"Mendacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continuing a hater of Friedrich all his days; and instilling the same sentiment into the Earl of Bute at a period which was very critical, as we shall see. This is my Author's, the often fallacious though not mendacious Dr. Zimmermann's, rather deliberate account; a man not given to mendacity, though filled with much vague wind, which renders him fallacious in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... little struck at Eugene's way of confessing to his sweetheart, she does not betray any suspicion of mendacity. She can truly say she likes Pauline, and that she is glad of the engagement, that she and Polly are certain to be the best of friends. The warms arms around her are so fond, the kisses so delicately sweet, the exaggerations of feeling are so utterly delicious, that Violet ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... to thee Let meaner mortals bend the subject knee! Thine is mendacity's imperial crown, Alike by genius, action and renown. No man, since words could set a cheek aflame E'er lied so greatly with so little shame! O bad old man, must thy remaining years Be passed in leading idiots by their ears— Thine ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... wishes a particular man to be ruined, and in twenty-four hours it will be furnished with grave charges, supported by depositions so full and circumstantial that any person unaccustomed to Asiatic mendacity would regard them as decisive. It is well if the signature of the destined victim is not counterfeited at the foot of some illegal compact, and if some treasonable paper is not slipped into a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said Yates, "that I am the innocent cause of Miss Kitty's mirth. You see, madam—it's a pathetic thing to say, but really I have had no home life. Although I attend church regularly, of course," he added with jaunty mendacity, "I must confess that I haven't heard grace at meals for years and years, and—well, I wasn't just prepared for it. I have no doubt I made an exhibition of myself, which your ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... encounter misrepresentation and antagonism. I do not wish to make too much of that. I have no doubt been exposed to much criticism and some abuse. There has, I sometimes think, been an exceptional display of mendacity at my expense. But this is the fate of every public man who is forced by circumstances into a somewhat prominent position in a great crisis. And, after all, praise and blame have a wonderful way of balancing one another if you only give ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... was about the age of Oliver Twist at the time Bill Sykes shoved him through the window, Hiram Hanway caused him to be appointed page in the State Senate. 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. He learned early that the ten commandments have no bearing on politics and legislation, and was taught that part of valor which, basing itself on greed and cunning and fear, is called ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Tutt rolled Bibby up and threw him away, while his master shuddered at the open disclosure of his trusted major-domo's vulgarity, mendacity and general lack of sportsmanship. Somehow all at once the case began to break up and go all to pot. The jury got laughing at Bibby, the footmen and the cops as Mr. Tutt painted for their edification the scene following the arrival of Mrs. Witherspoon, when ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... allow a nation to be Without a bible? Why didn't He give a few leaves to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Take from the bible the miracles, and I admit that the good passages are true. If they are true they don't need to be inspired. Miracles are the children of mendacity. Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, sublime, and eternal march of cause and effect. Reason must be the final arbiter. An inspired book cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. Is a man to be rewarded eternally for believing without evidence or against evidence? Do you ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sighed. "The usual fate of ghost-seers is mine," she said, resignedly. "My privileged encounter with a spirit is attributed to lobster salad or mendacity. Well, I have, at least, one memory left from the wreck—a kiss from the unseen world. Was Captain Kinsolving a very brave ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the winter I think of 1837, I heard of an association of gentlemen formed to investigate this terrible subject of mendacity in our city, and to find some way of methodizing our chari-[93] ties and protecting them from abuse. I went down immediately to Robert Minturn, who, I was told, took a leading part in this movement, and told him that I had come post-haste to inquire what he and his ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... nor feeling beyond that of humanity, and a right to expose the mendacity of those who have power to exercise it over the prisoners in Charleston. That mendacity has existed too long for the honor of that community, and for the feelings of those who have ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... will serve as a memorable example of the cant and mendacity of an editor! and that total absence of critical judgment that could assert such matured reflection, in so exquisite a style, could ever have been "first conceptions, just as they came into the mind of Lady Gethin, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... christened AMELIA; and we shall hear of her in time coming. But there was, as the Circulating Libraries still intimate, a certain loud-spoken braggart of the histrionic-heroic sort, called Baron Trenck, windy, rash, and not without mendacity, who has endeavored to associate her with his own transcendent and not undeserved ill-luck; hinting the poor Princess into a sad fame in that way. For which, it would now appear, there was no basis whatever! Most ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lost his time, if he referred to the subject at all, in pointing out the moral improbability of the current accounts. He might have dwelt on the unsupported testimony of the only witness, the unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself convicts on another subject of flagrant mendacity. But he would have been especially slow to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy he has described, would, in consequence of "some vision either of sleep or fancy," in which future exaltation ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... deliberate and rejoicing devilry of Glengarry, and from Charles's increasing distress and degradation, it is almost a relief to pass for a moment to the harmless mendacity of a contemporary spy, Rob Roy's son, James Mohr Macgregor, or Drummond. This highland gentleman, with his courage, his sentiment, and his ingrained falseness, is known to the readers of Mr. Stevenson's 'Catriona.' Though unacquainted ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... the ludicrous which he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn. There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic with a detective policeman ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... idleness they display other vices. The same inability to forgo immediate enjoyment, at whatever cost, shows itself in other acts. They are nearly always spendthrifts, usually drunkards, often sexually dissolute. Next to their lack of industry, their most conspicuous quality is their incurable mendacity. Their readiness, their resources, their promptitude, the elaborate circumstantiality of their lies are astonishing. The copiousness and efficiency of their excuses for failing to do what they have undertaken would convince anyone who had no experience of their capabilities ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... honestest people in Europe." In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do not know how the Americans are ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... when it is recalled that from the beginning of the great war, the German Foreign Office, with whom military honor is supposed to be almost a religion, has stooped to the most shameful and barefaced mendacity? ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... press, truth will not come to light through the mists conjured into life by the mendacity of subsidized newspapers, until the material wherewith to oppose all the mysteries of the Bund (Frankfort) shall be supplied to the Prussian press, with unrestricted ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... always engender much fraud. All people are most credulous when they are most happy; and when much money has just been made, when some people are really making it, when most people think they are making it, there is a happy opportunity for ingenious mendacity. Almost everything will be believed for a little while, and long before discovery the worst and most adroit deceivers are geographically or legally beyond the reach of punishment. But the harm they have done diffuses harm, for ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... his warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the bean-humbug . ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... low figure—an exact fourth, to be accurate, of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... libellous pamphlets and placards, of which he had not less than twenty-two on his table directed against himself, which he carefully preserved as his best eulogium and claim to immortality. He advocated the severe repression of the seditious; yet, with a stretch of hypocrisy and mendacity uncommon even with a Guise, he expressed himself as for his own part very sorry that such "grievous executions" had been inflicted upon those who went "without arms and from fear of being damned to hear preaching, or who sang psalms, neglected the mass, or engaged in other observances of theirs," ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... an application of the methods expounded in the 'Introduction,' in order to show how the various motives or 'springs of action' and the 'sanctions' based upon them may affect the trustworthiness of evidence. Any motive whatever may incidentally cause 'mendacity.' The second book, therefore, considers what securities may be taken for 'securing trustworthiness.' We have, for example, a discussion of the value of oaths (he thinks them valueless), of the advantages and disadvantages of reducing ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... knowledge of the claimants alone, and there can be no doubt that the race after the pensions offered by this bill would not only stimulate weakness and pretended incapacity for labor, but put a further premium on dishonesty and mendacity. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... in these words of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the persecution of the faith—a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by mendacity, derision, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... I offer myself as a substitute for the rest of this dance? Bob, the chief wants to see you a second," was the best that Barker could think of. They praised him later for his "mendacity," yet what he said was true to the letter. It took little more than a second for the colonel ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... in Paris, I cannot help feeling a good deal of sympathy for them, notwithstanding their childish vanity, their mendacity, and their frivolity. I sincerely trust, therefore, if they do seriously resist their besiegers, that the assurances of the Government that there are ample supplies of food and of ammunition, are not part of the system of official lying which was pursued by their predecessors; and I hope that ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... possibility of mistaking them. Hence you must suppose that they were due to devils in A.D. 30, and to nervous disorders in A.D. 1894. On the other hand, if you choose the other horn, you must accept either the hypothesis of the ignorance or that of the mendacity of Christ.' ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... to dislike, and whom he had not very politely described as a wooden fellow. The mystery, which from the first overhung the story of Marlborough's disgrace, was darkened, after the lapse of fifty years, by the shameless mendacity of his widow. The concise narrative of James dispels the mystery, and makes it clear, not only why Marlborough was disgraced, but also how several of the reports about the cause of his disgrace ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... statuesque, and looked so inspired with thoughts celestial, as she sat thus, impregnating herself with mendacity, that Gerard forgot all, except art, and proceeded eagerly to transfer that exquisite ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... labour has swept away such charm as my person ever possessed, has reduced me to a lean habit of body, sucked away all the freshness of life, destroyed my complexion and impaired my vigour. As to my hair, which they with unblushing mendacity declare I have allowed to grow long as an enhancement to my personal attractions, you can judge of its elegance and beauty. As you see, it is tangled, twisted and unkempt like a lump of tow, shaggy and irregular in length, so knotted ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... had no intention, however, of being buried beneath the wreckage of his endeavors, he sought to prop the weakening fabric of invention and mendacity by new shuffling or pretense. Should a disgraced fool be his undoing? From that living entombment should his foeman in cap and bells yet indirectly summon the force to bend him to the dust, or send him to the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... organized system of spiritualism in America, with its associations and lyceums and annual camp-meetings, and its itinerancy of mediums and trance speakers, is a system of mere imposture. In the honest simplicity of many of its followers, and in the wicked mendacity of its leaders, it seems to be on a par with the other American contribution to the religions of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Edward O'Connor, who sat beside him, to sing; but Edward whispered, "For Heaven's sake don't stop the flow of the lava from that mighty eruption of lies!—he's a perfect Vesuvius of mendacity. You'll never meet his like again, so make the most of him while you have him. Pray, sir," said Edward to the colonel, "have you ever been in any of the cold climates? I am induced to ask you, from the very wonderful anecdotes you have told ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... "Change in the value of money?" Alas, reader, no; that is not above the fourth part of the phenomenon. Three-fourths of the phenomenon are change in the methods of administering money,—difference between managing it with wisdom and veracity on both sides, and managing it with unwisdom and mendacity on both sides. Which is very great indeed; and infinitely sadder than any one, in these times, will believe!—But we cannot dwell on this consideration. Let the reader take it with him, as a constant accompaniment in whatever work of Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... interesting relic indeed, for they represent to us vividly that period when men who were willing to go to the stake for their religious opinions thought it not wrong to save the souls of their fellowmen by pious mendacity and consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this miracle is very simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those mixtures fusing at low temperature, which, while kept in its place within the cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being brought out into ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... must remark that some cases of apparent mendacity or inaccuracy on the part of a President—especially if he were as voluble and busy as Roosevelt—must be attributed to forgetfulness or misunderstanding and not to wilful lying. A person coming from an ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... between him and his usually correct and dispassionate sire, he is impelled to take a mild and tolerant attitude towards the momentary injustice brought about by the weakness of approaching old age, the vile-intentioned mendacity of outcasts envious of the House of Kong, and, perchance, the irritation brought on by a too lavish indulgence in your favourite dish ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... for mendacity is proverbial. One instance of this national weakness was attended with considerable inconvenience to us. By some mischance we had run by the village where we intended to stop for the night, which was situated some distance off the road. Meeting a Persian lad, we inquired the distance. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... fully established on ample and high authority within the medical prescriptive pale. And, in fact, even as "The Tonsure" or shaving of the crown, became by fashion and mendicity a feature of priesthood and monastic piety, so has the slaughter of the Tonsils come to be regarded by fashion and mendacity as a feature of childhood and medical expediency ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... authority, and we defy him to name any Freethinker "of whom the sceptics were greatly proud" who has of late years been converted to Christianity. It is easy enough to impose on an ignorant congregation, and Dr. Hitchens is probably aware of the lengths to which a reckless pulpiteer may carry his mendacity. But candid investigators will conclude that "converted infidels" cannot be very plentiful, when the majority of them are so ancient; nor very important, when an obscure youth has to be advertised as "a leader" of whom the sceptics (nine out of ten of them never having heard ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... intercession." Even Brask wrote: "He has won the king's ill-favor in many ways, for which he can offer no defence." Against such a pressure of public opinion the archbishop of Trondhem dared no longer stand, and on the 22d of September despatched Sunnanvaeder to the king, adding, with the mendacity of a child, that he had detained him in Norway only in order that he might not flee. Gustavus, with grim humor, thanked him for his solicitude, and begged him now to return all other refugees. Sunnanvaeder was kept in jail till the 18th of February, 1527. He was then ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... he had bought in the restaurant. "I see that Jorris and Walters—they're the two oil men—deny that they've ever met or that they're going to amalgamate. But can you believe these people?" he asked. "My dear old thing, the mendacity of these ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... upon the threshold of falsehood; and because of that inexplicable but obvious hostility, that attitude of expectancy to ensnare and destroy him, Captain Tremayne hesitated to step from the solid ground of reason, upon which he had confidently walked thus far, on to the uncertain bogland of mendacity. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... broken up late, and then there had been the excitement of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length jacket ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... or assisting the police, or hauling a mitrailleuse if he could help it. Yet the War dog worships the Army; it represents a square meal and a "cushy" bed. The new draft takes him for a mascot; but the old hand knows him better. A shameless blend of petty larceny, mendacity, fleas, gourmandism, dirt and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... a desire to protect herself from all reproach of mendacity on the part of the customers, had made the owner of the inn place a wire cupboard upon the sill of one of the windows near the door; in which receptacle were some eggs on a plate, a bit of bread with which David might have loaded his sling, a white glass bottle filled with a liquid of some color ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to, much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they availed naught, when Levine, with an expression of horror at such deliberate mendacity on the part of the clerk, ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... just the shade of irony necessary to rob the assertion of its mendacity. "But go on, go on. You have not begun to satisfy me yet. You did not stop with finding a motive for the crime I ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... Breaking into the Spotlight; Dukes of Eden; Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith; Knights-Champions of the Domestic Dog; the Holy Gregarians; the Resolute Optimists; the Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs; Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cess-Pool; the Society for Prevention of Prevalence; Kings of Drink; Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential; the Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll; Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats; ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the piece was described as "immoral," the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... he responded, with prompt mendacity. "I was in the neighborhood and heard the shot fired, so I ran in to have a look around and see if anyone was hurt, and I came across this poor little chap yowling on the doorstep. I won't want any supper to-night, Mrs. ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... editorial until she read it in the paper. She had inferred that he wrote it after leaving her, thus revenging himself upon her by further scarification of the friend for whom she had pleaded. To the charge of deliberate mendacity he had no specific clue, not knowing that Kathleen Pierce had denied the authenticity of the interview. He mused somberly upon the venomed injustice of womankind. The note and its symbol of withered sweetness he buried in his waste-basket. If he could but discard as readily the vision of a face, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... became content to be deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false witness, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the forger and the cheat.[14] As time went on, the atmosphere of accredited mendacity thickened, until, in the Renaissance, the art of exposing falsehood dawned upon keen Italian minds. It was then that history as we understand it began to be understood, and the illustrious dynasty of scholars arose to whom we still look both ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... happy," he said. "Your caring so much for me as to wish me to marry your sister, I shall never forget it. You see, I've never thought of her in that way. I suppose I don't think of women at all in that way," he went on, with a certain splendid mendacity. "It's a case of cog-wheels instead of corpuscles. I'm just a heathen bit of machinery, with my head full ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... welter of mendacity, evasions and intrigue, for a parallel to which the records of this or indeed of any civilised country might be searched in vain, one fact has at last emerged clear and indisputable. The nation will learn this morning, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... suspect; and one day, after he had been kept out with the loud, stolid "Not at home" of practiced mendacity, he watched, and saw ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... first, those portions of my Diary which may be interesting, and in which are recorded traits and incidents which will bear strongly upon the commentaries I shall subsequently make;" notwithstanding which the reviewer has the mendacity to assert that, "not until the last paragraph of the last volume, does he learn for the first time that the work is not complete." I will be content with quoting his own words against him—"An habitual story teller prefers invention ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the special case under consideration, the guilty man, I will assume, lies hard and fast, but, when he fancies that all that is left him will be to reap the reward of his mendacity, behold, he will succumb in the very place where such an accident is likely to be most closely analyzed. Assuming even that he may be in a position to account for his syncope by illness or the stifling ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... assistance rendered or proffered to Austria in 1798-9 which gave Napoleon his pretext for crushing her. Her recent struggle for independence, though fruitless, was respectable, and protracted beyond the verge of Hope; and not even Royalist mendacity has yet pretended that her revolt from Austria, or her prolonged defence under bombardment and severe privation was the work of foreigners. But the Croat again lords it in her halls; Trieste is stealing away ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... him. 'I am struck by your grip on these difficult problems, Mr Brand,' he told me. 'There is much I can tell you, and you may be of great value to our cause.' He asked me a lot of questions about my past, which I answered with easy mendacity. Before we parted he made me promise to ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... she replied quietly, with that gentle mendacity which can scarcely be grudged to women, because they are so poorly armed. "I should think so. You know what these men are. Every hour they have in Loango demoralises them more ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Enfield, mildly, "Mr. Nixon should have avoided that trap of an empty leadership. Mr. Nixon is no stripling; he knew Tammany and those elements of mendacity and muddy intrigue which are called its 'control'; he knew Mr. Croker, who in these last days was faithful to no promise and loyal to no man. Why did he permit himself to be flattered, cozened and destroyed? Why? He added inexperience to vanity and betrayed ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... reminded their followers that they had to do with dogs who did not believe in God, on which they fired two volleys against the enemy, then dropped their guns and charged with the knife in one hand and the war-club in the other. According to their own story, which shows every sign of mendacity, they drove back the Outagamies into their village, killed seventy warriors, and captured fourteen more, without counting eighty women and children killed, and a hundred and forty taken prisoners. In short, they would have us believe that they destroyed the whole village, except ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... familiar halls without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him—he will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor was I quite such an unremembered ghost ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... gifts and honours conferred upon her by the loyalty of the people this was the most acceptable. Yet Green,[51] in describing Elizabeth's reign, says: "Nothing is more revolting in the Queen, but nothing is more characteristic, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Dubourgay himself, CONVEYED by "a Lady" (one of the Queen's Ladies), as he dimly intimates.] What secret manoeuvring and endeavoring went on unweariedly on royal Sophie's part, we need not say; nor in what bad element, of darkness and mendacity, of eavesdropping, rumoring, backstairs intriguing, the affair now moved. She corresponds on it with Queen Caroline of England; she keeps her two children true to it, especially her Son, the more important ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fille honnete. For he had at once detected the girl's reckless temper. From what social stratum did she come—she and the brother? In her, at least, there was some wild blood! When he sounded Madame Cervin, however, she, with her incurable habit of vain mendacity, had only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie felt certain ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fighting us in order to restore to the world the freedom, the Kultur, which we threaten. What monstrous mendacity! Reproduce if you can the German national school teacher, the German upper-master, the German university professor! You have lagged far behind us, you are hopelessly inferior! Hence your chagrin, your envy, your fear! Powerless to rival us, you foam with hate and ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... I understand the whole matter like an eye-witness! Now there is another demand to be met, the demand of friendship! In here, candor; outside, friendship; in here, one of our brethren has been adventurous and unfortunate; outside"—the old man smiled a smile of benevolent mendacity—"outside, nothing ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... book-notice can express our obligations to Mr. Ellison and those few of his countrymen who have publicly rebuked the noisy bitterness of writers striving, with too much success, to debauch the sentiment of England. Most dear to us is an occasional lull in that storm of insolence and mendacity designed to embarrass the Government of the United States in the august and solemn championship of human liberty committed to its charge. And let it be remarked that our expectations of English approval were never Utopian. The great principle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... contributed to the Democratic campaign fund. This return of evil for good appears to have been a new experience for Hawthorne, but those who are much concerned in the affairs of the world soon become accustomed to it, and pay little attention to either the malice or the mendacity ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... cried, passionately. "I can't bear to have you study me as if I were a specimen of something—of mendacity, you think. But no matter about that. You must believe me. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... large supply of pigs"—even after the enormous number she has exported to Belgium. Germany, however, does not only export pigs; her trade in "canards" with neutrals grows and grows, chiefly with the United States, thanks to the untiring mendacity of Bernstorff and Wolff. Compared with these efforts, the revelations of English governesses at German courts, which are now finding their way into print, make but a ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... traditions which are connected with Falstaff that give him his perennial attraction. It is the personality that owes nothing to history with which Shakespeare's imaginative power clothed him. The knight's unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way of life supplies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from the highest manifestations of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... that was evil could contain the shock of a new experience. He had fought and lost all his battles—bitter struggles to think of even now, after the lapse of years, and the little he had to tell of himself was an intricate mingling of truth and falsehood, grotesque exaggeration, purposeless mendacity. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... is refused, he remarks, likewise with a grin, that he will come again to-morrow with three thousand light horsemen, and he gallops away; but in many cases he does not return. The secret of the fellow's success lies mainly in his unblushing impudence, his easy mendacity, and that intimate knowledge of every highway and byway of the country which, thanks to the military organisation of the Prussian army, he has acquired in the regimental school. He gives himself out to be the precursor ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... disposed to be very confident about matters of recollection, reflective persons are pretty sure to find out, sooner or later, that they occasionally fall into errors of memory. It is not the philosopher who first hints at the mendacity of memory, but the "plain man" who takes careful note of what really happens in the world of his personal experience. Thus, we hear persons, quite innocent of speculative doubt, qualifying an assertion made on personal recollection by the proviso, "unless my memory has played ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... in answer to his neophyte's half fearful question. Fitly underlined and sufficiently spaced, it was a statement calculated to awe, if only by its mendacity. I wonder if that chapter of Bulwer's would impress one now as it used to do then. It were better, perhaps, not ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is denominated heraldic zoology. And why not? For these hideous creatures, however visionary[8], have a real traditionary ground in medieval belief—sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed within himself—occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain—holding, perhaps, from that station ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... boat" of happiness at least once during a love affair—usually by trying to leap out of it before it lands in the port of Matrimony. All a man needs in order to win any woman is a little audacity, a little mendacity and plenty of pertinacity. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... Mr. Lee," said Kate, with swift mendacity; "he was all the time looking after something for you, when I begged him to shoot a bird to get a feather for my hat. And that wing is ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... liar when driven by necessity from the paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault. Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... must be, "See me reverse." Not that by suggesting this motto I would for a moment be understood as expressing a wish for OSCAR's once again dropping into poetry—that OSCAR should once again take to the other sort of Lyre; far from it. No; let him remain the head professor of the gay science of mendacity in the Cretan College. Now, when a Professor and double M.A., i.e., Master of the Mendacious Art in the Cretan College, says or writes one thing, he must be taken as meaning exactly the opposite. Otherwise he is no ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... was not so, Ndabezita. My 'Spider' told me that these were all the time alive," rejoined Laurence, with mendacity on a truly ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... to improve the impression made by his mendacity] I should never have dreamt of writing poems to her. ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... recover. It is teaching the people that no law of justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact, absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the complete indifference with which this mendacity is ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... accept a second creation, I thank the Omnipotent for his kind protection. From my minority, I profess the mendacity, Passed days in poverty, From my minority. Perpetually my duty, Sobbing under perplexity. Nothing least prosperity, But sad ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... difficulties of Hypatia; it is only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So that, if Westward Ho! does not present us with the weaknesses and the dilemmas of Hypatia, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so rich with interest. But it has real and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... girl, with a bold plunge into mendacity. "I expected to see him at breakfast. Then I was told he was gone. I don't ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... give the prevailing force and significance of the charges, of the defence, and of the evidence; the impression they made upon him with a view to his judicial conclusion. We know the judgment formed in advance by him and his colleagues on the mendacity of Ralegh's account of the motive of his enterprise. That could not but warp a compendium by him of an investigation instituted in order to find a legal justification for a capital sentence on ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... handkerchief passed over her coarse, black locks and tied under her sharp, pertinacious chin, and a smile which was as brilliant as a prolonged flash of lightning. She smiled at everything in life, especially the things she did n't like and which kept her talent for mendacity in healthy exercise. A glance, a word, a motion was sufficient to make her show her teeth at you like a cheerful she-wolf. This inexpugnable smile constituted her whole vocabulary in her dealings with her melancholy mistress, to ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... however; not of a parrot character, but chiefly of funny sayings of the little ones at home. Mrs. Judge Robinson, with the artistic mendacity of your true raconteur, accredited to her own four-year-old a speech about the stars being holes in the floor of heaven, although it was said of this gem in "Harper's Drawer," where she had read it, that "the following good one comes ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... that he did not bear away with him a high appreciation of the benefits which he owed to his alma mater. "Mendacity and insincerity—- in these I found the effects, the sure and only sure effects, of an English university education." He wrote a Latin ode on the death of George II., which was much praised. In later years he himself said of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where vests the discretion; ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... upon the Spaniards, who wasted or pocketed them, they kept their own army unsupplied with money, transport, or clothes. Unsupported by the home authorities, the British commanders had yet to struggle with the faithlessness, mendacity, and inertness of the Portuguese and Spanish authorities, and were hampered with obstacles such as never beset a British commander before. Still, in spite of this, British genius and valour triumphed over all difficulties, and Wellesley delivered ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... his moral life,—to his own manliness. He promised his mediation to better her eventful and mysterious life, to be a friend to her; and nobly did he keep his promise. On the following day he took measures for her rescue, and though several attempts were made to wrest her from him, and the mendacity of slave-dealers summoned to effect it, he had the satisfaction of seeing her restored to her ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... frame of mind. It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... at first sight, and instantly arrayed himself in her colour, which was green, whilst Matta wore blue, in compliment to the marquise; and they entered the next day upon duty, at La Venerie, where the Duchess of Savoy gave a grand entertainment. De Grammont, with his native tact and unscrupulous mendacity, played his part to perfection; but his comrade, Matta, committed a hundred solecisms. The very second time he honoured the marquise with his attentions, he treated her as if she were his humble servant: when he pressed ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... discredited herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud to be. In nothing has their historical character, as shown in the published literature of their [152] cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of amelioration. It cannot be affected by the spirit and the lessons of the times. Mendacity and a sort of judicial blindness seem to be the two most salient characteristics by which are to be distinguished these implacable foes and would-be robbers of human rights and liberty. But, gracious heavens! what can tempt mortals to incur this weight ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... left here several of his men. [Footnote: Cavelier says that he actually reached the Mississippi; but, on the one hand, he did not know whether the river in question was the Mississippi or not; and, on the other, he is somewhat inclined to mendacity. Le Clercq says that La Salle thought he had found the river. Joutel says that he did not reach it.] The fate of these unfortunates does not appear. He now retraced his steps towards Fort St. Louis; and, as he approached it, detached some of his men to look for his vessel, the "Belle," for whose ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... struggle for life an' death. Thar's plenty of bunkless gents, however, besides him, an' as he sinks into them sound an' dreamless slumbers which is the her'tage of folks whose consciences run trop, he hears 'em drinkin' an' talkin' an' barterin' mendacity, an' argyfyin' pol'tics ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever aroused deeper or more general ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... is not," Palliser replied, with serene mendacity. "No suggestion of that sort has been made. My business proposition was given out on an entirely different basis. You, of course, choose to put ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... keepsake," she added, with easy mendacity; and affecting to recognize in Mr. Brace's curiosity a not unnatural excuse for toying with her charming fingers, she hid them in chaste and virginal seclusion in her lap, until she could recover the ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... are far less intelligent than I supposed!" In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing any universal system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she contented herself, merely, whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything that she had done, with not telling him of it. So that a lie was, to her, something to be used only as a special expedient; and the one thing that could make her decide ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and, vivified by a few touches of a master's hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in a character portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important and prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is his matchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies the action ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... office without a stain upon his ermine. Millions might have been amassed by venality. He retires as poor as when he entered, owing nothing and owning little, except the title to the respect of good men, which malignant mendacity cannot wrest from a public officer who has deserved, by a long and useful career, the grateful appreciation of his fellow-citizens. We think that we may safely predict that, in his new place, Justice Field will fulfill the ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... women is notorious. It is exceeded only by their mendacity. But Angels have up to this time stood in good repute. Your conduct, sir, is scandalous. ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... longevity statistics, she was much too young to die. As a matter of fact, she was little more than a bride. That probably accounts for the brand-new mink coat and muff she was sporting. Moreover, it accounts for Mort's surprising mendacity and even more amazing humility in relation to the taking-off of Mike. No doubt in similar circumstances, he would have told his second wife, who died when she was pretty well along in years, that he'd show her who was boss ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... that in a brief time on our shores can build the finest temple to God which this country has yet seen? What will the people, to whom we have described this race as sunk in papistical stupidity, debased, unenterprising, think, when they gaze on this absolute proof of our mendacity?" ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the world ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... images together in the furnace. When they were thoroughly baked, and life had been breathed into them, hallowed Truth moved on with modest gait; but her imperfect copy remained fixed on the spot. Thence the spurious image, the result of the stealthy work, was called Mendacity,[4] because they say, she has no feet,—an assertion ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... had to let itself be overcome by the spirit of antiquity—for example, the idea of empire, the community, and so forth. We are suffering from the uncommon want of clearness and uncleanliness of human things; from the ingenious mendacity which Christianity ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with elevated sentiments of virtue and honour, have been pardoned. But of all the forms of pride, even the pride of upstart wealth not excepted, the most offensive is the pride of ancestry when found in company with sordid and ignoble vices, greediness, mendacity, knavery and impudence; and such was the pride of Seymour. Many, even of those who were well pleased to see the ministers galled by his keen and skilful rhetoric, remembered that he had sold himself ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their teachings, which the credulous peasantry imbibe like mother's milk. The peripatetic patriots who invade the rural communities seem to be easy, extemporaneous liars, having a natural gift for tergiversation, an undeniable gift for mendacity, an inexhaustible fertility of invention. Such liars, like poets, are born, not made, though doubtless their natural gifts have been improved and developed by constant practice. Like Parolles, they "lie with such volubility ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... newly elected legislature, a blunder in tactics due, it may be, to over-confidence. The secrecy which had shrouded the proceedings of the delegates at first was turned to account by their opponents, who set in motion a campaign of mendacity and misrepresentation. The actual terms became known too late to counteract this hostile agitation, which had been systematically carried on throughout the province. The bogey employed to stampede the electors was direct taxation. The farmers were told that every cow or ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... public approval of his death. He was the third of his race to perish in the New Forest, the scene of the Conqueror's cruelty to his people. He was a thick-set man with a red face, a debauchee of the deepest dye, mean in money matters, and as full of rum and mendacity as Sitting Bull, the former Regent of the Sioux Nation. He died at the age of forty-three years, having reigned and cut up in a ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... evidence of the grossest mendacity, was lightly passed over, and the men walked on with ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... scattered abroad with the sole idea of impressing the general public with what a marvelous and unusual person the individual in question is. There can be no reasonable doubt that they are merely evidences of childish vanity and puerile mendacity, and are only referred to here for the reason that young persons, ignorant of the laws of health, might attempt to emulate them, with results that could be but disastrous. Nothing so preserves youth, health, and good looks as a sufficient amount of sleep, and it is pre-eminently ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... the testimony is untrue and that he is being wilfully deceived. There is, so far as I can see, no theoretical criterion by which the patient can decide, in such a case, between the two equally satisfactory hypotheses of his madness and of his friends' mendacity. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Our Lord 1552"; but notwithstanding this very explicit statement, it is now practically certain that the Articles were never submitted to or approved by Convocation. In other words, as Gairdner puts it,[67] the title page is "nothing but a shameful piece of official mendacity" resorted to in order to deceive the people, and to prevent them from being influenced by the successful work accomplished ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... blushes. He is ashamed of the misery whence he comes, whither he must return. He lowers his head and lies, perhaps without realizing the extent of his mendacity: "No, after all, we're not unhappy, it isn't so ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... their bad governments are but too often the immediate and permanent causes from which spring the continual calamities that they are obliged to endure. Is it not the ambition of kings and of the great, their negligence, their vices, their oppression, to which are generally due sterility, mendacity, wars, contagions, bad morals, and all the multiplied ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... since they are never to do evil that good may come. Accordingly, those persons who make lies their refuge, must be liable to be doubted, even when they speak the truth. Still, it is possible, that a man's conscience may be so obdurate, as not to perceive the pravity of mendacity, when exercised for his supposed benefit, while he yet retains a regard for truth when engaged in relating his exploits to others. This, we think, is partly the case with our heroes. Their acknowledgment of their disregard of truth, while prosecuting illegal measures, is, indeed,—so inconsistent ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... reliance in advertisements. I have since learned that the most truthful people are apt to indulge a slight vein of exaggeration in describing their own possessions, as though the mere circumstance of going into print were an excuse for a certain kind of mendacity. But I did not fully awaken to this fact until a much later period, when, in answering an advertisement which described a highly advantageous tenement, I was referred to the house I then occupied, and from which a thousand inconveniences were impelling ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... pigtail, large cocked hat, and habiliments meant to represent those of a Tuscan citizen of some hundred years or so ago. He is a sort of shrewd fool, doing the most absurd things, lying through thick and thin with a sort of simple, self-confuting mendacity, yet contriving to cheat everybody, and always having, amid all his follies, a shrewd eye to his own interest. He talks with the broadest possible Florentine accent and idiom, and despite his cunning is continually getting more kicks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... Carlyle, is doubly guilty of a most heinous crime. And we suspect, we know, and for the welfare of the community we hope to be able soon to point out openly, who and where this vile one is. Yes, only an atheist and anarchist is capable of such villainous mendacity, such unutterable wickedness and treachery. Now, we would especially call upon our readers in Baalbek to be watchful and vigilant, for among them is one, recently come back from America, who harbours under his bushy hair the atheism and anarchy of decadent ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and credulous dotards Fitter to obey than to command Full of precedents and declamatory commonplaces I am a king that will be ever known not to fear any but God Infamy of diplomacy, when diplomacy is unaccompanied by honesty Mendacity may always obtain over innocence and credulity Never did statesmen know better how not to do Pray here for satiety, (said Cecil) than ever think of variety Simple truth was highest skill Strength does a falsehood ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... laws of the country and to the war upon the liberties of a free people." Governor Rector declared that the President's call for troops was only "adding insult to injury, and that the people of Arkansas would defend, to the last extremity, their honor and their property against Northern mendacity and usurpation." Governor Hicks for prudential reasons excused Maryland at the time from responding to the President's call, and when a month afterwards he notified the War Department of his readiness to comply with the request of the Government, he was informed that three-months' ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... then, the discovery that a man has the power to lie that shakes my confidence in him; it is loss of confidence in his mendacity that I find it impossible to get over. I forgive him for telling me lies, but I cannot forgive him for not telling me the same lies, or nearly so, about the same things. This shows he has a slipshod memory, which is ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... has a certain natural gift of rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. "I'm willing to tell you: I'm wanting to tell you: I'm waiting to tell you." Sentimental rhetoric! That's the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... consummate mendacity. His manner was entirely changed now—from one of gloomy depression, and absence of mind, to jaunty self-complacency, and even a degree of defiance was blended with his habitual coolness. It was only from his lurid and kaleidoscopic ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... he went hobbling down the row. There were the ladies and they accosted him to know if anything were wrong,—if they had not better go to Mrs. Truscott? et caetera, et caetera; but he answered with unaccustomed brilliancy and mendacity that he had a scare for nothing because he could not read her fine Italian hand. She was only getting some things ready to send to Captain Truscott by the stage to Fetterman. All the same he slipped into his room, got ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sea and one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... to link me with Sapphira, and deceit is not charged to me in the real Doomsday Book. Theft would be more possible for me than falsehood, for while both are labelled 'wicked,' I could never dwarf and shrivel my soul by the cowardly process of mendacity. Mr. Minge, had I been a trifle less honest and true than I find myself, I might have ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... town, a broken-down political roue—the victim of early indiscretions—or a Cheap-John merchant suffering the first paroxysms of financial dissolution. Although he knows how his medicine is made,—knows that it is a nauseous compound of rank hypocrisy and brazen mendacity—he actually believes that, if taken in liberal doses, it is potent to cure commercial paralysis or put new life into a political corpse. When the first experiment fails to prove satisfactory, instead of changing the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... device and artifice of the energetic and more or less unscrupulous publisher, other papers equally able and brilliant and comprehensive, but bringing also their burden of needless sensationalism and mendacity, undue expansion of all manner of scandal, amplification of every detail and kind of crime, and every phase of covert innuendo or open attack upon official doing and private character—the whole infernal mass ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... conversation seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in France during the last century. But, if we read old French memoirs, we see how many brakes of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were then removed. Where mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and malignity find unhampered expression, talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes dim where the mind is stitched all over with conscientious fear of violating ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... ever succeeded in compressing a greater amount of concentrated mendacity into one set of human bodies, above every other description, it is in the advertising quacks. Pacific Medical ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... for attending the wounded; all these Slavonic, pompous, senseless, and blasphemous prayers, the utterance of which in various towns is communicated in the papers as important news; all these processions, calls for the national hymn, cheers; all this dreadful, desperate newspaper mendacity, which, being universal, does not fear exposure; all this stupefaction and brutalization which has now taken hold of Russian society, and which is being transmitted by degrees also to the masses; all this is only a symptom ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... statements, which will leave a balance in hand after all. But people will not be deceived again and again. His credit becomes damaged. His moral bill returns dishonoured. His extravagance of diction, like extravagance in expenditure, involves him in difficulties, and thus the immediate fate of mendacity symbolizes that awful retribution which will finally exclude all liars from the society of the good ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... solution, when people keep their practice honest, and their heads cool. But when governments lose all office of pilotage, protection, or scrutiny; and live only in magnificence of authorized larceny, and polished mendacity; or when the people, choosing Speculation (the s usually redundant in the spelling) instead of Toil, visit no dishonesty with chastisement, that each may with impunity take his dishonest turn;—there are no tricks of financial terminology ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Painter. All I did was to publish a few serious poems (which, I hope, will survive Time), a couple of pseudonymous stories signed "The Baroness Von S." (!), and a long philosophical essay upon religion, and to lend a hand in the writing of a few playlets. Becoming convinced of the irresponsible mendacity of the dramatic profession, I gave up the stage, too, vowing never to write except on commission, and sank entirely into the slough of journalism (glad enough to get there), inter alia editing a comic paper (not Grimaldi, but Ariel) ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... wroth with Don Blas Nasarre for the assertion, that Naharro first taught the Italians to write comedy, taxing him with downright mendacity; and he stoutly denies the probability of Naharro's comedies ever having been performed on the Italian boards. The critic seems to be in the right, as far as regards the influence of the Spanish dramatist; but he might have been spared all doubts respecting their representation in the country, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... but that is neither here nor there. I am not speaking of men who lie with an object. There is some excuse for that: indeed, it is sometimes to their credit, when they deceive their country's enemies, for instance, or when mendacity is but the medicine to heal their sickness. Odysseus, seeking to preserve his life and bring his companions safe home, was a liar of that kind. The men I mean are innocent of any ulterior motive: they prefer a lie to truth, simply on its own merits; they like lying, it is their favourite occupation; ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... Protection of the Young had put up a Howl because the Game diverted the Attention of Urchins from their Work in the Public Schools and tended to encourage Mendacity among Office Boys. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... speech." He speaks of Luther's "ungovernable transports, riotous proceedings, angry conflicts, and intemperate controversies," of Luther's "contempt of all the accepted forms of human right and all authority, human and divine," of "his unscrupulous mendacity," "his perverse principles," "his wild pronouncements." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges Luther with having ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... incognito, and signalize himself in the Italian War (just expected to break out), which might have recovered him some favor from his Majesty: does not tell clearly where his money came from; shy extremely of elucidating Katte and Keith;—in fact, as we perceive, struggles against mendacity, but will not tell the whole truth. "Let him lie in ward, then; and take what doom the Laws have appointed for the like of him!" Divine Laws, are they not? Well, yes, your Majesty, divine and human;—or are ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... I said, 'they have been there for some time. But why do you ask?' 'Perhaps the number refers,' he replied, 'to the number of generations, just as they recite them in the Old Testament, you know?' 'Yes,' I unhesitatingly and with prompt mendacity replied, 'that is exactly it, and I don't see how you hit it so cleverly.' He smiled all over with delight as the train rushed up, and waved kind farewells to me as long as we were ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... antivivisection by the union of zany cranks and trade-unionized men of medicine, who have not refrained from the coercion of patients, from the deception of the public, from the inoculation of legislators with mendacity, capsuled in sophistry, and from the direct or indirect corruption or intimidation of not a few public journals. The discovery of the ways and means and men is bringing the evil ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him, but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft. ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... my mouth, except in the presence of a woman," observed Vivian, with impudent mendacity; and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... later marked the approach of the great revolution, but which was not a characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity. [Footnote: La Hontan attempted to impose on his readers a marvellous story of pretended discoveries beyond the Mississippi; and his ill repute in the matter of veracity is due chiefly to this fabrication. On the other hand, his account of what he saw ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman |
