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Malignity   Listen
noun
Malignity  n.  
1.
The state or quality of being malignant; disposition to do evil; virulent enmity; malignancy; malice; spite.
2.
Virulence; deadly quality. "His physicians discerned an invincible malignity in his disease."
3.
Extreme evilness of nature or influence; perniciousness; heinousness; as, the malignity of fraud. (R.)
Synonyms: See Malice.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Malignity" Quotes from Famous Books



... held the cold, cruel malignity of a snake. His brows were cold, straight, unruffled. His smile held the polished brutality of the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... beginning of the reign of King Charles I. affirms the power of prayer to be so great, that though there be a conjunction or opposition of Saturn or Mars, (as there was one of them then) it will overcome the malignity of it. In the life of Vavasor Powel, is a memorable account of the effect of fervent prayer, after an exceeding drought: and Mr. Baxter (in his book aforementioned) hath several instances ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... 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, and ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... is easy to perceive the real nature and causes of the insidious warfare, which is maintained, in various forms, against the essential doctrines of the Gospel. It is just an effusion of the malignity of the unsanctified heart. Its prevalence is an exact fulfilment of prophecy; and therefore an irrefragable proof of the truth and divine authority of that system which it is labouring to destroy. The emphatic declaration of the apostle, in the text, strikingly describes the state of feeling ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin

... year 1704, one Deodat Lawson, minister at Salem during the last sixteen or seventeen years of the Seventeenth Century, published a remarkable work, entitled "Christ's Fidelity, the only Shield against Satan's Malignity." In this work appears a record of the so-called calamity at Salem, which the author tells us was afflicted, about the year 1692, "with a very sore and grievous infliction, in which they had reason to believe that the Sovereign and Holy God was pleased to permit Satan and his instruments ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... that he made more mischief in Avonlea in a day than was made otherwise in a year, but people tolerated him by reason of his infirmity. To be sure, it was the tolerance they gave to inferior creatures, and August felt this. Perhaps it accounted for a good deal of his malignity. He hated most those who were kindest to him, and, of these, Thyra Carewe above all. He hated Chester, too, as he hated strong, shapely creatures. His time had come at last to wound them both, and his exultation ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... the sorcerer fitted him: "O full of all 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

... 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

... though not the only one, when the effect depends on something more than the persons engaged in it. The moon with the clouds driving over counts for more than a mere indication of time or weather; it is essential to the story, and lends itself to the malignity of the adversary in casting the spell of fear upon Grettir's mind. The solitude of Drangey, in the concluding chapters of Grettis Saga, the cliffs, the sea and the storms are all much less exceptional; they are necessary parts of the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... blows, and approving himself, in the phrase of "the fancy," game to the backbone. His faults, besides those incident to most satirists,—such as undue severity, intrusion into private life, anger darkening into malignity, and spleen fermenting into venom,—were carelessness of style, inequality, and want of condensation. Compared to the satires of Pope, Churchill's are far less polished, and less pointed. Pope stabs with a silver bodkin—Churchill ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... persecution. On me the scene made but little impression. I had no apprehension that the day was coming, when this inflexible guide of Christians would find his prayers effectual, and his prophecies of vengeance fulfilled. How could I know that there was so hateful a vice as malignity? The holy seer did not indeed indulge his wrath quite so far as Elisha, at least not openly; he did not curse me in the name of the Lord, nor did she-bears come out of the wood to devour me; but I soon enough ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... and influential British opinion would then be found on the side of the champions of Slavery, and against those of Abolition, the prediction would have been universally treated by Englishmen as an emanation and a proof of the most grovelling malignity, not less despicably silly than shamelessly calumnious. The time of trial came; and what no one would have ventured to suggest as conceivable proved to be the actual and positive truth. There must have been some deep-lying reason for this,—some reason which remained latent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers; and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... object, spirit, and provisions. He expressed his abhorrence of the maxim, that any nation was destined to be the natural and unalterable enemy of the other; it was a libel on the constitution of political societies, and supposed the existence of infernal malignity in human nature. In most of our wars, he said, France had been the aggressor; but her assurances and frankness in the present negociations were such as to entitle her to a return of confidence. Even from the recent American ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... which I saw it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a degree which it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity must almost have amounted to a sense of humour. Her detestation of her cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert's attachment. That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real vein at Julian's. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as people say, 'in it,' ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... Mr. Vane turned instantly round upon him, and, looking him haughtily in the face, said: "Sir Charles Pomander, the settled malignity with which you pursue that lady is unmanly and offensive to me, who love her. Let our acquaintance cease here, if you please, or let her be sacred from ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... biography of one so marked by a special malignity of fate is a difficult task. That bare justice may be done, it is necessary not only to follow out his openly recorded successes, things done in his own name and of his own right, but also to disentangle, as far as may be, the part which his authority, his knowledge, and his ceaseless industry ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... man only outwardly, for understanding with its thought is the external of man's life while the will with its affection is the internal. The healing of the understanding alone would therefore be like palliative healing in which the interior malignity, closed in and kept from issuing, would destroy first the near and then the remote parts till all would become mortified. The will itself must be healed, not by the influx of the understanding into it, for that is impossible, but by means of instruction and exhortation ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg

... determined the eschatological beliefs of the Mithraists. The antagonism between heaven and hell was extended into the life hereafter.[52] Mithra, the "invincible" god who assisted the faithful in their struggle against the malignity of the demons, was not only their strong companion in their human trials, but as an antagonist of the infernal powers he insured the welfare of his followers in the future life as well as on earth. When the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... getting up from the sophy, and looking at him with sich a jolly malignity, as I never see, "I declare, before heaven, that I will not ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... suspicion that dare not go to sleep; a strange vague terror, shapeless or taking all shapes—a body diseased and a mind diseased. Fear, quaking continually for nothing at all, is not to be borne in a handsome manner. And it passes, often enough (in these poor LETTERS), into transient malignity, into gusts of trembling hatred, with a tendency to relieve oneself by private scandal of the house we are in. Seldom was a miserabler wrong-side seen to a bit of royal tapestry. A man hunted by the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... the working-man, by proving to him, that his wife is a miserable creature for submitting to his sway, and rouses an audience of spectacled enthusiasts to frenzy by proclaiming, that she is ready to lead them to the tented field for the assertion of rights which the malignity of men has filched from them. Later on, she presides over her various Committees, and she returns home to find that her child has burnt himself by falling on to the dining-room fire, and that her cook has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various

... Farquhar's moral tone is not high; sensuality is confounded with love, ribaldry mistaken for wit The best that can be said of him that he contrasts favourably with his contemporary dramatists; Virtue is not always uninteresting in his pages. He is free from their heartlessness, malignity, and cruelty. The plot of The Beaux-Stratagem is comparatively inoffensive, and the moral of the whole is healthy. Although a wit rather than a thinker, Farquhar in this play shows himself capable of serious feelings. ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar

... imagery and the rapid touch serve alike to show that though he is angry, it is with the wrath of a man—not with the malignity of a demon. We have sometimes been induced to fancy that Pollok, in the "Course of Time," loves to linger amid the ruins of fallen and lost natures; and finds a savage luxury in the contemplation of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... incredulity, the friend promised to give him 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... set the world in order; those possessed of extreme maliciousness turn the world into disorder. Purity, intelligence, spirituality and subtlety constitute the vital spirit of right which pervades heaven and earth, and the persons gifted with benevolence are its natural fruit. Malignity and perversity constitute the spirit of evil, which permeates heaven and earth, and malicious persons are affected by its influence. The days of perpetual happiness and eminent good fortune, and the era of perfect peace and tranquility, which now prevail, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... but not Stones and Vegetables, &c. Secondly, of the Requisits to a perfect knowledge of the Metallick Art, and of the Qualities of the Mine-master; then of the Diseases of Mine-men, and their Cure, and the waies of purging the Mines of the Airs malignity; as also of Metallognomy, or the signs of latent Mettals, and by what Art they may be discovered. Thirdly, several Accounts sent to the Author, upon his Inquiries by the Mine-masters themselves, or other cheif ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... the resolve that my first act of power would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... breaking point. For four days the sirocco blew across the island. The sky was grey and seemed to press down on sea and land, heavy, unbroken, intolerably near. The wind blew strongly, but with none of the fresh boisterous fierceness of a northern gale. There was a sullen malignity about its force. Out at sea grey-topped waves wrangled and strove together confusedly. They broke in a welter of soiled foam across the reef which lay opposite the mouth of the bay. Within the harbour little waves, like jagged steel blades, rose, hissed at each ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham

... Thursday, had made a trip up the Bosphorus, and it was on this occasion that he first pointed out to me the hideous negro. He proved to be the same man I had seen once before, on our very first excursion. To-day he looked more ugly than ever, as he went ashore at Yeni Koej. There was a malignity in his face such as I have never seen equaled in the expression ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... great abilities, eloquence, and courage, but of a cruel and imperious nature, was the counsellor most trusted in political and military affairs. He had been one of the most distinguished members of the opposition, and felt towards those whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has, in all ages, been characteristic of apostates. He perfectly understood the feelings, the resources, and the policy of the party to which he had lately belonged, and had formed a vast and deeply ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... last escape of Beatrice, Clark went up to Brandon Hall. It was about nine o'clock. A sullen frown was on his face, which was pervaded by an expression of savage malignity. A deeply preoccupied look, as though he were altogether absorbed in his own thoughts, prevented him from noticing the half-smiles which the servants cast at ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... district, declaring that I had "the temper of a hedgehog, the adhesiveness of a barnacle, the vanity of a peacock, the vindictiveness of a Corsican, the hypocrisy of Aminadab Sleek and the duplicity of the devil." I rather enjoyed these paroxysms of malignity, which broke out all over the State among the Governor's conservative satellites, since my only offense was fidelity to my political opinions, the soundness of which I was finding fully justified by events; for the friends of the Governor, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... repulsive to all his feelings of aught the earth contained. The attendance of that brother was now become like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction; his approaches as undiscerned, and his looks as fraught with hideous malignity. It was seldom that he saw him either following him in the streets, or entering any house or church after him; he only appeared in his place, George wist not how, or whence; and, having sped so ill ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... upon his reputation. An answer to the libel presently appeared, which was signed S. O., and has been generally attributed to Sydney Owenson. The Familiar Epistles were believed to be the work of John Wilson Croker, then young and unknown, and it may be that the lifelong malignity with which that critic pursued Lady Morgan was due to this early crossing of swords. Sydney herself was fond of hinting that Croker, in his obscure days, had paid her attentions which she, as a successful author, had not cared ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... vapid panegyric, or gross invective; weary by uniform dulness, or tantalise by superficial knowledge. Sometimes merely written to catch the public attention, a malignity is indulged against authors, to season the caustic leaves. A reviewer has admired those works in private, which he has condemned in his official capacity. But good sense, good temper, and good taste, will ever form an estimable journalist, who will inspire confidence, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... obstinacy, he utterly refused to move. Delorier lashed and swore till he was tired, but Hendrick stood like a rock, grumbling to himself and looking askance at his enemy, until he saw a favorable opportunity to take his revenge, when he struck out under the shaft with such cool malignity of intention that Delorier only escaped the blow by a sudden skip into the air, such as no one but a Frenchman could achieve. Shaw and he then joined forces, and lashed on both sides at once. The brute stood still for a while till he could bear it no longer, when all at once ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... of those instances of injustice and malignity which so frequently occur in the Dunciad, and which reflect more dishonour on the author than on the parties traduced. De Foe lay friendless and distressed in Newgate, his family ruined, and himself without hopes of deliverance, till Sir Robert Harley, who approved ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe

... drucken to, and ganging to the kirk when the bell rings. You never can go into a party nowadays, that you don't meet with some shallow, prosing, pestilent ass of a fellow, who thinks that empty sound is conversation; and not unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead's composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole company claps to change the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... voice in the expending of them for the public weal; public taxes are public property. Some of these 'gentlemanly' officials made use of language on the occasion alluded to, that not only gave evidence of considerable malignity, but of a vulgarity that a gentleman would scorn to use; and we think it not an unfair inference to draw from the foregoing facts, that the digger-hunt of the 30th of November, and the cruel slaughter of the 3rd December, were unmistakable acts of petty official revenge; and, therefore, ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... blessings which this Providence makes us enjoy are as one hundred, and that the evils are as ten per cent.; would it not always result that against these hundred degrees of goodness, Providence possesses a tenth degree of malignity?—which is incompatible with the perfection we suppose ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier

... 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, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man; when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W—— had hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter at N——, near Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the heads of the colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... oppressors, Captain Fishley was a revengeful person. He would wait till he caught me napping, and then spring some trap upon me. He would delay his vengeance till some circumstances conspired against me, and then come down upon me with the whole weight of his malignity. I determined to keep a sharp lookout upon all his movements, and especially to avoid all cause of offence myself. I meant to keep myself as ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic

... Recumbent at her ease, ere long, And lulled by her own humdrum song, She left the cares of life behind, And slept as she would sleep her last, When in came, housewifely inclined, The chambermaid, and shut it fast, By no malignity impelled, But ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... he, Furnival, if the matter were pushed before a jury, make them think that the two documents stood balanced against each other? and that Lady Mason's respectability, her long possession, together with the vile malignity of her antagonists, gave the greater probability of honesty to the disputed codicil? Mr. Furnival did think that he might induce a jury to acquit her; but he terribly feared that he might not be able to ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... of his age forty-six, he fell into a long and sharp sickness, occasioned by a cold taken in his passage by water betwixt London and Gravesend, from the malignity of which he was never recovered; for after that time, till his death, he was not free from thoughtful days and restless nights: but a submission to His will that makes the sick man's bed easy, by giving ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... &c. In which their just commerce was nobly vindicated against Turkish treachery; victoriously defended against Portuguese hostility; gloriously advanced against Moorish and Heathenish perfidy; hopefully recovering from Dutch malignity; and justly maintained against ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... 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

... powerful adversary, or for notorious dissatisfaction with the existing government. Thus Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, once lord-keeper the favorite of King James, the possessor for a season of the power that was turned against him, experienced the rancorous and ungrateful malignity of Laud, who, having been brought forward by Williams into the favor of the court, not only supplanted by his intrigues, and incensed the King's mind against his benefactor, but harassed his retirement by repeated persecutions. It will sufficiently illustrate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... revolt, to which all the disaffected and all the worst characters of the district flocked, to gratify their lust for revenge of real or fancied wrongs, or their baser passions for plunder and unmeaning cruelty. The malignity of a subtle, acute, semi-civilized race, unrestrained by law or by moral feeling, broke out in its most frightful forms. Cowardice possessed of strength never wreaked more horrible sufferings upon its victims, and the bloody and barbarous annals of Indian history ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... we'd better—" began Jack; and stopped petrified, to see one vindictive-looking eye opened and regarding him, it seemed, with an expression of extraordinary malignity. Then the other eye opened, the mouth abruptly closed ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused Southey's interest ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... thought. Besides, I had a special mission to accomplish—namely, the discovery and deliverance, if possible, of between thirty and forty of my own countrymen, languishing in a bitter captivity, and in daily, if not hourly, peril of death by torture as cruel and protracted as the fiendish malignity of merciless savages can ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... Constance, why will you deliberate thus? If we delay a moment, all is lost for ever. Pluck up a little resolution, and we shall soon be out of the reach of her malignity. ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith

... middle-aged; then aid, a patron, servant, etc. Also a tribe of the Jinn usually made synonymous with "Marid," evil controuls, hostile to men: modern spiritualists would regard them as polluted souls not yet purged of their malignity. The text insinuates that they were at home amongst ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... be aware, and only few may be capable of understanding. Its truth, however, may be easily proved by watching the effect of words in irritating one person against another, and increasing, by repeated insinuations, the apparent malignity of some really trifling action. No one, probably, has led so blessed a life as not to have been sometimes pained by observing one person trying to exasperate another, who is, perhaps, rather peacefully inclined, by pointing out all the aggravating circumstances ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... wise unto salvation. It informs us of our original, how pure and innocent; and our present condition, how guilty, polluted and miserable! and the happiness or misery which awaits us in a future state. From this book we may learn, the malignity of sin, the holiness, spirituality, extent, and sanction of the law of God; and consequently, the just and certain condemnation due to our disobedience. It shews us, likewise, the way of our recovery. How perfectly the mediation of Christ is ...
— An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies, Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. • Richard Johnson

... that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... almost a century, to justify their insertion in our collection, where they would have very uselessly occupied a considerable space. Captain Betagh appears to have been actuated by violent animosity against Captain Shelvocke, whose actions he traduced and misrepresented with the utmost malignity, the innocent cause of his having suffered captivity among the Spaniards in South America, of which some account will be found in the subsequent section. Of all these charges, we have only deemed it expedient to insert the following statement of the circumstances connected with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... 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 ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... some of his most gallant adventures. He was with him on board the Pallas when her boats had gallantly cut out the Tapageuse brig, and afterwards in her action with the Minerva, a ship nearly double her size; but his gallant commander having been, by the malignity of his foes, compelled to leave the navy, he himself had very little prospect of ever ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston

... genius. It may be also advisable to add, as a curious trait in the history of the human mind, that the lawyers—I shall here prudently remark that we treat only of the lawyers of a neighboring country—to whom malignity imputes a superabundant luxury in words, reproached Watt, against whom they had leagued in great numbers, for having invented nothing but ideas. This, I may remark in passing, brought upon them before the tribunal the following apostrophe from Mr. Rous: "Go, gentlemen, go and rub yourselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... horribly true. "War" had come; war, after so many years of European peace and prosperity; and newly aroused, startled countries found themselves face to face with the malignity of ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... promised seed, retained the hope of forgiveness of sin, and did not give way to the evil imagination of their hearts, rather resisting it through the Holy Spirit, who is given for the very purpose of contending against, and overcoming, the malignity of man's nature. Because Ham gives way to his nature, he is wholly evil, and totally perishes. Shem and Japheth, who contend against it in their spirit, though being evil, are not altogether so. They have the Holy Spirit, through whom they ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... taken from them, and they not suffered to have any candle-light in the night season; nay, what is more, they were stript naked, under pretence to know whether they were witches [a true touch of sacerdotal malignity] tho' in searching no token was found upon them but of innocence. And in this search they were so barbarously misused that modesty forbids to mention it: And that none might have communication with them a board was nailed up before the window of the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... last few 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

... confidence toward a coming forth again from death? Now I think 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 ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... pail of water in his hand, and as David bent over the basin Henry was behind him. He had drawn something from his pocket, and was edging up close. As David dipped his hands in the water he looked up into Langdon's face, and he saw there a strange and unexpected change—that deadly malignity of last night. In that moment the object in Henry's hand fell with terrific force on his head and he crumpled down over the basin. He was conscious of a single agonizing pain, like a hot iron thrust suddenly ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity, and tribunitian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, perhaps, too much bustle in the first act, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... bird he did not pick it up for a possible pot-pie as I thought he would do. He ground it into the soft earth with the heel of his boot, stamping on the poor thing again and again. And never have I seen on human countenance such an expression of satisfied malignity! ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... were so monstrous that they carried with them their own refutation. It was too often the custom in the middle ages to overwhelm an enemy with incredible charges for it to be fair to accuse the enemies of Hubert of any excessive malignity. The substantial innocence of Hubert is clear, for the only charges brought against him were either errors of judgment and policy, or incredible crimes. Nevertheless he was in such imminent danger that he took sanctuary with the canons of Merton in Surrey. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... being mealted in a furnace wth other crude sea-coales under them, may be drawn out of the potts sticking to the yron, whence they are beaten off in greate halfe-exhausted cinders, which being rekindled make a cleare pleasant chamber fire, deprived of their sulphur and arsenic malignity. What successe it may have, time ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls

... 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 land through ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... 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 ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele

... and moon before their arrival, and could not have invented a language of his own without more understanding than Shakespeare has thought it proper to bestow upon him. His diction is indeed somewhat clouded by the gloominess of his temper, and the malignity of his purposes; but let any other being entertain the same thoughts, and he will find them easily issue in the ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... 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 no word that ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... it is "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, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... anything but by what is still blind and dumb within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether in life or letters, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats

... the unleavened turpitude of that hostile microbe displayed the full measure of its malignity. A horrible odor presently filled the place. Stale eggs would have been ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... 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 meddler, and from which his exit shall be that of a ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... witticisms attributed to great judges are so tinged with personality—even tending to malignity—that no one possessing respect for human nature can read them without being tempted to regard them as mere biographical fabrications. But such a construction cannot be put upon the stories told of Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... 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 with a strange, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are discernible, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... a tear was dropped by the auditors, and many a prayer wafted to Heaven for his happiness. Joseph took up the story where she left it: he told the rising dawn of youth and virtue, darting its ray through the clouds of obscurity, and how every stroke of envy and malignity brushed away some part of the darkness that veiled its lustre. He told the story of the haunted apartment, and all the consequences of it; how he and Oswald conveyed the youth away from the Castle, no more ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve

... States, in order to signify that the Democracy could harmonize on her soil, and speak peace to the nation through the voice which had so often spoken peace before. But the Northern Democrats failed to comprehend their Southern allies. In their anxiety to impress the slave-holders with the depth and malignity of Northern anti-slavery feeling, they had unwittingly implicated themselves as accessories to the crime they charged on others. If they were, in fact, the friends to the South which they so loudly proclaimed themselves to be, now was the time ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... or a glorious war the more likely to ensue; trade to flourish; the Ostend Company to be demolished; Gibraltar and Port Mahon left entire in our possession; the balance of Europe to be preserved; the malignity of parties to be for ever at an end; none but persons of merit, virtue, genius, and learning to be encouraged? I ask whether any of these effects will follow upon the publication of this author's libel, even supposing he could prove every syllable ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... is in store for thee. Feel'st thou within thee strength enough to smother Each impulse of malignity and hate? ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... when her presence there was no longer of service. At last she made preparations to return; but, as she was on the point of departure, Mrs. Preston—whose face then wore an expression of triumphant malignity which chilled Selma's very life-blood—told her that she could not go; that she was a part of her father's estate, and must remain, and be sold with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... "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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... malfeasance, malignity, malleable, mandate, matutinal, medieval, mephitic, mercenary, mercurial, meretricious, metamorphose, meticulous, microcosm, misanthropic, misogyny, misprision, mitigate, monitor, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... had come over to make some personal inquiry into the melancholy matter, and then proceeded with his opinion respecting Sam Brattle. "From all that I can hear and see," said his lordship, "I fear there can be no doubt that this murder has been due to the malignity of a ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... is to be subjected to the scrutiny of a parish meeting on Tuesday, when, though the minute accuracy of a professional accountant is not to be expected of one whose province is not to serve tables, it will be evident that only malignity to the Church could have devised the attack to which your paper ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... making notes and collecting and classifying material. I've got collectors at work in England. I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while a stenographer set it down. As my labors grew, so also grew my fascination. Malice and malignity faded out of me—or maybe I drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it. I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I was going to write a book which the very devils and angels ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... morning having forgotten your new engagement; for this you must not reproach me, for if I had looked upon your present station with malignity I could not have forgotten it. I came to consult you upon a little matter that gives me some uneasiness. In one of the pages there is a severe censure of the clergy of an English Cathedral which I am afraid is just, but I have since recollected that from me it may be thought improper, for the ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell

... laughed, a low, guttural, unpleasant laugh, which Herbert listened to with a secret shudder. It was so full of malignity, and cunning triumph, and so suggestive of the fate which he reserved for his white foe, that it aggravated the latter, and made him impatient to have the blow fall, since ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... Pulfennius, "I can tell you. It is because this whole comedy has been rehearsed between you just to make me ridiculous. I know your way, your malignity, your tenacity of a grudge, your pretence of reconciliation, your ingenuity, your well-laid traps. I'll ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... You fear and dislike him of the sneering laugh. How does God laugh? He says, "I will laugh at their calamity and mock at their misfortune," speaking of some who have sinned. Think of the malice and malignity of that in an infinite God when speaking of the sufferings He is going to impose upon His children. You know that it is said of a Roman emperor that he wrote laws very finely, and posted them so high ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... the presence of kings; this man abused his majesty, and spoke what was unworthy of him." The king turned away indignant at this remark, and replied, "I was better pleased with his falsehood than with this truth that you have told; for that bore the face of good policy, and this was founded in malignity; and the intelligent have said, 'A peace-mingling falsehood is preferable to a mischief-stirring truth':—Whatever prince may do that which he (his counsellor) will recommend, it must be a subject of regret if he ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... reside for forty-six weeks, the Scholars, and probably the Commoners, for forty-eight weeks in each year. All undergraduates had to attend lectures or disputations for twenty-four hours in every week. These tasks were arranged with careful malignity to begin at 6 A.M., and resumed at 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Nor were examinations wanting. The Bible was to be read during dinner in Hall by a Bible Clerk or Scholar, and heard attentively and reverently. Latin was to be spoken in Hall, and English only when the presence of an unlearned person or ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... called to her sister in the darkness, the storm without continued to rage. It had shown no mercy to the hapless leaves, neither did it lessen any of its malignity now as it tore along the straight road leading to the penitentiary of St. Vincent de Paul, and overtook the sadly bedraggled figure clad in bridal robes. The heavy rain had wet her through and through, and she staggered from weakness and exposure. The road was deep with mud, and the bridal ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... down suddenly on the baking black rock, with a cold shiver running down his back in spite of the scorch of the sun. The utter cold malignity of those great violet eyes, and the thought of what would have happened if he had stepped into that pool, made him ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham

... My account of these transactions I have been forced to take from the narrative of the Duchess of Marlborough, a narrative which is to be read with constant suspicion, except when, as is often the case, she relates some instance of her own malignity and insolence.] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Vinicius's hand as a frightened child would, and disconnected, quick impressions pressed into her head: Was not that he, the terrible, the all-powerful? She had not seen him hitherto, and she thought that he looked differently. She had imagined some kind of ghastly face, with malignity petrified in its features; now she saw a great head, fixed on a thick neck, terrible, it is true, but almost ridiculous, for from a distance it resembled the head of a child. A tunic of amethyst color, forbidden ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... bent on 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, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... of it.... You see him leaning over the face of the water talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets an enemy of his to upset his canoe and destroy him.... If a man is knocked on the head with a club, or shot by an arrow or a bullet, the cause of death is clearly the malignity of persons using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by the falling of a tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in a whirlpool in the river is also a victim of some being using these things ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... loud, rough chuckle, more expressive of malignity than mirth, the man turned himself round, applied vigorously to his pipe, and sank into a silence which, as mile after mile glided past the wheels, he did not seem disposed to break. Neither was Philip inclined to be communicative. Considerations ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... man, but he has his peculiarities. Belden is your real enemy. He is blue with malignity—so are most of the cowmen I met up there. I wish I could do something for the Service. I'm a thoroughly up-to-date analytical chemist and a passable mining engineer, and my doctor says that for a year at least I must work in the open air. Is there anything in this ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland

... existence. If he did not appear in the 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 of its own ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... puzzling line in Homer which is applied once or twice to features in a landscape—for instance, to a river: 'The gods call it Xanthos, mankind Skamandros.' So we might say of the downfall of Greece: the Greeks attributed it to the malignity of God, but the divine oracles gave ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... 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 from her teeth, revealed more distinctly ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay

... year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... harassed by pecuniary difficulties; forced to quit his country, home, and child; friendless—we have seen it too clearly since his death—pursued even on the Continent by a thousand absurd and infamous falsehoods, and by the cold malignity of a world that twisted even his sorrows into a crime; he yet, in the midst of inevitable reaction, preserved his love for his sister and his Ada; his compassion for misfortune; his fidelity to the affections of his childhood and youth, from Lord Clare to his old servant Murray, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... virtues, and sufferings, and genius, and experience, of our species have laboured for successive generations to accumulate and preserve. The fruit of their blood, of their labour, of their doubts, and their struggles, is before us—a treasure that no malignity can corrupt, or violence take away. And above all, it is here that, when tormented by doubt, or startled by anomalies, stung by disappointment, or exasperated by injustice, we may look for consolation and encouragement. As we see the same events, that to those who witnessed them must have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... strange hap it chanced that Sir James Craven, excited with drink, the bile of his saturnine temper stirred to malignity by heavy losses at cards, alighted from his four in hand at White's shortly after Volney. Craven's affairs had gone from bad to worse very rapidly of late. He had been playing the races heavily and ruin stared the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... of deep malignity, Ross closed with Philip again. It was now a struggle of right with wrong as well as nerve with strength. The sun had set under the sea, the sally bushes were shivering in the twilight, a flight of rooks were screaming ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... teaching of John. It is said "he did many things." Only he could not and would not do the one thing needful: Herodias still retained her place. Naturally she feared and hated the man of God, who was seeking to remove her; and she plotted against him with implacable malignity. She was only too successful, making use of her own daughter—not Antipas', but her first husband's—for her purpose. On the king's birthday Salome danced before Herod and so intoxicated him with her skill and beauty, that, heated and overcome, he promised—the promise showing ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... frequently stained by the guilt of conspiracy, or civil war. Even in those governments which allow the reigning monarch to declare a colleague or a successor, his partial choice, which may be influenced by the blindest passions, is often directed to an unworthy object But the most suspicious malignity cannot ascribe to Theodosius, in his obscure solitude of Caucha, the arts, the desires, or even the hopes, of an ambitious statesman; and the name of the Exile would long since have been forgotten, if his genuine and distinguished virtues had ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... pointing their forks at him; and the prime tormentor, whom he perfectly recognized, not only leapt over him, but spurned at his face with a cloven foot, giving a blow, not of gay French malice, but of malignity. It was too much for the boy's forbearance. He struggled free, dashing his adversaries aside fiercely, and as they again gathered about him, with the leader shouting, 'Rage, too, rage! To the prey, imps—' he clenched his fist, and dealt the foremost foe such a blow in the chest as to level ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... each armed with the instruments of his office; and I must say that, in malignity of construction, they were equal to any thing used on similar occasions even by Captain G——. The culprit was now brought forward, and to my surprise it was the very man whom Thompson, when in the boat, had thrown overboard for mutiny. I cannot say ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... deviation of a single minute, of half a minute, of what one has been doing previously would have prevented it; and out of it one of those frightful things that ought to come with premonition, by hints, by stages, but that come careering headlong as though malignity, bitter and wanton, had loosed ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... existed, or I should be said by yours to cast upon you, and for such causes as they would not fail to invent, the heaviest of all censures, the tacit condemnation of a friend. And, however anxious each would be to do justice to the other, calumny would drown our voices, or malignity affect not to believe us. Thus circumstanced, I should, were that practicable, request you to reassume that seat, which I could no longer fill with honour to you, or safety to myself. Though this cannot be done directly, yet we may obtain the same end by an expedient ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... family, as the Irish banshee is with true Milesian families. She announces good or ill fortune, and manifests a general interest in the family to which she is attached, but to others she acts with considerable caprice; thus she shows unmitigated malignity to the sacristan and the robber. Any truly virtuous mortal has commanding ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of the all-powerful malignity of fate. ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... the cause of his ruin; and now he bent all the energies of his dark nature to destroy the reputation of the man whom he had betrayed and plundered. Of all the beings self-delivered to the rule of unscrupulous malignity, with whom it has been my fate to come professionally in contact, I never knew one so utterly fiendish as this discomfited pilferer. Frenzied with his imaginary wrongs, he formed the determination to labor, even if it were for years, to ruin his victim. Nothing short of death ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... of the world and would be a clod when no longer living—her essence would remain to inspirit some other evil woman—the same malignity in a beautiful shape which appeared in Lais, Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia, the Medici, Ninon, Lecouvreur, Iza, not links of a chain, but the same gem, a little ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... 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 girl drew ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... around it, they would not have placed me here. Heaven only knows what I have suffered, and still suffer. I live in constant dread that some ruffian, instigated by my landlady, who wishes to gratify both her avarice and malignity, may break in upon me some time when I am off my guard, and make me the victim of a brutal outrage. This fear keeps me awake nights, and makes my days miserable. Nor is this all; I have not tasted food ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson

... proudly, 'who is my accuser, and I guess wherefore he thus arraigns me. Men and citizens, know this man for the most bitter of the Nazarenes, if that or Christians be their proper name! What marvel that in his malignity he dares accuse even an Egyptian of the murder ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... of the Balikh and the Khabur, all seemed to conspire to aggravate the helpless state into which Babylon had sunk since the close of the dynasty of Uruazagga. Elam was pressing upon her eastern, and Assyria on her northern frontier, and their kings not only harassed her with persistent malignity, but, by virtue of their alliances by marriage with her sovereigns, took advantage of every occasion to interfere both in domestic and state affairs; they would espouse the cause of some pretender during a revolt, they would assume the guardianship ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... like a dog incensed and terrified at the presence of some superior creature, at whom he snarls, then runs away, and then returns to snarl again. If the comparison be a just one, it may be added, in extenuation of Johnson's malignity, that he is at least a dog who thinks himself to be attacking the inveterate foe of his master; for Milton's hostility to a kingly government was the crime ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... 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, and in the sederunt ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... arm, and it was without surprise that I saw the monster cower back before a similar movement made spontaneously by each one of us. It would be impossible to describe the expression of hate and baffled malignity, of anger and hellish rage, which came over the Count's face. His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound. The next instant, with a sinuous dive ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... on its keeper!" he hissed in my ear. "I wounded it twice from below, and you severed one arm; in its insensate fury, its unreasoning malignity, it returned—and there lies its ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer



Words linked to "Malignity" :   benignancy, benignity, evil, maliciousness, malignance, benevolence, hatred, evilness, vengefulness, spitefulness, spite, vindictiveness, malevolence



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