must be virtuous. I was idle, extravagant, and vicious, and I was one of the happiest of men. As to my racing and my horses, they were a constant delight to me. I can't think now of those mornings on the Heath—the gallops of my colts—the change and excitement of it ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sit, were derived not from the people, but from themselves; from the strong measure of the septennial bill, which can only be paralleled by il serar di consiglio of the Venetian history. Yet candour will own that to the same parliament every Englishman is deeply indebted: the septennial act, so vicious in its origin, has been sanctioned by time, experience, and the national consent. Its first operation secured the House of Hanover on the throne, and its permanent influence maintains the peace and stability of government. As often as a repeal has been moved in the House of Commons, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... understand that MALAMBRUNO told me that, whenever fortune should direct me to the knight who was to be our deliverer, he would send him a steed—not like the vicious jades let out for hire, for it should be that very wooden horse upon which PETER of Provence carried off the fair MAGALONA.... MALAMBRUNO, by his art, has now got possession of him, and by this means posts about to every port ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various

... Time doth in its flight debase Whate'er it finds? our fathers' race, More deeply versed in ill Than were their sires, hath born us yet More wicked, destined to beget A race more vicious still. ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... was Del Pinzo who had sent, or caused to be sent the mysterious warnings, no one doubted. Nor did anyone doubt but that the vicious Mexican half-breed had played tricks with ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... and elevated Otho, a profligate noble, to the throne; but he was obliged to contend with a rival aspirant, Vitellius, commander of the German legions, who defeated him, and became emperor A.D. 69. Vitellius was not only vicious, like his predecessor, but was cowardly and inefficient. The Syrian and Egyptian legions refused to obey so worthless a ruler, and proclaimed their commander, Flavius Vespasian, as emperor. As Vespasian's general, Antonius, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... put off the burden of one's own debts upon other people. That man ought to pay the "tributum" for a property who receives the income of it. But some of the Goths in Picenum and the two Tuscanies[339] are evading the payment of their proper taxes[340]. This vicious practice must be suppressed at once, lest it spread by imitation. If anyone in a spirit of clownish stubbornness shall still refuse to obey our commands as expressed through you, affix the proper notice to his houses and confiscate them, that ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... too obvious to create any embarrassment to so consummate a deceiver. He described the danger of that vicious mistrust of our powers, that is the enemy of all generous and heroic action. He reminded his captive how recent were his purposes, and how many unforeseen incidents might be crowded into so eventful a moment. There were goblins, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... left his mouth when an explosion was heard and the shell could be observed moving upward at a very high angle, and descending into the water with a vicious plunge. ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward

... burst of flame, a crash, and a vicious whizz as the powerful projectile leaped from its stand and sped out to sea, in grand defiance of the opposing gale, with its light line ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... vicious twist, but happily her bones were in better condition than his. She stretched her other hand toward the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... have the effect of putting the worst elements of the Irish nation in power, and keeping them there irremoveably. We are to have an Executive at the mercy of a House of Representatives, and the result will be a government, or series of governments, as weak and vicious as those of France, with this difference, that here all purifying changes such as seem imminent in France will be absolutely prevented by the irresistible power of England. The true model for us would be a constitution like yours in the United ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... at the mark in an instant, Jim as full of sprightly confidence as ever, and Berks with a fixed grin upon his bull-dog face and a most vicious gleam in the only eye which was of use to him. His half-minute had not enabled him to recover his breath, and his huge, hairy chest was rising and falling with a quick, loud panting like a spent hound. "Go in, boy! ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... weeks. Interminable they seemed to the anxious conqueror at Moscow, who yawned even at the theater; who forgot the stern abstemiousness of his table habits, and, like a gourmet, spent hours at his meals merely to kill time; who threw himself into vicious ways, and contracted a loathsome disease; who lost all interest even in his troops, and finally, unkempt, preoccupied, and feverish, seemed indifferent to everything. The crown, scepter, and robe wherewith he had hoped to be invested as Emperor ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... just at sunset, came A scud of driving cloud; the lightning's flame; The sun glared from a vicious, misty socket, And in the moaning twilight curved a rocket While a blue flame blurred and frayed At Castle Pinckney; thus we knew the storm Had ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... always delighted with something new, strange, and unusual, the better to humour them, he was not only frequently extravagant in his expressions, but likewise in his characters too, and drew them often more vicious, more covetous, and more foolish than they really were, and this so set the people a gazing and wondering. With these sort of characters many of our modern Comedies abound, which makes them too much degenerate into farce, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... "Lord! What a vicious little spitfire it is," said he to himself. Then, aloud: "It was my good intention to remove that foot and substitute the other one, which is better ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... state that those pretas who suffer especially from thirst, as a consequence of faults committed in former lives, are unable to see water.—This proverb is used in speaking of persons too stupid or vicious to perceive ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... became strangely directed to just such reforms of language as would be apt to strike the imagination of a pedagogue of his calibre. In the first place, he had brought from home with him a great number of sounds that were decidedly vulgar and vicious, and with these in full existence in himself, he had commenced his system of reform on other people. As is common with all tyros, he fancied a very little knowledge sufficient authority for very great theories. His first ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... might relate, if he were endowed with reason and speech. Your good sense will suggest to you that the amiable characters herein depicted are meant as examples for imitation; and that the conduct of the vicious is to be disapproved of ...
— The Adventures of a Squirrel, Supposed to be Related by Himself • Anonymous

... their vicious tendency; others fall because of misplaced affections; many sin through a love of dress, which is fostered by society and by the surroundings amidst which they may be placed; many, very many, embrace a life of shame to escape poverty While each of these different phases of prostitution require ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... domestic days—broken maritally only by the jaded, harsh word at the gate, the explosive criticism of food, the deadening, depressing, feminine consciousness of there being a man's—vicious temper in ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... and scattered in front of the menacing hoofs that flew in the air as the vicious ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard

... Caught in this "vicious circle," woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Whether it was the tyranny of a monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... criminals and their offences! No punishment however exemplary, no reward however great, could operate on the minds of these unthinking people. Equally indifferent to the pain which the former might occasion, and the gratification that the other might afford, they blindly pursued the dictates of their vicious inclinations, to whatever they prompted; and when stopped by the arm of justice, which sometimes reached them, they endured the consequences with an hardened obstinacy and indifference that effectually checked ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... Promenade des Anglais meets you every day in your study of Nice. The city charms: and it repels. You have been drinking in its beauty and its fascination. Suddenly something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell. On the Promenade des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose. Not vicious women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... a curse on her; then he said with a vicious, sharp flash in his eyes: "That patrician viper! Every where in everything—she spoils it all! But wait a while! I fancy she will soon be removed from our path, and then. . . . No, even now, at ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... which beset young men, and warned them to avoid vice of all kinds, drinking, gambling, and the rest. Among other things he mentioned the social evil, and contrasted the happy home of the chaste man and his virtuous wife with that of the drunken, vicious libertine. The seducer was anathematized, and a graphic description given of the poor degraded women who had lost the one jewel in their crown. It is needless to say that both Mrs. Hazelton and her paramour felt exceedingly uncomfortable during this discourse; the former who ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer

... excludes, for example, the use of a toxic substance such as alcohol, which is not a natural food, but not the moderate satisfaction of the sexual appetite which is normally intended for the preservation of the species, for this satisfaction may be good or bad, normal or vicious, innocent or criminal, according to circumstances. In this connection, the application of the right measure, and choice of the appropriate object raise delicate and complicated questions. So-called moral sermons lead to ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... have his hand cut off; and whoever slew a brother Crusader was condemned to be tied alive to the corpse of his victim, and buried with him. No young women were allowed to follow the army, to the great sorrow of many vicious and of many virtuous dames, who had not courage to elude the decree by dressing in male attire. But many high-minded and affectionate maidens and matrons, bearing the sword or the spear, followed their husbands and lovers to the war in spite of King Richard, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... course, must mean your own), And the "rational" abolished and "sincerity" demolished, you will find that you have grown With a "colour-sense" fresh handselled (whilst the moral ditto's cancelled) you'll develop into—well, What Philistia's fools malicious might esteem a vaurien vicious (alias "hedonic swell"). And every one will say, As you writhe your sinuous way. "If the highest result of the true 'Development' is decomposition, why see What a very perfectly developed young man this developed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable. Macaulay believed a London apprentice could detect Scotticisms in Robertson; Hume's style is often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... the frame rots in the ermine: how the body and soul are polluted by vicious passions! Such, Balsamo, are the penalties of the lusts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... Warren had felt poverty's vicious pinch, and before her life had become one continual struggle to make both ends meet. Somehow, her point of view had changed since then—points of view will change when the howl of the wolf is heard in the near distance, and yet ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... this a vicious-looking nag, with mane half pulled out, and a "watch-eye," and feet "interfering," and a tail from which had been subtracted enough hair to make six "waterfalls," squealed out the suggestion that it was time for a rebellion, and she moved that we take the field, and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... myself; still, though a little better result was obtained, I found trade adulteration still at work with the oils, the varnishes, the mediums—in fact, with everything that painters use to gain effect in their works. I could nowhere escape from vicious dealers, who, to gain a miserable percentage on every article sold, are content to be among the most dishonest men ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... king, especially of this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep himself in a continual state of communication, as it were, by some vital and organic sympathy, with the most essential of these changes. And yet this punctilio of etiquette, like some vicious forms of law or technical fictions grown too narrow for the age, which will not allow of cases coming before the court in a shape desired alike by the plaintiff and the defendant, is so framed as to defeat equally the wishes ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... such things, but I am sure his hands are near as small as mine, but with a grasp like iron. He is wonderfully strong and hath an awful stamp when in rage, and his temper is most violent and bad, and his tongue is vicious;—indeed, Father, I know not what to do with his oaths. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... not know. He lay still and endured this horrible tickling, which seemed to bite deep into him, rather than make the effort to move, which he loathed to do. The drops ran off his forehead down his temples. Those he did not mind: he was blunt there. But they started again, in tiny, vicious spurts, down the sides of his chest, from under his armpits, down the inner sides of his thighs, till he seemed to have a myriad quivering tracks of a myriad running insects over his hot, wet, highly-sensitized body. His nerves were trembling, one and all, with outrage and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... hoofs to the ground and thunders towards the youngster at full gallop. Just as the great horns lash upwards for the toss, the boy twists himself round, and at that moment the space between the two is to be counted by inches. The bull usually puts so much vicious power into this first effort, that at the attempted toss he flings his forequarters clear of the ground, and his forefeet come down with a sounding crack on the hard floor. There is nothing left for the fighter to do but run, and he vaults the barrier into the ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... strangers in the greenwood and had learned many cunning and desperate holds; moreover, he had learned to bide his time; thus, though Gefroi's iron muscles yet pinned his arms, he waited, calm-eyed but with every nerve a-quiver, for that moment when Gefroi's vicious grip should slacken. ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... in fact a brighter day for the colored people. In 1840 an observer said that they had improved faster than any other people in the city. The Cincinnati Gazette after characterizing certain Negroes as being imprudent and vicious, said of others: "Many of these are peaceable and industrious, raising respectable families and acquiring property."[36] Mr. James H. Perkins, a respectable citizen of the city, asserted that the day school which the colored children attended had shown by examination that it was as good as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... copy have set it in imprint, to the intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knyghts used in those days, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punished and put oft to shame and rebuke.... For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, hardness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... the slave, by conferring on him that freedom to which he, in common with all mankind, had an inviolable right; justice to the slave-owner, by compensating him fairly for the loss of what (however originally vicious the practice may have been) he was entitled by long usage and more than one positive law to regard as property; and a farther justice to the slave, that justice which consists in being careful so to confer benefits as to do the greatest amount of good to the recipient. ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... away. But Halsted Street, with its picturesque mutations of poverty and its foreign air, was infinitely worthier than this. Sommers shuddered to think how many miles of Cottage Grove Avenue and its like Chicago contained,—not vicious, not squalid, merely desolate and unforgivably vulgar. If it were properly paved and cleaned, it would be bearable. But the selfish rich and the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... invalid. The fifth trope points out the impossibility of proving the sensible by the intelligible inasmuch as it remains to establish the intelligible in its turn by the sensible. Such a process is a vicious circle and has no logical validity. A comparison of these tropes with the ten tropes enumerated in the article AENESIDEMUS shows that scepticism has made an advance into the more abtruse questions of metaphysics. The first ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... were left much as they were. The towns had little or no cause of complaint, and the lesser Saxon gentry, with the Franklins and the Earls, were unmolested, unless they happened to have vicious neighbors. The Curfew bell, about which so great a clamor was raised, was a universal regulation in Europe; it was a call to prayers, an intimation that it was bedtime, and a means of guarding against fire, when streets were often nothing but wooden booths thatched. The intense ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... uncle's assertion that he must always, inwardly, have been naturally wild and bad, was as wrong as such assertions usually are, for he was no more truly vicious ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed and agonized With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child, Poor, anxious penitence is quick dissolved; Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air; And all our rarer, better, truer self, That sobbed religiously in yearning song, That ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot

... purchase goods which have been conveyed along it. I remember my grandfather well. He was a well-bred man, and a perfect gentleman in his manners; but, on the whole, I think he was wickeder than my father, who, after all, was caught in the wheels of a vicious system, and had either to spoil others or be spoiled by them. But my grandfather—the old rascal!—was in no such dilemma. Master as he was of his bit of merry England, no man could have enslaved him, and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw



Words linked to "Vicious" :   vicious cycle, roughshod, inhumane, venomous, deplorable, brutal, barbarous, cruel, criminal, viciousness, fell, reprehensible, malicious, vicious circle, poisonous, wrong, vice, wicked



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