Oppressive

The oppressive tax laws made it difficult to start a small company.

The oppressive land-owners kept a grip on the labourers.

Will the oppressive heat of summer never end?

Without being slaves in fact, their condition is little better than vassalage in its most oppressive form.

The class of noblemen, who, at this particular epoch, had lost nothing of their primitive vigour, saw with pleasure the influence of the French depressed; but they suffered scarcely less from the absolute and oppressive influence which the Spaniards had acquired over them.

Their mantle was for a while worn unconsciously by him who showed to us Macbeth: and here again, in the deepening gloom of this tragic tale, we feel the oppressive influence of this invisible power, from the time we hear the prophetic rhymes, the spell has begun its work, and the clouds of misfortune blacken round us; and the fated course moves solemnly onward, irresistible and unerring as the progress of the sun, and soon to end in a night of horror.

With startling and oppressive force of illustration, he brings before us the fact, that in that grandest city of the earth, “if all the churches, chapels and buildings devoted to public worship, were filled to their last seat, there would be still left outside the buildings as many people as the whole population—men, women and children—in the cities of Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield and Birmingham.”

It had been one of those unnaturally still and oppressive days when scarcely a leaf quivers, and every breath of air seems charged with electricity. Suddenly the thunder began to growl. Before many minutes eveiy pine-needle was shaking with a fierce chill wind, and a torrent of rain swept down the valley and drenched us through to the skin.

He defines it as belief in exalted spiritual powers by whose help human weakness is supplemented in its struggle with the oppressive forces of the natural world.

Mr. Wardlaw had left the castle: so also had Charlotte, by her own wish, her residence there having been found too oppressive to herself to be continued for the present.

The possibility that women are not very sensitive to odours is often suggested to men by the perfumes of oppressive strength which women frequently use.