"Malignity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by fraud and force our just government sixty-seven years ago (cheers). They have been sixty-seven sad years of insult and robbery—of impoverishment—of extermination—of suffering beyond what any other subject people but ours have ever endured from the malignity of foreign masters (cheers). Nearly through all these years the Irish people continued to pray for the restoration of their Irish national rule. They offered their forgiveness to England. They offered even their friendship to England if she would only ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... particulars, if they require any, must be found in the savage ferocity with which I was assailed, the brutal language applied to my character and conduct, and the constant threats made of personal violence. Malignity and hate, with threats of assassination, followed me like a shadow for months. I went always armed for protection against assault. I should have been less or more than man had I preserved at all times perfect calmness either in ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... touch of the Gulab on his arm, and the scorn in her eyes, Hunsa shivered and drew back, his head hanging in abasement, but his face devilish in its malignity. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... galleys; but first he resolved to clear the Tuscan sea, and the coasts of Africa, Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, of all piratical adventurers; which he effected in forty days, by his own indefatigable endeavors and those of his lieutenants. But, as the consul Piso was indulging his malignity at home, in wasting his stores and discharging his seamen, he sent his fleet round to Brundusium, and went himself by ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... occasion apprehension. His frame was small, his limbs slight, and they did not afford promise of much activity. His face was not ill favored, though a quick, restless black eye, keen and searching, had in it a lurking malignity, like that of a snake, which impressed the spectator with suspicion at the first casual glance. His nose, long and sharp, was almost totally fleshless; the skin being drawn so tightly over the bones, as to provoke the fear that any violent effort would cause them ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of overwhelming malignity oppresses me. In spite of much baffling ambiguity and the frequent evasion of conscious guilt, there can be no longer any reasonable doubt that these barbarians DO ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Machiavelli's model, a man who rivalled all the atrocities of the worst Roman emperors. But Borgia failed. That matters not to Machiavelli. His failure was "due to the extreme malignity of fortune." Mr. Morley's rapid sketch of Caesar Borgia, ferocious, lustful in insane ways, treacherous, splendidly vile, is a glance into the Hell that was Italy. Machiavelli was in this man's train and frankly admired him and his methods. All the men of the times seemed to ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... have ears," returned Ellieslaw, eyeing him with a look of triumphant malignity, "but domestic spies, Mr. Ratcliffe, will soon find themselves without any, if any such dares to continue his abode in a family where his coming was an unauthorized intrusion, where his conduct has been that of a presumptuous ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... of what medical men call malignity in the case of Maurice Kirkwood. The most alarming symptom was a profound prostration, which at last reached such a point that he lay utterly helpless, as unable to move without aid as the feeblest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... judge from its local knowledge (pp. 217 and 254) together with its ignorance of Marocco (p. 223). It shows a contrast, in which Arabs delight, of an almost angelical goodness and forgiveness with a well-nigh diabolical malignity, and we find the same extremes in Abu Sir the noble-minded Barber and the hideously inhuman Abu Kir. The excursion to Mauritania is artfully managed and gives a novelty to the mise-en-scene. Gharib and Ajib (vi. 207, vii. 91) belongs to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perished; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity nor gratify malignity, but are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... last gasp. Yet Mrs. Edwards shook in dread every time she entered the room. The look seemed conscious still, intensified malignity and despair creeping in. She was afraid and guilty and unstrung. Perhaps, with some sudden revival of his forces, he would kill her. He was lying there, too still for defeat. His life had been an expression of hates; the last one might ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... water of Lough Neagh glistening in the sunlight. Nearer at hand thatched farmhouses smoked, signs that the yeomen were enjoying the fruits of victory. Hope pointed to Farranshane, where William Orr's house was burning—a witness to a malignity so bitter that it wreaked the vengeance from which the dead man was safe on his widow ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... betrayed no uneasiness at a threatening demonstration, a determination was made to preserve it for critical examination. As soon as the snake was touched the cloudy veils were withdrawn, and the eyes flashed with the fire of malignity. It appeared to be spiteful because it had been caught napping. The specimen was not preserved, although ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... uncontroulable eagerness of anticipation, which seems to dilate her form and take possession of all her faculties, this solid, substantial flesh and blood display of passion, exhibit a striking contrast to the cold, abstracted, gratuitous, servile malignity of the Witches, who are equally instrumental in urging Macbeth to his fate for the mere love of mischief, and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... glancing aside at his sister, as though he were talking for her information, and speaking with a snarling malignity, in violent contrast to his usual smoothness, 'that I answer to all these questions,—Quilp—Quilp, who deludes me into his infernal den, and takes a delight in looking on and chuckling while I scorch, and burn, and bruise, and maim myself—Quilp, who never once, no never once, in all ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... human beings give, as it were, a moral sanction to feelings of hatred or contempt, they unchain a demon in their breasts. We are all oftentimes shocked by anecdotes illustrative of the rancorous spite, and vulgar, unwomanly malignity, cherished by many Southern females against the Union and its defenders. Now were it not well for us, on the other side, to take warning, and, for the sake of our own peace of mind, our own dignity of character, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... anxious about his position, for while he believed that Whately was scarcely capable of transcending the usages of war, he knew well that opportunity only limited the malignity of Perkins. He therefore rarely took his eyes from this ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... newspapers, and the attacks were concentrated on Mr. Adams. The calumnies by which his father's administration had been prostrated five-and-twenty years before were revived, and poured out with renewed malignity. Duane, in his Aurora, published in Philadelphia, and his coaedjutors in other parts of the Union, represented him as "a royalist," "an enemy to the rights of man;" as a "friend of oligarchy;" as a "misanthrope, educated in contempt of his fellow-men;" as "unfit to be the minister of ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Calvados even if he suspected her, would never venture to cause her arrest, went fearlessly among her neighbours. She was not aware that the enquiry had passed from Caffarelli's hands into those of the prefect of Rouen, and was now managed by a man whose malignity and stubbornness would not be ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... persecutions against Ursula Mirouet, his future wife; he gave me proofs, and told me of Goupil's confession before witnesses. He also told me of my father's conduct, first in refusing to pay Goupil the price agreed on for his wicked invention, and next, out of fear of Goupil's malignity, going security to Monsieur Dionis for the price of his practice which Goupil ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... the lovers' trysting place. The little cry that Diana had uttered upon perceiving the Duke had put him upon his guard. Bruno had found him out; but, as he knew him, merely fawned upon him. He was delighted at the fury of the Duke, whom he hated with cold and steady malignity; but the courage of Diana filled him with admiration. Her sublime audacity won his warmest praises, and he longed for her as an ally to aid him in his scheme of revenge. He knew that the girl would find herself in a terribly embarrassing position, and thus she would be sure to call upon ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... that step, that irrevocable step, he knew that he would not have the courage to take it. For if Basterga had so much as two minutes' notice, if his ear so much as caught the tread of those who came to take him, he might, in pure malignity, pour the medicine on the floor, or he might so hide it as to defy search. And at the thought—at the thought of the destruction of that wherein lay his only chance of life, his only hope of seeing the sun and feeling again the balmy breath of spring, the Syndic trembled and shook ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... woollen carpet. His age might have been anything between twenty-five and sixty; it was impossible to form any opinion on the point. Just now, however, his yellow monkey face was convulsed with an expression of intense malignity, and he was standing there in the sunshine cursing rapidly beneath his breath in Dutch, and shaking his fist after the form of the retreating Boer—a very epitome of impotent but ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... fire is no less certain: the fire evaporates and disperses all that is innocent and pure, leaving only acrid and sour matter which resists its influence. The effect produced by poisons on animals is still more plain to see: its malignity extends to every part that it reaches, and all that it touches is vitiated; it burns and scorches all the inner parts ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of Bolshevism one is a Russian, the other a Jew, the former, Ulianoff (better known as Lenin), the brain; the other, Braunstein (called Trotzky), the arm of the sect. Trotzky is an unscrupulous despot, in whose veins flows the poison of malignity. His element is cruelty, his special gift is organizing capacity. Lenin is a Utopian, whose fanaticism, although extensive, has well-defined limits. In certain things he disagrees profoundly with Trotzky. He resembles ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... wrote in 1753:—'I had the assurance to dispute with Mr. Johnson on the subject of human malignity, and wondered to hear a man, who by his actions shews so much benevolence, maintain that the human heart is naturally malevolent, and that all the benevolence we see in the few who are good is acquired by reason and religion.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... installed in a villa, semi-detached; the name, "Rosemore," on the gateposts. In a chair on the gravel walk he seemed to sit smoking a cigar, a blue ribbon in his buttonhole, victor over himself and circumstances and the malignity of bankers. He saw the parlour, with red curtains, and shells on the mantelpiece—and, with the fine inconsistency of visions, mixed a grog at the mahogany table ere he turned in. With that the Farallone gave one of the aimless and nameless movements ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fog, which with a seeming malignity was lifting, veil upon thick veil, now that the mischief was accomplished, Dick could see the faint outlines of land; gaunt trees and a house, quite near at hand, certainly within call. Mrs. Hayter was in a paroxysm of terror, murmuring her fright and strange endearing terms all ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... it is far more reasonable to believe in another life, than in the delusiveness of these expectations. For I cannot suppose that this universal expectation will be disappointed, without believing in the wickedness, nay, the infinite malignity, of the Supreme Ruler, which my whole nature utterly refuses to do. For what more cruel, than to create this earnest and universal longing, and not gratify it? Does it ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... similar malignity, a certain secretary in Spain, who was likewise invited to a supper, hearing the servants, while bringing in the evening candles, cry "let us conquer," affixing a malignant interpretation to that common exclamation, in like manner ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... a stop to all the little Advances of Hymen; the fatal Star that presided over the Destiny of Don Pedro had not yet vented its Malignity; and one moment's sight of Agnes gave new Force ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... privilege to be false to his old friends and to corrupt his young ones. In an age when sobriety was scorned or ignored he had the honor to be famous for his insobriety. A sycophant to those who could serve him and a bully to those who could not, Rigby added the meanness of the social parvenu to the malignity of the political bravo. At a time when men of birth and rank came to the House of Commons in the negligence of morning dress, Rigby was conspicuous for the splendor of his attire, and illuminated the green benches by a costume ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... with the royal views. But if the King chose to lay down a different policy, the Cardinal had to carry it out as best he could—or else to retire in disfavour. And he could not afford to retire in disfavour, since, if the royal countenance were once withdrawn, the malignity of his many enemies would be given rein, and his utter ruin would be inevitable. Therefore, while watching for any opportunity to convert the King from his martial designs, he made a desperate effort to fill ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... which poverty sometimes drives the best disposed persons, adding, that he "preserved the sources of action unpolluted, that his principles were never shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure or casual temptation." A higher eulogium, from so rigid a moralist, could not be pronounced on a man whose life was, for many years, unsettled and perplexed; and those only who have experienced the pressure of pecuniary necessities can ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... other assaults Pope replied by a long letter, suppressed, however, for the time, which, as Johnson says, exhibits to later readers "nothing but tedious malignity," and is, in fact, a careful raking together of everything likely to give pain to his victim. It was not published till 1751, when both Pope and Hervey were dead. In his later writings he made references to Sappho, which fixed the name upon her, and amongst other pleasant insinuations, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... house where he was a guest, and telling him he had attacked the serpent, the Jew was chagrined, and expostulated with him, for the injury he had done him: apprehensive that evil would visit him, he intimated to his guest, that he hoped he would leave his house, as he feared the malignity of the serpent; and he was not reconciled until my friend discovered to him that he had actually killed ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... that they might thus do evil with impunity. He offered to send, in each case, lists of Portuguese witnesses required, that they might be summoned by the native authorities; but nothing could overcome the obstinacy of the magistrates; they answered that his method was insolent; and with sullen malignity continued to accumulate charges against the troops, to refuse attendance in the courts, and to call the soldiers, their own as well as the British, 'licensed ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other. By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were confusingly twisted together to form ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... exceeded twenty-five, yet the countenance was that of one well versed in intrigue. The cast was Italian—the crisp black hair, swarthy complexion, and never-to-be-mistaken eyes. A large amount of Jesuit determination was expressed in his iris, blended with cunning, malignity, and fierceness. The features were prominent particularly the nose; the lips finely cut, but thin; the teeth beautiful and regular. In stature he was low, and habited in the dress of his order, a long black coat or gown, buttoned to the throat, ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... wildly fashioning excuses to avoid that horrid duel in the morning. He had always escaped by a margin so narrow that no precedent of the past gave assurance of luck for the future. He was mortally afraid that at last he had challenged such a monster of brute courage, malignity, and strength that nothing terrestrial could ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... of February 22, notwithstanding it was a National Holiday, such was the haste of the impeachers, to the evening of the 24th, almost without interruption. It was at times illustrated by marked ability, and on the Republican side by intense bitterness and partisan malignity. A large number of the members of the House participated ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... society around him, wealth honoured, poverty contemned, intrepid virtue proscribed and servility encouraged. From the influence of social and political institutions there is no escape: "They poison our minds before we can resist or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of Eastern seraglios they deprive us of our virility, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. So false is the opinion that has too generally prevailed that politics is an affair with which ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... which I have quoted begins with an indignant retort upon a member who had applied to him Burke's phrase about a perfect-bred metaphysician exceeding the devil in malignity and contempt for mankind. Huskisson frequently protested even against the milder epithet of theorist. He asserted most emphatically that he appealed to 'experience' and not to 'theory,' a slippery distinction which finds a good exposure in Bentham's Book of Fallacies.[48] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... beneath it at the moment, the recollection rankled in his heart as an affront to be avenged. As he drank his wine, courage, the want of which was, in his more sober moments, a check upon his bad temper, began to inflame his malignity, and he ventured upon several occasions to show his spleen, by contradicting Tyrrel more flatly than good manners permitted upon so short an acquaintance, and without any provocation. Tyrrel saw his ill humour and despised it, as that of an overgrown schoolboy, whom it was ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... air of the man expressed the cautious, careful voluptuary. The other, Father Johannes, was thin, wiry, and elastic, with hands like birds' claws, and an eye that reminded one of the crafty cunning of a serpent. His smile was a curious blending of shrewdness and malignity. He regarded his companion from time to time obliquely from the corners of his eyes, to see what impression his words were making, and had a habit of jerking himself up in the middle of a sentence and looking warily round to see if any one were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendships were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giant of literature did not take some unseemly directions and several unlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes of any unbiassed observer, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... general faults. The black ingredient which fouls our disposition is envy. Hence our eye is seldom, I am afraid, turned upward to those who are manifestly greater, better, wiser, or happier than ourselves, without some degree of malignity; while we commonly look downwards on the mean and miserable with sufficient benevolence and pity. In fact, I have remarked, that most of the defects which have discovered themselves in the friendships within my observation have arisen from envy only: a hellish vice; and ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... does it cannot for all that, if he be not such himself, but look upon you as an accursed and execrable fellow, and conclude you a greater traitor than he does, against whom you are so: for he tries the malignity of your disposition by your own hands, where he cannot possibly be deceived, you having no object of preceding hatred to move you to such an act; but he employs you as they do condemned malefactors in executions of justice, an ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... qualities—the most ennobling in national character—on the part of the so-called Southern Confederacy. From the hour of firing upon Fort Sumter to the present moment, the war has not been waged by the rebels as if in defense of the great principles of truth and justice, but with the malignity, the cruelty and barbarity which would, in many instances, put to blush the savages upon our western borders. In our dealing with them, the honor, integrity, fidelity and dignity of the nation have never been forgotten; and the policy of the noble ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering, makes the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... decisive evidence of the full truth of his assertion. It came to Franklin in a form which astounded him, while it opened his eyes and fixed his indignation upon a class of men who from that moment onward were to him the exponents of all malignity and baseness. The evidence came in the shape of the originals, the autographs, of the above-named letters, written by natives of the American soil, office-holders under the Crown, who, while pampered and trusted by their constituents on this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Burke that he was always desperately in debt, and in this country no politician under the rank of a baronet can ever safely be in debt. Burke's finances are, and always have been, marvels and mysteries; but one thing must be said of them—that the malignity of his enemies, both Tory enemies and Radical enemies, has never succeeded in formulating any charge of dishonesty against him that has not been at once completely pulverized, and shown on the facts to be impossible. {159} Burke's purchase of the estate at Beaconsfield in 1768, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... other's fortified posts as though they were the castles of barons living in mediaeval times. We see savage Micmacs and Etchemins of Acadia, only too willing to aid in the quarrels and contests of the white men who hate each with a malignity that even the Indian cannot excel; closely shorn, ill-clad mendicant friars who see only good in those who {93} help their missions; grave and cautious Puritans trying to find their advantage in the rivalry of their French neighbours; a Scotch nobleman and courtier who would be a king in Acadia ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... enter a broad field, wherein the prepuce seems to exercise a malign influence in the most distant and apparently unconnected manner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in the Arabian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malignity, striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations; unfitting him for marriage or the cares of business; making him miserable and an object of continual scolding and punishment in childhood, through its worriments ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... two forms of evil you will encounter, especially if you make an effort to be a godly Christian, to defend the truth and to live uprightly in the sight of all. You will meet with all manner of malice aforethought and deceit, and with faithlessness and malignity on the part of those you have benefited; again, with unmasked violence and injustice on the part of those who should protect you and see to your interests. This will hurt and move you to wrath. Yea, in your own house and among your dear Christian brethren you will often meet with that which vexes ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... more seriously than usual The mere fact of "Mrs. Mandeville's" having changed her lodging without telling any one where she was going, and without leaving any address at which letters could be forwarded to her—which the jealous malignity of Mrs. Milroy had interpreted as being undeniably suspicious in itself—had produced no great impression on the more impartial judgment of Allan's solicitor. People frequently left their lodgings in a private manner, with perfectly producible reasons for doing so. But the appearance of the place ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... and Acland, with profound contempt, and dislike the notion of personal contact or collision with them, as representatives of the foulest state of ill feeling that can be generated in the worst manufacturing regions—of sordid avarice, selfishness, envy, and malignity; but they are active—ever up and doing, and steadily applying themselves, with palatable topics, to the corruption of the hearts of the working classes. So, unless the persons to whom we allude choose to cast aside their morbid aversions—to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... accounts of the ways of God in bringing his sheep into the fold, must be admitted by all. The Bible abounds with these manifestations of Divine grace from the gentle voice that called Samuel, even unto the thunder which penetrated the soul of one, who followed the church with continued malignity, calling unto him, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?"—a voice so terrible, and accompanied by such a flood of light, as to strike the persecutor to the earth, and for a season to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sceptical inquirers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers. Less than an apostle is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibilities. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn: malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the known cases of signal opposition to Christianity, could not but hurry many good men into a vindictive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is communicated polemically (this is, not as it exists ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feet May stamp it for a slight time into smoke That shall blaze up again with growing speed, Until at last a fiery crash will come To cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere, And heal it of a long malignity That angry time discredits and disowns. Tonight there are men saying many things; And some who see life in the last of me Will answer first the coming call to death; For death is what is coming, and then life. I do not say again for the dull sake Of speech what you have heard me say ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... then, that I am sorrowful, cut off as I am from all my relatives, with strict orders never to cross the threshold of my father's house again, not even if I am dying for want of food? You have, doubtless, heard of the malignity displayed by the rebel leaders toward any Southerner who dares to differ with them in opinion, and have looked upon them as idle stories, gotten up for effect; but I know, by the most bitter experience, that it is a reality. Does it seem possible that a person can be so blind, ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... for an offence of great malignity and mischief; it is for the offence of conspiracy, which is charged to have been committed by the eight persons whose names are upon this indictment; and it is for you to consider upon the statement of the evidence I shall make to you, how far that offence is brought ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... firm in Paris in which I had invested a considerable sum of money afforded an opportunity for envy and malignity to irritate the First Consul against me. Bonaparte, who had not yet forgiven me for wishing to leave him, at length determined to sacrifice my services to a new fit ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... they indicate envy. The same eyes, when dry, show the possessors to be faithless, traitorous, and sacrilegious; and if these eyes are also yellow and cold, they argue insanity. For hollow eyes are the sign of craft and malignity; and if they are wanting in darkness, they also show foolishness. But if the eyes are too hollow, and of medium size, dry and rigid,—if, besides this, they have broad, overhanging eyebrows, and livid and pallid circles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Public Affairs, which, throughout the contest, acted in opposition to the Royal authority, and held sederunts at Aberdeen and Dundee as well as at Edinburgh, gratified their malignity, after Montrose gave up the fight in 1646, by fining the loyalists in enormous amounts of money, and decerning them to "lend" to the committee such sums - in many cases exorbitant - as they thought proper. Sir Robert Farquhar, formerly a Bailie of Aberdeen, was treasurer, ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness." He was a type of those whom the apostle described as "filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, deceit, malignity—implicable, unmerciful." ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... her anger of yesterday was as nothing to the storming rage which shook her now. Every line of her face revealed malignity. The eyebrows were drawn higher on her forehead, nearer to the wave of white hair that showed under her black hat. The nostrils dilated and contracted with indescribable rapidity. The lips, thickened and rolling back at intervals ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt of which his kindly nature could admit was at all times in store. 'Unhappy mortal!' says he to the literary tradesman, the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... himself at once in the arm-chair George had vacated. He was a powerful, thick-set fellow and evidently, by the deference the others paid him, a man of considerable importance. His expression was one of fixed malignity, and George rightly surmised that he need look for no mercy from this individual. He wondered who and what he was. Was he a magistrate, or some potentate of Arabi's army? He did not give him the idea of being ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... enchanting splendour of the court circle; those only who have felt its cheering influence can speak of its inspiring pleasures; and all who have participated in the elegant scene will laugh at the whispers of malignity and the innuendoes of disappointment, which are ever pregnant with some newly invented on dit of scandalous tendency, to libel a circle of whom they know nothing but by report; and that report, in nine instances out of ten, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... seeing the manuscripts, enlisted the aid of our tyrants, and came to seize, by force, a box that contained the precious papers. Lambert and I defended it with incredible courage. The trunk was locked, our aggressors could not open it, but they tried to smash it in the struggle, a stroke of malignity at which we shrieked with rage. Some of the boys, with a sense of justice, or struck perhaps by our heroic defence, advised the attacking party to leave us in peace, crushing us with insulting contempt. But suddenly, brought to the spot by the noise of a battle, Father Haugoult roughly intervened, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... America, a mob armed with tar, feathers, poles, and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails, together with the reasons which induced that mob, I propose to give it. I cannot promise however, to write such a book as ought to be written to illustrate fully the bitterness, malignity, and cruelty, of American prejudice against color, and to show its terrible power in grinding into the dust of social and political bondage, the hundreds of thousands of so-called free men and women of ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... a caustic and vigorous mode of expression. His name was a target for the wits. "A physician who plays on the guitar and fancies himself a composer," was the scoff of malignant gossips. The journals poured on him a flood of abuse without stint. French malignity is the most venomous and unscrupulous in the world, and Berlioz was selected as a choice victim for its most vigorous exercise, none the less willingly that he had shown so much skill and zest in impaling the victims of his own artistic and ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... abstain from reading the passage to which I was about to call your attention. I shall read the passage which is charged as libelous, and if the learned counsel for the defendant can find throughout a single passage to qualify its malignity, do you, gentleman, give the defendant the benefit of it. The passage is this:—"To talk about the British Constitution, is, in my opinion, a sure proof of dishonesty; Britain has no constitution. If ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... as to take true part in any system of national economy. Nor is there any other eternal distinction between the upper and lower classes than this form of liberty, Eleutheria, or benignity, in the one, and its opposite of slavery, Douleia, or malignity, in the other; the separation of these two orders of men, and the firm government of the lower by the higher, being the first conditions of possible wealth and economy in any state,—the Gods giving it no greater gift than the power ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... ominous flash from the dark eyes, as, with a gesture of proud disdain, he folded his arms and again faced his interlocutor, while, with eyes gleaming with revenge from under their heavily drooping lids and lips that curled from time to time in a smile of bitter malignity, she watched him, listening eagerly for his testimony, losing ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... is of your making, secretly held, all these years, with unrelenting malignity. The devil himself is not wicked enough to send an innocent, loyal lad to his doom in his own mother's house, with his father as his executioner. Oh, uncle, uncle, repent and make reparation ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... self in the dramatic incidents in the lives of one's acquaintances without ventilating or vilifying their character. Gossip is capable of a more genial purpose than traducing people. It is the malignity which turns gossip into scandal against which temperate conversationalists revolt; the sort of thing which Sheridan gibbeted in his celebrated play, The School ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... irony went deeper than human reach. Nemesis was merciless; an error was punished like a crime, and the more confident you had been that you were right, the most severe was the probable penalty. But it was part of Fate's malignity that, though the offender was punished, though Justice took care that her own interests were not neglected nor her own majesty slighted, even where a humane judge would have shrunk from inflicting a disproportionate penalty,[11] ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... malignity of this curse, fierce as it is, yet wants the moral venom, the devilish leaven, of a consenting spirit: it is all ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... had not the preservation of my father's blood occasioned such malignity from the English, that nothing but an armed force can deliver his preserver, I, too, might be content to see Scotland in slavery. But now, to wish my father to shrink behind the excuse of far-strained family duties, and to abandon Sir William Wallace to the blood hounds who hunt his ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... source of these horrible things is to be found outside the Grey Room, and not in it. I agree with you, so far. We have reached a pitch where, in my judgment, we are justified in believing that some motiveless malignity is at work. But by going into that room, are you not giving somebody another opportunity to do what has already been done? Evil performed without motive, as you know better than I can tell you, must be the work of a maniac, and there may exist in this house, unsuspected ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... it was simply the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... I was old enough to have told the story myself,—and young enough, I hope, to have done it without malignity; yet Susannah, in passing by the kitchen, for fear of accidents, had left it in short-hand with the cook—the cook had told it with a commentary to Jonathan, and Jonathan to Obadiah; so that by the time my ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the dangerous epoch of 1853, he could point to an unequalled diplomatic record in the past; to the Treaty of Bucharest, to reunion of the Helvetic Confederacy shattered by Napoleon's fall, to the Convention which ratified Greek independence, to the rescue from Austrian malignity of the Hungarian refugees. ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... many years it has happened, that both Englishmen and Americans are perplexed at intervals by a malice and an acharnement of hatred to England, which reads very much like that atrocious and viperous malignity imputed to the father of Hannibal against the Romans. It is noticeable, both as keeping open a peculiar exasperation of Irish patriotism absurdly directed against England; as doing a very serious injustice ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... has been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old wine. The vengeance of civil war—always very much of a family affair in England—has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole. University reformers may accuse ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... again cast into perplexity & doubt—I might have considered the earth as an imperfect formation where having bad materials to work on the Creator could only palliate the evil effects of his combinations but I saw a wanton malignity in many parts & particularly in the mind of man that baffled me a delight in mischief a love of evil for evils sake—a siding of the multitude—a dastardly applause which in their hearts the crowd gave to triumphant wick[ed]ness ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... Ellangowan possessed so little the spirit of a litigant that he was on two occasions charged to make payment of the expenses of a long lawsuit, although he had never before heard that he had such cases in court. Meanwhile his neighbours predicted his final ruin. Those of the higher rank, with some malignity, accounted him already a degraded brother. The lower classes, seeing nothing enviable in his situation, marked his embarrassments with more compassion. He was even a kind of favourite with them, and upon the division of a common, or the holding of ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... father is alleged to have purloined State money he was received with honour by King Louis-Philippe, the Prince de Joinville, the Minister of War, and other high personages of the time—incidents which all tend to establish the falsity of the accusations by which Judet, in his venomous spite and malignity, hoped to cast opprobrium on the parentage of my dear ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... sure, when your flights are bold, that you have the right. "Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just." Hope has been defamed more than any other of the joys of life, just as the most charitable become the target of the greater portion of the malignity of fault-finding fellow-creatures. Treat Hope fairly, my young friend, and she will never desert you, neither will she poison your expectations, as did the hags who ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... self-esteem or by ignoble rancour. What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to "counteract the immorality of The Times," adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic misrepresentation, malignity and absolute ruffianism? Let those who hold such language exaggerated glance at my piece justicative, the Saturday's article (June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... insolent opposition in the south, it would be well if the empress, at the termination of the war, allowed him to escape with banishment to Siberia." But every reproach thus levelled at the palatine he found had been bought by some new success of Thaddeus; and instead of permitting their malignity to intimidate his age or alarm his affection, he told the officer (who kept guard in his chambers) that if his grandson were to lose his head for fidelity to Poland, he should behold him with as ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... vent to the flood of malignity which she mistook for inspiration, the speaker was silent. Her voice was succeeded by the hysteric shrieks of several women, but the feelings of the audience generally had not been drawn onward in the current with her own. They remained stupefied, stranded, as it were, in the midst of a torrent ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bad man. He was not inhuman or tyrannical. He bore with meekness his high civil honors, and the far higher honors gained by his intellect. He was very seldom, if ever, provoked into treating any person with malignity and insolence. No man more readily held up the left cheek to those who had smitten the right. No man was more expert at the soft answer which turneth away wrath. His faults were—we write it with pain—coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. He seems to have been ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... seconds Harold had been thinking. And as he had been thinking for the good, the safety, of Stephen, his thoughts flew swift and true. This man's very tone, the openness of his malignity, the underlying scorn when he spoke of her whom others worshipped, showed him the danger—the terrible immediate danger in which she stood from such a man. With the instinct of a mind working as truly for the woman he loved as the needle does to the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... exclaimed Foley, darting a look of hatred and malignity at him. "I wish I had you in my power once more. I ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... great fondness for society and music and poetry and art,—the most accomplished woman of her day, and so attractive as to be compared by the poets of her court to Aurora and Venus. Her life only shows how much heartlessness, cruelty, malignity, envy, and selfishness may be concealed by the mask of beauty and agreeable manners and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... a million. We have the authority of a near relative of that gentleman for asserting, that the satisfactory testimonials which he possesses of the correctness of his narrative, are sufficient to satisfy the most incredulous, and to silence malignity itself." ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... she would be gay and melancholy in turn, and her gaiety, like her sadness, seemed spontaneous. She could be gracious, disdainful, insolent, or confiding at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no temptation to descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood changed; she was full of confidence or craft; her moving tenderness would give place to a heart-breaking hardness and insensibility. Yet how paint her as she was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In a word, the Duchess was anything that she ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... force of his understanding was indifferent to him, but an affront to one's belle ame is beyond pardon. It was hard that a man who had prodigally thrown away the forces of his life for others should be charged with malignity of heart and an incapacity for friendship. This was the harder, because it was the moral fashion of that day to place friendliness, amiability, the desire to please and to serve, at the very head of all the virtues. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought. And although the task be arduous, still, with the help ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... however, were a good deal less scrupulous than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text, "was given also the Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note he commented upon the Bishop's inclination ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... him nothing but their blessing, and the virtuous habits of integrity and obedience, in which they had trained him from his earliest youth. On their death-bed they entreated that the excellent clergyman, who, in spite of the malignity of the disease, continued to comfort and pray by them in their last moments, would take compassion on their poor little orphan, and find him employment among the neighbouring farmers, either as a herd-boy to some of the numerous flocks of sheep which are common in Eskdale, or as a plough-boy ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... raging in Kansas, which in the excited state of the public mind, both North and South, might have extended into the neighboring States. The hostile parties in Kansas had been inflamed against each other by emissaries both from the North and the South to a degree of malignity without parallel in our history. To prevent actual collision and to assist the civil magistrates in enforcing the laws, a strong detachment of the Army was stationed in the Territory, ready to aid the marshal and his deputies when lawfully called upon as a posse ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... unmoistened by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will be remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad, detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall have perished forever,—when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "absolutely certain that his policy worked gross wrong," what is the explanation and the defence? We are quite content with Mr. Dicey's own answer. "Ignorance and want of sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English attempts to reform and improve Ireland." This description would apply, with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... untruthfulness, Mill upbraids the Hindus for what he calls their litigiousness. He writes:[21] "As often as courage fails them in seeking more daring gratification to their hatred and revenge, their malignity finds a vent in the channel of litigation." Without imputing dishonorable motives, as Mill does, the same fact might be stated in a different way, by saying, "As often as their conscience and respect of law keep them from seeking more daring gratification ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... began; and Emma was so completely absorbed, that she did not perceive that most of the audience were intent upon her. Those who act any part may be ridiculous in the playing it, but those are safe from the utmost malignity of criticism who are perfectly unconscious that they have any part to perform. Emma had been abashed at her first appearance in an assembly of strangers, and concerned by the idea that she had kept them waiting; but as soon as this embarrassment passed over, her manners resumed ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... public duty; of the load of injustice he must be content to bear even from those who should be his friends; the imputations on his motives; the sneers and sarcasms of ignorance and malice; all the manifold injuries which partisan or private malignity, disappointed of its object, may shower upon his unprotected head. All this, if he would retain his integrity, he must learn to ear unmoved and walk steadily onward in the path of public duty, sustained ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... astonished Abnakis, in a shape which seemed to the sleeper to be that of a panther, wearing the shape of man, yet fierce and cruel as any ever found in the wilds of the river of the Abnakis. With this fierce and cruel disposition was coupled a cunning beyond that of the fox, and a malignity greater than the rattlesnake's. Their fierceness and cruelty, and the malignity and savage ferocity of their natures, were hidden, however, under a show of peace. They laughed, and grinned, and did the other things, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... felt that they had not taken warning by the hints they had received. Humpy Dee had been on the watch, and, in his malignity, let them get away before giving notice to the sentry, that they might be caught, ironed, and flogged, or perhaps meet ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... yesterday a place was discovered which is supposed to have served for his retreat. It was a hollow, thickly surrounded by shrubs, which some person had evidently made his habitation for a considerable time. There is a dispute whether this man is insane or not, but there is no dispute as to his malignity. He has threatened to take the life of Mr. Bingham, the venerable Baptist missionary at this place, and as long as it is not certain that he has left the neighborhood a feeling of insecurity prevails. Nevertheless, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... presently peeped into that room. The old woman was sitting on a low stool by the fire, her knees up to her chin, her grizzled hair unkempt; she looked so remarkably like a witch, and, on Thyrza's appearance, turned with a gaze of such extreme malignity, that the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... lying, I know of none that exceeds in malignity and magnitude that of a political campaign. In such a struggle, men get in love with lies. They seek apologies for the circulation of lies. They hug lies to their hearts in preference to truth. It is the habit of hopeful philosophers to enlarge upon the benefit ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... maya—delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology. Evil, we are told, "is good in another way we are not skilled in."[32] So says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making; that pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism; it is the last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... had exhausted all his resources of impudence, maliciousness, and power of tormenting, on the "aristocrat"—somewhat disappointed, however, that the utmost ingenuities of his insolence and even his malignity never succeeded in breaking the "aristocrat's" silence and contemptuous forbearance from all reprisal. For the first two years the hell-on-earth—which life with a Franco-Arab regiment seemed to Cecil—was a hundredfold embittered by the brutalized jests and mosquito-like ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... to expect that anything he might choose to say on such a question as the Origin of Species would be listened to with profound attention, and discussed with respect; and there was certainly no man whose personal character should have afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with malignity and ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... stroked his mustache and meditated. There was a malignity about Stanistreet's humor conceivable enough—if there was any truth in history. It struck Stanistreet that his feeble jest met with an amount of attention out of all proportion to its merits. Sir Peter was the first ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... had no power or jurisdiction—[Greek: exousian]—over him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: ano boule], and therefore it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews. The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be their sort of Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that he was the Son of God; the crime in their eyes was his ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... his Assistance; he laid hold of him; and ask'd him, with an Air of Pity and Concern, the Cause of his rash Intention. 'Tis an old saying, that a Person is less unhappy when he sees himself not singular in Misfortune. But if we will credit Zoroaster, this is not from a Principle of Malignity, but the Effect of a fatal Necessity. He was attracted, as it were, to any Person in Distress, as being One in the same unhappy Circumstances. The Transport of a happy Man, would be a Kind of Insult; but two Persons in bad Circumstances, are like two weak Shrubs, which, by propping up each ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... history, studied impartially, is a grand lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days when the only ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... places at unholy hours, and that he shunned you, like one with a guilty conscience? Let him advance in years, his face lose its broad colour, his hair grow scant and grey, his figure, per chance, stoop a little, his eyes acquire the malignity of miserly old age—and there you have the hero of a Dunfield legend. Even thus do ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... thoughts. Musard stared gloomily at Phil with unseeing eyes. He was as one who had passed through unimagined horrors in a space not to be measured by time, to emerge with a fatigued sense of the black malignity of unknown gods who create the passions of humanity for their own brutal sport. His moving lips betrayed a consciousness loosened from its moorings, tossed in a turbulent sea of disaster. Then ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... under a sanctimonious guise the boundless ambition and quenchless malignity of Lucifer, was the first to blow the trumpet of extermination against the poor Vaudois. And from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century they suffered not fewer than ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... that no direct measures for ridding himself of Baldassarre ever occurred to him. All other possibilities passed through his mind, even to his own flight from Florence; but he never thought of any scheme for removing his enemy. His dread generated no active malignity, and he would still have been glad not to give pain to any mortal. He had simply chosen to make life easy to himself—to carry his human lot, if possible, in such a way that it should pinch him nowhere; and the choice had, at various times, landed him in unexpected ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the sort of "love" I have in my mind is not so much "hate" as a kind of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of brutal malignity and callous aversion. Perhaps what we are looking for as the true opposite of love may be best ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... executed immediately afterwards in the church of S. Lodovico, representing the life of St. Cecilia, would have silenced the attacks of envy and malevolence; but they only tended to increase the alarm of his competitors, and excite them to redoubled injustice and malignity. Disgusted with these continued cabals, Domenichino quitted Rome, and returned to Bologna, where he resided several years in the quiet practice of his profession, and executed some of his most admired works, particularly the Martyrdom of St. Agnes for the church of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... respect to the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions, the translation of the New Testament should rather be the occasion of continuance or increase of errors among the said people than any benefit or ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... indeed, Mr. President; you never said a truer word than that in your life. The fact is the Germans have all gone mad with self-esteem, and are convinced that every criticism of their actions must have its foundations in envy and malignity. And yet they feel bitterly, too, that, in spite of their successes here and there, the War on the whole has been an enormous disappointment for them, and that the longer it continues the worse their position becomes. The mixture ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... she listened to him. It was because he knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that moved him—it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an interest, with which her very heart-strings ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... poor, unable to indulge in the luxury of precious metals, found substitutes in shells and glass; and the extravagance of the taste was defended on the ground that their brilliancy served to avert the malignity of "the evil eye" from the wearer ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... enemy; being, I believe, Southern born. I learn it is the purpose of the governor to release him. And this may be a blunder. I fear about as much from ill-timed Southern magnanimity as from Northern malignity. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... been called a "sty." Epicurus has been branded as a libertine, and the name "Epicurean" has, in almost all languages, become the synonym of sensualism. Diogenes Laertius repels all the imputations which are cast upon the moral character of his favorite author, and ascribes them to the malignity and falsehood of the Stoics. "The most modern criticism seems rather inclined to revert to the vulgar opinion respecting him, rejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some French and English writers of the last century. Upon the whole, we ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... period I saw little of President Johnson, who fought his fight in his own way, had his hands completely tied, and barely escaped impeachment; the Congress, meanwhile, making a whipping-post of the South, and inflicting upon it every humiliation that malignity could devise. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... words. All he had seen and heard tallied too well with it to leave in his mind any room for doubt. A plot of some sort he had always suspected—he would have been foolish indeed to have come to any other conclusion; but a plot of such malignity and such diabolical scope would never have presented itself to his mind. He found it hard to believe that such a terrible thing could be menaced against the King and the nobles of the land, many amongst whom must surely be of the same faith as those conspirators who were ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... harmony of its people under the system of universal suffrage, the lightness of its taxation,—behold, above all, its immunity from war!" All this is now turned upon us as a taunt; but the taunt implies rather a sense of escape on the part of those who utter it than malignity, and the answer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... very different from the sincere and noble tribute which a good man renders to goodness. Still, it is valid testimony to the truth that the mere approbation of goodness is not the love of it. It is true, that these panegyrics of virtue, when read in the light of Rousseau's sensuality and Voltaire's malignity, wear a dead and livid hue, like objects seen in the illumination from phosphorus or rotten wood; yet, nevertheless, they are visible and readable, and testify as distinctly as if they issued from elevated and noble natures, that the teachings of man's conscience are not obeyed by man's ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... respecting the "Zapolya." The corrections and additions to the two first books of the "Christabel" may become of more value to you when the work is finished, as I trust it will be in the course of the spring, than they are at present. And let it not be forgotten, that while I had the utmost malignity of personal enmity to cry down the work, with the exception of Lord Byron, there was not one of the many who had so many years together spoken so warmly in its praise who gave it the least positive furtherance after its publication. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... feudal ages, and give Rome their hearts and Canterbury only their pockets, will find that such doctrines and practices find no favor in the present volumes. The greatest rascal in the novel is a piece of incarnate malignity named Pearce—a Jesuit, whom the author represents as carrying out the principles of Romanism to their logical ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from a long line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men. They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whether to expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purred complacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up her white, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm, light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gather herself together ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... village it was an accidental circumstance, it being only at irregular intervals that he ever made his appearance there. Thus, then, passed a week longer; the petulant constable on the watch, and the steady malignity of Davenport gradually becoming impatient for gratification. But the little drama had a course ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... ambassadors to you, as I have to my son Alaric, and hope that they may be able so to arrange matters that no alien malignity may sow the seeds of dissension between you, and that your nations, which under your fathers have long enjoyed the blessings of peace, may not now be laid waste by sudden collision. You ought to believe him who, as you know, has rejoiced ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Winklestein's, and the words, hissed in a whisper of incredible malignity, arrested me as if I had been struck by a live wire. I listened. Behind the stateroom door there followed a silence, grimly intense; then a dull pounding; then ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... breath came in short, stertorous gasps, his throat was parched and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. The slope of the hill is precipitous here, and the house—nigh to the summit—seemed to recede farther and farther with devilish malignity. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Confirmed by the Experience of many Ages." For another curious turn given to this theory, with reference to sanitary science, see Deodat Lawson's famous sermon at Salem, in 1692, on Christ's Fidelity a Shield against Satan's Malignity, p. 21 of the second edition. For Cotton Mather, see his biography by Barrett Wendell, pp. 91, 92; also the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria in this work. For Fromundus, see his Meteorologica (London, 1656), lib. iii, c. 9, and lib. ii, c. 3. For Schott, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... cause of both. Of him an honest thinker has said,—and there is much truth in the apparent paradox,—"No man who was not a fanatic, had ever more natural piety than he; and his supposed atheism is a mere metaphysical crotchet in which he was kept by the affected scorn and malignity of dunces."[37] ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... convent, whom should she face but the Alcalde! How he escaped the trench, who can tell? He had no time to write memoirs; his horse was too illiterate. But he had escaped; temper not at all improved by that adventure, and now raised to a hell of malignity by seeing that he had lost his prey. In the morning light he now saw how to use his sword. He attacked Kate with fury. Both were exhausted; and Kate, besides that she had no personal quarrel with the Alcalde, having now accomplished her sole object in saving ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... as they reached the corner, had hastened along with flaming eyes and cheeks and loudly throbbing heart. She was furious at him for daring to speak of such things, daring to couple Forrest's name with hers, with—anybody's. She was ready to cry out against the man for such malignity—mendacity; and then her cooler judgment and common sense began to reassert themselves. Why shouldn't it be true? Why shouldn't he seek the hand of one so—so lovely and wealthy as Miss Allison? What more natural than that Miss Allison ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... cruelty the girls displayed to any of their number who suffered from any physical defect. Many times in the day would the afflicted one be reminded of her infirmity; the consequent tears incited the tormentors to a further display of malignity. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... of a great island close to our kingdom, Pandafilando of the Scowl by name—for it is averred that, though his eyes are properly placed and straight, he always looks askew as if he squinted, and this he does out of malignity, to strike fear and terror into those he looks at—that he knew, I say, that this giant on becoming aware of my orphan condition would overrun my kingdom with a mighty force and strip me of all, not leaving me even a small village to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... all if I had a gun!" cried Wicks in an outburst of malignity. "I killed Hardy, yes! I said I'd get him, and I got him! It's all I lived for, but, by Heaven! you'll never take me ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele |
