"Doctrinaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bourgeoisie, who belong no longer to the habits and needs of the proletariat. These men were moved by hatred, disappointed ambition, mistaken patriotism, fanaticism without an ideal, sentimental folly or natural maliciousness—there was all that in them—and even certain doctrinaire points of honor, unwilling to withdraw in the face of danger. They certainly did not lean on the middle class, which trembled, fled or hid itself. They were forced to put in action the real proletariat which had nothing to lose. Well, the proletariat ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... inextricable confusion between a saddle, a man, and his horse." This was a defect from which she must have speedily freed herself, since her style, as her first reviewer allowed, is conspicuously direct and clear. Accuracy in speaking and writing had, indeed, been early impressed upon her. Her father's doctrinaire ally and co-disciplinarian, Mr. Thomas Day, later the author of Sandford and Merton, and apparently the first person of whom it is affirmed that "he talked like a book," had been indefatigable in bringing this home ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... the suit fitted, and the cut of it, and the shirt-collar, and the necktie. The book he was reading was Langmuir's Social History of the American People—not one of my favorites, a bit too much on the doctrinaire side, but what a bookshop clerk would give a foreigner looking for something to ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper
... commissioned to represent the great cause of Democracy and to offer you as its militant and triumphant leader a scholar, not a charlatan; a statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains, without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... doctrinaire, bound at all costs to uphold a system. He was a practical man, fighting practical abuses. When parliament met, early in 1837, the young editor, already recognized as the Liberal leader, in company with Laurence O'Connor Doyle, began the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... disappointed and embittered Chateaubriand, who almost redeemed his devotion to the royal cause by those elegant essays which recalled the eloquence of his early life. Villemain wrote for the "Moniteur," Royer—Collard and Guizot for the "Courier," with all the haughtiness and disdain which marked the Doctrinaire or Constitutional school; Etienne and Pages for the "Constitutionel," ridiculing the excesses of the ultra-royalists, the pretensions of the clergy, and the follies of the court; De Genoude for the "Gazette de France," and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... public opinion in India did not generally see the wisdom of the Viceroy's appointment. There were not lacking indeed hireling organs, notoriously in the pay of a tyrannous bureaucracy, who more than hinted that His Excellency was a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men. 'The Viceroy's Excellence Gazette,' published in Calcutta, was at pains to thank 'Our beloved Viceroy for once more and again thus gloriously vindicating the potentialities ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... an overstocked world, with individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless and dissolute and imprudent. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... upon one when reading newspapers, particularly during political campaigns. One paper lauds a candidate as a great administrator, while another condemns him as a doctrinaire. One advocates protective tariff and the gold standard, while another urges revenue tariff only and free silver. Among the news columns one article predicts war, while another discerns signs of peace. Russia is at one time pictured as moving ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... curriculum of study, and here also—the religious question being disposed of—I was able to follow much the same line as his, and I remember being struck not only with his clear-headed ability, but with his strong commonsense, as to what was useful and practicable, and the utter absence in him of doctrinaire aspiration after ideal impossibilities. There was (I think) very little under his chairmanship of strongly-accentuated difference ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... debates touched every aspect of the question. James Madison, the wise supporter of Washington and Hamilton in earlier days and the fellow worker on "The Federalist," led the Democrats in their furious attacks. He was ably seconded by Albert Gallatin, the high-minded young Swiss doctrinaire from Geneva, a terrible man, in whose head principles became two-edged weapons with Calvinistic precision and mercilessness. The Democrats requested the President to let them see the correspondence in reference ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... liberties of the City hung upon his word. That word went forth to save and to preserve. The stern warrior respected the rights of the industrious burgesses, and by his wisdom paved the way for the future greatness of the metropolis. But theoretical and doctrinaire statesmen are willing to risk all for the sake of consistency to certain arbitrary first principles, which do not apply to the spirit of the ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... and treasure as the war went on, and the Confederacy's unexpected tenacity of life, demanded peace on the easiest terms inclusive of intact Union. Secretaries Seward and Chase were for a time in this temper. The doctrinaire abolitionists bitterly assailed President and Congress for not making, from the outset, the extirpation of slavery the main aim of hostilities. Even the great emancipation pacified them ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... position as a doctrinaire of Progress lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic view of some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the same time adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially Helvetius. His survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably to pessimism; ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... hue of every age. In 1822 love is a doctrinaire. Instead of proving love by deeds, as in times past, we have taken to argument and rhetoric and debate. Women's tactics are reduced to three shifts. In the first place, they declare that we cannot love ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word 'Whim.' Besides, my article is really a most salutary and valuable ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... their hearts dislike them. However much the young person might be shielded, he soon got to know that men and women of the world—often far nicer people than the prophets who preached abstention—continually spoke sneeringly of the new doctrinaire laws, and were believed to set them aside in secret, though they dared not do so openly. Small wonder, then, that the more human among the student classes were provoked by the touch- not, taste-not, handle-not precepts of their rulers, into questioning much ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the toiler but a bare sustenance, the bare means of a livelihood, would be a hindrance to human progress, a hindrance not to be removed by all of the maxims of the philosopher or the theories of the doctrinaire. Promise without fulfillment is barren, but when you can place before the mechanic the assured fact that the performance of his duty means success in life, and that his non-performance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... on its way to Paris treated Rheims Cathedral, well and good! In fact, most excellent! And if the British Navy can somehow emasculate Wilhelmshaven and Heligoland I shall not complain that its behavior has been purely doctrinaire. But otherwise I see nothing practical in the Essen-Wilhelmshaven-Heligoland suggestion. Nor in the project for dethroning the Kaiser and sending him and his eldest son to settle their differences in St. Helena! The Kaiser—happily—is not a Napoleon, nor has he ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... and the "passion to bless and save" should inspire those who were formerly drilled only in the exercises of conquest and slaughter. Americans may well be proud to reflect that this era, which a few decades ago seemed but the chimerical dream of a doctrinaire, has found its pledge and promise in the generous endeavors of our ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall |
