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Savagery   Listen
noun
Savagery  n.  
1.
The state of being savage; savageness; savagism. "A like work of primeval savagery."
2.
An act of cruelty; barbarity. "The wildest savagery, the vilest stroke, That ever wall-eyed wrath or staring rage Presented to the tears of soft remorse."
3.
Wild growth, as of plants.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books



... open might be a cousin of the blue beasts. But where they had given only an impression of brutal menace, this was savagery incarnate. Taller than Hume, but hunched forward in its neckless outline, the thing was a monster. And over the round of the lower jaw, ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... other French commanders of a later date, Champlain found it impossible to curb wholly the passions of his savage allies. In this case his remonstrances had the effect of gaining for the victim a coup de grace—which may be taken as a measure of Champlain's prestige. The atrocious savagery practised before and after death is described in full detail. Champlain concludes the lurid picture as follows: 'This is the manner in which these people behave towards those whom they capture in war, for whom ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby

... he lived alone, even though, like Crusoe, he were monarch of his whole environment. It would be a losing bargain for the worker to surrender the product of mere labor in a state of civilization in exchange for what both labor and capital create in a state of savagery. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... usefulness alone. Utility is the first purpose of most of the works of man. But when the maker is moved by pride in his work and a desire for beauty to make his handiwork pleasing in appearance as well as useful a second purpose is fulfilled. All civilization and most forms of savagery demand that the equipment of routine life shall be pleasing to the eye after its prime purpose of ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage

... acquired some skill in criticism he has generally ceased to be a critic, through no fault of his own, but through sheer weariness of spirit. When a man is very young he can dance upon everyone who has not written a masterpiece with a light heart, but after this period of joyous savagery there follows fatigue and a certain pity. The critic loses sight of his first magnificent standards, and becomes grateful for even the smallest merit in the books he is compelled to read. Like a mother giving a powder to her ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... their hideous lips in anticipation of the feast to come, and vied with one another in the savagery and loathsomeness of the cruel indignities with which they tortured the still ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... those people in Christian London. Nothing would please me better—not even to discover a new truth—than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will tend to become worse, and to create something worse than savagery,—a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will swallow up ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick." But more than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and he would come to a recollection of himself, startled and shamefaced ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... from the confinement of the hold, wandered about the deck, not a little to the discomfiture of the crew in whose minds there remained a still vivid picture of the savagery of the beasts in conflict with those who had gone to their deaths beneath the fangs and talons which even now seemed itching for the ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... out, we are in a peculiarly favourable position in Canada, because we have in our own history, in the comparatively short time of 400 years, the development of a free and prosperous country from a state of wildness and savagery. The early stages of our history present those elements of life that appeal strongly to children—namely, Indians with all their ways of living and fighting, and the early settlers with their simpler problems and difficulties. The development of this simpler life to the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... and destruction had celebrated the maddest orgies on our path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the bars which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called barricades. An elderly gentleman who was explaining their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the savage in the most of us and it needs but to put a gun in the hands of some and decorate them with brass buttons with U. S. inscribed thereon to bring to the surface—like a plaster on a boil—all the native savagery there is in the man; personally, I would prefer to run my chances among the Head Hunters on the Isle of Borneo than among uniformed thugs protected and encouraged by martial law to carry out their natural murderous propensities as was the case in San Francisco, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... 1794 he erected a rustic, nondescript sort of log chateau on the steep acclivity overlooking the valley of the Don, rather more than a mile from the river's mouth. The situation is one of the most picturesque in the neighbourhood, even at the present day, and there must have been a wild semi-savagery about it in Governor Simcoe's time that would render it specially attractive to one accustomed, he had been, to the trim hedges and green lanes ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... Madam Rothsay, too, plunged from the height of civilization into the depths of savagery without even a maid or a mirror. I can fully sympathize with her. But what do you propose to do? Have you thought out ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... The savagery was all gone from the Indian's eyes; they were wonderfully soft and un-Indian in their expression. He seemed, all at once, to be thinking of something far off. And his look ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates

... hanging the Pope (see The Popes of Rome, by Leopold Ranke, translated by Sarah Austen, 1866, i. 72). Brantome (Memoirs de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille.... Leyde, 1722, i. 230) gives a vivid picture of their fanatical savagery: "Leur cruaute ne s'estendit pas seulement sur les personnes, mais sur les marbres et les anciennes statues. Les Lansquenets, qui nouvellement estoient imbus de la nouvelle Religion, et les Espagnols encore aussi bien que les autres, s'habilloient ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... even the warlike Barsoomian. The mad rending, the hideous and deafening roaring, the implacable savagery of the blood-stained beasts held him in the paralysis of fascination, and when it was over and the two creatures, their heads and shoulders torn to ribbons, lay with their dead jaws still buried in each ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Under the sway of Barbarossa, under our old anti-chaotic friend Henry the Fowler, how different had it been! No field for a Belleisle to come and sow tares in; no rotten thatch for a French Sun-god to go sailing about in the middle of, and set fire to! Henry, when the Hungarian Pan-Slavonic Savagery came upon him, had got ready in the interim; and a mangy dog was the "tribute" he gave them; followed by the due extent of broken crowns, since they would not be content with that. That was the due of Belleisle ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... serious disturbance of the peace; and there seems to be good reason to hope that, so long as the Rajah's government continues to be conducted along the same lines, there will be no recrudescence of savagery. The last case of fighting on any considerable scale occurred in 1894, when Tama Bulan's people, resenting the offensive conduct of bands of Sea Dayaks who had penetrated to their neighbourhood in search of jungle-products, turned out and took the heads of thirteen of the Dayaks. It was only after ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... away by excess of frenzy, thou art little prone to love. Steeped in blood and slaughter, thou judgest wars better than the bed, nor refreshest thy soul with incitements. Thy fierceness finds no leisure; dalliance is far from thee, and savagery fostered. Nor is thy hand free from blasphemy while thou loathest the rites of love. Let this hateful strictness pass away, let that loving warmth approach, and plight the troth of love to me, who gave thee the first breasts of milk in childhood, and helped thee, playing a mother's part, duteous ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... way, namely, by neglect and infidelity, while he treats his numerous mistresses just as the Turk treats the creatures of his harem— merely as so many pretty soft animals, requiring to be fed with sweets and ornamented with jewels, and then to be cast aside when done with. All pure savagery! But we are slowly evolving from it into something better. A few of us there are, who honour womanhood,- -a few of us believe in women as guiding stars in our troubled sky,- -a few of us would work and climb to greatness for love of the one woman ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... of a governess in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, 'through eighteen sloughs, at the imminent peril of one's life', and when one had reached it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of her brothers and ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... longer 3000 years ago. But that is a mere guess, and is contradicted by the facts of their language. They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery, or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages. Think only of the rules that determine marriage among the lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, superstition, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... fire which she made no effort to control. She was primitive, savage. When Jerry's blows landed, her lips parted and she breathed hard. I think at this moment he was the only man for her, her mate in savagery, the finest human beast in the world. When the round ended I moved away. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... It was evidently a very slim canoe with a balance beam and sails. Then my gaze encountered other unfamiliar objects scattered about: necklaces of shells strung on human hair, head-dresses of feathers, ornaments appertaining to a dark and primitive savagery; it was as if distant Polynesia had come to me during my sleep. My brother, it seems had already begun to open his cases, and while I slept he had slipped noiselessly into my room and grouped around me these ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... the daughter and granddaughter of one of these gentlemen afterwards became Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The country, as far as I could see, appeared to be highly cultivated. The people in their habits and customs presented a curious mixture of savagery and civilisation. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... the sake of plunder, with or without the incentive of revenge; crushing peasant rebellions by hanging such few peasants as escaped the sword; and at all times robbing every unlucky merchant who chanced to come their way. It was a curious twist, that reversion to savagery, from the Roman epoch: when the Rhone Valley was inhabited by a civilized people who encouraged commerce and who had a genuine love for the arts. And, after all—unless they had some sort of pooling arrangement—the robber lords in the mid-region of the Rhone could ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It—Oh, alliteration is useless. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... to like this application by the early colonists to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown dear to them ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... of their country, they had continued to live among the Shawnees and Wyandots, and in their savagery were worse than the Indians. Their names are red on ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin

... sacrifice, the symbolism, the practices all prove this. The crucified Saviour, in honour of whom all the Christian cathedrals and churches of the world are built, is only another late survival of the god-making practice of primitive savagery. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... capital, rivals, if not exceeds, Samoa in the magnificence of its scenery, and the natives are a highly intelligent race of Malayo-Polynesians who, despite their being citizens of the French Republic, never forget that they were redeemed from savagery by Englishmen, and a taata Peretane (Englishman) is an ever-welcome guest to them. The facilities for visiting the different islands of the Society Group are very good, for there is quite a fleet of native and European-owned vessels constantly cruising throughout the archipelago. ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... interested in a knowledge of prehistoric times. The rude implements of the past appeal to the curiosity of all. We arise from a study of the past with clearer ideas of man's destiny. Impressed with the great advancement in man's condition from the rude savagery of the drift, to the enlightened civilization of to-day, what may we not hope the advancement will be during the countless ages we believe a beneficent Providence has in ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... last more than a minute longer, and the strong, murky smell of the beast was turning him faint, as the wolf seemed to be gaining in strength and savagery. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... others half our resentment is forestalled. Knowing that from a race such as ours we shall not get anything else we learn to take it philosophically. If I hurl my assegai at another, another hurls his assegai at me, and in a measure we are quits. Even if, trying to rise above my inborn savagery, I withhold my assegai, it is no sign that another will withhold his, and I may be wounded even in the effort to do my best. Very well; that, too, is to be expected and ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals, lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... For the first time in the history of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no effectual guarantee that it ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... acquainted with their savageness and brutality, is wonderful beyond exaggeration. But this very brutal and barbarous nature renders them (a marvelous thing!) less incapable of our holy faith, and less averse to it—because in their state of pure savagery they have not, as I know from observation, any idolatries or superstitions, neither are they greatly averse to the gospel and baptism. The others—who to their own detriment and misfortune, are more civilized—abandon ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson

... reservation at the Bosque Redondo. Here they engaged in civilized farming. A great system of irrigation was developed; but the appropriations necessary for the maintenance of so large a body of people in the course of their passage from savagery to civilization seemed too great to those responsible for making grants from the national treasury, and just before 1870 the Navajos were permitted to break up their homes at the Bosque Redondo and return to the canyons and cliffs of their ancient land. Millions were spent ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... massacre by the Japanese troops in Port Arthur is to be condemned, there is not the slightest doubt in the world that the Chinese brought it on themselves by their own vindictive savagery towards their enemies. The attacking armies, advancing down the Peninsula in touch with the fleet, were now within a day or two's march of the inland forts. Bodies of Chinese troops harassed and resisted them, ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan

... hate. But after learning the futility of it, sentient creatures discovered another, the succeeding evolutionary emotion. It is pure savagery in its destructive power, a thousand times more effective in ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones

... what Tarzan said, was none the less enraged because of that. He saw only a naked man-thing, hairless and futile, pitting his puny fangs and soft muscles against his own indomitable savagery, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Months of semi-savagery had made also a good deal of difference in Dick's appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they landed. Freckled and tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve. He was the promise of a fine man. He was not a good-looking child, but he was healthy-looking, with a ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... it struggling fiercely for the mastery, one party, that high-seated crowd called the Mountain, red republicans whose cry was ever "No King," growing stronger day by day. Nations in arms were gathering on the frontiers of France, and the savagery of the populace was let loose. The Tuileries had been stormed, the Swiss Guard butchered, the royal family imprisoned in the Temple. Quickly the Legislative Assembly had given way to a National Convention, and ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... second time before speaking of them, so that I could give an exact and genuine account of actual facts. Courage failed me to see all, but what I have seen can be summed up in one phrase. In the environs of Shabatz the vanquished put the finishing touch to their acts of fearful savagery by butchering their Servian prisoners, whose corpses were found heaped up in ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... a period longer than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth

... growth and development of the moral sentiment in man, they show how he has grown from savagery to civilisation, and think therein that they have explained everything. They are like the photographer I spoke of above. They have found out the history of ethics, and they think there is nothing more to know. Far ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... landlord, and a constabulary who seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an intolerable family blood-feud to harden his heart. Savagery had begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry. He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like Jim Holan, or Patrick McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... among an inhospitable people. Coppinger lived by smuggling and wrecking; he was brave, violent, and of great physical strength, and he terrorized the population of these little villages by acts of savagery and cruelty. A ganger who had had the boldness to interfere with him he seized, and beheaded on the gunnel of his own boat, and even for this no one dared to bring him to justice. He played violent practical jokes, by inviting to dinner with him ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... green sea. Beyond is the range which divides the Valais from Italy. Sweeping round, the vision meets an aggregate of peaks which look as fledglings to their mother towards the mighty Dom. Then come the repellent crags of Mont Cervin; the ideal of moral savagery, of wild untameable ferocity, mingling involuntarily with our contemplation of the gloomy pile. Next comes an object, scarcely less grand, conveying, it may be, even a deeper impression of majesty and might than the Matterhorn itself—the Weisshorn, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... of a god's character is illustrated with special clearness by the history of Dionysus. It is generally agreed that he was of foreign origin, an importation from Thrace. The features of his earliest cult known to us are marked by bald savagery. His worshipers indulged in wild orgies, probably excited by intoxicating drinks, tore to pieces a goat (as in Thrace) or a bull (as in Crete) and ate the flesh raw;[1338] and the evidence goes to show that they practiced human sacrifice. All these ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... surpassed Roman luxury in the lavishness of his expense, Roman pride in his sense of complete independence of circumstance, and Roman niggardliness and cruelty in his treatment of his slaves. Satiety had begotten a chronic callousness and even savagery that showed itself, not merely in the now familiar use of the ergastulum and the brand, but in arbitrary and cruel punishments which were part of the programme of almost every day. His wife Megallis, hardened by the same influences, was the torment of her maidens and ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... old Greek world, in which man had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery and ignorance had swept away the established order of things. There was need of something more positive and more definite. This ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... the family were amiable, intelligent and hospitable; but, like all the women of Buenos Ayres at that time, were perforce ardent Federalists and detesters of the "savage Unitarios." Farragut mentions an incident occurring at an official festivity in honor of Rosas, which shows the savagery that lay close under the surface of the Argentine character at that time, and easily found revolting expression in the constant civil strife and in the uncontrolled rule of the dictator. "In the ball-room was a ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... villages and find at the most some lout in a reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in spelling a word of three letters. Cultured life has not yet begun among us. There's the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same triviality, as five hundred years ago. Movements, currents there have been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary interests—and one cannot see anything important in them. If you think you have discerned a deep ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... should like to wring your neck for that!" he said. At the swift ruthless savagery in his tone the girl shrank back. Nicanor saw and laughed. "Since I may not, I'll take payment otherhow. As for the old man, let him squeal as best likes him. If they break him on the wheel, I shall go and tell them how to do it; if they boil him in oil, I shall go and stir the gravy. ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... waiting, and have to sweat and swear and endure this waiting longer now than then before the intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts' desire, when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their souls cries "Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low in every man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured, like the juicy battlefields of old, "with carrion men groaning ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... Maud. Of more importance was the sallying forth, during the Civil War, of the Royalists, who had fortified a mansion which had arisen from the Castle ruins, against the republican town, capturing and partly burning it. The soldiers displayed great savagery, fifty-three houses being destroyed. The garrison of "the most notoriously disaffected town in Wiltshire" was the first taken in the War. The Castle was also famous as the place of meeting for the Parliament of Henry III which passed the ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... Mrs. Porter if she has got that toilet vinegar for me. She promised to get it down from London quite a week ago. It is really too ridiculous! But what can one expect in this hole, and living among a set of barbarians? I know that I shall never grow accustomed to this life of savagery; my memory of the past is too acute, alas! But I must stifle it; I must remember that the great trial of my life has been sent for my good, and I will never complain. Not one word of discontent shall ever pass my lips. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... bursting out with a kind of savagery that he could not explain. "Yes. She's young, and she finds even my age spicy. There'd be something quite amusingly piquant for her in marrying a man ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... earl, and was soon transferred to an outpost on the upper Wye, where he was at once engaged in deadly warfare with the fiercest of savages. For the Welsh, once the cultivated Britons, had degenerated into savagery. Bloodshed and fire raising amongst the hated "Saxons" (as they called all the English alike) were the amusement and the business of their lives, until Edward the First, of dire necessity, conquered and tamed them in the very next generation. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... the life of the Romans, and we marvel at the inhumanity of those soulless Luculli, who satiated themselves on viands and wines while the populace were dying with hunger. We shake our heads, and we marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, who were serf-owners, supporters of household orchestras and theatres, and of whole villages devoted to the care of their gardens; and we wonder, from the heights of our grandeur, at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isa. ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... terrible destruction, the treasures and relics, and painted glass, and monuments, the plunder of the secret almerys, the intoxicated triumph of those rude northern hordes let loose in our fair and lovely island; what scenes of savagery, where now the jackdaw builds, and the blackbird whistles, and the wild water-rat plays with her brood amongst ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... influenced his bloodthirsty followers. His chief traits were treachery and cruelty, and his pre-eminence in these qualities commanded their respect. His conduct of the siege of Detroit, as we shall see, was marked by duplicity and diabolic savagery. He has often been extolled for his skill as a military leader, and there is a good deal in his siege of Detroit and in the murderous ingenuity of some of his raids to support this view. But his principal claim to distinction ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... had never known; but now, with this averted, her nature leapt beyond the past eight years of training—eight years spent in fitting herself as teacher for this school—and transported her to those early days of partial savagery. Again she was the little mountain outlaw, and the feeling was good, and her heart bounded with a primeval pleasure of this excitement which was routing every previous qualm of fright. Bent breathlessly forward, her hands clenched into ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as he was by the trammels of civilization, he contented himself with imagining ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... travellers were at this time introduced had just succeeded in obtaining a quantity of the coarse and fiery spirits of the traders. Their native visitors being quite ready to assist in the consumption thereof, there was every prospect of a disgusting exhibition of savagery ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... involvement is this?" demanded Chang Tao. "This one's thoughts and intention were not turned towards savagery and arms, but in the direction of a pacific union of two ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... feeling was almost that of a paganism, of an earth-smell and an earth-worship, of a giant awakening from torpor, ravenous with hunger. It was all the grand savagery, the terrible strength of Mother Earth, the Great Protector, from whose loins I had sprung, but who is unspeakably awesome until you see her face in the rising sun. Then the nightmare of the darkness which ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... talons of the harpy eagle and claws of the tiger cats; but when Suma dealt her crushing blow it proved at once the fallacy of taking too many things for granted. So the shattered casques and broken bones of many a luckless armadillo were strewn along the way, mute evidences of Suma's insatiable savagery. ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... government for conference or special duty, and he issued the strictest orders from time to time to drive the throng of military idlers from the capital and keep them at their posts. He was stern to savagery in his enforcement of military law. The wearied sentinel who slept at his post found no mercy in the heart of Stanton, and many times did Lincoln's humanity overrule ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure

... now; cast back into savagery and blindly groping for its primitive weapons. Honoria crossed the floor not knowing what she meant to do, or might do. Lizzie sprang to defence against she knew not what. But when her enemy advanced, towering, with a healthy ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Peter, of course, but I don't imagine he had any idea of the peck of trouble he was going to stir up at Casa Grande. For Dinky-Dunk picked up the sheet of paper on which that light-hearted message had been written and perused the two lines, perused them with a savagery which rather disturbed me. He read them for the second time, and then he put them down. His eye, as he confronted me, was a ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... presentation rests. These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... the world at peace, she had given humankind at least the opportunity to grow. The moment her restraining hand was shaken off, war sprang up everywhere. Not only do we find the inheritors of her territory fighting among themselves, they are exposed to the savagery of Attila, the fury of the Arabs. New bands of more distant Teutons come, ever pushing in amid their half-settled brethren, overthrowing them in turn. The Lombards capture Northern Italy, only Venice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... by instincts is pure savagery. All civilization is the result of subordinating instinct to reason, and to the necessities of peace, amity and righteousness. To surrender to instinct, would destroy all civilization in three days. If, then, the color-line is the result of natural instincts, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various

... the direct sacrifices and material losses by slaughter, fire, hunger, and disease, a war will cause to humanity a great moral evil in consequence of the forms which a struggle on sea will assume, and of the examples of savagery which it will present at a moment when the civil order will be threatened by new theories of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... and in Italy, that great treasury of the world's art, has been raised the sinister cry: "Burn the museums!" They have not yet taken to the torch, but if they were sincere they would do it; for their doctrine calls for nothing less than the reduction of mankind to a state of primitive savagery that it may begin again ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox

... by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made colorful ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... Dion, with sudden savagery, springing up from his chair. "So you and he have talked me over! I was sure of it. And no doubt you told Jimmy he was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... you, and I can only do it in a sentence or two, of more important changes in these fifty years. English manners and morals have been bettered, much of savagery and coarseness has been got rid of; low, cruel amusements have been abandoned. Thanks to the great Total Abstinence movement very largely, the national conscience has been stirred in regard to the great national sin of intoxication. A national system of education ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... overheard Trevison's tense whisper to Corrigan. The cold savagery in it had paralyzed him, and he gasped as Trevison's eyes found him, and the pistol that he tried to raise dangled futilely from his nerveless fingers. It thudded heavily upon the boards of the floor an instant later, a shriek of fear mingling with the sound as he ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... claqueurs and retailers of tickets. It was an ill smelling squad, attired in caps, seedy trousers, and threadbare overcoats; a flock of gallows-birds with bluish and greenish tints in their faces, neglected beards, and a strange mixture of savagery and subservience in their eyes. A horrible population lives and swarms upon the Paris boulevards; selling watch guards and brass jewelry in the streets by day, applauding under the chandeliers of the theatre at night, and ready to lend themselves to any ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... conditions of existence thus to behold the 'ills that flesh is heir to' in the midst of a city where such rich outward provision for human activity and enjoyment fills the senses. Excessive civilization has its morbid tendencies, and great refinement in one direction is paralleled by an equal degree of savagery in another. There is in absolute relation between the facilities for pleasure and the frequency of suicide. Of all places in the world, Paris is the most desolate to an invalid stranger. The custom of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and forgetting both what painful facts self-criticism has revealed to ourselves, and the eyes upon us of the yet more delicate refinement and the yet gentle breeding of the high countries? May these not see in us some malgrace which it needs the gentleness of Christ to get over and forget, some savagery of which we are not aware, some gaucherie that repels though it cannot estrange them? Casting from us our own faults first, let us cast from us and from him our neighbor's also. O gentle man, the common man is yet thy ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... action and all manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back—for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... work is a good thing. A moderate and reasonable amount of labor is usually the salvation of any individual. No nation or race has come up from savagery to civilization without the stimulating influence of labor. It is likewise true that no individual can advance from the savagery of childhood to the civilization of adult life except through work of some kind. Work in a reasonable amount is a blessing and not a curse. ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... included English, French and Dutch sailors, and were complemented occasionally by bands of native Indians, there are few instances during the time of their prosperity and growth of their falling upon one another, and treating their fellows with the savagery which they exulted in displaying against the subjects of Spain. The exigencies, moreover, of their perilous career readily wasted their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... mankind slowly came through the savage state, the world was filled with infinite fear. They accounted for everything bad that happened as the wrath of this supreme being. But they went from savagery to barbarism—a step in improvement—and then began to build temples to, and make images of, this being. Then man began to believe he could influence this being by prayer, by getting on his knees to the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... such are in danger of believing in an evil God. And if men believed in an evil God, and had not the courage to defy him, they must sink to the very depths of savagery. At least that is what I ventured to suppose ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... expediency dictated the savage massacre and mutilation which followed. The death of Zedekiah's sons, and of the nobles who had scoffed at Jeremiah's warnings, and the blinding of Zedekiah, were all measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... pleasant people. I heard from Janet to-day of ice at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices. I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e'en stay here and grill at Thebes. Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery! What if we do wear ragged brown shirts? ''Tis manners makyth man,' and we defy you ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... America, having an analogous organization, and similar weapons and tools. A few lived in the desert, in the oasis of Libya, or in the deep valleys of the Red Land—Doshirit, To Doshiru—between the Nile and the sea; the poverty of the country fostering their native savagery. Others, settled on the Black Land, gradually became civilized, and we have found of late considerable remains of those of their generations who, if not anterior to the times of written records, were at least contemporary with the earliest ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... was dead. It could not rally from that stroke. They went on to Stra, as they had planned, but the glory of the Villa Pisani was eclipsed for Don Ippolito. He plainly did not know what to do. He did not address Florida again, whose savagery he would not probably have known how to resent if he had wished to resent it. Mrs. Vervain prattled away to him with unrelenting kindness; Ferris kept near him, and with affectionate zeal tried to make him talk of the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... become the great commercial and naval emporium of the North Sea. The time seemed to favour the design; Hamburg and Bremen were blockaded, and London for a space was menaced by the growing power of the First Consul, who seemed destined to restore to the Flemish port the prosperity which the savagery of Alva had swept away with such profit to Elizabethan London. But grand as were Napoleon's enterprises at Antwerp, they fell far short of his ulterior designs. He told Las Cases at St. Helena that the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... another life remains, because the hope does not depend upon a book—it depends upon the heart—upon human affection. The fear, so far as this generation is concerned, is born of the book, and that part of the book was born of savagery. Whatever of hope is in the book is born, as I said before, of human affection, and the higher our civilization the greater the affection. I had rather rest my hope of something beyond the grave upon the human ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... (on the obverse), i.e., line 117, and the beginning of column 4 (on the reverse), i.e., line 131—a gap of 13 lines—the tablet is obscure, but apparently the story of Enkidu's gradual transformation from savagery to civilized life is continued, with stress upon his introduction to domestic ways with the wife chosen or decreed for him, and with work as part of his fate. All this has no connection with Gilgamesh, and it is evident that the tale of Enkidu was originally an independent tale to illustrate ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous

... The Evolution of Property from Savagery to Civilization, 18, 19. "If the savage is incapable of conceiving the idea of individual possession of objects not incorporated with his person, it is because he has no conception of his individuality as distinct from the consanguine group in which he lives.... Savages, even though ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... at a fairly accurate understanding of the whole situation. He remembered vaguely the report of a row between Watson and Busby, and he was aware of the reckless cruelty of the dead man. It might be that in revenge for some savagery on his part, some graceless act toward Rita, this moody, half-insane youth had crept upon the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... appealed to him. He had a way with women of a certain kind, and if his confidence had been rather shaken by Jean's savagery and Lydia's indifference, he had not altogether abandoned the hope that both girls in their turn might be conquered by the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace

... is a man in whom the people who confer honor upon him find themselves also honored. He is a native of the Commonwealth, of whose laws he is the chief administrator, and comes of that sturdy stock which wresting a new country from savagery, fostered with patient industry the germs of civilization it had planted, and aided in developing into a nation the colonies that, throwing off the yoke of foreign tyranny, presented to the world an example of ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... he had it in his power to punish, let him go free, saying, Forgiveness is better than revenge. The one shows native gentleness, the other savagery. ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... the final troubles that precipitated the country again into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war, constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against her Austrian rulers, expelled the bailies, and entered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... some remote cataclysmal period, registering thus its throes and turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the farther summits that defined its craggy serrated edge against the ultimate distances of the western heavens, seemed of a singularly suave tint, incongruous with the savagery of the scene, which clouds and portents of storm might better have befitted. The little graveyard, which John Dundas discerned with recognizing eyes, albeit they had never before rested upon it, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... Wars of the sixteenth century: the ferocities, cruelties, and savagery of those wars: depopulated and ruined this rich and flourishing country: the Inquisition drove thousands of Flemings, an industrious and orderly folk, to England, where they established silk manufactures: and the carrying trade which had been wholly in the hands of the Antwerp shipowners was ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... pile in, and so Jimmie Higgins was driven to a second line of defence. Well, maybe so, but then all the armies were alike. Somebody told Jimmie the saying of a famous general, that war was hell; and Jimmie took to this—it was exactly what he wanted to believe! War was a return to savagery, and the worse it became, the better Jimmie's argument went. He was not interested in men's efforts to improve war, by agreeing that they would kill in this way but not in that way, they would kill this kind of people ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... boiled with rage and horror whenever she permitted herself to contemplate the excesses of the late Jerry. She had always mistrusted the man. She had never liked his face—not merely on aesthetic grounds but because she had seemed to detect in it a lurking savagery. How right events had proved this instinctive feeling. Mrs. Pett was not vulgar enough to describe the feeling, even to herself, as a hunch, but a hunch it had been; and, like every one whose hunches have proved correct, she was conscious in the midst of her grief of a certain complacency. It seemed ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... savagery which suddenly edged the voice of the man who had first greeted him. There was contempt in it—and an assumption of personal superiority ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks

... his task stood fully revealed. For the next three years he struggled with enormous difficulties— with the confused and horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the loathsome diseases, the indifference of subordinates and superiors, the savagery of the slave-traders, and the hatred of the inhabitants. One by one the small company of his European staff succumbed. With ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... of the Argus pheasant waving from their war-caps, the brilliant colors of their war-coats trimmed with the black and white feathers of the hornbill, and the strange devices upon their gaudy shields but added to the savagery of their appearance as they danced and howled, menacing and intimidating, in the path of ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... himself detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he preserves game, and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal rights over his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man who ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw

... Hungarian town, with its streets knee-deep in mud, and swarming with huge dogs of ferocious temper. On quitting the steamboat for the inn, I seemed at one step to have passed from civilisation into savagery. Anything more atrociously filthy and repulsive than this establishment I never saw, and yet it was the best inn of a ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... glory; nowadays it is a calamity. Later on it will be condemned as the sad ancestral remains of barbarism and savagery. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... Ottoman Empire. It was as if a man suffered from gout in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of inhuman savagery. When it was dead it ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed Mrs. Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she could not ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... first frankly make two or three admissions. We have no right to hinder, nor do we seek to prevent, the legitimate development of the colonial power of France. So far as France can replace savagery by true civilization, we shall rejoice in her advances in any part of the world. And further, we have no right to, nor do we pretend to the exercise of, the duty of police of the world. But at the same time, while we ought not and ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... stared, with aching eyes, at the rich twilight which crept like purple mist among the trees. The very quiet of the scene grated as a discord upon his mood, and he would have welcomed with a feeling of relief any violent manifestation of the savagery of nature. A storm, an earthquake, even the thunder of battle he felt would be less tragic than just this pleasant evening with the serene moon ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... accrue to it for having shown that a people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... jury sat upon a log in the woods, and the foreman signed the bills of indictment, which I had prepared, upon his knee; there was not a petit juror that had shoes on; all wore moccasins, and were belted around the waist, and carried side-knives used by the hunters." Yet amidst all this apparent savagery we see justice was done, and the law vindicated even against the bitterest prejudices of these ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... inclinations, of our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to reproduction." The two latter tendencies the savage possesses as completely as the civilized man, but he does not share the civilized man's instinct for correlation. And in this sense, I think, a certain savagery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. His productions have many attractions and many merits—merits and attractions that the traditional painting has not. But they are really only by a kind of automatic inadvertence, pictures. They are ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... strifes and dissensions followed another breach of the Admiral's wise regulations; they no longer cared to remain together in the fort, but split up into groups and went off with their women into the woods, reverting to a savagery beside which the gentle existence of the natives was high civilisation. There were squabbles and fights in which one or two of the Spaniards were killed; and Pedro Gutierrez and Rodrigo de Escovedo, whom Columbus had appointed as lieutenants to Arana, headed a faction ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... which all the marvellous agility with which this whale is gifted was exerted to the full in order to make his escape. But with the bottom not twenty fathoms away, we were sure of him. With all his supple smartness, he had none of the dogged savagery of the cachalot about him, nor did we feel any occasion to beware of his rushes, rather courting them, so as to finish the game as quickly ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... would seem that cruelty differs not from savagery or brutality. For seemingly one vice is opposed in one way to one virtue. Now both savagery and cruelty are opposed to clemency by way of excess. Therefore it would seem that savagery and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... but be concerned with manners, refinement, good breeding, and in a more minute sense, with the forms of etiquette. It is these things that distinguish civilization from savagery, and so unmistakably lift the cultured person above the one who does not see fit to cultivate the grace ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman

... growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise—a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark like ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by more perfect material appliances, and commercial ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... Prometheus has been fought out. On the ground of science, who does not know the defiant and Titanic mood in which knowledge has at times been sought? The passion for knowing flames through the gloom and depression and savagery of the darker moods of the student. Difficulties are continually thrust into the way of knowledge. The upper powers seem to be jealous and outrageously thwarting, and the path of learning becomes a path of tears and blood. That is all that ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... too apt to look upon the condition of savage and of barbarous tribes as standing on the same plane with respect to advancement. They should be carefully distinguished as dissimilar conditions of progress. Moreover, savagery shows stages of culture and of progress, and the same is true of barbarism. It will greatly facilitate the study of the facts relating to these two conditions, through which mankind have passed in their progress to civilization, to discriminate between ethnical periods, or stages ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... in the cut-throat exploits of Moroccans and Senegalese, in the bestial orgies of drunken Boches, and in the most revolting horrors of bayonet charges and the corps-a-corps. It was as though they wanted to reveal the savagery of war to the last indescribable madness of its lust. "Pah!" said an old cabotin, after one of these word-pictures. "This war is the last spasm of the world's barbarity. Human nature will finish with it this ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... deliberate profligacy. Of two of his amours we learn enough or too much from his letters to Murray and to Moore—the first with his landlord's wife, Marianna Segati, the second with Margarita Cogni (the "Fornarina"), a Venetian of the lower class, who amused him with her savagery and her wit. But, if Shelley may be trusted, there was a limit to his candour. There is abundant humour, but there is an economy of detail in his pornographic chronicle. He could not touch pitch without being defiled. But to do ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... commonly termed savagery through barbarism to civilisation is marked by a change in the character of the associations which are almost everywhere a feature of human society. In the lower stages of culture, save among peoples whose organisation has perished under the pressure of foreign invasion or other external ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... could have been imported into the colorless literature of the empire. "Atala" is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European—that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... expressions of face were natural to him; one eloquent of good humour, in which the reader of countenances would find some promise of coming frolic;—and the other, replete with anger, sometimes to the extent almost of savagery. All those who were dependent on him were wont to watch his face with care and sometimes with fear. When he was angry it would almost seem that he was about to use personal violence on the object of his wrath. At the present moment he was rather grieved than ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... he glided into war. Now his voice rose, full and prolonged, without any of the tremor or shrillness of age, and his eccentric dancing grew more violent. His emotions, too, were shown on his face in all their savagery as he told of the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... ordeals by poison and fire, to which Mr. Darwin alludes. "The improvement of our science" has freed us from misdeeds which are unknown to the Andamanese or the Australians. Thus there was, as regards these points in morals, degeneracy from savagery as society advanced, and I believe that there was also degeneration in religion. To say this is not to hint at a theory of supernatural revelation to the earliest men, a theory which I must, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... can't think the cast was up to its extremely difficult task, if you estimate that task, as it seems to me you must, to be the reproducing of the original Victory characters. Perhaps Mr. SAM LIVESEY'S Ricardo was the nearest, though the primitive savagery of his wooing had to be toned down in the interests of propriety. Mr. GAYER MACKAY made his Jones interesting and plausible in the quieter opening movements. In the intended tragic spasms one felt that he became rather comic than sinister. Not his fault, I think. He had no room or time ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... arm's-length of her dainty arm, In menace sweeter than a kiss could be And terribler than sudden whispers are That come from lips unseen, in sunlit room. So with the spell of all the Powers of Sense That e'er have swayed the savagery of hot blood Raying from her whole body beautiful, She held the eyes and wills of all the crowd. Then from the numbed hand of him that cut, The knife dropped down, and the quick fool stole in And snatched and ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... the procedure of criminal justice knows that it goes ahead slowly and surely and finally lays hold upon the guilty.—But as Commissioner von Stoeckel quite rightly observed: The whole moral downfall of our time, its actual return to savagery is a consequence of the lack of religion! Educated people do not hesitate to undermine the divine foundations upon which the structure of salvation rests.—But, thank God, we're always to be found at our place! We are, so to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann



Words linked to "Savagery" :   cruelty, wildness, ferociousness, viciousness, atrocity, savageness, savage, cruelness, inhumanity, fierceness



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