"Contumelious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were, withal, of great pride, yet it was not like our inflammable Spanish pride: they stood not much upon the "pundonor," the high punctilio, and rarely drew the stiletto in their disputes, but their pride was silent and contumelious. Though from a remote and somewhat barbarous island, they believed themselves the most perfect men upon earth, and magnified their chieftain, the Lord Scales, beyond the greatest of their grandees. With ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... added the knight, colouring, "I forgot that he is not advised of my name and land; and, indeed, sith thou art to be spokesman, I marvel why Harold should have prayed my service at all, at the risk of subjecting a Norman knight to affronts contumelious." ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and proprietor of Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... under their protection. Of the five prisoners first tried, condemned, and duly hanged, two were signal criminals. One of them, the Kotwal or Mayor of Cabul, was proved to have superintended the contumelious throwing of the bodies of the slaughtered Guides of the mission escort into the ditch of the Balla Hissar. Another was proved to have carried away from the wrecked Residency a head believed to have been Cavagnari's, and to ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... a man as Mr. Middleton. You have heard the audacious and insulting language he has held to them, his declining to correspond with them, and the mode of his doing it. There are, my Lords, things that embitter the bitterness of oppression itself: contumelious acts and language, coming from persons who the other day would have licked the dust under the feet of the lowest servants of these ladies, must have embittered their wrongs, and poisoned the very cup of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... pitiless Alva, which once, as the Hotel de Cuylembourg, covered the same site. Beneath its roof the Protestant Confederates, in 1566, drew up their memorable "Request" to Margaret of Parma; and at one of its windows these "Beggars," being dismissed with such contumelious scorn from the presence of the Regent, nobly converted the stigma into a war-cry; and, with the wallet of the "Gueux" slung across their shoulders, drank out of wooden porringers a benison on the cause of the emancipation of the United Provinces. So prompted to think of these stirring ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... best understands himself is least likely to be deceived in others; you judge of others by yourselves, and therefore measure them by an erroneous standard whenever your autometry is false. This is one reason why the empty critic is usually contumelious and flippant, the competent one ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the incident took place which has passed down in the form of an inspiriting proverb. Yuen Yan had conscientiously delivered at the door of his abode the last of his company and was turning his footsteps towards his own arch when he encountered the contumelious Ho, who was likewise returning at the close of a day's mendicancy—but with this distinction: that, whereas Ho was followed by two stalwart attendants carrying between them a sack full of money, Yan's share of his band's enterprise consisted ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... doubted but he was a doer in it, so far as might tend to the maintenance of the right and prerogative of holy church. And even no less unquietness had another of our princes with Thomas of Arundel, who fled to Rome for fear of his head, and caused the pope to write an ambitious and contumelious letter unto his sovereign about his restitution. But when (by the king's letters yet extant, and beginning thus: "Thomas proditionis non expers nostrae regiae majestati insidias fabricavit"[3]) the pope understood the bottom of the matter, he was contented that Thomas should be ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Crown Lands. He had inveighed against some of the human bloodsuckers of that day, in language which certainly was not gracious or parliamentary, but which as certainly was both forcible and true. He had even ventured to speak in contumelious terms of the reverend Rector of York himself, whom he had stigmatized as "a lying little fool of a renegade Presbyterian." Nay, he had advised the sending of commissioners to England to entreat Imperial attention to colonial grievances. He had been the one man in Upper Canada possessed ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... crowd which usually is in following at such affairs, beside the little troop of horse which was my escort, and my brother and Parson Downs riding on either side. Parson Downs, though some might reckon him as being somewhat contumelious in his manner of leaving the tobacco-cutting, yet was not so when there was anything to be gained by his service. He was moreover quit of any blame by his office of spiritual adviser, though it was not customary for a criminal to be attended to the stocks by a ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... further, to bring into contempt the authority of the Company, and to excite a resistance to their lawful orders, frame a supposition that the Court of Directors had intended the restoration of the Rajah of Benares, and on that ground did presume in the said libel to calumniate, in disrespectful and contumelious terms, the policy of the Court of Directors, as well as the person whom he did conceive to be the object of their protection, as followeth. "Of the consequences of such a policy I forbear to speak. Most happily, the wretch whose hopes may be excited ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
