What is "rapacious"

Usage examples of "rapacious".

The acquisition of riches served only to stimulate the avarice of the rapacious Barbarians, who proceeded, by threats, by blows, and by tortures, to force from their prisoners the confession of hidden treasure.

The complaints of those people who have claimed that your troops have been more rapacious than the godless invaders have been revealed as the calumny they are, doubtless the result of agents of the disgraced Belisarius who are attempting to discredit all you have done and give false praise to the former commander.

Pulteney inveighed against such a vague and general way of accounting for the public money, as tending to render parliaments altogether insignificant, to cover embezzlements, and to screen corrupt and rapacious ministers.

But the fair and reasonable proportion was soon violated by the rapacious arts of monopoly.

She had been an untamed mestiza of the so-called shopkeeper aristocracy: seductive, rapacious, brazen, with a hunger in her womb that could have satisfied an entire barracks.

Chancing to meet with one of his acquaintance at a certain coffee-house, the discourse turned upon the characters of mankind, when, among other oddities, his friend brought upon the carpet a certain old gentlewoman of such a rapacious disposition, that, like a jackdaw, she never beheld any metalline substance, without an inclination, and even an effort to secrete it for her own use and contemplation.

The rapacious Vandals confiscated the patrimonial estates of the senators, and intercepted the regular subsidies, which relieved the poverty and encouraged the idleness of the plebeians.

Master and Miss Percevals, the reversionary sum of 21,000 pounds a year of the public money, and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster: and the best of it is, that this minister, after abusing his predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found himself compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant the sum in question, thus dissolving his pearl in vinegar, and destroying all the value of the gift by the virulence and reluctance with which it was granted.

Solemnly, Hiraga explained as best he could about the shishi and their struggle to eliminate the despotic government--his sincerity obvious-- explaining the greed of Utani and his rapacious taxes, how the Toranaga clans and daimyos possessed all the wealth of the land, the Toranagas most of all, about the corrupt Bakufu, and that the people were starved and powerless.

Nor was the rapacious son of Severus contented with such a measure of taxation as had appeared sufficient to his moderate predecessors.

And now Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball, that esuriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz.

Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball, that esuriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz.

But the friendship of Heraclius and Mahomet was of short continuance: the new religion had inflamed rather than assuaged the rapacious spirit of the Saracens, and the murder of an envoy afforded a decent pretence for invading, with three thousand soldiers, the territory of Palestine, that extends to the eastward of the Jordan.

Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale.

Agencies, reduced to skeletal cells of their best and most rapacious creative minds, cast wildly about for new pulses to finger and niches to fill.