Greediness

Usage examples of rapacity.

His rapacity, like the trunk of an elephant, with equal skill twists a fortune out of the Broadway widening, and picks up dishonest pennies in the Bowery.

Bominger, although engaged in vaster commerce far, nevertheless allowed no scruple to interfere with his esurient rapacity.

There, for eight years, he lived in the midst of all that treason and mendacity and cowardice and rapacity and dishonor which as raw materials are ground together to produce laws for a commonwealth.

But in the time of James the First, from the neediness of the monarch himself, and the rapacity of his minions and courtiers and their satellites,each striving to enrich himself, no matter howa thousand abuses, both of right and justice, were tolerated or connived at, crime stalking abroad unpunished.

It was represented as a mockery of the national distress, no less than of the melancholy visitation of the aged monarch, kept up for the purpose of ministering to the prodigality of the regent, and the rapacity of his courtiers.

The ignorance and conservatism of the peasantry, the habits engendered by widespread insecurity and the fear of official rapacity under Turkish rule, insufficiency of communications, want of capital, and in some districts sparsity of population, have all tended to retard the development of this most important industry.

All his rapacity and connivery had alienated his nobles and he had not even the chance of vindicating his plans by a great victory.

By one of the exclusive ordinances of those times, in which men were glad to get relief from the violence and rapacity of the baron and the satellite of the prince, ordinances that it was the fashion of the day to term liberty, the family of Hofmeister had come into the exercise of a certain charge, or monopoly, that, in truth, had always constituted its wealth and importance, but of which it was accustomed to speak as forming its principal claim to the gratitude of the public, for duties that had been performed not only so well, but for so long a period, by an unbroken succession of patriots descended from the same stock.

Yet for many years more the nations of Europe continued the tribute wherewith the rapacity of the Moors was appeased, and to the United States belongs the honour of first refusing this disgraceful payment.

Now her finery, her paste jewels and her enormous super-imposition of black hair hung up in the green room and she wore a drab rag of coarse hemp for the final scene of her desperate decline, when, outrageous nymphomaniac, she practised extraordinary necrophilies on the bloated corpses the sea tossed contemptuously at her feet for her dry rapacity had become entirely mechanical and still she repeated her former actions though she herself was utterly other.

Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and greater rapacity, and cost more human lives, than the nobler ambition for extended empire of Consular Rome.

Our German commentator has collected the passages of the Theodosian Code which relate to this class of officers, and has shown that on account of their rapacity and extortion their office was subjected to a continual process of degradation.

And Saxon, back in her own kitchen and preparing supper for Billy, wondered what lusts and rapacities had led the old, burnt-faced woman from the big Peruvian ranch, through all the world, to West Oakland and Barry Higgins Old Barry was not the sort who would fling away his share of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, much less ever attain to such opulence.

He was a corn dealer who travelled with the army, unpopular with the quartermasters who dealt with him, suspected by them, because of his rapacity, to be sympathetic with the French.

He had once described to a fellow-writer the impression produced on him by that plaster face, so capaciously ugly, as though comprehending the whole of human life, sharing all man's gluttony and lust, his violence and rapacity, but sharing also his strivings toward love and reason and serenity.