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Reactionary   Listen
adjective
Reactionary  adj.  Being, causing, or favoring reaction; as, reactionary movements.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Reactionary" Quotes from Famous Books



... transformation. Gregory's gladness had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,—the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning acceptances ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... know, then, that the renderings of the New York Rendering Company are likely to be reactionary as well as suicidal, (perhaps suetcidal might be a better word here,) in their results. Their "offence is rank," and has reached the nose of authority, for we find it stated that "Mayor HALL has already made complaint against the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various

... preceding years. They were all conceived in the spirit of a lawyer and judge, and were passed in an alliance with the wing of the Republican party that was most impervious to the new reforms, and were hence open to the attack that they were in spirit and intent reactionary. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... been the measures taken by the king to secure the peace of his good city of Nimes, they had nevertheless been reactionary; consequently the Catholics, feeling the authorities were now on their side, returned in crowds: the householders reclaimed their houses, the priests their churches; while, rendered ravenous by the bitter bread of exile, both the clergy and the laity ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays," and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... vicinism^; V. revert, turn back, regress; relapse &c 661; recoil &c 277; retreat &c 283; restore &c 660; undo, unmake; turn the tide, roll back the tide, turn the scale, tip the scale. Adj. reverting &c v.; regressive, revulsive, reactionary; retrorse^. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... late husband's memory. The mood of attachment grew and continued when the statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... against the mantels announced the approaching appearance of a sheet entitled the "Aristo," a reactionary paper. The Brea affair,* which was being tried at that very moment, was discussed. What particularly struck these grave men in this sinister affair was that among the witnesses was an ironmonger named "Lenclume" ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... influences merely to weaken the Entente nations in the present critical situation, and urging them to keep careful watch against such manoeuvres on the part of pro-German international financiers, who were able to exercise considerable reactionary influence among the wealthy and official classes in ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... questions, was in 1870 appointed to report the budget. During and after the war, for which he voted, he retired for a while into private life; but in 1872 he was again elected deputy, this time as a Legitimist, and took his seat among the extreme Right. He was the soul of the reactionary opposition that led to the fall of Thiers; and in 1873 it was he who, with Lucien Brun, carried to the comte de Chambord the proposals of the chambers. Through some misunderstanding, he reported on his return ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... Dante shows in the first canto of his Purgatorio. But the geographical doctrines of Islam, compounded from the Hebrew Pentateuch and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy, had a more immediate and reactionary effect on knowledge. The symmetrical Greek divisions of land into seven zones or climates; and of the world's surface,[10] into three parts water and one part terra firma; the Indian fourfold arrangement of "Romeland" and the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... This reactionary movement was greatly aided by the personal character of George III, for he, being despotic as well as superstitious, was equally anxious to extend the prerogative and strengthen the church. Every liberal sentiment, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... with all these in this respect are the men who represent the extreme conservative or reactionary spirit, who as a rule are as ignorant of English as the great reformers are the reverse. We ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... criticism—the revelation, rather—of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to declare the supremacy of Degas—'the greatest artist that we possess to-day in France'—while announcing with no less fervour the remote, reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to discover Raffaelli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky—a sort of Parisian Millet,' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'le veritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... was insisted upon. In the ideal justice, it makes no difference whether the crime committed is against oppression or against liberty. In the latter case, punishment assumes the form of a liberal revolt; in the former, it appears reactionary. This is why Galds, holding the balance even, with the impartiality which is the root of his character, seems in Brbara to advocate a static philosophy, whereas in most of his work he is the liberal whom Spain, a backward ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... the world's current backward, and which the world dislikes as offending its ideals of progress. Stripped of its broad humor, its object, rubbed in with no great delicacy of touch, was to uphold the most extreme and reactionary Toryism of the time, and to jeer at political liberalism from the ground up. Its theoretic loyalty is the non-resistant Jacobitism of the Nonjurors, which it is so hard for us now to distinguish from abject ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... pace with neither his old associates nor with the times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple trees. Monroe came to laugh at "old Monroe's" pigheadedness. He fought the town on every question ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... Burke when his predictions with regard to the French Revolution were realized. During all the years that have intervened since reconstruction days, the conservative has had as a resource for leadership his harking back to those days. The demagogue and the reactionary — enemies of the children of light — have always been able to inflame the populace with appeals to the memories and issues of the past. Such men have forgot nothing and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... unparalleled keenness. "Let me tell you something,'' he writes (Conversations with Eckermann. Vol. 1). "All periods considered regressive or transitional are subjective. Conversely all progressive periods look outward. The whole of contemporary civilization is reactionary, because subjective.... The thing of importance is everywhere the individual who is trying to show off his lordliness. Nowhere is any mentionable effort to be found that subordinates itself through love ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... stipulation which may not be found in some subsisting treaty between the United States and foreign powers, it will prove to be mutually advantageous. Several of the Republics of this hemisphere, among which is Salvador, are alarmed at a supposed sentiment tending to reactionary movements against republican institutions on this continent. It seems, therefore, to be proper that we should show to any of them who may apply for that purpose that, compatibly with our cardinal policy and with an enlightened view of our own interests, we are willing to encourage them by strengthening ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... majority of the voters as expressed in the last election," met with approval on every side. The "Anti-Revolutionary" lion lay down with the "Christian-Historical" lamb; the "Liberal" bear and the "Clerical" cow fed together; and the sucking "Social-Democrat" laid his hand on the "Reactionary" adder's den. It was idyllic. Real progress ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... club. Under the circumstances, and having heard that such people as "dug-outs" actually existed, the Press as a matter of course assumed that within the portals in Whitehall Lord Kitchener was struggling in vain against the ineptitude and reactionary tendencies of a set of prehistoric creatures who constituted the whole of his staff. The fact, however, was that all the higher appointments (with scarcely an exception other than that of myself) were occupied by soldiers who had ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... 'Mercy'—in all probability a corruption or familiarisation of the word Mercia, with a Roman pun included. We learn from early manuscripts that the place was called Vilula Misericordiae. It was originally a nunnery, founded by Queen Bertha, but done away with by King Penda, the reactionary to Paganism after St. Augustine. Then comes your uncle's place—Lesser Hill. Though it is so close to the Castle, it is not connected with it. It is a freehold, and, so far as we know, of equal age. It has always belonged to ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... Dean, she appeared at her best when seated, having rather short legs. Her face was well-coloured, her mouth, firm and rather wide, her nose well-shaped, her hair dark. She spoke in a decided voice, and did not mince her words. It was to her that her husband, Sir James, owed his reactionary principles ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... young men in large, round spectacles, and scraggy women who haven't succeeded in getting married—the leaders of modern thought, you'll observe, Major—every one of whom is deeply attached to Nietzsche. You can't, without labelling yourself a hopeless reactionary, fly right in the face of cultured society by refusing to associate ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless the duke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in a little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man can get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is no natural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye view of common sense ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made responsible for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally differ, but of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who suspect and blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and offensive to modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... Palmerstonians, accepting with their chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure of his basenesses. Lucas in "The Times" pronounced the work perverse and mischievous; the "Westminster Review" branded it as reactionary. "The Quarterly," in an article ascribed to A. H. Layard, condemned its style as laboured and artificial; as palling from the sustained pomp and glitter of the language; as wearisome from the constant strain after minute dissection; declaring ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... fanatical Moslems! Wrapt, absorbed, with yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets. Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all thinking as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... been brought into the comity of nations. Then outbreaks of this kind in Saga, in Higo, in Akizuki, and in Choshu occurred, but they were all put down without difficulty or delay. The promptness with which the government dealt with these factions boded no good to the reactionary movements that were ready to break ...
— Japan • David Murray

... a lot of reactionary warlords tell her," said Aubrey. "This man I was talking with at the Crillon—I wish I could tell you his name—heard it directly from...Well, you know who." He turned to Henslowe, who smiled knowingly. "There's ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... the human race. It is truer even than it appears. Not only is woman half of the present generation, but present woman is half of all the generations of men and women to come. The argument of this book, which will be regarded as reactionary by many women called "advanced"—presumably as doctors say that a case of consumption is "advanced"—involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... suddenness with which the metaphorical can had, metaphorically speaking, been tied to his caudal appendage. Every large business office has its Skinner—a queer combination of decency, honesty, brains and brutality, a worshiper at the shrine of Mammon in the temple of the great god Business, a reactionary Republican, treasurer of his church and eventually a total loss from diabetes, brought on by lack of ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... down (uninvited), very energetic, and very kind in using the last few days of her holidays in nursing a disagreeable reactionary relation. She dominated the nurse, who was much meeker than nurses usually are, and quite quelled her poor aunt, too weak to protest even at attacks on the monarchy. But Henrietta was much happier when the niece's holidays came to an end, and she was left to die quietly and ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor

... Reveal Napoleon's dynastic ambition. b. Lead Europe to combine against him and to blame democratic ideas for the sorrows of the time. c. Result in the defeat of Napoleon and the triumph of anti-democratic or reactionary elements. E. The fruits of the principle of popular sovereignty during the 19th century (chronologically England and France lead the other countries in most of these developments).[39] 1. Constitutions, embodying ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... Government to recall Prie a few years later (1724). These popular movements were only the first signs of the increasing restlessness of the people which caused the Brabanconne revolution of 1789. While the conservative and even reactionary character of these civil troubles must be made clear, in order to avoid any confusion between the Belgian and the French revolutions, it must at the same time be admitted that both movements started from the same desire for change ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and nature ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... witnessed the break-up of the old order in '48 and the years that followed. In the most impressionable age of life he was driven to contemplate a Europe in solution; the crash of the kingdoms; the Pope a Liberal, an exile, and a reactionary; the principle of nationality claiming to supersede all vested rights, and to absorb and complete the work of '89; even socialism for once striving to reduce theory to practice, till there came the "saviour ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... drive is a fearful thing. Men just off the river draw a deep breath, and plunge into the wildest reactionary dissipation. In droves they invade the cities,—wild, picturesque, lawless. As long as the money lasts, they blow ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... indication of his subsequent activity, and up to the moment of his accession in 1855 no one ever imagined that he would be known to posterity as a great reformer. In so far as he had any decided political convictions, he seemed to be animated with that reactionary spirit which was predominant in Europe at the time of his birth, and continued in Russia to the end of his father's reign. In the period of thirty years during which he was heir-apparent, the moral atmosphere of St Petersburg was very unfavourable to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Already a reactionary policy is being enacted in several countries where for years the State-School was the only one to share in the public treasury. In Holland, the Parliament of June, 1920, by a vote of 72 against 3, passed a new school-law ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... to all the more respect for that reason. Both the labor interests and the "special interests" resent excessively the recent tendency of intelligent judges to look at precedent and history. Mr. Debs will tell you that such matters are aristocratic and reactionary; Mr. Rockefeller, or his lawyer, that they are both visionary and obsolete. Yet a statute may only represent the sudden will of a small body of mediocre intelligence on a new subject (or an old one) which they have never studied. It is true that if they make a mistake they can amend it to-morrow; ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... case, it is more likely that there was nothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to conclude his essay. He cut short his lectures on the Arabs because, somehow and by some one (probably one of his reactionary enemies) a letter had been seized giving an account of certain circumstances, in consequence of which some one had demanded an explanation from him. I don't know whether the story is true, but it was asserted that at the same time there was discovered in Petersburg a vast, unnatural, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and a look as if the satyrs had toyed with her hair, made him shrink not as a man of starch and patent leather, but as a man potentially himself a poet or even a faun. The ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James

... more glory to the so-called leaders, for the more often their names appear in the papers; the more "reasonable" the utterances of these gentlemen (which means that they are neither fish nor flesh, neither warm nor cold), the surer they grow of the sympathy of the most reactionary element in the country or of an invitation to the White House to join the Chief Magistrate at dinner. Labor leaders of such caliber fail to consider that every strike is a labor event upon the success or failure of which thousands of lives depend; rather do they see in it an opportunity to push ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... deprive the hierarchy of all influence over England, she on the contrary reinstated it: she put the power and all the resources of the State at its disposal. Though historically deeply rooted, the Catholic tendency showed itself, through the reactionary rule which it brought about and through its alliance with the policy of Spain, pernicious to the country. We have seen what losses England suffered by it, not merely in its foreign possessions, but—what was ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... yelling 'Radical,' abusing emancipation, and doing all in their power to hoist themselves into notoriety. They are determined to force separate parties into existence, and they will end by accomplishing their purpose, by being in a losing reactionary minority, which will bear the brand in later days of having been the most unprincipled, narrow-minded, and desperately selfish faction which this country has ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... would be in a very unsafe position, confronted by powerful tendencies that easily might gain the upper hand should a relatively small number of the Germans, whether from social-democratic, political-reactionary or doctrinary reasons, separate from the other German parties. The establishment of the new Polish element as a third factor with Austria-Hungary in our constitutional organism would represent an element so unsafe, and would be combined with such risks for the further ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... smokes so much as to injure his general health. Alcoholic drinks are, of course, mentally as well as physically stimulative, and I have found them useful at a pinch. But everybody knows that stimulants are reactionary, and it is pretty certain that in the end they take more out of a man than they put into him. Under extraordinary pressure they have their uses, but their habitual employment muddles the faculties, and the last state of the man who ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade

... may congratulate himself upon being the only man of letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy; whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barres, Bourget, Bordeaux, and many others, whose persuasive and romantic role it is to prop up tottering altars; in England we ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys

... Catholic! Inexplicable in a sensible man. A miracle, eh? A little journey to Damascus, perhaps? Number ten. Lafayette. The heroic upholder of freedom, the revolutionary, who was forced to leave France as a suspected reactionary, because he wanted to help Louis XVI; and then was captured by the Austrians and carried off to Olmuetz as a revolutionary! What was ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... modern times the institution of marriage is menaced by two opposite forces; on the one hand, by a revolutionary type of socialism, and on the other, by the reactionary influence of self-interested individualism. (a) It is contended by some advanced socialists that among {226} the poor and the toiling home life is practically non-existent; indeed, under present industrial conditions, impossible. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... spring, complicated with a fierce struggle for the congressional nomination. There is no doubt the so-called "liberal element" will be a unit for an open town, while the better elements, as usual, will be confused and divided. In the event of the election of a reactionary who could secure control of the Department of Public Safety, the cause of clean and moral city government would receive a decided setback. Nothing less than everlasting vigilance by the heads of the police department will keep the city out of the old rut. Great things are ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... Maggie, with calm decision. And she believed it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a sense ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... leader of the reactionary section of the Boers, finally became the President. The rival of Mr. Kruger was Mr. Joubert, otherwise known as "Slim Piet," on account of his wily ways, and between them from that day up to the present time considerable jealousy ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... oppose but, instead, actually approved the enactment of the recent "bone-dry" prohibition legislation forbidding transportation of alcoholic beverages into states which prohibit the sale and manufacture of intoxicants, on the ground that its drastic measure would have a "reactionary effect" and thus result in the return of a number of the present "dry" states into the "wet" column. Vaporings of this sort sound very much like the old sour grape story and have their origin in the fertile brain of the publicity manager of the ...
— Government By The Brewers? • Adolph Keitel

... characteristics. The object undertaken apparently in the interests of democracy can only be accomplished by the wholesale suppression of democratic rights, and involves an organised manufacture of imperialistic emotion which ends by delegating the authority of the State to a reactionary triumvirate of bureaucracy, jingoism and vulgarity (or Tory, Landowner and Journalist). The guarantees of democracy, the rights of free thought and free speech, every sort of civil liberty and every defence against the servile state, will all have to be suppressed in the interests ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... property, animated by roads and towns and unified by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived in a transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic government. I take it that this is the condition to which the minds of such original and vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc for example turn, as being the most desirable state ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... relation between Employer and Employed, can hardly fail to be of interest. They contain, too, some considerations which Woman as well as Man is too much in danger of overlooking, and which seem, even more than when first urged, to be timely in this reactionary to-day.—ED.] ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... days before he could adequately comprehend what had provoked this furious storm, with its shower of money and warning flashes of wrath and rumblings of violence. Then it became clear that he was being made the political tool of the reactionary combination then laying the axe at the root of the republican tree. The Orleanists, Bonapartists, Anti-Semites, and their allies were quick to see the value of a popular leader in the most turbulent and unmanageable ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... changes are made blindly and convulsively. The great crises in the history of nations have often been met by an ecclesiastical positiveness, and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary statesman may be compared to madness; they grow upon him, and he becomes possessed by them; no judgement of others is ever admitted by him to be weighed in the ...
— The Republic • Plato

... said, halting in front of the Greek, a reactionary pallor on his countenance, "the effort thou art making to get away from God proves how greatly He is a terror to thee. The Academy is only a multitude thou hast called together to help hide thee from Christ. Thou art an organizer of Sin—a disciple of Satan"—he was speaking not loud or threateningly, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... occupation of Rome, the brilliant essays of liberalism of Pius IX., the Republic, the siege of Rome, the reactionary government of late years, have alike supplied matter for Master Pasquin, which he has shaped according to the fashion of the times. He still pursues his ancient avocation. Res acu tetigit. But the point ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... should be sorry to see them exercised by the women I admire and love. It is all very well to say that the presence of woman at the ballot-box would purify it, and restrain the manners of the men around it; but I have seen enough of the world to learn that all human influence is reciprocal and reactionary. Man and the ballot-box might gain, but woman would lose, and men and the ballot-box themselves would lose in the long run. The ballot-box is the bass, and it should be man's business to sing it, while woman should give him home melody with which it ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... "Yes, I'm a reactionary," he would say. "I'm for the good old things of life. Things that mean something." And even this definition of faith would leave ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... powerfully; a reactionary swell helped him too much, and next moment the three men went, heads, hands, and ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... heart, who never left his cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it sound incredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become the pole-star of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and his pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, while Alcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court of Charlemagne, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... old Landsmannschaften. It originated at Jena, under the patronage of the grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, and rapidly spread, the Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft being established in 1818. The loud political idealism of the Burschen excited the fears of the reactionary powers, which culminated after the murder of Kotzebue (q.v.) by Karl Sand in 1819, a crime inspired by a secret society among the Burschen known as the Blacks (Schwarzen). The repressive policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... bird of freedom. Doubtless, he might find many other things to surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. But I am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equally obvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of vengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have some difficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the red flag on the railway between Willesden and ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... rather than the conservative party, all of them the favourites of the Empress Dowager, placed in positions of influence and kept in office by her, all of them working for progress and reform, and yet she has been constantly spoken of by European writers as a reactionary. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as we shall see. Nevertheless she kept some of the great conservative officials in office either as viceroys or Grand Secretaries that she might be able to hear both sides ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... similarity to the one with which our own Government is contending. We refer to the secession of the seven Swiss cantons forming the Sonderbund, which, like the insurrection of the Southern States, was a revolt of reactionary against liberal principles of government; it was likewise the fruit of a well-organized and long-matured conspiracy, which only delayed an open outbreak until all its preparations were adequately perfected for a formidable resistance. The issue of the contest ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Comtesse de Rudolstadt, vol. ii.; upon, or just before, its extinction, a new political association was formed at Baden and Carlsruhe, under the auspices of Baron van Edelsheim, police minister of the Elector, under the title of Die Rosenkrietzer. This society was called into existence by a reactionary dread of that republicanism in politics, and atheism in morals, which seemed at that time to prey upon the vitals of European society. The society soon spread, and had its affiliations in various parts of Germany, giving such uneasiness to Buonaparte, to the accomplishment of whose projects ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various

... appear at first sight irreconcilable and, in his earlier writings, has not been sufficiently careful when speaking of the distinction between Intelligence and Intuition. Some of his early statements are reactionary and crude and give the impression of a purely anti-intellectualist position involving the condemnation of Intellect and all its work. [Footnote: E.g., the statement "To philosophize is to invert the habitual direction of the work of thought"—Introduction to Metaphysics p. 59.] ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... Against this reactionary legislation we must credit the session of '93, besides the Catholic Relief Bill and the East India Trade Bill, with Mr. Grattan's Barren Lands Bill, exempting all newly reclaimed lands from the payment of tithes for a period of seven ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... special meeting towards the end of May, and that Nekhludoff was to be sure and come to "donner un coup d'epaule," at the important debates concerning the schools and the roads, as a strong opposition by the reactionary party was expected. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... wrote "God Save the Queen," in imitation of the British national anthem, and the satirical piece entitled "Swellfoot, the Tyrant." In the following words he attacked the prime minister, Lord Castleragh, whose reactionary counsels were transforming England into a state analogous ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... was in one of its reactionary moods. It did not wish to quarrel with the Pope; it dallied with the King, and the matter was adjourned. From that moment the rising became a revolt, and the Pope was free to do with Avignon what the court might have done with Paris, if ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... exclusively Christian, while the Cantonal legislation was in many cases frankly and even aggressively anti-Semitic. Until 1827 the Swiss Commercial Treaties contained no hint of religious differentiation, but in that year, availing themselves of the reactionary and clerical sympathies of the government of Charles X, the Federal Authorities negotiated a Treaty with France containing a "National treatment" clause, under which the powers of the separate Cantons to deal as they pleased ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf

... divided. It is a great pity that the world cannot deal with men of the type of Scheidemann, who, in other democracies, would appear so conservative as to be almost reactionary. But Scheidemann and his friends, while they have, in their attempted negotiations with the Socialists of other countries, the present protection of the Imperial Government, will have no hand in dictating terms of peace so long as ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard

... would have been less pressing. But the President and his Raad would have none of the recommendations of the commission. The rugged old autocrat declared that Schalk Burger was a traitor to his country for having signed such a document, and a new reactionary committee was chosen to report upon the report. Words and papers were the only outcome of the affair. No amelioration came to the new-comers. But at least they had again put their case publicly upon record, and it had been endorsed by the most respected ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle

... establish society on the basis of the freedom of labour, which we call the Commune of Paris of 1871. Whatever mistakes or imprudences were made in this attempt, and all wars blossom thick with such mistakes, I will leave the reactionary enemies of the people's cause to put forward: the immediate and obvious result was the slaughter of thousands of brave and honest revolutionists at the hands of the respectable classes, the loss in fact of an army for the popular cause: but we ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... Georgian-English people was his Cosmopolitanism. He was the poetical representative of the Sturm und Drang period of the xixth century. He reflected, in his life and works, the wrath of noble minds at the collapse of the cause of freedom and the reactionary tendency of the century. Even in the distant regions of Monte Video Byron's hundredth birthday was not forgotten, and Don Luis Desteffanio's lecture was welcomed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's trouble, and she counted as friends all ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... but unscrupulous destruction and violence which marked the Assembly, controlled as it was by Jacobin orators and infidel demagogues. A frenzy seized the nation. It feared reactionary movements and the interference of foreign powers. When the Bastille had fallen, it was by the hands of half-starved people clamoring for bread; but when the monarchy was attacked, it was from sentiments of fear ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... other words, faced with the fact that while Ireland has been waiting for Home Rule we have taken the first great step in granting Home Rule to India. Surely this is a fact that presents a new challenge to the reactionary Unionist of the United Kingdom. Does he really contend that Ireland is incapable of receiving the same liberties as we are granting to India? Or will he make the wicked and dangerous suggestion that we are only conceding these things to India by force from fear of disorder, ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... branch. People of the type of M. Ducros, and of the President of the Nyons Tribunal, viewed the possible return of a Legitimist Bourbon Monarchy with the gravest apprehension. Given the character of the Comte de Chambord, they felt it would be a purely reactionary regime. Traditionally, the elder branch of the Bourbons were incapable of learning anything, and equally incapable of forgetting anything. These two shrewd lawyers had both been vigorous opponents of the Bonapartist regime, but they pinned their faith on the Orleans branch, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... character exhibits a very curious mixture of autocratic ambition and a mystical vein of sheer undiluted idealism. Probably it would be true to say that he began by being an idealist, and was forced by the pressure of events to adopt reactionary tactics. Perhaps also, deeply embedded in the Russian nature we generally find a certain unpracticalness and a tendency to mystical dreams, far remote from the ordinary necessities of every day. It was ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy. He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... THE STATE. I. Reactionary concept of the State. II. Changed minds. III. Origin and nature of the modern State. IV. The state is tempted to encroach. V. Direct common interest. VI. Indirect common interest. VII. Fabrication of social instruments. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Complete - Linked Table of Contents to the Six Volumes • Hippolyte A. Taine

... nominated Woodrow Wilson had adjourned, a convention wholly dominated by reactionary bosses, it seemed as if progress and every fine thing for which the Progressives had worked had been put finally to sleep. Behind the selection of the Princetonian and his candidacy lay the Old Guard who thought the Professor could be used as a shield for their strategy. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... to indicate the nature of the struggle which will confront the public of this country for the achievement of political and industrial democracy when the war is over. The economic roots of Militarism and of the confederacy of reactionary influences which are found supporting it—Imperialism, Protectionism, Conservatism, Bureaucracy, Capitalism—are subjected to a critical analysis. The safeguarding and furtherance of the interests of Improperty and Profiteering are exhibited ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... think alike as to men and measures? Impossible! Even for our great party! There is not a reactionary among us. All Democrats are Progressives. But it is inevitably human that we shall not all agree that in a single highway is found the only road to progress, or each make the same man of all our ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... Cliff protested. "Accept that and Roosevelt was not only not a liberal, but a reactionary. Stop ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... period which was agreed upon by all parties after several years of wrangling as to whether a certain kind of mangle which was much in use among washerwomen should be saved or no. It was at last ruled to be dangerous, and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which it would be beyond my present scope ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelman introduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justice Coke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptions which prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insist rather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The great source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their earlier stages of education men find ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... physical force ever dies; it merely changes its form or direction"—and could we but get a glimpse behind the veil, we might see his imperishable soul fleeting from sphere to sphere, struggling with cruel reactionary spirits who forced him into eternity before the work he was sent ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... the Jewish people; and I consider it just and fair that they should strain every effort to put a stop to such atrocities as have been witnessed by the civilized world within a few years. But it must be borne in mind that it is the Russian government, the Russian reactionary party, including the Russian Church, and not the Russian people, that are responsible for the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... sudden light of a new liberty, to be a most dangerous experiment; he foresaw that the ballot which the North gave to them as a protection against their arrogant masters, would prove a two-edged sword with a terrible reactionary force in the hands of an untrained race just freed from mental leading-strings; he knew the difficulty to be inherent, a difficulty which the existence of slavery must necessarily have produced. He maintained that although the sword had struck off the outward ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... what she read. But she could not stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart . . . "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the 'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole nightmare will ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... danger in Anarchism is not that some Anarchists believe in violence, and that from time to time there are cowardly assassinations which are as futile as they are cowardly. The real danger lies first in the reactionary principle that the interests of society must be subordinated to the interests of the individual, and, second, in holding out a hope to the working class that its freedom from oppression and exploitation may be brought about by other than ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... Ruskin asks a pertinent question. What is it after all but "sentiment," he inquires, that prevents a man from killing his grandmother in time of hunger? Sentiment is the most respectable thing in human psychology. No one believes in it more thoroughly than your reactionary Tory. But he wears his heart on his sleeve with a difference. He is so greedily patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism in the world to himself. That he should love his country is natural and noble, a theme so high as to be worthy of Mr Kipling or even Mr Alfred Austin himself. That we should ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... Renunciation Revolt Succession of Nicholas I. Order Restored Character of Nicholas His Policy Polish Insurrection Reactionary Measures Europe Excluded Turco-Russian Understanding Beginning of the Great Diplomatic Game Nature of the Eastern Question Intellectual Expansion ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... allowed to resume his seat in the Lords, he could make his power felt only through his pen. As he was thoroughly cured of his Jacobite sympathies, the doctrine he proclaimed was a Toryism stripped of the reactionary element. He proposed to make the State dominate over all the interests—land, Church, trade, and the like. That this might be done, and the government by a class for a class abolished, he appealed to the crown. The elevation of the State over the dominant classes had been the part of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... way, recalls a saying of the great French reactionary, De Bonald, which is never quite out of date: "Follies committed by the sensible, extravagances uttered by the clever, crimes perpetrated by the good,—there is ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... that conversion to those general principles is the very bed-rock of education. But others think otherwise, and so we would point out the broad distinction which must be drawn between propaganda of the simple liberal and propaganda of the simple reactionary principle—on the one hand freedom of thought, on the other acceptance of ideas not one's own. Our liberal propaganda carries with it the instrument of its own overthrow. If you can inspire a boy with a desire to put all things to ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... party, therefore, stretching through all parts of the South, forming an important element in the population of every village and county which threatened at one time with its passive resistance to overturn the whole scheme of the rebellion, stands now exposed to the full influence of the reactionary tide which has now begun to set back toward the Union. The change may not be at once, but the same motive which led the Union man of Tennessee to return to loyalty, will prove equally effective with his whole party, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... the same time passed a stringent law to prohibit the immigration of free Negroes into that State. Later there followed an attempt to open the State to slavery by the Legislature of 1822-1823, but the slave party was defeated by the election of Governor Coles, who would not permit the reactionary element to reduce that commonwealth to a mediaeval basis.[1] Such slavery as existed in Illinois, however, differed widely from that in the South where it had become economic rather than patriarchal as it then existed in certain ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... by the superior skill and forces of the Swedish crown prince (Bernadotte). The brief war was finally concluded by the convention of Moss on the 14th of August 1814 (see NORWAY: History). Henceforth Christian's suspected democratic principles made him persona ingratissima at all the reactionary European courts, his own court included, and he and his second wife, Caroline Amelia of Augustenburg, whom he married in 1815, lived in comparative retirement as the leaders of the literary and scientific ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... fulsome adulation; assailed with the most violent condemnation. Editorials were written upon it. Special articles, in literary pamphlets, dissected its rhetoric and prosody. The phrases were quoted,—were used as texts for revolutionary sermons, reactionary speeches. It was parodied; it was distorted so as to read as an advertisement for patented cereals and infants' foods. Finally, the editor of an enterprising monthly magazine reprinted the poem, supplementing it by a photograph and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... July (perhaps the Fourth), 1795, and was meant to influence the decision of the National Convention on the Constitution then under discussion. This Constitution, adopted September 23d, presently swept away by Napoleon, contained some features which appeared to Paine reactionary. Those to which he most objected are quoted by him in his speech in the Convention, which is bound up in the same pamphlet, and follows this "Dissertation" in the present volume. In the Constitution as adopted Paine's preference for a plural ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... 18th of Fructidor (September 4, 1797). In 1795, on the dissolution of the Convention, the government of France was entrusted to a Directory of five persons, assisted by two councils—the Council of Ancients, and the Council of Five hundred. In course of time, the reactionary, or anti-revolutionary, party obtained a large majority in the councils, which were thus involved in continual disputes with the Directory. The army supported the Directory, and on the 4th Of September ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... allegiance, and it was Putney's delight to witness its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro' Kilburn, the daughter of a shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force of her reasons, should be content to rest ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... victim had two assassins assigned to him. The occasion was to be the opening of the new post-office, when Hong Yung-sik would give an official banquet to which all must come. During the dinner, the detached palace was to be set on fire, a call was to be raised that the King was in danger, and the reactionary Ministers were to be killed as they rushed to his help. Two of the students were appointed sentries, two were to set fire to the palace, one group was to wait at the Golden Gate for other members of the Government who tried ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... (1750-1818), first Baron Ellenborough. He was chief counsel for Warren Hastings, and his famous speech in defense of his client is well known. He became Chief Justice and was raised to the peerage in 1802. He opposed all efforts to modernize the criminal code, insisting upon the reactionary principle of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... them had never been at Court before, and in consequence were not so well drilled as the Bishops. Some of them bowed too often, and too hurriedly, and before they need, beginning with the Lord Functionary whom they mistook for royalty; and they walked out sideways instead of backwards, reactionary methods of progress not being in their blood. Still, taking them for all in all, they were a very learned-looking body, and their presence in such uncongenial surroundings ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... that San Pedro and the other natives had deserted—fled in the night, for fear of the giants—there was a reactionary feeling of despondency and gloom among Tom and his three friends. But the boldness and energy of the young inventor, his vigorous words, his determination to proceed at any cost to the unknown land that lay before them—these served as a tonic, and after a few moments, ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton

... environmental conditions (never mind whether these be new stimuli to variation, or only acting as their selectors or censors), and moreover secures separation from the original stock and thus eliminates or lessens the reactionary dangers of panmixia. Darwin accepted Wagner's theory as "advantageous." Through the heated polemics of the more ardent selectionists Wagner's theory came to grow into an alternative instead of a help to the theory of selectional evolution. Separation is now rightly ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... of Pinero and similar ones would belong only indirectly in this circle—is probably Wedekind's "Spring's Awakening." It brought to Germany, and especially to Berlin, any education which the Friedrichstrasse had failed to bring. To prohibit it would have meant the reactionary crushing of a distinctly literary work by a brilliant writer; to allow it meant to fill the Berlin life for seasons with a new spirit which showed its effects. The sexual discussion became the favourite topic; the girls learned to look out for their safety: ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... its ushers must each Sabbath morning turn away many late-comers. Indeed, the whole parish had been born to a new spiritual life since that day when the worship at St. Antipas had been kept simple to bareness by a stubborn and perverse reactionary. In this happier day St. Antipas was known for its advanced ritual, for a service so beautifully enriched that a new spiritual warmth pervaded the entire parish. The doctrine of the Real Presence was not timidly minced, but preached unequivocally, with dignified boldness. Also there was a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... about the "masses" and the "classes". We all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, i.e., thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. The Radical calls his opponent Tory and reactionary. The wicked Tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the House of Lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... The powerful reactionary role which princedom assumed only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has evolved, which feels the political husk—the appropriate covering of the old society—to be an unnatural fetter which it must burst. The more immature these ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... hand this reactionary process may be used to confirm good and life-giving modes of thought, so that by a knowledge of its laws we may enlist even the physical body itself in the building up of that perfectly whole personality, the attainment of which is the aim and ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... wholly undisciplined, hungry, and panic-smitten public; and, upon the other side, the irresponsible, more than half-hysterical action of a group of terrified and incompetent politicians. These men had been swept into great positions, which they were totally unfitted to fill, by a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ignorance as ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... made up their mind that they would rather see the republican party wrecked than see it come under the control of the people themselves. So I am not dealing with the republican party. There are only two ways you can vote this year. You can be progressive or reactionary. Whether you vote republican or democratic it does not make any difference, you are voting ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey

... granted to many other provinces; especially to Flanders, ever ready to stand forward in fierce vindication of freedom. For a season all is peace and joy; but the duchess is young, weak, and a woman. There is no lack of intriguing politicians, reactionary councillors. There is a cunning old king in the distance, lying in wait; seeking what he can devour. A mission goes from the estates to France. The well-known tragedy of Imbrecourt and Hugonet occurs. Envoys from the states, they dare to accept secret instructions from the duchess to enter ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... a man who, beginning as a reactionary of an extreme type, advocating the most ruthless measures toward convicts, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison reform which is gathering force just now, and adjusted his reports and addresses so as to make himself appear as a leading apostle of the new ideas. But though ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... not a warning for all time in Hallam's words, "the absolute Government of the majority is in general the most tyrannical of any"? It is possible to decapitate a king who sets himself above the law, or to deport or destroy a reactionary and tyrannous aristocracy, but against the crimes or follies of an unrestrained majority there is no appeal. Chaos, "red ruin, and the breaking up of laws" follow in their steps. A general and deep sense of responsibility ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson

... scholars the world had ever seen. But the fundamentalists won out, and in a couple of hundred years the only thing being taught at Fez was the Q'ran. To even suggest that all necessary information isn't contained therein, is enough to have you clobbered. Islam became the most reactionary force to suppress progress in the civilized world. In fact, by this period in world history, we don't even think of the ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... "means to persevere in the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed with respect to the internal dissensions of France; and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispensable as an act of self-defence." So far indeed was he from sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading around him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what was libellous in any publication from the judge to the jury, completed the freedom of the press; and ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... of evening costume, you see, Jeeves is hidebound and reactionary. I had had trouble with him before about soft-bosomed shirts. And while these mess-jackets had, as I say, been all the rage—tout ce qu'il y a de chic—on the Cote d'Azur, I had never concealed it from myself, even when treading the measure at the Palm Beach Casino in the ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... in the public mind; to the ever-increasing pressure from above and the never-ceasing fermentation from below; to the feverish restlessness that had come over the body politic, changing its form, its ideals, and its convictions; and to the more scrupulous and sometimes reactionary stand that was being taken on all matters ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... quite different. Aunt Marcia calls her a 'reactionary,' because she is very high church and great friends with all the clergy. She is a very quiet little thing, short and fair, with a long thin nose and eyes that look you through. Her two great passions are—curates, especially consumptive curates—and animals. There ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... out, violently. "There's not a gram of metal inside the fourth zone—within a hundred thousand kilometers—and yet they must be close to send such a wave as that. But the Second thinks not—what do you think, Costigan?" The bluff commander, reactionary and of the old school as was his breed, was furious—baffled, raging inwardly to come to grips with the invisible and undetectable foe. Face to face with the inexplicable, however, he listened to the younger men ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... people as he suggests frequently in this story, Cooper believed that the promise of the July Revolution was betrayed, and that the new government of King Louis Philippe proved little better than the old reactionary one of King Charles X; in this he shared the views of his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolution, who as head of the French National Guard had been one of the leaders of the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... asked aloud. Deklay could only have taken such a drastic action with the majority of the clan solidly behind him. It could well be that this reactionary was the new chief, this act of Travis' expulsion merely ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... to have ought to do!" The peace with France was hardly signed when his distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's withdrawal to the French court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was the signal for a reactionary movement. From France the king forbade the summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct breaches of the Provisions ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... camouflage. Yet in the German Press there is far more criticism of militant imperialism than those who have no access to it can imagine. There is far franker criticism of militarism in Germany than there is of reactionary Toryism in this country, and it is more free to speak ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells

... liberty, for there is too much of the blood of the count flowing through the veins of the tribune of the people. Danton answered him with a smile: 'In that case we must draw off the count's blood from the tribune of the people, that he may either be cured of his reactionary disease or die ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... expressions about his Anglo-Catholic days that betray something like vindictiveness—which is certainly not philosophical, whatever else it was. But his intellectual faculties were too strong to let him feed on the poison of a reactionary antipathy to a deserted faith. Puseyism, as he says, dropped away from him for lack of nutrition of the religious brain,—which perhaps at the best was more like an artificial limb than a natural organ in a man of Pattison's constitution. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... analysis that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries' speed; ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... element to the play which was bound at once to dignify it and create a popular stir that might lead to a triumph. Whence the suggestion came is not known, but its execution, so far as the libretto was concerned, was left to Gieseke. Under the Emperor Leopold II the Austrian government had adopted a reactionary policy toward the order of Freemasons, which was suspected of making propaganda for liberal ideas in politics and religion. Both Schikaneder and Mozart belonged to the order, Mozart, indeed, being so enthusiastic a devotee ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... very able young man—very able. Quite wrong-headed; you know, violently reactionary—but thoroughly able. And he's evidently disposed to make capital out of this stuff of ours. Takes a very emphatic line. Talks of our proposal to use it in ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... of a personal and party brawl which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me that his personal experience with the President had been very much like mine. When Sumner left Washington ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... province of this book to enter into controversy with either radical or reactionary, but rather to search for truth which may be used for adjusting to fuller advantage the relation of woman to society. First of all must be recognized the fact that the "woman movement" deserves the thoughtful ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... ages, when a reactionary movement was beginning to secretly undermine accumulated property, that the influence of Christianity was first exercised to ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... in and, by directly encouraging the expectation that the States would without delay be restored to full self-control even under present circumstances, distinctly stimulated the most dangerous reactionary tendencies to more reckless ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... Moulay-Hassan, Abd-el-Hafid, was proclaimed Sultan by the reactionary Islamite faction, who accused Abd-el-Aziz of having sold his country to the Christians. Abd-el-Aziz was defeated in a battle near Marrakech, and retired to Tangier, where he still lives in futile state. Abd-el-Hafid, proclaimed Sultan ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... be that this reactionary movement rather expresses a fear of education than a serious doubt of its power? We must remember that conditions are peculiar in the South, and, in some quarters, there exists a not unnatural apprehension ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... one great danger to the Republic is Christian superstition. It is the Church, her priests and her devotees, that furnish the real strength of every reactionary movement. That consummate charlatan, General Boulanger, took to going to church and cultivating orthodoxy when at the height of his aspiration for power. Happily he was defeated by the men of light and leading. Happily, too, the ablest ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... home rule in local affairs to every community. They have calmed disturbing political elements;—the press is purified, the politician disarmed, the civil service well regulated. Hurtful partisanship is passing away. Since the people as a whole will never willingly surrender their sovereignty, reactionary movement is possible only in case the nation should go backward. But the way is open forward. Social ideals may be realized in act and institution. Even now the liberty-loving Swiss citizen can discern in the future ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan

... infatuation was it which made that nonsense beautiful? One wonders that such puling and trash could ever have made one happy. And yet there were dates when you kissed those silly letters with rapture—lived upon six absurd lines for a week, and until the reactionary period came, when you were restless and miserable until you got a fresh ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray



Words linked to "Reactionary" :   right, ultraconservative, extreme right-winger, bourbon, reaction, far-right, Colonel Blimp, conservative



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