"Agitator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about eleven, after encountering various perils and vexations, in the loss of horse-shoes and wheel-pins, and in a great gap in the road, over which we had to lead the horses, and haul the carriage separately. At this place we supplicated our agitator for leave to eat a little breakfast; but he would not stop an instant, and we were obliged to snatch up a roll or two apiece and gnaw the dry crusts during our passage to keep soul and body together. We got in soon after one, ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... representative of the infant United States than the reception accorded him by this dictator of Paris. Though Mr. Morris was known to disapprove openly of the excesses to which the Assembly and the revolution had already gone, yet this agitator, this leader of the most violent district of Paris, welcomed him with marked deference and consideration. And it was with the deepest regret that he professed himself unable to undertake to obtain, at Mr. Morris's request, ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... of thrift, the intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an "agitator"—as though that, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the first strike for many years, the townspeople looked upon it with a strange mingling of pride and fear. It was stirred up by an agitator called Mars, and had broken out simultaneously in other ports too. More gendarmes were sent for in case of need, though Mademoiselle Loire said it was hoped matters might be arranged amicably by a ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... other; "we never had a Republic, and after a time they arrested the chief agitator, who was the soul of the revolutionary movement in our town, a wonderful orator. I had heard him speak several times and been carried away. When he was arrested I saw him taken to prison, and he said 'Good-bye' to the people, and bowed to them ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... and an open uncovered country, save for low stone walls, all around. The people danced in derision on the spot where he fell, and threw soil stained with his life blood in the air. He wanted his due, and, goodness knows, he was poor enough to satisfy oven an Irish agitator. His name was down for the next vacancy among the resident magistrates. The people who were guilty of inciting to those outrages are the most prominent of the Nationalist party. Is this the class of men you wish to set over us ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary, bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place. There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern manufacturer; ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Bourgeois," and he was never called otherwise. He had become remarkably clever in the trade of a carpenter, which he had taken up. He was also said to be a socialist fanatic, a believer in communistic and nihilistic doctrines, a great reader of bloodthirsty novels, an influential political agitator and a clever orator in the public meetings ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in here lowering the price of goods and the price of labor," said the agitator a few years ago, "we'll put a poll tax of five hundred dollars on and make him pay for his profit." The poll tax was put on every Chinaman coming into Canada, but do you think John Chinaman pays it? It is a way that unjust laws have of coming back in a boomerang. The ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... claim at Yatala, the trial of Pole and the inquest on Challerson, with their rendering of witnesses' depositions in the manner of a newspaper report, the riot at Green Valley and Oxley, and the scene at the funeral of the agitator Radetsky? Yet, though these episodes are given at great length, and do not form any essential part of the story of Hereward Pole and Ruth Allerton—the vindication of a man's honour and the triumph of a woman's invincible devotion—they are told with ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... became involved in the revolutionary movement of 1848 and was put in prison as an agitator and ringleader. During his confinement, he had plenty of time and leisure to pursue his favorite theory and he became more and more convinced of the importance of his discovery. After his release, he entered upon the study of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... plura? hoc enim fateris, neque ultimum te paucorum neque primum multorum respondere posse. Cuius generis error ita manat, ut non videam quo non possit accedere. 94. Nihil me laedit, inquit: ego enim, ut agitator callidus, prius quam ad finem veniam, equos sustinebo, eoque magis, si locus is, quo ferentur equi, praeceps erit. Sic me, inquit, ante sustineo nec diutius captiose interroganti respondeo. Si habes quod liqueat neque respondes, ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the inexpugnable proof that no such man or God as Christ existed, or was known to his contemporaries, Jewish and Roman, there must have been some legend which had crystallized into a mighty religion. Was He an agitator who preferred His obscurity that His glory might be all the greater? There must have been a beginning to the myth; behind the gospels—though they are obviously imitated from the older testaments, imitated and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Great Main Road says: 'If a Community is agitated by a Question—inquire politely after the health of the Agitator,' This I did, without success; and had to temporise all across the Continent till I could find some one to help me to acceptable answers. The Question appears to be confined to British Columbia. There, after a while, the men who had their own reasons for not wishing to talk referred me to others ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... books and his studies, where he could satisfy his desires without quarrels and fighting. His deep convictions impelled him to mingle with the masses, and speak in public places—where he proved to be a successful agitator, but he refused to join party organizations; and after a lecture or an oration, he would spend days and days with his books and magazines, alone save for his sister—a docile, pious woman who worshipped ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... assured her, apologetically. "I oughtn't to have said that—it was only to put you on your guard, in case you heard it spoken of. You see how important it is, how much trouble an agitator might make by getting them stirred up? You can see what it means to me, with this order on my hands. I've staked ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... burned high; but it burned with new heat when she found that the very best of Boston culture and respectability would not lift a finger or pay a copper to have the law enforced in Mr. Garrison's favor. Beacon Street and Harvard professors told her that the victim was a disreputable agitator, richly deserving what he got. They seemed to think this English lady very cranky and unreasonable. The mob had the entire sympathy of the best people in the community, and that should satisfy her. De Tocqueville had an awakening at a polling-booth in Pennsylvania ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.—He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... an English village are the manor-house and the rectory, wherein according to the theories of the modern political Socialist and agitator "the two arch-tyrants" of the labourers dwell, the squire and the parson. There is much of interest in the growth and evolution of the country house, which resulted in the construction of these old, pleasant, half-timbered ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... beyond a doubt. It changes its shape, and alters its name, and takes a new colour, but still it is the Serpent, and it ought to be crushed. Sometimes it calls itself liberal, then radical, then chartist, then agitator, then repealer, then political dissenter, then anti-corn leaguer, and so on. Sometimes it stings the clergy, and coils round them, and almost strangles them, for it knows the Church is its greatest enemy, and it is furious against it. Then ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the push' — Has a quiet little billet — breeding rabbits in the bush; Where the idle shanty-keeper never fails to make a draw, And the dummy gets his tucker through provisions in the law; Where the labour-agitator — when the shearers rise in might — Makes his money sacrificing all his substance for The Right; Where the squatter makes his fortune, and 'the seasons rise and fall', And the poor and honest bushman has to suffer for ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... finally got around to telephoning her friend and congratulating her on her successful speech. But Hazel had become so involved in the movement by this time, especially so intimate with the fascinating young married agitator, that she had less time and less interest to spare for Milly's small affairs. She was planning with her new friend, so she told Milly when she did get out to the flat, a serious campaign that promised to ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... about his bank, were nicely calculated to get under the rind. He was waiting for the committee, right in front of the bank; and the moment they began to talk he began to orate, and to denounce them and everything else in Blackwater. What was intended as a call-down of an envious and destructive agitator threatened momentarily to turn into a riot and, hearing his own good name brought into question, Judson Eells stepped quickly out and challenged ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... his project by organizing a series of public meetings in some of the most populous cities and towns of the Province, at each of which a petition was adopted and numerously signed. It is said that the aggregate number of signatures obtained exceeded 24,500. The agitator's success encouraged him to persevere in the course he had adopted, and when Parliament re-assembled in November he was ripe and ready for the fray that was sure to follow. The assault against him ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... are in the work which a political agitator might be glad enough to seize on; but, upon the whole, it is very little that Radicalism or Chartism obtain from Mr Carlyle. No political party would choose him for its champion, or find in him a serviceable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... labor agitator, while Mr. Bonar Law is the leader of the Conservative party; but when it comes to legislation which he does not like, Mr. Bonar Law's language is fully as incendiary. He is not content with opposing the Irish Home Rule Bill: he gives notice that when it has become a law the opposition will be continued ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... risen on the fourth act, and England, as always heretofore, is the chief actor. And where now is the great anti-slavery agitator? Why, England has reversed her position, and suddenly discovered the surpassing beauty and perfection of secession and slavery. Secession, an anarchical absurdity, destructive of all law, and all government, she kindly adopts as the true theory ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 'patriots' were bent upon 'whipping the Britishers' out of every acre of land on the western side of the Rocky Mountains. And now, for the third time, we are recalled to the same territory, no longer as the goal of the adventurous trader or the battle ground of the political agitator, but as a land of promise—a new El Dorado, to which men are rushing with all the avidity that the presence of the one, thing which all men, in all times and in all places, insatiably desire ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... trouble him that the minister offered him wine bought from the wine-merchant Hgstedt at sixty-five re the pint, and wafers from Lettstroem, the baker, at one crown a pound, as the flesh and blood of the great agitator Jesus of Nazareth, who was done to death nineteen hundred years ago. He didn't think about it, for one didn't think in those days, one ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... and the violent ultra-demagogue sink alike, after a few years of excitement, into the moth-eaten receptacle of newspaper renown, alike unheeded, and alike forgotten, by a newer and more enlightened generation, who find that, to the cost of the real interest of the people, the mouthing orator, the agitator, the exciter, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... on this proposal, but at length, on the reception of information from the county itself, which gave strong assurance of success, the hero of the adventure decided for himself. The bold course was again selected as the wise course, and the spirit-stirring address of "the arch-Agitator" to the electors, was at once issued from Dublin. "Your county," he began by saying, "wants a representative. I respectfully solicit your suffrages, to ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... of the sons of the well-to-do in coming forward to offer their lives to the country does give a doubly false and sickening sound to the ranting of the agitator who would arouse class hatred—who calls this "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" when an overwhelming percentage of the sons of the men of means have eagerly and freely offered themselves for military service, when the draft exemption regulations, discriminate not, as in former wars, in favour ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... another element of disaster which now and then gains ascendancy in the community of reformers. It is the professional agitator, the parasite who will speak for or against a principle according to the economic advantage which one side or the other may offer. You may hold that such a man is not altogether undesirable, provided he can "organize" and persuade people that the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... still assails the woman. Reason, toleration, humanity, charity and liberality are terms which have been selected and abused by the servants of the devil "to deceive the hearts of the simple." These are alike the watchwords of the spiritual seducer and the political agitator. What dogma or heresy so absurd,—what conduct so immoral, as not to find patronage in the journals of the day? or not to find tolerance or protection under the fostering wings of church or state? What is impiously called "free love," as well ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... was a song of Burns that first turned Whittier to poetry; but hardly had he begun to write songs of his own when Garrison, the antislavery agitator, turned his thought from the peaceful farm to the clamoring world beyond. Attracted by certain verses (Whittier's sister Elizabeth had sent them secretly to Garrison's paper) the editor came over to see his contributor and found to his surprise a country lad who was in evident need of education. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... devil, that man, Pope," Dr. Summers remarked. "Quite a character; socialist, labourite, agitator, general crank; anything ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... odious miscreants who played fool and demon in turns in the insurrectionary Commune and elsewhere: such men as Collot d'Herbois, or Carrier, or Panis. The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original, sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of the historian are the exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin of the poet. "Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre. He had in him the absolute. He had been ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Crimean War; but Mr. Gladstone, who differed from him on this point, calls it the action of his life most worthy of honor. He was perhaps the most warlike opponent of war ever high in public life; the pugnacious and aggressive agitator, pouring out floods of fiery oratory to the effect that nobody ought to fight anybody, was a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... street side that the news of the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. Here, in 1835, William Lloyd Garrison found refuge from a mob which had broken up an anti-slavery meeting and threatened the life of this brave agitator. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... in nowise contrary to that law, he has deserved well of the state, and has behaved as a good citizen should; but if he accuses the authorities of injustice, and stirs up the people against them, or if he seditiously strives to abrogate the law without their consent, he is a mere agitator and rebel. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... things I'm up against," she exclaimed in a low voice. "That fellow is a regular agitator. Talking is his long suit. Why, he didn't even know how to throw a bowline when he hit in here, flat broke and down on his uppers. I've taught him all he knows. And now he's trying to start something. If men weren't so scarce I'd can him in ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... Ottawa. Only what I recommend, will the Government do; so that you see the settlement is very completely in my hands." This man was a valuable ally to Riel; for almost literally did he, while portending to speak for the Dominion authorities, corroborate the allegation of the arch agitator. Then two officials, Messrs Snow and Mair, sent out by Mr. McDougall, while he was yet Minister of Public Works, had established an intimacy with the obnoxious white man, received his hospitality, and given acquiescent ear to his advice. These ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... little he could retaliate by sending the guilty one to prison. But the merchant himself could invidiously and continuously rob the customer without fear of any law. All of this was converted into a code of moralities; and any bold spirit who exposed its cant and sham was denounced as an agitator and as an enemy of law and order. [Footnote: A few progressive jurists in the International Prison Congress are attempting to secure the recognition in law of the principle that society, as a supreme necessity, is obligated to protect its members from being made the victims of ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... agreement made by Duke George of {555} Saxony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, [Sidenote: 1520] not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking work, and not to hire any troublesome agitator ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... them again and scooping in all they needed, a stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel, and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the lobby. These Western fellows were just "meat" for Tommy Hinds—he would get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of "the System." Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis's story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England. The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with his naked fists any agitator who proposed to interfere with that ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France and which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; {215} of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's conscience, was one of the leaders of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... at Petrograd, the soldiers confidently assumed that matters would take a similar course in the future. All that was necessary, they thought, was to send an agitator to the Cossacks, who would lay down their arms the moment the object of the proletarian revolution was explained to them. Korniloff's counter-revolutionary uprising was put down by means of speeches and fraternization. By agitation and well-planned seizure of certain institutions—without ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... in the south a rising of a new "master of the hour,'' Mahomet ben Abdallah, the sherif of Wargla. A column seized Laghouat (El Aghuat) in December 1852. Si-Hamza, leader of the Walidsidi-Sheikh, an ally of France, indignant at the growing influence of a base-born agitator, pursued him and seized Wargla (1853). In 1854 General Desvaux entered Tuggurt. Henceforth matters remained quiet in the region of the Sahara, and Marshal Randon turned his efforts towards Kabylia. Neither the Romans nor the Turks had been able to subdue this square mountainous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ignominy and wreck our life with sorrow and remorse, or it may spur us on in noblest efforts to acquire glory and honor, here or hereafter. According to the inflection of the voice a word may strike terror into the bravest heart or lull a timid child to peaceful slumber. The word of an agitator may rouse the passions of a mob and impel it to awful bloodshed, as in the French Revolution, where dictatorial mandates of mob-rule killed and exiled at pleasure, or, the strain of "Home, Sweet Home" ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... agitator in Drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and had their office in a cigar box. The next year, he had a suite of offices and was buying time on a couple ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings until he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... given me the most remarkable list of references I ever came across in my life. I don't suppose anyone ever before was recommended for a post by a Protestant divinity professor, a notoriously violent political agitator, a Roman Catholic priest, and a—well, we won't describe my brother. How do you come to be mixed up with all these people? Who ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... important labour demonstration in the Square was in 1855, when, during a period of "hard times," eight thousand workmen assembled there with drums and trumpets, and made speeches in the most approved and up-to-date agitator style, collecting a sum of money which went well up ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... Ladislaw has his ideas. It's my opinion that if he were to part from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country. With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are few men who could come up to him as an agitator—an agitator, you know." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... honour of Virginia." At the end of the week the Major's hand was held out, but his heart still bore his grievance, and he began quoting William L. Yancey, as he had once quoted Mr. Addison. In the little meetings at Uplands or at Chericoke, he would now declaim the words of the impassioned agitator as vigorously as in the old days he had recited those of the polished gentleman of letters. The rector and the doctor would sit silent and abashed, and only the Governor would break in now and then with: "You go too far, Major. There is a step from which there is no drawing ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... the latent genius within the untutored child, and produced an emotion she had never felt before. "I, too, can make a stone man," she said. Almost instinctively, she turned to that great Apostle of Human Liberty, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and asked his advice. The kind-hearted agitator gave her a note to Mr. Brackett, the Boston sculptor. He received her kindly, heard her express the desire and ambition of her heart, and then giving her a model of a human foot and some clay, said: "Go home and make ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... an old man of eighty, afflicted with the palsy, was arrested during the reign of terror, under suspicion of being an agitator. Being asked what he had to say to the accusation, "Alas, gentlemen, it is very true, I am agitated enough, God knows, for I have not been able to keep a limb still for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... plainly, the victory of Jesus was not a victory over the cross; for He did not come down from the cross. Nor was it a victory over His enemies; for what they sought was to get rid of a man whom they deemed an agitator, and their wish was gratified, inasmuch as, thanks to the cross, He troubled them ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... factions would obtain was determined by forces for centuries at work in that State. Southerners who thought that, because Kentucky was a slave State it should go with the South, had failed to take these causes into consideration. In the first place, not every slaveholder was an ardent proslavery agitator. There were masters who like Henry Clay considered slavery an evil and hoped to see it abolished, but while the majority of their fellow countrymen held on to it they did so too. Many Kentuckians, moreover, were like that restless class of Westerners who, dissatisfied ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... workingmen in their lodges will do. There, as a rule, the 'Walking delegate' and a few agitators rule with despotic power. If a workman, whose large family forces him to take conservative views, dares in his lodge to suggest peaceful measures, an agitator rises at once in indignation and demands that traitors to the cause of labor be expelled. This throttles freedom of action in many labor unions, so that often what appears on the surface to be the unanimous action of the members of workingmen's ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... mistake to call him a statesman. He was bold to rashness, impulsive, impatient and vehement. Because a man is great is no reason why he should be proclaimed perfect. Such men as Victor Hugo need no veneer—the truth will answer: he would explode a keg of powder to kill a fly. He was an agitator. But these zealous souls are needed—not to govern or to be blindly followed, but rather to make other men think for themselves. Yet to do this in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... originally a Methodist, having become a Quaker, while his mother remained a Wesleyan. At 13 he was sent to the care of his uncle, Thomas S., a clergyman, near Bath, but a Radical and anti-corn-law agitator. Declining a Univ. career he became a school assistant, but shortly after accepted a situation under the engineer of the London and Birmingham railway, in which he remained until the great railway crisis of 1846 threw him out of employment. Previous to this he had begun to write ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... opinionated. If he had the strength of a giant in battle, he lacked the wisdom of the sage in council. If he was irresistible in his own appropriate sphere of moral and economic discussion, he was uncertain and unstable when he ventured beyond its limits. He was a powerful agitator and a matchless leader of debate, rather than a master of government. Those who most admired his honesty, courage, and power in the realm of his true greatness, most distrusted his fitness to hold the reins of administration. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... things, good or bad, that seem good and reasonable, or amazingly wicked. True, the acts and motions of the soul are only seen and heard in, and by the members and motions of the body, but the body is but a poor instrument, soul is the great agitator and actor. 'The body without the spirit is dead' (James 2:26). All those famous arts, and works, and inventions of works, that are done by men under heaven, they are all the intentions of the soul, and the body, as acting and labouring ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Oxford, held to celebrate the formation of a Liberal Palmerston Club. He strongly condemned the sending of the British fleet into the Dardanelles as a breach of European law; and confessed that he had been an agitator for the past eighteen months, day and night, to counteract what he believed to be the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... The Convention chose Patrick Henry to be the first Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. A skilled agitator, a great orator, and a radical-turning-conservative, Henry made but an ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... listened awhile to Citizen Lermina, who, taking Thiers's mission and Bismarck's despatch as his text, protested against France concluding any peace or even any armistice so long as the Germans had not withdrawn across the frontier. There was still no little talk of that description. The old agitator Auguste Blanqui—long confined in one of the cages of Mont Saint-Michel, but now once more in Paris—never wearied of opposing peace in the discourses that he delivered at his own particular club, which, like the newspaper he inspired, was called "La Patrie ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... majority. Mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only intelligence. They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it. Say that the guy is the effigy of an agitator in the cause of something to be desired; the street man and boy have then two motives of mocking: they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing to suspect the reformer of some ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... going. It can be lighted to some purpose, as when money is extracted from the enthusiasts before they have had time to cool; but even this process—so skilfully conducted by the initiated—seems unworthy of great and noble charities, or of great and noble causes. It is true also that the agitator—no matter what he may be agitating—is always sure of his market; a circumstance which made that most conservative of chancellors, Lord Eldon, swear with bitter oaths that, if he were to begin life over again, he would begin it as an agitator. Tom Moore tells ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... character. Under such assumptions the States of this Union would have no security for peace or tranquillity, but might be converted into the mere instruments of Executive will. Actuated by selfish purposes, he might become the great agitator, fomenting assaults upon the State constitutions and declaring the majority of to-day to be the minority of to-morrow, and the minority, in its turn, the majority, before whose decrees the established order of things in the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... campaigns—they went as right as men could go in the politics of those days who watched and went the way Jack Denver went; header of subscription lists for burnt-out, flooded-out, sick, hurt, dead or killed or otherwise knocked-out selectors and others, or their families; barracker and agitator for new provisional schools, assister of his Reverence and little bush chapels, friend of all manner of wanderers—careless, good-hearted scamps in trouble, broken-hearted new chums, wrecks and failures and outcasts ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... contrast with the negative character of socialism, are not generally appreciated by the socialist. On the other hand, the socialist places an undue emphasis upon the defects of the present system. The radical agitator too often overlooks the millions of happy, prosperous homes in this and other countries; he too often sees capitalism in terms of poverty, crises, unemployment, vice, disease, ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... over some imagined grievance on the railway, and all the men in all the factories to strike—that's the new game of the modern labour agitator! Marchand has been travelling in France," he added disdainfully, "but he has brought his goods to the wrong shop. What do the priests—what does Monseigneur Lourde say to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was Feargus O'Connor, an Irish barrister and journalist, who had entered Parliament in 1832 as a follower of O'Connell and as member for Cork. He quarrelled, however, with the Irish leader, a circumstance which was fatal to success as an agitator in his own country. Restless and reckless, he henceforth carried his energy and devoted his eloquence to the Chartist movement in England, and in 1847 the popular vote carried him once more to the House ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... John Gifford. A labor agitator. A man of the people, rough-hewn, narrow as a labor-leader may well be, earnest and sincere. He is a proper, better ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... the Great Powers may have deprecated Rakovski as much as he deprecated them. It must have been exasperating for those solid persons subsequently to acknowledge—if they did so—that this unbalanced agitator weighed them very well. But the Balkan countries were too weak; they had to suffer being thrown aside, pushed here and there, and trampled on; for when the Great Powers came down to the Balkans they could really not pay much attention to the little peoples of the country and at the same time ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... date that Dr. Buchanan delivered his oration at Baltimore, the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, conferred upon Granville Sharp, the great abolition agitator of England, the degree of LL. D. Granville Sharp had no other reputation than his anti-slavery record. This slender straw shows significantly the current of public opinion in Virginia at that time. ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... Bolshevik orator on a soap box. His satchel bursting out with propaganda and pamphlets on Bolshevism from Europe. In his hand he holds a pamphlet that has a message for the returning doughboys. The agitator's hair and whiskers bristle with hatred and envy. His yellow teeth look hideous between his snarling lips. And he points a long skinny finger for the doughboy to see his message, which is, "Down with America, it's ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... ride six miles at three o'clock on a scorching day to listen to a stump speech by a rustic agitator, seems to me a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... pleasure in observing,' interrupted the squire, 'that the man who effects the change of balance does it in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unfortunately he also was a respectable man. When he saw something going forwards that he did not think was right, he protested and voted against it and then—he collapsed! There was nothing of the low agitator about HIM. As for the Brigands, they laughed at his protests and his vote ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... gentlemanly man, always wearing a genuinely good-humored smile, and looking as if nothing in the world could disturb the equanimity of his spirits." He had, besides, a marvelous gift of persuasive oratory. He was the Wendell Phillips of the South, for, like his Northern rival, he was a born agitator. Above all his colleagues, he was the brain and soul and irrepressible champion of the pro-slavery reaction throughout the Cotton States. He was tireless and ubiquitous; traveling, talking, writing, lecturing, animating every ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... people. If the papers were things of thought and not of passion, prejudice and sensation and interest, they could do the work that police and courts are called upon to do. They could effectively answer the agitator. But the people do not believe them when they cry aloud. Maybe I am wrong, but isn't there a grain, or a ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... directions. They obviously believed in their statement of the case and their very wealth and position in the community gave their words such weight that finally all of their hearers were convinced that the young Agitator must be done away with in order that the highest interests of society might be conserved. These simple peasants made it clear that it was the money power which induced one of the Agitator's closest friends to betray him, and the villain of the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... forty-four years old. Of medium build, he wears a shock of long, curly, upstanding hair, which rather accentuates his "agitator" type of countenance, and is a skilful and eloquent debater. A university graduate and well-read thinker and student, he turned out to be the one consistent Social Democratic politician in Germany on the question of the war. When the war began the Socialist Party was ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... (March 31, 1850) the great political gladiator and pro-slavery agitator and originator and disseminator of disunion doctrines was dead;(70) but there were others to uphold and carry forward his work ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... an inspired voice crying in a wilderness of unbelief. Lassalle was no prophet. His function was to reduce principles to action, to engage the forces of the times in the spirit of the times, and by combat with such weapons as lay to hand to urge the cause forward. The word "agitator" might have been invented for him. He was the first great warrior of socialism. It is no reflection upon Marx to indicate that the present need of the Social Democracy is for warriors ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Massachusetts, Member of the first Massachusetts Board of Education, "an honor intended to be conferred only on such as were well qualified by their literary acquisitions to discharge its responsible duties." He was also a prominent agitator against the fugitive slave law, and organizer and corporator of the Illinois Central Railroad, the first transcontinental line projected. John Jay McGilvra (1827-1903), of Scots parentage, took part in many prominent enterprises ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... moment. "No, I'll not give him up, for he's Tim's b'y, though most unlike him. I do moind hearin' wanst that Tim had a brother of that sort. Jim's loike him, no doubt, and he come to a bad end, so he did, a-gettin' to be an agitator, as they calls 'em. And sure what's an agitator but wan that's sour at iverybody's good luck but his own, and his own good luck turnin' out bad on account of laziness and consate? I'm needin' more wisdom than I've got when I'd ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... Glidden, the I.W.W. agitator and German agent.... He—just the same as murdered my father.... He burned my ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of the opposition, and most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... the agitator business ... he's a grain broker now. But Dennis started something. Capital is a little more willing to listen to labor. And Chinese immigration will be restricted, perhaps stopped altogether. The Geary Exclusion Act ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. Of these three, Cavour, the civil-engineer with the short-sighted eyes and the steel-rimmed glasses, played the part of the careful political pilot. Mazzini, who had spent most of his days in different European garrets, hiding from the Austrian police, was the public agitator, while Garibaldi, with his band of red-shirted rough-riders, appealed to the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... what do you say to that? Would you ever have thought I would become a political agitator in my ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... remarked at one of her evening gatherings, "Every landowner in the county is in his favour; therefore it is impossible." The statistics of Zenobia were quite correct, yet the result was different from what she anticipated. An Irish lawyer, a professional agitator, himself a Roman Catholic and therefore ineligible, announced himself as a candidate in opposition to the new minister, and on the day of election, thirty thousand peasants, setting at defiance all the landowners of the county, returned O'Connell at the head of ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... The Chinese agitator, particularly if he believes that he enjoys official support, is invariably willing to fight to the death for some cause that he professes to have at heart, until there is some risk that he may be taken at his word. Then he invariably beats an ignominious retreat. And unless we are greatly mistaken, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... unpretentious lodging-house in Pennsylvania avenue, near the Capitol, the man who as much, if not more than any other agitator, is said to have blazed the way to the Civil War, the writer who stirred this nation to its core by his anti-slavery philippics, and the promoter with the most gigantic railroad enterprise projected in the history of the world, was found gript in the icy hand of death. The brain which gave ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... indeed a heretic and an agitator of the lower orders; to the pagans, he was a magician who through sham miracles and with subversive words had incited the people to rebellion, and as a leader of a gang of desperate men had attempted to seize ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... are: the shopgirl, the policeman, the peddler, the cabman, the night watchman, the clairvoyant, the vaudeville performer, the quack doctor, the bartender, the ward boss, the strike-breaker, the labor agitator, the school teacher, the reporter, the stockbroker, the pawnbroker; all of these are characteristic products of the conditions of city life; each with its special experience, insight, and point of view determines for each vocational ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... once assumed the function of leader. His position should be clearly understood; for in the vast labor which lay before the abolition party different tasks fell to different men. Mr. Adams assumed to be neither an agitator nor a reformer; by necessity of character, training, fitness, and official position, he was a legislator and statesman. The task which accident or destiny allotted to him was neither to preach among the people a crusade against slavery, nor to devise and keep in action the thousand ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... done so well? For every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse door. And the schoolhouse itself ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Congress. In the Park the malecontents wore their biggest looks, and talked sedition in their loudest tones. The most conspicuous among these swaggerers was Sir John Fenwick, who had, in the late reign, been high in favour and in military command, and was now an indefatigable agitator and conspirator. In his exultation he forgot the courtesy which man owes to woman. He had more than once made himself conspicuous by his impertinence to the Queen. He now ostentatiously put himself in her way when she took her airing; and, while all around him uncovered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... necessary or even their most natural groove), Mazzini made an Italian kingdom possible. There is reason to think that the King's ministers were kept entirely ignorant of his correspondence with the Agitator. The letters were impersonal drafts carried to and fro by means of trusted emissaries; each party freely expounded his views, and stated the terms on which his support could be given. Victor Emmanuel's favourite ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... this valiant Red Cross knight, and now shine with due brilliance in the circle of their peers. It must also be admitted that a large number of false lights, popular will o' the wisps, have been ruthlessly extinguished with the same breath. For instance, Karl Marx, the socialist theorist and agitator, finds in Croce an exponent of his views, in so far as they are based upon the truth, but where he blunders, his critic immediately reveals the origin and nature of his mistakes. Croce's studies in Economic are chiefly represented by his work, the title of which may be translated ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... returned for Clare in the famous election of 1828. The ashes of the controversy that raged around O'Connell in his lifetime are long since dead, and if one wanted proof of this it is in the recent biography of the great agitator which appears in the "Heroes of the Nation" series. In that, the famous Clare election is treated with true historic discrimination by the writer, who compares the bravery of the Clare peasants at Ennis to the gallant Covenanters standing up ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... paper we are not discussing Lassalle as a public agitator or as a Socialist, but simply in his relations with the two women who most seriously affected his life. The first was the Countess von Hatzfeldt, who, as we have seen, occupied—or rather wasted—nine of the best years of his life. Then came that profound and thrilling passion ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... grasp, or extend to, and that in despair they must abandon it; he must be very ignorant of the state of every popular interest, who does not know, that in all the corporations, all the open boroughs, indeed in every district of the kingdom, there is some leading man, some agitator, some wealthy merchant, or considerable manufacturer, some active attorney, some popular preacher, some money-lender, etc. etc. who is followed by the whole flock. This is the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... receive a visit from August Rockel. This name will probably call up to your imagination—as it has done in many other cases—an ultra-revolutionary agitator; in place of which you will find a gentle, refined, kindly and excellent man. I should like you to cultivate his acquaintance, and can cordially recommend him to you. His daughter (at the Burg Theater) you are sure to know—and you will also know of his old friendship with Wagner and Bulow. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... well-known Hindu writer describes the situation in the following words: "The class of people the Indian Extremists appeal to, consists of irresponsible and impressionable students and the ignorant populace; and the agitator, who is thoroughly cognizant of this fact, uses it for his purposes. He appeals to their feelings, and succeeds in making them believe in the soundness of his fallacies and mischievous preachings. The authorities have therefore to see that this class of people is protected ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... up to the extent of lettin' me come around once a week without makin' me assume a disguise, or crawl in through the coal chute. Course I'm still under suspicion; but while the ban ain't lifted complete she don't treat me quite so much like a porch climber or a free speech agitator. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... two days a week. He talked, if I remember correctly, about a cruel fourpence and a mythical ninepence. He read fierce letters he had composed for the Press, and when the papers published them, which was seldom, he read them to us all over again. As an anti-insurance agitator Wilson now comes under the unemployment section of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various |
