What's the difference between pillage and theft?

Pillage


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of pillaging; robbery.
  • (n.) That which is taken from another or others by open force, particularly and chiefly from enemies in war; plunder; spoil; booty.
  • (v. i.) To strip of money or goods by open violence; to plunder; to spoil; to lay waste; as, to pillage the camp of an enemy.
  • (v. i.) To take spoil; to plunder; to ravage.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Crowds attacked a police station in Kef yesterday, pillaging documents and equipment and setting it on fire.
  • (2) Sitting with him as he spoke were Sigourney Weaver and Joel David Moore, who starred in Avatar , which charts the fight of the fictitious Na'vi people against outside attempts to pillage their resources on the planet Pandora.
  • (3) The area was pillaged, women were raped, murders committed.
  • (4) Makhaya wrote: “These contradictions, Rhodes the pillager and Rhodes the benefactor, are a symbol of our country’s evolution towards a yet to be attained just and inclusive order.
  • (5) At a press conference on Thursday, the Ivorian state prosecutor Simplice Kouadia Koffi said the couple were accused of "aggravated theft, attacks on the national economy, embezzlement of public funds and pillage".
  • (6) They were pillaging our shit,” Gates says, speaking of the modernists, who were influenced by deliberately abstracted proportions and forms in African figural carvings, often meant to represent more than one person.
  • (7) There is a rape culture – a mindset that seems to have infected every aspect of our lives: the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful, pillaging resources for their own coffers with no concern for the Earth, or the indigenous peoples, or the notion of reciprocity; the rape of the poor through exploitation, land grabs, neglect; the rape of women's bodies through physical violence and commodification, where a girl can be purchased for less than the cost of a mobile phone.
  • (8) Based on Robert Edsel's book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes , the film focuses on the ragtag group of Americans, played by Clooney, Damon, Murray, Goodman and Bob Balaban, one Brit (Hugh Bonneville – Heslov is a big fan of Downton Abbey) and one Frenchman (Jean Dujardin, who is sweet in the film, even if he clearly only understood about one English word in every five of his lines) who were formed to try to save some of the great works of European art and architecture from being destroyed and pillaged during the second world war.
  • (9) In a striking breach of precedence, the Taliban militia did not make use of their unspoken right to pillage and loot.
  • (10) Will Cragin, the IMC's programme co-ordinator for North Kivu province, said there was no fighting and no deaths, but "lots of pillaging and systematic raping of women".
  • (11) Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of torture, hostage-taking, murder, execution without due process, rape, attacking protected objects and pillage.
  • (12) "We have criminals, and semi-criminals, carrying out killings, robbery, and pillaging," he says.
  • (13) Others see the removal of boatloads of ancient art by Elgin's agents as an act of pillage.
  • (14) Photograph: Shawn Carrié Despite his unapologetic endorsement of pillaging, after listening to him talk for hours, I couldn’t shake the impression that looters like Dante couldn’t just be condemned as opportunistic thieves.
  • (15) Former Congolese vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba denies charges that he unleashed his personal militia to murder, rape and pillage in the Central African Republic in 2002-03.
  • (16) Nigeria’s army has faced repeated allegations of rights abuses, including summary executions, rape and pillage – charges which authorities deny.
  • (17) The international criminal court has convicted a rebel leader of charges including murder and pillage over a deadly attack on a village in eastern Congo, but acquitted him of rape, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.
  • (18) Hopes of a deal have been severely tested in recent days by the increasingly bitter war of words, with the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras , accusing the country’s creditors of “pillaging” Greece, while European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, previously seen as sympathetic to Greece’s cause, said the government was misleading the Greek public about the negotiations.
  • (19) The UN mission has a difficult mandate to support the Congolese army, whose troops often are also accused of raping and pillaging.
  • (20) It’s also built around the pillaged scores of 15th-century sacred choral music – hence the Guide inviting him back to church for the first time since he was 14.

Theft


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
  • (n.) The thing stolen.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cruddas, who has several BNP councillors in his Barking constituency, told MPs in the House of Commons: "What's been uncovered in the internal workings of the BNP appears to be systematic illegality in terms of data protection, bugging, money laundering, theft and the operation of the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000."
  • (2) In this investigation, reanalysis of responses to case vignettes obtained from 436 psychologists, psychiatrists, and internists revealed that on the issue of confidentiality management, these health care providers discriminate among cases involving: Premeditated harm to others, socially irresponsible acts with possible dire consequences to self or others, and minor theft.
  • (3) Although she's been performing since 2000 – in the punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls , in a controversial conjoined-twin mime act called Evelyn Evelyn (they wear a specially constructed two-person dress and have been castigated by disability groups for presenting conjoined twins as circus freaks, an accusation she denies) – in her new band, Amanda Palmer And The Grand Theft Orchestra , she's suddenly become a kind of phenomenon.
  • (4) Though the exercises have given the US a chance to vent its frustration at what appears to be state-sponsored espionage and theft on an industrial scale, China has been belligerent.
  • (5) The ICE's Khaalid Walls confirmed the incident took place, and AMC responded with a statement: "Movie theft is something we take very seriously, and our theatre managers contact the Motion Picture Association of America any time it's suspected that someone may be illegally recording content on screen.
  • (6) That level of thefts is just not acceptable – logging each missing phone takes up a lot of police time."
  • (7) Postaddiction crime rates among narcotic (principally heroin) addicts in five different areas (theft, violence, dealing, confidence games, and other crime) were found to be substantially related to a number of preaddiction characteristics, especially criminal activity and drug and alcohol use prior to addiction to narcotics.
  • (8) This dramatic fall has been repeated across nearly every category of crime, including the big "volume" crimes such as burglary and car break-ins and thefts where better security and alarms have brought about even deeper falls in the crime levels.
  • (9) Banda, who has turned to lecturing abroad since she lost power, told an audience in the Netherlands this month that when she was alerted by an EU official about the theft, she knew she had no choice but to start fighting against corruption.
  • (10) Grand Theft Auto series Mostly about running around the streets with a big gun causing all kinds of chaos.
  • (11) And that being the case, should they be remanded in custody over the possession of an Oyster card not registered to them and the theft of a mirror?
  • (12) There has been a spate of thefts of rhino horns and elephant tusks from European museums, zoos and auction houses in recent years, amid a rising illegal trade in poached or stolen ivory .
  • (13) The new ban will mean that an offender who receives a simple caution for a shoplifting offence should not get another simple caution for further theft-related offences within the next two years.
  • (14) Power theft in Karachi and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas alone is believed to cost the state £138m in lost revenues .
  • (15) Car theft led to a third sentence, and it was during that time that he was to meet Bruce Reynolds , the mastermind of the Great Train Robbery.
  • (16) John Madelin, CEO at RelianceACSN and a former vice president responsible for the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, said: “We thought the previous breach of 500 million user accounts was huge, but 1 billion is monumental.” Tyler Moffitt, senior threat research analyst at Webroot, said: “All of the data stolen, including emails, passwords and security questions, make a potent package for identify theft.
  • (17) The Liberal Democrats' biggest donor, who has been on the run for three years after being convicted of a multimillion pound theft, is hiding in the Dominican Republic under a false British identity, the Guardian can disclose.
  • (18) Too many still write down pin numbers, contrary to all the advice from the banks, and are thereby at risk of theft.
  • (19) And of course, if the software that infects your machine is malicious, there's the serious risk of identity theft.
  • (20) Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation , gave a wide-ranging address to US media regulators that attacked internet news aggregation as "theft" and claimed that advertising-only business models were dead.