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Highway robbery   /hˈaɪwˌeɪ rˈɑbəri/   Listen
Highway robbery

noun
1.
An exorbitant price.
2.
Robbery of travellers on or near a public road.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Highway robbery" Quotes from Famous Books



... punishment for crime, or from an instinctive desire to return to primitive simplicity, foreswore life in the towns "under the bell," and made their homes in the mountains or other remote places. Gathered in small bands with such arms as they could secure, they sustained themselves by highway robbery and the levying of ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... to find it now complete. The old folio editions have been often mutilated by over use; the many later editions in octavo are mutilated by design of their editors; and for conveying any idea of the rough truthful descriptiveness of a book compiled in the palmy days of highway robbery, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... a warrant for the man for felonious assault, attempted highway robbery, or something of the sort, and have him sent where he won't trouble you again ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish

... a lawn somewhat quicker than seed. The best are cut from the road-side, but it is a hateful despoiling of one of the fairest of travellers' joys. Those who commit this highway robbery should reckon themselves in honor bound to sow the bare places they leave behind. Some people cut the pieces eighteen inches square, some about a yard long and twelve inches wide. Cut thin, roll up like thin bread and butter. When they are laid down, fit close ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Beach to Long Key. And the obvious reason is that nobody seems to take the trouble to get what might be proper bait for sailfish. Mullet is an easy bait to get and commands just as high a price as anything else, which, as a matter of fact, is highway robbery. With a bait like a ballyhoo or a shiner I could get ten bites ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... regarded as a very grave offence. Analogous to our crime of piracy is the forcible arrest of ships at sea and the transfer to them of valuables. Sometimes the Kosekin pirates give themselves up as slaves. Kidnapping, assault, highway robbery, and crimes of violence have their parallel here in cases where a strong man, meeting a weaker, forces himself upon him as his slave or compels him to take his purse. If the weaker refuse, the assailant threatens to kill himself, which act would lay the other under obligations to receive ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... concise legend before you, all you need to do, my dear Marcel, is simply to decide for yourself whether our story deals with an unscrupulous wretch who abandons his young wife to engage on a career of highway robbery; or whether it is the history of a deserted girl who becomes the wife of a professional outlaw; or whether it is a betrayed young wife who gives herself up to the cause of elevating the human race. A French ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... didn't see any diamond rings on his hands when I looked at his body, and I particularly noticed his hands, to see if there were signs of any struggle. No sir—it's just a plain case of what used to be called highway robbery and murder. But come round with me to the police-station, Mr. Viner—they'll have taken him to the mortuary by now, and I should like to hear what our divisional surgeon has to say, and what our people ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher

... said Tish to the girl, pouring in more batter, "that you yourself would never have thought of highway robbery had you not been led to ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... you speak, I should like to know? It seems absurd that Dermot should be living at the Grange, not two miles off, and yet we're never to see one another. I thought I should at least meet him once a week, and now I mayn't even say, 'How do you do?' without being scolded as if I had committed a highway robbery." ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle, where such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... too, some of them were, acute reasoners, sophists, casuists. We had no doubts, fears or suspicions of them, and they thought no evil of us. Some of them we invited to a reading in our tower; and once we enacted the "Aminta" with great applause: Beltramo, a very engaging boy (afterwards hanged for highway robbery and prison- breaking), Violante, an unfrocked priest called Il Corvo, Virginia and I took parts. Beltramo I never saw again but once, and that against my will. I saw him hanged at Genoa in 1742. A curious life indeed, which, to one so addicted to research into the ways of men ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... Trick.—The following anecdote serves to exemplify how necessary it is upon any important occasion to scrutinise the accuracy of a statement before it is taken upon trust. A fellow was tried at the Old Bailey for highway robbery, and the prosecutor swore positively that he had seen his face distinctly, for it was a bright moonlight night. The counsel for the prisoner cross-questioned the man so as to make him repeat that assertion, and insist upon it. He then affirmed ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... of lies and flies, the grave of reputation, the refuge of the remittance man and the bad egg; the land of the unexpected pest, but never the unexpected blessing; of sunstroke and fever; scandals and broken careers; snobbery, bobbery, and highway robbery. How, yet, when one had been away from her for a little while, sometimes for a few months only, one forgot all these things and remembered only with hunger and aching the pink-tipped hills of her, the crystal air, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... eyrie of Fastcastle over, at six hours' notice, to the officers of the King. Through the stormy years of Bothwell's repeated raids on James (1592-1594) Logan had been his partisan, and had been denounced a rebel. Later he appears in trouble for highway robbery committed by his retainers. Among the diversions of this country gentleman was flat burglary. In December 1593, 'when nichts are lang and mirk,' the Laird helped himself to the plate-chest of William Nesbit ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang

... forward with the present dilemma in Greece, where it seems that to be armed or to be unarmed is almost equally perilous. But our secret opinion is, that in all countries alike, the only absolute safeguard against highway robbery is—a railway; for then the tables are turned; not he who is stopped—incurs the risk, but he who stops: we question whether Samson himself could have pulled up his namesake on the Liverpool railway. Recently, indeed, in the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... read to the people. This increased their disposition to capitulate. Still the indomitable governor could not endure the thought of surrendering the majestic province of New Netherland to a force of four frigates. He regarded the movement, on the part of the English, as an atrocious act of highway robbery. But he was well aware that there was no escape from ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott

... he heard these words, and said very calmly, "Come now, base, ill-born brood; call ye it highway robbery to give freedom to those in bondage, to release the captives, to succour the miserable, to raise up the fallen, to relieve the needy? Infamous beings, who by your vile grovelling intellects deserve ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... father, dear," she said more gently, "but somehow I cannot believe that this was just ordinary highway robbery. This road is supposed to be quite safe: travellers are not warned against armed highwaymen, and marauders wouldn't be so well horsed and clothed. My belief is that it was a paid gang stationed at the broken bridge on purpose to rob us and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... be ashamed of," she said, smiling, "no mere highway robbery. The man was a government messenger. We are all Jacobites about here, and no man would have thought the worse of you for bidding him stand and deliver. Why, my uncle had a message from Squire Inglewood himself, that he had better provide for your safety ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... honorable conduct has been found here? Something, to be sure. The establishment of world credit systems is built on splendid and realizable faith in fellow-men. But it is, after all, so low and elementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor among thieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in the business world and in all its great modern centers have raised in the hearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolution in our basic methods and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... Paul IV., in 1557, but they still live and flourish in their crime, the victims of a criminal inheritance. The ratio of homicides in Italy and Artena is as 9 to 61; of assault and battery as 34 to 205; of highway robbery as 3 to 145; of theft as 47 to 111. Professor Pellman, of Bonn University, has traced the careers of a large number of defectives, and shown their cost to the State. Take this example:—A woman who was a thief, a drunkard, and a tramp for forty years of her life, had 834 descendants, ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... respect to missionaries and takes no steps to protect them will easily yield to the temptation to infringe on the rights of other citizens. Is it not possible that because our government has allowed outrages against our missionaries to go on since 1883 in Turkey,—highway robbery, brutal assault, destruction of buildings,—without any demonstration beyond peaceful and patient argument, the Ottoman government is now proceeding in so highhanded a manner to prevent by false allegations the importation ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... departed, to spy at them from other boxes and heave an inflated shirt-front. Young Cressett, the bottle of effervescence, dashed in, and for him Livia's face was motherly. He rattled a tale of the highway robbery of Sir Meeson Corby on one of his Yorkshire moors. The picture of the little baronet arose upon the narration, and it amused. Chumley Potts came to 'confirm every item,' as he said. 'Plucked Corby clean. Pistol at his head. Quite old style. Time, ten P.M. Suspects Great Britain, King, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... little whether their book is good or bad, provided it sells well. How many young people have been ruined by bad books, and how many more by foolish books! Boys, for example, read in some worthless book of desperate deeds of highway robbery or piracy, and are at once filled with the desire to imitate the hero of the tale. Young girls, on the other hand, are equally infatuated by the wonderful fortunes and adventures of some young woman whose life has been ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead

... It's plain enough. You wanted some letters that belonged to me. You have spent the morning in stealing them—yes, stealing them, by highway robbery. And you have spent the afternoon in putting me in the wrong about them—in assuming that it was I who wanted to steal YOUR letters—in explaining that it all came about through my meanness and selfishness, and your goodness, your devotion, your ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw

... newspapers, to show that it is "an illusion" to believe that war ever pays, because it is expensive. This is precisely like arguing that we should disband the police and devote our sole attention to persuading criminals that it is "an illusion" to suppose that burglary, highway robbery and white slavery are profitable. It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... judge said, "young as you are, there can be no doubt whatever in the minds of anyone who has heard the evidence that you have been an associate with these men who have been found guilty of highway robbery accompanied by murder. I consider that a merciful view was taken of your case by the magistrates who committed you for trial, for the evidence of your heartbroken father, on whose gray hairs your conduct has brought trouble and disgrace, leaves no doubt that you have for some time been in league ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... "Highway robbery!" he cried, making a trumpet of both hands, and then with a parting wave he passed from view, leaving the exasperated and almost tearful Alene to return to the house, with the disobedient Prince at her side proudly ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne

... his prisoners from one to seventeen, according to the cell each happened to be in, and he wrote a crime opposite each number. The first was highway robbery, the next forgery, and after that followed treason, smuggling, barn-burning, bribery, poaching, usury, piracy, witchcraft, assault and battery, using false weights and measures, burglary, counterfeiting, robbing hen-roosts, conspiracy, and poisoning ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton

... through the facilities which were given to inter-migration. Good roads connected the ends and dissected the width and breadth of the great Roman Empire. Travel was well protected. A well-drilled army suppressed highway robbery, and an excellent navy put down piracy. A resident of Gaul could with ease settle in Syria, while the Syrian, if he so desired, could find with ease a home in Gaul. The residents of Brittania and Greece could with comparative ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... "This is highway robbery," he finally calmed down enough to say. "I am an official of the Zone, and you shall ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... trick of piratical fighting, for in those days when there was no police of the seas there was a certain amount of piracy and smuggling carried on by the men of Dover and the Cinque Ports. Just as for lack of police protection highway robbery was a danger of travel by road, so till organized naval power developed there was a good deal of piracy in the European seas, and peaceful traders sailed in large fleets for mutual protection, just ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... neglecting their Callings and Families at home, sit tippling one half Pint after another, till they become as fuddled as a Beef-Eater at a Tavern on a Sunday Morning, and go home mightily edified with the particulars of a Trial for a Rape, or a Highway Robbery. ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson

... other charges against him, it inclines me to great distrust of his moral principles. Be that as it may, he managed his stock of provisions very thriftily,—burying it in the earth, and eating a portion of it whenever he felt an appetite. If he insists upon living by highway robbery, it would be well to make him share his booty with us. . ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was Philadelphia Red. Because of prior conviction he was serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of Alameda. He had already served a dozen of his years at the time he talked to me in the jacket, and that was seven years ago. He was one of the forty lifers who were double-crossed ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London



Words linked to "Highway robbery" :   price, robbery, terms, damage



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