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Mutilate   /mjˈutəlˌeɪt/   Listen
Mutilate

verb
(past & past part. mutilated; pres. part. mutilating)
1.
Destroy or injure severely.  Synonyms: cut up, mangle.
2.
Alter so as to make unrecognizable.  Synonyms: mangle, murder.
3.
Destroy or injure severely.  Synonym: mar.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Mutilate" Quotes from Famous Books



... Thy way at will, each shape to use; In power and might like one of us: What hand has maimed and marred thee thus? What God or fiend this deed has wrought, What bard or sage of lofty thought Was armed with power supremely great Thy form to mar and mutilate? In all the worlds not one I see Would dare a deed to anger me: Not Indra's self, the Thousand-eyed, Beneath whose hand fierce Paka(459) died. My life-destroying darts this day His guilty breath shall rend away, E'en as the thirsty wild swan drains Each milk-drop that the wave retains. Whose ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... forget that the products of industry are made for man, not man for industrial products; to ignore the close relationship between their fruitful investigations and the whole circle of the moral sciences; to debase them and to mutilate them. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... stated, as showing the highly civilized condition of the Nez Perces, that they did not scalp or otherwise mutilate the bodies of the soldiers who fell within their lines. It is true they did not while the fight was in progress, probably owing to the good influence exerted over the warriors by Chief Joseph, who is, in reality, an Indian of remarkably high moral principles; but Lieutenant Van Orsdale writes, ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields

... It was reserved for monks and inquisitors, in the name of religion and the Gospel, to continue, through after centuries, those brutalities toward women of which gentlemen and knights had grown ashamed, save when (as in the case of the Albigense crusaders) monks and inquisitors bade them torture, mutilate, and burn, in the name of Him who ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... it should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. For every man that they have tortured, we must torture one of theirs. For every child mutilated, we must mutilate ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... Charlemagne to support the papal authority, as holding out the only means of spreading Christianity, which he justly considered the most effectual instrument he could employ to enlighten and civilize the world. An attempt had been made to mutilate the Pope, and thus disqualify him for his office, by Campulus and Paschal, two disappointed aspirants to the papacy; but he escaped from their hands and brought his complaints before Charlemagne. The conspirators then attempted to justify the deed, by accusing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... around, he fetched the poker from the fireplace. He felt horribly brutal, as if he were going to mutilate and maltreat a creature that could feel; but he nerved himself to tap the back of Aphrodite's hand at the dimpled base of the third finger. The shock ran up to his elbow, and gave him acute "pins and needles," but the stone hand was still intact. ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey

... next place, I agree with the learned counsel that I was out of doors at one o'clock that morning. But if he will use me as HIS WITNESS in that matter, then he must not pick and choose and mutilate my testimony. Nay, let him take the whole truth, and not just so much as he can square with the indictment. Either believe me, that I was out of doors praying, or do not believe me that I was out of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... movers going to the place whence they themselves started? If we are to accept the only historical records or quasi-records we possess at all, that is, the Chinese records, then we must accept them for what they are worth on the face of them, and neither add to nor mutilate them; imperfect things that do exist are necessarily better than imaginary things that might have existed in their place. A few hundred families at most, we are told, escaped; and if it be true that they went intentionally to Japan, it ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... mutilated gospel of Luke, is particularly instructive as showing how deep and settled was the conviction of the early Christians that nothing could be a gospel which did not proceed from apostles or apostolic men; and how watchful they were against all attempts to mutilate or corrupt the primitive apostolic records. In defending the true gospel of Luke against the mutilated form of it employed by Marcion, he says: "I affirm that not in the apostolic churches alone, but in all which are joined with them ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... (1841). This, in the language of its author and his friends, was the famous attempt to clear the Articles from the glosses encrusting them like barnacles, and to bring out the old catholic truth that man had done his worst to disfigure and to mutilate, and yet in spite of all man's endeavour it was in the Articles still. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, regarded Tract Ninety with uneasy doubts as to its drift, its intentions, the way in which the church and the world would ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... confidence of your children do not threaten to mutilate the feet of their sensibilities for the sake of a narrow theory. I myself at least, after what I had experienced, would sooner have gone to the nearest police agent for intimate advice, than back to ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... he believes that his officers have done their best for him. He is ordered to fall in upon the deck of a burning troopship and to stand at attention while Death inspects the ranks. He is besieged in a hill fort on the Indian frontier by a horde of fanatics eager to kill or to mutilate him. He lies wounded on the field of battle from which, after an indecisive engagement, each combatant has retired; and there, scorched by the mid-day sun and starved by the cold of the night, and perhaps also in danger of being burnt alive by a veld fire, he waits without water ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... our warfare pays no respect to international laws. It knows no indisciplined cruelty. But in the east the earth is saturated with the blood of women and children unmercifully butchered by the wild Russian troops, and in the west dumdum bullets mutilate the breasts of our soldiers. Those who have allied themselves with Russians and Servians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of inciting Mongolians and negroes against the white race, have no right whatever to call themselves ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... Lord Byron. The greatest misfortune of his life—his marriage—gave them their opportunity. Then they came forth, threw down the mask which they had hitherto worn, to put on one more hideous still; overturned the statue from the pedestal upon which the public had raised it, and tried to mutilate its remains. But as the stuff of which it was made was a marble which could not be broken, they only defiled, insulted, and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... custom, she had come alone, walking many miles across the plain. She would probably slash her breast or mutilate her flesh in some other way as a sacrament to her grief. As I rode on slowly, her wailing cry rose and fell until it grew dim in my ears, blending with the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... slavery. The Speaker said that only the latter prayer could be received under the "gag" rule. Connor, of North Carolina, (p. 261) moved to lay on the table so much of the petition as could be received. Mr. Adams tauntingly suggested that in order to do this it would be necessary to mutilate the document by cutting it into two pieces; whereat there was great wrath and confusion, "the House got into a snarl, the Speaker knew not what to do." The Southerners raved and fumed for a while, and finally resorted to their usual expedient, and ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... Bergmann. The Australian warriors go through a mimic battle, and, after a series of combats, finally capture the boys aged about from thirteen to fourteen years, whom they bear away amidst the cries and lamentations of the mothers and other female relatives, who, in their excess of grief, mutilate themselves by cutting gashes into their thighs, so that they bleed profusely. The boys are, in the meantime, carried to some out-of-the-way place, where an old man, perched on a tree or some rising ground, through the means of a musical instrument made of a deal-board and human hair, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... printing, I use the freedom humbly to protest against the leaving out of anything. I had satisfactory reasons of my own for all that I allowed to pass; and my submission to the stage does not extend so far, that I can leave holes in my work, and mutilate the characters of men for the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... a danger and should be removed. Who knows what excuse he might take to use the knife on thee and me and the little ones of our households? Tobah! he is a wolf, not a man. And this one the Sarcar has sent among us to mutilate, kill, and rob us of our comforts and rights. Soon, he will take away the jhil from Panipara busti so that the people will be put to the labour of dragging water out of deep wells, and for the washing of their garments, they will have to walk ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... then, Albinik, that Caesar has any suspicions? Could he suppose that a man would have the courage to mutilate himself in order to induce confidence in ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue

... imagination to fancy the atrocities that followed the second blow. It has always been noticed that the sight of blood, which appals a civilized man, serves to excite and enrage the savage, till his frantic passions induce him to mutilate his victims, even as a tiger becomes furious after it has torn the first wound in its prey. For five days the strangers were doomed to hear the yells of the storming amazons as they assailed the fort for fresh ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... terrible and frenzied desire to overthrow the idol that still persistently rose up lofty and enigmatic before his imagination, do what he would to abase it. With cynical cruelty, he set himself to insult, to undermine, to mutilate it. The destructive analysis he had already employed upon himself, he now turned upon Elena. To those dubious problems which, at one time, he had resolutely put away from him, he now sought the answer; of all the suspicions ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... as too dark and horrible for belief, and made him feel as he would have done if she had told him that she was going to mutilate her beautiful face, or drink some potion that would make her mad. He clasped his hands and began to ...
— The American • Henry James

... personal and the impersonal, between pantheism and theism, between Spinoza and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No, for it is the one state which makes us conscious of the other. And as man is capable of ranging the two domains, why should he mutilate himself? ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... prolonged search, Cutwolfe at last finds his enemy, Esdras of Granada, alone, in his shirt, and far from all help. The unfortunate man implores Cutwolfe, whose brother he had killed, to make it impossible for him to do any more harm, to mutilate him, but to spare his life. His enemy replies: "Though I knewe God would never have mercie on mee except I had mercie on thee, yet of thee no mercie would I have.... I tell thee, I would not have undertooke so much ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand

... brethren, the Cross of Christ is a commandment. For we miserably mutilate it, and sinfully as well as foolishly limit its application and its power, if we recognise it only—I was going to say mainly—as being the ground of our hope and of what we call our salvation, and do not recognise ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... and keeps away from other localities altogether. On the under side of the leaves we shall often see patches of its crimson eggs. Later the caterpillars use the plant as their main, if not exclusive, food store. They are the innocent culprits which nine times out of ten mutilate ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... my Lord Keeper's suggestion for the bringing in of this older coin, I must ask you if this plan can escape that selfish impulse of the human mind which seeketh for personal gain? For, look you, short as would be the time proposed, it taketh but still shorter time to mutilate a coin; and it doth seem to me that, under the plan of my Lord Keeper, we should see the old currency of England mutilated in a night. Sir, I should opine in the contrary of this plan, and would base my decision upon certain principles which ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... pictures show how the chestnut blight acts in China—very differently from the way it acts in this country. In China, it produces, as the pictures show, definite cankers, which do not girdle the tree, which kill young trees occasionally, mutilate old trees, kill branches, but the cankers do not girdle the trees. That disease has been known in China we have no idea how many years, and, while it does a certain amount of harm, is said by Mr. Meyer not to be really serious in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various

... carried slung on the back by the Torres Strait islanders and the New Guinea men of the adjacent shores, when on a marauding excursion;* these Papuans preserve the skulls of their enemies as trophies, while the Australian tribes merely mutilate the bodies of the slain, and leave them ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... method or another, every individual eminence, great and small, that dares to vary by the merest fraction from the regulation standards. This is ostracism, and ostracism, so to speak, is a physiological organ of democracy. Democracy by using it mutilates the nation, without it democracy would mutilate itself. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... beneath Old Pine and built a fire against his instep, and that some of the explorers hacked him with an axe. The old pine had distinct records of axe and fire markings during the year 1540. It was not common for the Indians of the West to burn or mutilate trees, and as it was common for the Spaniards to do so, and as these hackings in the tree seemed to have been made with some edged tool sharper than any possessed by the Indians, it at least seems probable that they were done by the Spaniards. At any rate, ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... out. I hate them, for I was too long getting where I am now, and I want to stay. But I don't make the mistake of ignoring them, and I rather like having a squint at them at close quarters. Kirkpatrick has taken us to several socialist meetings...we borrow the servants' coats and mutilate our oldest hats....Socialism seems to me rather more endurable than the socialists, and of these Kirkpatrick is about the sanest I have heard. They rant and froth, contradict themselves and one another, wander from the point and never get anywhere....That ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... the names and surnames of public or private individuals; prerogatives or favors granted, such as the right of asylum, of hospitality, of citizenship; the punishments pronounced against those who should destroy or mutilate the monument; the conditions of treaties and alliances; the indications of weights, moneys ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... objections depend almost on the same sophism; they change and mutilate the fact, they only half record things: God has care for men, he loves the human race, he wishes it well, nothing so true. Yet he allows men to fall, he often allows them to perish, he gives them goods that tend towards their destruction; and when he makes someone happy, it ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... a coupla toes off'n yeh," he snarled, "—I'll hamstring yeh fur keeps!"—struggling to mutilate her while she flung her helpless and entangled body from side to side and bit at the hand ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... feel what Mr. Shaw probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit to this rush and riotous ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... I want my papers whole, and don't you dare to mutilate them." By way of letting her down easier I added: ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth, but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there, but this must be shown. It was a matter of life and death to us to show it. And I believed that it could be shown; I considered that those grounds of justification, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... remember the scandal about the statues of Hermes. I did not mutilate them, but they have become ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... of which every friendly highlandman would say, Feiich an cabracli mor de Clanruadli! What a mockery of fate to be exposed for ever to the vulgar Cockney gaze, the trophy of a fool, whose boast was to kill! Such a noble beast! Such a mean man! To mutilate his remains for the pride of the wretch who killed him! ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... far does this go, that some experimentalists have carefully examined the lower orders of animals,—among them the Abbe Spallanzani, who made a number of experiments upon snails and salamanders,—and have found that they might mutilate them to an incredible extent; that you might cut off the jaw or the greater part of the head, or the leg or the tail, and repeat the experiment several times, perhaps, cutting off the same member again and again; and yet each of those ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her whom they consider more favored; on such occasions they may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and stone-knives with which to mutilate ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... friend and foe, and to robbery join cruelty so atrociously horrible that indignation at the crime is frequently lost in wonder; for the Galician robbers are seldom satisfied with booty, and unlike their brethren in other parts generally mutilate or assassinate those who are so unfortunate as to fall in their hands; prostitution is carried on to an enormous extent, and although loathsome concustant [sic] diseases stare the stranger in the face in the street, in the market-place, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... and ten miles. He bids me tell you to follow to Huejugilla el Alto, where he says arrangements will be made for my ransom. Remember Jack Burk. He spoke of the mountains to the west of Zacatecas. Pacheco threatens to mutilate me and forward fragments to you if you do not follow to the point specified. He is watching me as I write, and one of his men will carry this letter to Mendoza, and deliver it. The situation is desperate, and ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish

... him why he had been rescued from the fire. Doubtless his gigantic struggles had been observed by the onlooker, and he was considered too good a man to burn. They would keep him for a slave, possibly mutilate ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... into a short compass all the facts which my researches have furnished, not omitting those which are known, concerning the feelings and conduct of Rawleigh at these solemn moments of his life; to have preserved only the new would have been to mutilate the statue, and to injure the whole ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Perpend, young man, perpend! Consider, who among inferior mortals shall imitate them becomingly? Dreamest thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair? How can thy shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions? How darest thou say, as they do: 'Hang this fellow; quarter that; flay; mutilate; stab; shoot; press; hook; torture; burn alive'? These are royalties. Who appointed thee to such office? The Holy Ghost? He alone can confer it; but when ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... too, the respectable English newspapers shying, like frightened kine, over the beautiful simplicity of the tale. The mind leaped forward a hundred—two hundred—a thousand years. I saw with sorrow that men would mutilate and garble the story; that rival creeds would turn it upside down till, at last, the western world which clings to the dread of death more closely than the hope of life, would set it aside as an interesting superstition and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... usually applied in England, to garble is to pick out, sift out what may serve a particular purpose, and thus destroy or mutilate the fair character ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various

... gives us as it were a perspective view of it. In this sort of perspective Shakspeare is the greatest master I know: a single word frequently opens to view an almost interminable vista of antecedent states of mind. Confined within the narrow limits of time, the poet is in many subjects obliged to mutilate the action, by beginning close to the last decisive stroke, or else he is under the necessity of unsuitably hurrying on its progress: on either supposition he must reduce within petty dimensions the grand picture of a strong purpose, which is no momentary ebullition, but a firm resolve ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... never a word, contenting herself with keeping a watch on the man's movements, though to the very innermost part of her she longed to fling herself upon him to mutilate or to kill. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... substituting the will of 1200 individuals for that of the people, "our representatives have failed to treat us with respect." This is not the first time, and it is not to be the last. Often do they exceed their mandate, they disarm, mutilate, and gag their legitimate sovereign and they pass decrees against the people in the people's name. Such is their martial law, specially devised for "suppressing the uprising of citizens", that is to say, the only means left to us against conspirators, monopolists, and traitors. Such a decree ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... Empire that it is mortal. True, the riot disperses—but it is unpunished; riot unpunished is a revolution begun. The earthquake is nearer than you think; and for that earthquake what are the pills you quacks advertise? They prate of an age too enlightened for war; they would mutilate the army—nay, disband it if they could—with Prussia next door to France. Prussia, desiring, not unreasonably, to take that place in the world which France now holds, will never challenge France; if she did, she would be too much in the wrong to find ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... he stood Nick could not see the face of the body clearly enough to form a decision. If, however, this was only an ordinary subject for the dissecting-table, why did Dr. Jarvis mutilate it with such caution and at such ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter

... shot struck him in the forehead, and he fell dead from his horse. His companions, however, before the Amharas could reload, made a second brilliant charge, avenged their chief, and carried away the body all were anxious to mutilate. More horsemen came pouring in from all directions; the war-cry was echoed far and wide; men, women, and children assailed the Amharas with lances and stones. Mahomed's brothers, now supported by fifty ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... knew of an instance in India in which a horse lay down, deliberately exposing his anus, and allowing the crows to pick and eat his whole rectum. In temporary insanity, in fury, or in grief, the lower animals have been noticed by naturalists to mutilate themselves. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... his eyes] No, no, no—don't speak to me—you'll drive me into convulsions. Keep silent! Leave me alone! You mutilate my brain with your clumsy pincers—you put your claws into my thoughts and tear them ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... and impartial trial! How much does nature approve thy laws, as consistent with her own feelings, while she absolutely turns pale, trembles, and recoils, at the institutions of these receivers! Execrable men! you do not murder the horse, on which you only ride; you do not mutilate the cow, which only affords you her milk; you do not torture the dog, which is but a partial servant of your pleasures: but these unfortunate men, from whom, you derive your very pleasures and your fortunes, you torture, mutilate, murder at discretion! ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson

... whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to 'mutilate' the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it. But with these letters of Mary Taylor's before us, let us not hear again that the story of Charlotte Bronte's life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... the mitre of this house, not to be excused from the intrusion of heresy? Dost thou come," he said, "to enjoy the hopes which fete holds out to thy demented and accursed sect, to see the bosom of destruction sweep away the pride of old religion—to deface our shrines,—to mutilate and lay waste the bodies of our benefactors, as well as their sepulchres—to destroy the pinnacles and carved work of God's ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... lease. These propositions were warmly advocated by Pitt and others on the same side of the house, and as warmly opposed by members on the opposite benches. Mr. Powys, after condemning the whole of Pitt's plan, as tending to mutilate the constitutional authority, and after asserting that the heir-apparent ought to be invested with the full powers and prerogatives of the crown, moved an amendment to the first resolution, by which his royal highness would be appointed regent, "subject to such limitations ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... men and women! Dash the children's brains out against the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father. Burn, steal, kill—but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have promised to stand between you and God Almighty and the Day of Judgment! Even if Jesus did say, "Woe unto ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the ponds, the lakes and the wells, into all of which offerings were thrown with the idea either of venerating in them the thirst-quenching liquid or else the fecund nature of the earth; the worship of the trees that shaded the altars and that nobody dared to fell or mutilate; the worship of stones, especially of the rough stones called bethels that were regarded, as their name (beth-El) indicates, as the residence of the god, or rather, as the matter in which the god was embodied.[29] Aphrodite Astarte was worshiped ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in reality, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the condition of traversing their age, like scared persons, at a running pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the influence of their age, which would mutilate their genius. Never, for ay and forever, will society produce these poets; but out of society they still appear sometimes at intervals, rather, I admit, as strangers, who excite wonder, or as ill-trained ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Quarter. Even after Rattray had sent her copy back to be amended for the third time, she did not seem able to realize that their public wouldn't stand unions libres when not served up with a moral purpose—that no artistic apology for them would do. In the end, therefore, Rattray was obliged to mutilate the article himself, and to neutralize it here and there. He was justified in taking the trouble, for it was matter they wanted, on account of some expensive drawings of the locality that had been in hand a long time. Even then the ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... fish in the world. Even the most formidable fish, the sharks or the barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves. They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water; they mutilate swimmers—in every river town in Paraguay there are men who have been thus mutilated; they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness. They will ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... deserter from Darius, with a view to obtaining an influence and a command within the city, which should enable him afterward to deliver it up to the besiegers; and, in order to convince the Babylonians that his desertion was real, he resolved to mutilate himself in a manner so dreadful as would effectually prevent their imagining that the injuries which he suffered were inflicted by any contrivance of his own. He accordingly cut off his hair and his ears, and mutilated ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... rouutine which has niver varied a hair since scholastic midicine, the silliest and didliest of all the hundred forms of Quackery, first rose—unlike Seeince, Art, Religion, and all true Suns—in the West; to wound the sick; to weaken the weak; and mutilate the hurt; ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... They regard it as the voice of some devil, and say good men should not listen to it. The scientists say it isn't a devil, it is part of our nature, which should of course be civilized and guided, but should not be stamped out. (It might mutilate us dangerously to become under-simianized. Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Washington. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.

... accomplished on either side, however. Occasionally a stray bullet would carry off one of our men in his sleep. Sometimes these naked savages would stealthily creep in upon our sentries and with their sharp knives would overpower them and mutilate them ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... widespread that freedom from it is the exception. It is painfully common to hear public speakers mutilate the king's English. If they do not actually murder it, as Curran once said, they often ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... down alive into hell." There is the keynote of this ancient document—a document which advocates massacre, condones polygamy, accepts slavery, and orders the burning of so-called witches. Its Mosaic provisions have long been laid aside. We do not consider ourselves accursed if we fail to mutilate our bodies, if we eat forbidden dishes, fail to trim our beards, or wear clothes of two materials. But we cannot lay aside the provisions and yet regard the document as divine. No learned quibbles can ever persuade an honest earnest mind that that ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... if, you will permit me first to go to my room, I will find something which sorts better with a soldier than this churchman's gown. My buckskin, I was obliged to mutilate to make me ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... peasant) receives but seventeen grammes (little over half an ounce) of animal food." Notwithstanding the superior food of the soldier, such is the hatred of the peasant for the aristocratic classes, in whose service the army is employed, that he will mutilate himself to escape the conscription.[6] Says Malte-Brun: "During four months of the year the inhabitants of the Algarve have little to eat but raw figs. This causes a disease called mal de veriga, which sweeps away numbers of the people." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... waiting for the milk-pail!" On the milk-stool sits the hostess, Milks one moment, then a second, Then a third time milks and ceases; When the bloody wolves disguising, Quick attack the hostess milking, And the bears lend their assistance, Tear and mutilate her body With their teeth and sharpened fingers. Kullerwoinen, cruel wizard, Thus repaid the wicked hostess, Thus repaid her evil treatment. Quick the wife of Ilmarinen Cried aloud in bitter anguish, Thus addressed the youth, Kullervo: "Evil son, thou bloody herdsman, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... not put his poilu inconnu in the depths of a cathedral in order to bring an unbelieving crowd into the house of God, but puts him in the public way under the Arc de Triomphe. He does not say that the soldier died for King and Country, and then mutilate a text—"Greater love hath no man than this," but he inscribes—"Ici repose un soldat francais mort pour la patrie," and leaves the living to make their own reflections. His Paris is a city of statues and gardens but it is all dignified, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... to us with the grim humour of a warlike age. After referring to the beauty of the blossoms, the inscription says: "Whoever cuts a single branch of this tree shall forfeit a finger therefor." Would that such laws could be enforced nowadays against those who wantonly destroy flowers and mutilate objects of art! ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... the instinct to mutilate, that is as easily accounted for as any other inherited habit, whether of man to mutilate cattle, or of ants to make slaves, or of birds to make their nests. I can see no way of accounting for the existence of any one of these ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... Comprachicos. They bought children, and understood how to mutilate and deform them, thus making them valuable for exhibition at fairs. But an act of parliament had just been passed to destroy the trade of the Comprachicos. Hence this flight from Portland, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one faculty to stunt or paralyze ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... of neurotic egomaniacs in Paris styling themselves worshippers of Satan, the God of Ugliness." Some of these men were suffering from the "visual derangement" of the insane, whilst "many of the pictures exhibited another form of mania. The system of this is an incontrollable desire to mutilate the human body." Sadism, as we know, played a prominent part in both the French and Russian revolutions. The most important point in all this is not that degenerates should be found to perpetrate these abominations, but what the circular describes as the "Machiavellian ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... his country." Knowing the gentleman to be a northern man, she answered freely, saying that the country of herself and son was the whole country, and for it she was willing he should shed his last drop of blood, but not to divide and mutilate it, would she consent that he ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... the necessary result. It is very difficult to come across the best pur sang horses, as the Arabs are afraid of the Bey's taking a fancy to them, and taking them by force; and, consequently, they often purposely mutilate them, lest he should seize them to himself. There are also some very fine bazaars at Tunis, and the otto of roses there is especially excellent. Our Consul has a very fine, large house, and dispenses ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham

... ever recurring throughout the ages, with a different name for their Hero in each new recension, cannot pass unrecognised by the student, though they may naturally and rightly be ignored by the devotee; and when they are used as a weapon to mutilate or destroy the majestic figure of the Christ, they must be met, not by denying the facts, but by understanding the deeper meaning of the stories, the spiritual truths that the legends expressed under ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... man who avoids all these faults, so as neither to transpose words in such a manner that every one must see that it is done on purpose, nor cramming in unnecessary words, as if to fill up leaks, nor aiming at petty rhythm, so as to mutilate and emasculate his sentences, and who does not always stick to one kind of rhythm without any variation, such a man avoids nearly every fault. For we have said a good deal on the subject of perfections, to which ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... down a man who had an aim in life. "They that have had a guid schoolin' and do nae mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him that has aye something ayont need never be weary." I have had to mutilate the dialect much, so that it might be comprehensible to you; but I think the sentiment will keep, even through a change of words, something of the heartsome ring of encouragement that it had for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... past, the spirits are so still. When the living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the shocking inference that the dead might eat the living. Doubtless they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice. Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a cannibal dainty. And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least in the far eastern ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to a strangled, growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword free and grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again and again. He meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash and mutilate that haughty mask of infamy, but Graciosa clutched his weapon ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... last few years has it won much favour. At the present time it is much sought after. It has the reputation of being a ticklish subject to grow. Many have had it and lost it, and those who still retain a specimen are loth to mutilate it for increase. This may to some extent account for the present demand for and difficulty experienced in obtaining it. For the last three years, hard as the seasons have been within that time, its flowers have been produced in ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood

... to cut down a tree planted by the hand of an ancestor, even though it may darken our home. The temple ought to be closed, bloody sacrifices to the god should be prohibited—but his image—the noblest work of Bryaxis—to mutilate, or even to touch that would be a rash, a fateful deed, treason to the city and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... visitors. It may be difficult to prevent them from damaging such works of art, but it is hoped that feelings of greater reverence may grow which would render such vandalism impossible. All civilized persons would be ashamed to mutilate the statues of Greece and Rome in our museums. Let them realize that these monuments in our cathedrals and churches are just as valuable, as they are the best of English art, and then no sacrilegious hand ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... Antonio Vandyck—what a power he has! Steel may mutilate, warriors may waste and destroy—still the King stands uninjured by time; and our grandchildren, while they read his history, may look on his image, and compare the melancholy features with the woful tale.—It was a stern necessity—it was an awful deed! The calm pride of that ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... money. He changed the standard or name of current coin with a view to counterbalance the mischief arising from the illicit coinage of the nobles, and especially to baffle the base traffic of the Jews and Lombards, who occasionally would obtain possession of a great part of the coin, and mutilate each piece before restoring it to circulation; in this way they upset the whole monetary economy of the realm, and secured immense profits to themselves (Figs. 273 ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... of his person, his industry, and his labour. He can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything, but what must belong to his master. The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master, who may correct and chastise him, though not with unusual rigour, or so as to maim and mutilate him, or expose him to the danger of loss of life, or to cause his death. The slave, to remain a slave, must be sensible that there is no appeal from his master." Where the slave is placed by law entirely under the control of the man who claims him, body and soul, as property, what else ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... tolerable condition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e. g., as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself, as to exposing my ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant

... primarily involved those indeed of which we can speak most confidently, knowing them best — it is intolerable to think they should thus mutilate and destroy ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter

... those things that are on him, Abel, and have them carried to Mr. Dudley Veneer's. If he does not want them, you may keep them yourself, for all that I have to say. One thing more. I hope nobody will lift his hand against this noble creature to mutilate him in any way. After you have taken off the saddle and bridle, Abel, bury him just as he is. Under that old beech-tree will be a good place. You'll see to it,—won't ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... that, with such mighty enemies, we can do nothing by halves. We cannot afford to retract, mutilate, or moderate our original determination. He who swerves from the straight road at the beginning is lost; he who stumbles at the first step is apt to fall down the whole staircase. If, on account of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... keep cowardice in countenance. We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... is it our fault if we have been brought so low that we must vie with your dogs and pick up the crumbs that drop from your table? Thou didst come up against us and crush us with thy powerful hand, thou didst mutilate us and chain us in these cages. No longer are we able to work or seek our sustenance. Why should these dogs have the right to bite and bark? O that the just—if still there are such men in our time—might rise up! O that one whose heart has been touched by God might judge between ourselves ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... o' the dirty work himself—no more prisons for him. He just goes around like a Sunday-school director at Christmas time, while his enemies turn to an' poison an' stab an' mutilate each other in a way to turn a butcher pale; but his favorite plan is to make 'em go insane an' have their hair turn white in a single night. That got to be ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... chanced that Alice Snowton did make a hat of paper, to be placed on Charles's head when he was more than usually naughty, to be called the fool's-cap out of derision; but this same paper hat, which was of a fantastic shape, being conical and high, the boy with scissors did dexterously mutilate and nearly destroy, and, coming quietly behind me when I was meditating the future with my excellent wife, he placed it on my head; and, to all our eyes, there was no mistaking the shape into which, fortuitously, and with no view or knowledge of such emblems, he ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... admitted that they had some customs which indicate a tinge of barbarism. They used torture for the extraction of answers from reluctant persons, employed the scourge to punish trifling offences, and, in certain cases, condescended to mutilate the bodies of their dead enemies. Their addiction to intemperance is also a barbaric trait. They were, no doubt, on the whole, less civilized than either the Greeks or Romans; but the difference does not seem to have been so great as ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... restraint, every opportunity to weaken the confidence of the people, and, by having the whole game in their hands, they have scrupled not to publish things that do not, as well as those which do exist, and to mutilate the latter, so as to make them subserve the purposes which ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... have been plucked out for the good of the kingdom. Certain princes, too near to the throne, have been conveniently stifled between mattresses, the cause of death being given out as apoplexy. Now to stifle is worse than to mutilate. The King of Tunis tore out the eyes of his father, Muley Assem, and his ambassadors have not been the less favourably received by the emperor. Hence the king may order the suppression of a limb like the suppression of a state, etc. It is ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... an equivalence between the two is simply to curtail, and make almost unintelligible, the Spinozistic or Leibnizian metaphysic. It is to accept this philosophy, such as it is, on the side of Extension, but to mutilate it on the side of Thought. With Spinoza, with Leibniz, we suppose the unifying synthesis of the phenomena of matter achieved, and everything in matter explained mechanically. But, for the conscious facts, we no longer push the synthesis to the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... shall be a sure pledge to you of that eternal life. And though this be painful and laborious yet consider, that it is but the cutting off of a rotten member, that would corrupt the whole body, and the want of it will never maim or mutilate the body, for you shall live perfectly when sin is perfectly expired, and out of life, and according as sin is nearer expiring, and nearer the grave, your souls are nearer that endless life. If this ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... different. Some he chopped with the spade, others he tore and ripped with his teeth and nails. Sometimes he tore the mouth open and rent the face back to the ears, he opened the stomachs, and pulled off the limbs. Although he dug up the bodies of several men he felt no inclination to mutilate them, whereas he delighted in rending female corpses. He was ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... French. The source is Greco-Lat. manganum, apparatus, whence Ital. mangano, with both meanings. The verb mangle, to mutilate, is unrelated. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... Panthea, "shall we hack him to pieces at once, like the Bacchanals, or tie his limbs and mutilate him?" ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... wedge graft or the bark graft. We have had equally good results with each. If any difference it is in favor of the side or bark graft which we prefer because it does not split or mutilate the stock, there is not the chance for decay, and the wounds heal over much quicker. On limbs three to four inches in diameter put ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various

... pulpit-fellowship with the sects, some of them being disloyal even to doctrines distinctive of Lutheranism. During the Platform controversy some of the most influential conservatives differed from Schmucker not so much in theology as in their policy of mutual toleration and the refusal to mutilate and abandon the venerable Augsburg Confession. The lack of bold aggressiveness on the part of the most Lutheran of these conservatives is illustrated by the letter of H.J. Schmidt, already referred to: "If all open conflict is avoided, ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... hast put all things under his feet." Slavery puts HIM under the feet of an owner, with beasts and creeping things. Who, but an impious scorner, dare thus strive with his Maker, and mutilate HIS IMAGE, and blaspheme the Holy One, who saith to those that grind his poor, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... are, Is it not true? the objects fair, To whom ye for unnumbered crimes Had to compose in secret rhymes, To whom your hearts were consecrate,— Did they not all the Russian tongue With little knowledge and that wrong In charming fashion mutilate? Did not their lips with foreign speech The native ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... find compensation and peace in the other world if you do not mutilate her; and when I turned to the mason's lean corpse, and looked at his hands, which were harder and rougher than my own, the demon whispered the same. Then I stood before the strong, stout corpse of the prophet Rui, who died of apoplexy, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no fit name ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... a tree felled without shaking his fist at the wood-cutter, turned pale with anger, and felt exasperated that the authorities had thus dared to mutilate nature. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... Character, and break against the forms of firmly-founded Beauty, as the waves of a stream that just fills, but cannot overflow its banks. Otherwise, this striving after moderation would resemble only the method of those shallow moralists, who, the more readily to dispose of Man, prefer to mutilate his nature; and who have so entirely removed every positive element from actions that the people gloat over the spectacle of great crimes, in order to refresh themselves at last with the view of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... value of money, and, of course, another spur to industry. Every land is not so blessed." Many quotations from this able state paper have already been made in the preceding pages, though it is so brilliant a piece of work that to quote is only to mutilate. Its argument, denunciation, humor, and satire are interwoven in a masterly combination. The renowned "sketch in the lapidary style," prepared for the gravestone of Thomas and Richard Penn, with the introductory paragraphs, constitutes ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... Louisiana declares: 'The slave is entirely subject to the will of the master, who may correct and chastise him, though not with unusual rigor, nor so as to maim or mutilate him, or to expose him to the danger of loss of life, or to cause his death.'" Who shall ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... opened the beautiful little casket, then dashed it with horror to the ground. "Prince!" she cried, "what can have induced you to mutilate yourself so cruelly? Could you imagine that I would ever wed a man who submitted to ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

... He carried his insolence so far, as to declare that he should mutilate Honorius before he sent him into exile. But this assertion of Zosimus is destroyed by the more impartial testimony of Olympiodorus; who attributes the ungenerous proposal (which was absolutely rejected by Attalus) to the baseness, and perhaps the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... garbling,, &c. v. mutilation, detruncation[obs3]; amputation; abscission, excision, recision; curtailment &c. 201; minuend, subtrahend; decrease &c. 36; abrasion. V. subduct, subtract; deduct, deduce; bate, retrench; remove, withdraw, take from, take away; detract. garble, mutilate, amputate, detruncate[obs3]; cut off, cut away, cut out; abscind[obs3], excise; pare, thin, prune, decimate; abrade, scrape, file; geld, castrate; eliminate. diminish &c. 36; curtail &c. (shorten) 201; deprive of &c. (take) 789; weaken. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... "F.S. Martin"—Calamity (calamitas), not from calamus, as it is usually derived, but perhaps from obs. calamis, i.e. columis, from [Greek: kholo, kolhao, kolhazo] to maim, mutilate, and so for ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various

... who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... touch As froze her very heart; and drawing on, Her, to the abbey's inner ruin, led Resistless. Thro' the broken roof the moon Glimmer'd a scatter'd ray; the ivy twined Round the dismantled column; imaged forms Of Saints and warlike Chiefs, moss-canker'd now And mutilate, lay strewn upon the ground, With crumbled fragments, crucifixes fallen, And rusted trophies; and amid the heap Some monument's defaced legend ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey

... winged woman Youwarkee! Prudish people may be scandalised at the unreserved frankness shown in the account of the consummation of Wilkins' marriage with this fair creature; but the editor was unwilling to mutilate the book in the interests of such refined readers. A man or a woman who can find anything to shock his or her feelings in the description of Youwarkee's bridal night deserves the commiseration of sensible people. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... some birches, and the roads are bordered by elms cruelly cropped, pollarded, and switched. The demand for firewood occasions these mutilations. If I could waft by a wish the thinnings of Abbotsford here, it would make a little fortune of itself. But then to switch and mutilate my trees!—not for a thousand francs. Ay, but sour grapes, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... great clock of history, it was permissible to straddle one's enemy when one got him down, and churn his head against the ground; to gouge out his eyes; to bite off his ears; to kick him, carve him, mutilate him in various and unsportsman-like and unspeakable ways. But it was the high crime of the code to slug him with brass or steel knuckles, commonly called knucks. The man who carried this reenforcement for the natural ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden

... Popular Tales from the Norse, 1888, p. 39, under the title of Hacon Grizzlebeard. A princess refuses all suitors, and mocks them publicly. Hacon Grizzlebeard, a prince, comes to woo her. She makes the king's fool mutilate the prince's horses, and then makes game of his appearance as he drives out the next day. Resolved to take his revenge, Hacon disguises himself as a beggar, attracts the princess's notice by means of a golden spinning-wheel, its stand, and a golden ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various

... for some other prisoner, perhaps to act as a hostage in case he should happen to be captured. I could come to no other conclusion; for so far the custom had been for the revolted people to murder and mutilate every one who fell ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... have been persecuted, but they number nearly six thousand, and regard themselves as the real Christians, the only true followers of Christ. They castrate themselves, and sometimes amputate the genitals entirely; the women even mutilate their breasts as a ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... drama, the privacy of the mails, in fact, our most intimate tastes, are at the mercy of this inexorable tyrant. Anthony Comstock, or some other equally ignorant policeman, has been given power to desecrate genius, to soil and mutilate the sublimest creation of nature—the human form. Books dealing with the most vital issues of our lives, and seeking to shed light upon dangerously obscured problems, are legally treated as criminal offenses, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... system of custom-houses, and made all the other provisions for security, convenience, and concentration, that are necessary to the affairs of a great nation, it would seem to be very presumptuous to impute to any particular district the right to destroy or mutilate a system regulated ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper

... he is not wise who does not make liberal use of his knowledge so long as God may give him grace. The story is about Erec the son of Lac—a story which those who earn a living by telling stories are accustomed to mutilate and spoil in the presence of kings and counts. And now I shall begin the tale which will be remembered so long as Christendom endures. This is ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... presenting themselves. In one place I saw some ten or twelve soldiers with a number of unfortunates whom they had tied back to back in a batch. With volley after volley they despatched them, and proceeded to mutilate their bodies in the usual horrible fashion. Nobody was spared, man, woman, or child, that I could see. The Chinese appeared to offer no resistance. Many of them prostrated themselves on the ground before the butchers with ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan

... time, but not so the latter. Signa afterwards are the standards of the maniples, cohorts, and legions. [538] Latrocinium, 'a predatory attack,' as opposed to a regular battle. [539] Obtruncare in opposition to caedere (cut down) signifies 'to mutilate by cutting off a limb or limbs.' The word multos is chosen here only for variety's sake, instead of alios. [540] The words veteres novique express a whole sentence: 'as old and new soldiers were united in the several divisions ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... wells surely up from those mysterious sources where, in darkness and silence, Nature works her wondrous transformations,—proving, through each waxing and waning year, by bud and leaf and branch, that, thwart and mutilate and deny her as you may, she is the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... sometimes it contains a note of warning. In a manuscript of St. Augustine now at Oxford, there is written: "This book belongs to St. Mary's of Robert's Bridge; whoever shall steal it or in any way alienate it from this house, or mutilate it, let him be Anathema Marantha!" A later owner, evidently to justify himself, has added, "I, John, Bishop of Exeter, know not where this aforesaid house is, nor did I steal this book, but acquired it in ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... Brahmin, like the Thug of seven victims, has tasted the sugar of blood, sweeter upon his tongue than to the lips of an eager babe the pearl-tipped nipple of its mother. Henceforth he must slay, slay, slay, mutilate and ravish, burn and slay, in the name of the queen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a style of writing in the future. Sterne, in reply, protests that he would "willingly give no offence to mortal by anything which could look like the least violation of either decency or good manners;" but—and it is an important "but"—he cannot promise to "mutilate everything" in Tristram "down to the prudish humour of every particular" (individual), though he will do his best; but, in any case, "laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as I can." And laugh he did, and in such Rabelaisian fashion that ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... have sought in prolonging it. He well knew, and admitted in private correspondence, that reform was inevitable; he must have known that a sham reform would be a stimulus to revolutionary agitation; yet he strove to mutilate the bill so that it might pass its second reading in the house of lords, and there undergo such further mutilation as would destroy its efficacy as a settlement of the question. For the present he yielded. No attempt ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... "love-children" of peers would be contented (if they ever had them) with courtesy titles; but Lord David has been further favoured by Fortune and King James II., who has first induced the comprachicos to trepan and mutilate Clancharlie's real heir (afterwards Gwynplaine, the eponymous hero of the book), and has then made Lord David a "pair substitue"[115] on condition that he marries one of the king's natural daughters, the Duchess Josiane, a duchess with no duchy ever mentioned. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... "have become the craftsman of Death, training my arm and intellect to be cunning in the butchery of my fellows! Wearing the instrument of torture at my side, and using the faculties God gave me to mutilate His image. Yet, from the pulpit and the statesman's chair, and far back through ages from the pages of history, precept and example have sought to record its justification, under the giant plea of necessity. But is it justified? Has man, in his enlightenment, sufficiently studied to throw aside ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... think the practice of scalping an enemy, generally indulged in by the Sioux, is a wanton desire cruelly to mutilate the foe. Such is not the case at all; he is prompted solely by the desire of procuring proof of his success, and he will take more chances to get a scalp than he would for any other object in life. Among the Sioux, and I believe most of the tribes of North America, for ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... to-day men are very tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as sacred—however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve, suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required more than half a century to attain ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... he been killed, the Indians would have taken particular pains to mutilate and place his body where the passing column would have seen it. That in itself is good evidence that he is living. The worst that is likely to happen is that he may be held for ransom ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... Hence, mainly, her hunger for the story of the Quakeress. She had perceived, she thought, a relation between it and the clouded brow, and was bent on finding for the brow's owner as amazing a part in the tale as could be contrived by any piecing together of its facts which did not absolutely mutilate them. And these facts already she had begun to collect when by the mention of this "Phyllis" she discovered that old Joy had at least a share of the facts and under due pressure ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... that "to go against one's common sense in obedience to Scripture is a most hazardous proceeding:" for the "rule of Scripture" means to each of us nothing but his own fallible interpretation; and to sacrifice common sense to this, is to mutilate one side of our mind at the command of another side. In the Nicene age, the Bible was in people's hands, and the Spirit of God surely was not withheld: yet I had read, in one of the Councils an insane anathema was passed: "If any one call Jesus God-man, instead of God ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... liked to sing had he been able, but he had no voice, though this did not prevent his humming now and then pieces which struck his fancy; and as these little reminiscences usually recurred to him in the mornings, he regaled me with them while he was being dressed. The air that I have heard him thus mutilate most frequently was that of The Marseillaise. The Emperor also whistled sometimes, but very rarely; and the air, 'Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre', whistled by his Majesty was an unerring announcement to me of his approaching departure for the army. I remember ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... aspect uncompromising and incorruptible. It seemed to look up at him reproachfully and to say, with its essential finish: "How could you promise anything so base; how could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?" The alterations demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude of his conception of the public mind were degrading. The public mind!—as if the public HAD a mind, or any principle of perception more discoverable ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James

... "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam." This science has done, while yet in her infancy. What she will do in her maturity, who dare predict? At least, in the face of such facts as these, those who bid us fear, or restrain, or mutilate science, bid us commit an act of folly, as well as of ingratitude, which can only harm ourselves. For science has as yet done nothing but good. Will any one tell me what harm it has ever done? When any one will show me a single result of science, of the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley



Words linked to "Mutilate" :   force out, garble, distort, falsify, mutilator, murder, mutilation, damage, gouge, maim, warp



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