"Chicane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which not even a reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation, making for continuation of the current international situation of animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... matter who they be, going about and asserting to listening multitudes that we are fighting for our very existence as a nation. We most emphatically are not. It is just conceivable that certain unscrupulous marplots might by chicane produce such domestic discord in this country as would undermine the very basis of victory. I regard the thing as in the very highest degree improbable, but it can be conceived. The result might be an inconclusive peace, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... few other French words which like 'prestige' are at this moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve', 'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them often employed by us,—and it is out of such frequent employment that adoption proceeds,—because expressing shades of meaning not expressed by any words of our own{67}. Some of these, we may confidently anticipate, will complete their naturalization; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... near the place, so this apprentice had gone, on a promise from the Royal Court that he should have for himself—this he demanded as reward—free lodging in two small upper rooms of the Cohue Royale, just under the bell which said to the world, "Chicane—chicane! Chicane—chicane!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... you; by long impiety, you have let the supply of noble human wisdom die out; and the wisdom that now courts your universal suffrages is beggarly human attorneyism or sham-wisdom, which is not an insight into the Laws of God's Universe, but into the laws of hungry Egoism and the Devil's Chicane, and can in the end ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the keystone of the arch that sustained the structure of chicane. To dislodge him was the direct way to collapse it. I was about to set to work when Langdon, feeling that he ought to have a large supply of cash in the troublous times I was creating, increased the capital stock of his already enormously overcapitalized Textile ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... car, and raised his hat rather stiffly to a nice girl sitting in a corner. He then sat down in another corner, far away from her. Such is the capacity of youth for chicane! For that nice girl was exactly Alice, and her presence on the car was part of the plot. When the car arrived at Bursley these monsters of duplicity descended together, and went to a small public building and entered therein, and were directed to an official and inhospitable ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Orleans to study the Common Law; which he did with so great Applause, that at Three Years End he merited the Degree of Doctor. His Father designing to surrender to him his Place of Counsellor of Parliament, sent for him home: But the young Gentleman was soon tired with the Chicane of the Bar, and plung'd himself deep in the Studies of [Footnote: Les belles Lettres.] Humanity and the Roman Laws; for which he had a wonderful Inclination. He happen'd to be a frequent Spectator of the Protestants Sufferings, who, about that Time, had their Tongues cut ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... be thrown into water deep enough to drown them; and if they underwent such treatment without injury, she held them innocent. Another device was the oath. The parties went to the Church altar and swore their innocence or the justice of their cause. But all these methods gave room for chicane. Kings and knights protested that the oath led to indiscriminate perjury, that if the priests' hands were tickled with money the hot iron was only painted, and that a suitable fee could render the boiling liquid innocuous to the skin of a baby. They therefore drew their swords, exclaiming, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... of life sufficiently queer for a student. While his colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary, land and other business law-suits, into the memorizing and logical analysis of quashed decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a notary's ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... quiet smoke might easily be distinguished from where they stood. It was said that the Cleggs, its original owners, had been beggared and dispossessed by vexatious and fraudulent lawsuits; and the Ashtons had achieved their purpose by dishonesty and chicane. However this might be, busy rumour gave currency and credit to the tale, though probably it had none other foundation than the idle and malevolent gossip of the envious ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... and esteem of this government—not by improper compliances, but by that sincerity, candor, truth, and prudence, which, in my opinion, will always prove to be more wise and more effectual than finesse and chicane. Formal discussions of disputed points should, in my judgment, be postponed until the case becomes desperate; my present object is to accommodate, rather than to convert or convince. Men who sign their names to arguments ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... allies, obeying his behests without a question: for their degradation there was no plea either of expediency or of a right secured by conquest. The extinction of what still ranked as a great royal house was accomplished by chicane, was due to a boundless ambition, and was rendered utterly abhorrent to all divine-right dynasties by the specious pretext of reform under which it was accomplished. This gave Francis ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... country, "a calamity which stained the face of nature with human gore, gave loose rein to crime, and took bread from the people. No doubt negotiation is repugnant to the national impatience at the sight of injustice and oppression; it is beset with delay, intrigue, and chicane; but these are not so horrible as war, if negotiation can be made to result in saving this country from a calamity which deprives the nation of subsistence and arrests the operations of industry. To attain that result ... Her Majesty's Ministers have persevered in exercising ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the soul of the mother. The distiller was to her as the publican to the ancient Jew. No dealing in rags and marine stores, no scraping of a fortune by pettifogging, chicane, and cheating, was to her half so abominable as the trade of a brewer. Worse yet was a brewer owning public-houses, gathering riches in half-pence wet with beer and smelling of gin. The brewer was to her a moral pariah; only a distiller was worse. ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... And when the Whigs unwittingly held a great demonstration for "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," on the birthday of King George III, Douglas saw to it that an address was issued to voters, warning them against the chicane of unpatriotic demagogues. As a counter-blast, "All Good Democrats" were summoned to hold mass-meetings in the several counties on the Fourth of July. "We select the Fourth of July," read this pronunciamento, "not to desecrate it with unhallowed shouts ... but in cool ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... that essential incognito of his punctured, his vanity touched to the quick—all that laboriously constructed edifice of art and chicane which yesterday had seemed so substantial, so impregnable a wall between the Lone Wolf and the World, to-day rent, torn asunder, and cast down in ruins about his feet—Lanyard wasted time neither in profitless lamentation or any other sort ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... had a high reputation for excellence. Up till a year previously they had always been held at the Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the Club, had by persistent and relentless chicane, triumphing over immense influences, changed their venue to the Dragon, whose landlady, Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting. (It must be stated that Mrs Louisa's name contained no slur of cantankerousness; it is merely the local word for a harmless plant, the knapweed.) He had now won ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... facilities exist for his doing indirectly what he dares not, or may choose not, to do openly. We are not without fear, from our knowledge of the Chinese character, and of their long-established mode of procedure, that every chicane and evasion will be resorted to, in order to neutralize and nullify, as far as possible, the commercial advantages which we have, at the cannon's mouth, extorted from them. A great deal, at all events, will depend on the skill, firmness, and vigilance, of the consuls ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... clergy did real good to Europe, in preserving the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by preserving therewith other elements—Roman chicane, and Roman cruelty. In that respect, as in others, 'Rome conquered her conquerors;' and the descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the honest Teutons called adders, and as adders killed them down, destroyed, in course of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the most infamous Chief Justice that ever existed in England. Charles II. and James II. well acquainted with his talents for chicane, his debauchery and blood-thirstiness, his baseness and his crimes, made use of him to exterminate, with the sword of law, all those worthy men who defended the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... reign of terror began—a reign of terror heightened by mystery. No man knew what was next to be expected from this strange tribunal. It had collected round itself an army of the worst part of the native population—informers, and false witnesses, and common barrators, and agents of chicane; and above all, a banditti of bailiffs' followers compared with whom the retainers of the worst English spunging- houses, in the worst times, might be considered as upright and tender-hearted. There ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction, that the country can afford. But supposing, what hardly can be supposed as a case, that the House of Commons should be composed in the same manner with the Tiers-Etat in France, would this dominion of chicane be borne with patience, or even conceived without horror? God forbid I should insinuate anything derogatory to that profession, which is another priesthood, administering the rights of sacred justice. But whilst I revere men in the functions which belong to ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of chicane too much. One could not go and lay one's conscience before the policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief of his district's police—a common-looking person whom he used to see sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... princes, this was never the language of our antient constitution and laws. The limitation of the regal authority was a first and essential principle in all the Gothic systems of government established in Europe; though gradually driven out and overborne, by violence and chicane, in most of the kingdoms on the continent. We have seen, in the preceding chapter, the sentiments of Bracton and Fortescue, at the distance of two centuries from each other. And sir Henry Finch, under Charles the first, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... facts; if only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane. Browning's vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his Eastern Luria. In Djabal, at once enthusiast and impostor, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... towns returned to their towns or to the vicinity thereof in the uniform and with the pleasing manners of German warriors. The organisation for doing good to Belgium against Belgium's will was an incomparable piece of chicane and pure rascality. Strange—Belgians were long ago convinced that the visitation was inevitably coming, and had fallen into the habit of discussing it placidly over their beer ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... characteristic example of the manner in which building was added to building in London contrary to the intention of the original laying-out, and George in his expert capacity wondered how the plans had been kept within the by-laws of the borough, and by what chicane the consent of ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... with memories more inspiring than that of O'Neill—the princely house of Ulster, the champions of the Red Hand, who, for centuries, in the struggles of the nation against the Saxon invader, led the hosts of their people to victory, and only succumbed at last when poison and treachery, and chicane had accomplished what force failed to effect; for their valor was powerless against the dagger of the assassin, as were their honesty and open-heartedness against the bad faith of England's perjured ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... night when he returned from Madame Uccelli's. The porter was again equal to his duty, and contrived to light a new candle to show him the way to his room. The repetition, almost mechanical, of this small chicane made Colville smile, and this apparently encouraged the porter to ask, as if he supposed him to have ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... to have been carrying on a Jacobite correspondence at the foot of the throne—the infamous treachery of his brother-minister, St John—the undenied and undeniable corruption of Walpole, and the half-imbecility which made the chicane of Newcastle ridiculous, while his perpetual artifice alone saved his imbecility from overthrow,—altogether form a congeries, which, like the animal wrecks of the primitive world, almost give in their deformity a reason for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... should miscarry. For God's sake consider only to what a dismal condition old Lewis is brought. He is at an end of all his cash; his attorneys have hardly one trick left; they are at an end of all their chicane; besides, he has both his law and his daily bread now upon trust. Hold out only one term longer, and I'll warrant you before the next we shall have him in the Fleet. I'll bring him to the pillory; his ears shall pay for his perjuries. ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... and England soon after Edward had settled the Scottish succession. Neither Edward nor Philip the Fair sought a conflict. Edward was satisfied with his diplomatic successes, and Philip's designs upon Gascony were better pursued by chicane than by warfare. But questions arose of a different kind from the disputes as to feudal right, which had been hitherto the principal matters in debate between ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... a strange looking lawyer's clerk in the Inner Temple. Indeed, nobody who had ever seen him was likely to forget him. For his grotesque features and his hideous squint were far beyond the reach of caricature. His parts, which were quick and vigorous, had enabled him early to master the science of chicane. Gambling and betting were his amusements; and out of these amusements he contrived to extract much business in the way of his profession. For his opinion on a question arising out of a wager or a game at chance had as much authority as a judgment of any court in Westminster Hall. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
