"Fallacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fermentation subsided; the patriot lords reappeared at court; and the Prince of Orange acquired an increasing influence in the council and over the stadtholderess, who by his advice adopted a conciliatory line of conduct—a fallacious but still a temporary hope for the nation. But the calm was of short duration. Scarcely was this moderation evinced by the government, when Philip, obstinate in his designs, and outrageous in his resentment, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... enough, was the highest bidder for the land. He of all men should have known that if the farm would not pay expenses when there was no rent, it would not reward the man who had rent to pay. This reasoning proved fallacious. The farm which without rent proved a loss, in the same hands turned out when rent was charged a perfect gold-mine. In another case, a bailiff on leaving his employ expended on land the accumulated savings of his thrifty years, and—strange to say—his savings ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... commanding strength and fortunate augury. Heiliger Lee was a wooded eminence, artificially reared by Premonstrant monks. It was the only rising ground in that vast extent of watery pastures, enclosed by the Ems and Lippe—the "fallacious fields" described by Tacitus. Here Hermann, first of Teutonic heroes, had dashed out of existence three veteran legions of tyrant Rome. Here the spectre of Varus, begrimed and gory, had risen from the morass to warn Germanicus, who came to avenge ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the character of dogs is that, not content with escaping from the responsibilities entailed on all the other inhabitants of our globe by the struggle for existence, these four-legged Pecksniffs have succeeded in making for themselves a fallacious reputation for honesty and devotion. What little lingering belief I had in canine fidelity succumbed then I was told that St. Bernards—those models of integrity and courage—have fallen into the habit of carrying the flasks of brandy that the kind monks provide for the succor ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... uncommonly handsome, with an expression of sweetness of temper, which was not fallacious; his manners were rather formal, but full of genuine kindness, especially when exercising the duties of hospitality. His general habits were not only temperate, but severely abstemious; but upon a festival occasion, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... still detained in the Tower on Wyat's information, as was pretended, and on other indications of guilt, all of which were proved in the end equally fallacious: and at the time of Elizabeth's removal hither this state-prison was thronged with captives of minor importance implicated in the designs of Wyat. These were assiduously plied on one hand with offers of liberty and reward, and subjected on the other to the most ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... mischievous principles, and even applying them in direct resolutions, it was the fashion to say that they never intended to execute those declarations in their rigor. This made men careless in their opposition, and remiss in early precaution. By holding out this fallacious hope, the impostors deluded sometimes one description of men, and sometimes another, so that no means of resistance were provided against them, when they came to execute in cruelty what ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... This was very fallacious reasoning, but somehow or other it impressed Bert as having a good deal of force in it. The simple truth was that he was willing to be convinced. But he did ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... verify their predictions!—what a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... remained some time inactive, under pretext of making preparation to prosecute the campaign with vigour; but it was the fallacious hope of an early insurrection in his favour that lulled him into a supineness fatal to the safety of his army. Amherstburg lay about eighteen miles below him, and the mud and picketed fortifications of that post was not in a condition to make resistance against a regular ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... thinks, is ready to think, that he must give up the very noblest part of his life, his powers of thinking, in order that he may enter into Christianity. It seems to me that there are certain reasons for it which we can see; but how fallacious those reasons are! Is it not partly because man, when he is called upon to live Jesus' life, when he is called upon to be a spiritual creature, immediately sees that he is entering into a new and different region from that ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... It was better to know nothing, than to be deceived by an artful tale. What he was unwilling to communicate, and this unwillingness had been repeatedly manifested, could never be extorted from him. Importunity might be appeased, or imposture effected by fallacious representations. To the rest of the world he was unknown. I had often made him the subject of discourse; but a glimpse of his figure in the street was the sum of their knowledge who knew most. None had ever seen him before, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... it may be worth while to point out that the current impression that the maintenance by states of "bloated armaments" is a keen incentive to war, is fallacious. How often do we hear, "There must be a big war soon; the powers cannot long stand the cost of standing looking at each other, all armed to the teeth!" War is infinitely more costly than the costliest preparedness. But this is not all. The country ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... hat, yet not shady enough to conceal the impetuous blushes that mantled her cheeks on her companion's evasion. She felt what it was the prelude to. Mr. Cecil Burleigh, inspired with the needful courage by these fallacious signs, broke into a stammering eloquence of passion that was yet too plain to be misunderstood—not reflecting, he, that maiden blushes may have more sources than one. The hot torrent of Bessie's rose from the fountain of indignation in her heart—indignation at his inconstancy to the sweet ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the House in the year 1782 to adopt a measure of the same kind as the present. Had any thing happened to change the opinion of members since? On the contrary, they had now the clearest evidence, that all the arguments then used against the abolition were fallacious; being founded not upon truth, but on assertions devoid of all truth, and derived ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... the night my compass lamp began to glimmer faint, and it was soon evident that the flame must go out. Here was a discomfort: the wind veered so much that its direction would be utterly fallacious as a guide to steer by, and this uncertainty might continue until the lightning ceased. Therefore, at all hazards, we must light up the compass again. So I took down the ship-light from the mizen shroud, and held it between my knees that it might shine on the needle, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... Lord the King in the Year 1526, over-perswaded by fallacious appearances (for the Spaniards use to conceal from His Majesties knowledge the dammages and detriments, which God himself, the Souls and state of the Indians did suffer) intrusted the Kingdom of Venecuela longer and larger then the Spanish Dominions, with its ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... scarce be said that the statement—whether true or fallacious,— acted as a stimulus to his comrades at the oar. The word "water" was music to their ears; and, on hearing it pronounced, one and all of them put ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... found no end, in wandring mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argu'd then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie: Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm Pain for a while or anguish, and excite Fallacious hope, or arm th' obdured brest With stubborn patience as with triple steel. Another part in Squadrons and gross Bands, 570 On bold adventure to discover wide That dismal world, if any Clime perhaps ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... high-minded people should hold most vital and most sacred. Was it in good taste, that I may use the mildest term, for Earl Russell to expound our own Constitution to President Lincoln, or to make a new and fallacious application of an old phrase for our benefit, and tell us that the Rebels were fighting for independence and we for empire? As if all wars for independence were by nature just and deserving of sympathy, and all wars for empire ignoble and worthy only of reprobation, or as if these easy phrases in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... circumstances which, to a keen observer who had taken due pains to sift the matter, would have rendered the testimony untrustworthy. There have generally been means of accounting for the impression on the senses or minds of the alleged percipients, by fallacious appearances; or some epidemic delusion, propagated by the contagious influence of popular feeling, has been concerned in the case; or some strong interest has been implicated—religious zeal, party feeling, vanity, or at least the passion ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... another valuable contribution to the philosophy of this controversy. There are few positions more relied on by Roman Catholics, or more thoroughly unsound and fallacious, than the assertion that there are no essential differences between the position of Roman Catholics and of Protestants as regards the state and the English ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... disaster. The mass of French reserves were in Lorraine or far away to the south, and the safety of the French line on the northern front had depended upon the assumed impregnability of Namur and an equally fallacious underestimate of the number of German troops in Belgium. Three French armies, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth, were strung along the frontier from Montmdy across the Meuse and the Sambre to ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... theory, by divers sprightly stories, such as Gentlemen of the Old School are in the habit of repeating, but which, from deference to the prejudices of gentlemen of a more recent school, I refrain from transcribing here. But it would appear that even the Colonel's theory was fallacious. The only woman who personally might have exercised any influence over the partners was the pretty daughter of "old man Folinsbee," of Poverty Flat, at whose hospitable house—which exhibited some comforts and refinements rare in that crude civilization—both ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor Babbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identical with moral perception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unless observation and experience are alike fallacious. Thus the whole argument falls to the ground when we confess that possession of knowledge does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the two things, knowledge and virtue, according to universal experience, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Campbell having disposed of his whole Fortune in the Island of Isla, expended the far greatest part of it from his confidence in these fallacious promises found himself at length constrained to employ the little he had left in the purchase of a small farm seventy miles north of New York for the subsistence of himself and his Family consisting of three sons and three daughters. ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... by the succeeding dialogues of the series: the Theaetetus (already quoted from above, p. 89), which is a close and powerful investigation of the nature of knowledge on familiar Platonic lines; the Sophist, which is an analysis of fallacious reasoning; and the Statesman, which, under the guise of a dialectical search for the true ruler of men, represents once more Plato's ideal of government, and contrasts this with the ignorance and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... doubtful. We are not disposed to accept the theory of the passive mind as a sufficient philosophical explanation of the Scotch novels. But Hazlitt is certainly right to make much of the store of reading and reminiscence they imply, and it is not erroneous or fallacious to think of all Scott's writings in verse or prose as peculiarly the fruits of his life and experience. His various modes of writing are suggested to him by the way, and he finds his art with no long ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... out to wash pavements and entrances: the collective life of the town was waking up to another uneventful day; but they two were hastening off to long hours of sunlight and fresh air, unhampered by the passing of time, or by fallacious ideas of duty; were setting out for a new bit of world, to strange meals taken in strange places, reached by white roads, or sequestered wood-paths. In the train, they were crushed between the baskets of the marketwomen, who were journeying from one village to another. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... spot, which both nature and art have so liberally contributed to adorn: I have converted it into the most perfect and delightful habitation in which a mortal could desire to end her days. Nevertheless, this hope of passing my life tranquilly and happily within its sheltering bosom will prove but fallacious, if I may credit a prediction which has been verified already in part. You doubtlessly remember the young man who so obstinately pursued me to announce the high destiny to which I should attain, ere I had for one moment contemplated such an elevation. Well! You will scarcely credit ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the rescue was the most unique episode she ever witnessed, and says that she never understood America until she made our acquaintance. I persuaded her that this was fallacious reasoning; that while she might understand us by knowing America, she could not possibly reverse this mental operation and be sure of the result. The ladies of Pettybaw House said that the occurrence was as ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... growing demand for cotton, and the stimulus given to the production of it by the cotton-gin, made the prospect of emancipation by legislative action less probable as time advanced. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1811; and the fallacious hope was entertained by many, that the negroes might be carried back to the Liberian settlement on the African coast. The extension of slavery in the territory north-west of the Ohio had been prevented by the Congressional ordinance of 1787. When the question of the admission of Missouri ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... is lost in the accidental conflicts of personalities, because the quality which plays the most important part is presence of mind, not correct reasoning. A conversationalist whose argument is wholly fallacious will often, by exercise of verbal adroitness, dispose of an objection which is really fatal. The full swing of the personalities of the speakers in a conversation is what makes the flint strike fire. It is only from heated minds that the true essence ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... were fallacious—well, were they fallacious? Does this spectacle of a nation drowned look 'fallacious' to you? Why didn't you study the matter until you understood it? Why did you issue officially, and with my ignorant sanction—may God forgive me for my blindness!—statement after statement, assuring the people ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... any extensive region, even in countries most densely peopled and best supplied with instruments and observers. The progress of science is constantly detecting errors of method in older observations, and many laboriously constructed tables of meteorological phenomena are now thrown aside as fallacious, and therefore worse than useless, because some condition necessary to secure accuracy of result was neglected, in obtaining and recording the data on ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... liabilities he succeeded in extending; to restrict it, and it was only the profits he managed to restrict. Nobody had ever made money out of that concern except the capable Scot, who retired (after his discharge) to the neighbourhood of Banff and built a castle with his profits. The memory of this fallacious Caledonian Morris would revile daily, as he sat in the private office opening his mail, with old Joseph at another table, sullenly awaiting orders, or savagely affixing signatures to he knew not what. And when the man of the heather pushed cynicism so far as to send him the ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... entirely upon the elevation of the freeman; therefore, to elevate the free colored people of America, anywhere upon this continent; forebodes the speedy redemption of the slaves. We shall hope to hear no more of so fallacious a doctrine—the necessity of the free remaining in degradation, for the sake of the oppressed. Let us apply, first, the lever to ourselves; and the force that elevates us to the position of manhood's considerations and honors, will cleft the ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... that in southern latitudes anything may be easily cultivated is often proved by actual observation to be fallacious. Sometimes there may be too much rain, sometimes not enough. The worst enemies of plant-life in the warm countries are the many pests. One evening my host, Don Manuel Perez, showed me some of the foes he had to combat in ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... startled out of a dream. The belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others, that belief had been proved fallacious. It had been made plain that on the economic issue, even as on the issue of sectional distrust, the upper South would not follow the lower South into secession. When delegates from the Georgia Secessionists ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... their tongues, and discussed with unrestrained earnestness the amount of the succession, and the probability of its destination. The principal expectants, however, kept a prudent silence, indeed ashamed to express hopes which might prove fallacious; and the agent or man of business, who alone knew exactly how matters stood, maintained a countenance of mysterious importance, as if determined to preserve the full interest of ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ideas there are in existence about the digestibility of foods. Many of these are fallacious. For instance, it is common belief that nuts are difficult to digest. This is not well founded. Of course nuts like all foods which are used as a part of the dessert are considered merely as an addition to the meal, and not a part of the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... bearings with map and electric torch. Sergeant M'Nab, who, under a hirsute and attenuated exterior, concealed a constitution of ferro-concrete and the heart of a lion, brought up the rear, uttering fallacious assurances to the faint-hearted as to the shortness of the distance now to be covered, and ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... theory, and are well calculated to fasten upon the minds of the many. They have been, time and again, incorporated into the constitution of governments, and have uniformly produced the same disastrous results. They are equally as fallacious as the declaration "that all men are born free and equal," which, with those above, has won the public approbation in spite of experience. The equality of intellect is as certainly untrue as the equality of stature; the one is not more apparent than the other. Transcendent ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... said Mr. Robertson, who had listened quietly to the talk of the children. "I think that every noble, honorable man and woman works, and is glad to work, for a living. The old saying that 'the world owes us a living' is a very fallacious one. The world doesn't owe us anything, and God does not either. Indeed, he has said: 'If any man will not work, ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... by the misfortune of their fall, are less fit and less able to take stronger counsels; and having left off prayers and supplications, whereby with long and continued satisfaction the Lord is to be appeased, they invite them by the deceit of a fallacious peace ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... more apply that fallacious standard of what is called consistency to a man's moral nature, and argue against the existence of fine impulses or habits of feeling in relation to his actions generally, because those better movements are absent in a class of cases which act ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... were in hopes that after such a repulse he might take himself off, but we soon perceived that our hopes were fallacious; neither the stabs nor the shot had seriously injured him. They had only served to render him more furious and vengeful; and after tumbling about for a while, and angrily biting at his own bleeding paw, he returned once more to the attack, as before, endeavouring to spring up to the branches of ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... experience only proves that many things have causes, whereas the axiom declares that all things have causes. The syllogism, "many things which come into existence have causes, A has come into existence: therefore A had a cause," is obviously fallacious, if A is not previously shown to be one of the "many things." And this objection is perfectly sound so far as it goes. The axiom of causation cannot possibly be deduced from any general proposition which simply embodies experience. But it does not follow ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... thrived, about this time, on that fallacious feeling, born of hope eternal, that he was growing young. It is one of the precautionary lies of nature, to keep us going, that, the instant we are tinkered in any part, we ignore its merely being fitted up for shortened use. Hope eternal tells us how much stronger it is than it ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... "I now feel better satisfied with reference to your action upon that occasion," I assured him. "While I do not agree with you in your conclusions, and while I believe your reasoning to be unsound and fallacious, still I cannot help giving you credit for having been actuated by no other motive than to do what you honestly believed was for the best interest of the country and ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE 'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this is a process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious elements in our 'Civilization' and to the temporary and fallacious domination of a leaden-eyed so-called 'Science.' According to this view the true evolution of Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded not by the denial by man of his unity with the world, but by his seeing and understanding that unity more deeply. And the more deeply ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... trust the State governments, though we have no means of resisting them; but we cannot confide in the national government, though we have an effectual constitutional guard against every encroachment. This is the essence of their argument, and it is false and fallacious beyond conception. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... account of the right honorable gentleman, was so eminent for his sagacity in evading the subject altogether. Now, let me ask the house to consider the position of Lord Derby when he was called to power, a position which you cannot rightly understand if you accept as correct the fallacious statements of the right honorable gentleman. I will give the house an account of this subject, the accuracy of which I believe neither side will impugn. It may not possibly be without interest, and will not, I ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... successively been consulted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and they had all expressed the same opinion and given the same advice; but that he had met their conclusions with a long chain of reasoning founded upon the most fallacious premises, columns of prices of stocks and exchequer-bills in former years, and calculations and conjectures upon these data, which the keen view and sagacious foresight of these men (whose wits are sharpened by the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... bitingly true, yet withal of a kindly sympathy with his victims. One would say that he knows boys as well, were it not for the conviction that to imagine any kind of understanding of Boydom is (if my contemporaries will forgive me) the last enchantment of the middle-aged, and the most fallacious. As for the Educational experts, he has all the cold and calculated hate for them that is the mark of experience. I admired especially his treatment of the "craze for practical teaching," the theory which holds, for example, that, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... and Rousseau the novel was a convenient medium for the expression of certain ideas rather than a representation of life. The first strove to popularize a knowledge of Greek antiquity, the second to combat doctrines that he deemed fallacious, the third to reform society. However, Rousseau brought nature into his Nouvelle Heloise, and, by his accessories of pathos and philosophy, prepared the way for a bolder and completer treatment of life in fiction. Different from these was Restif de la Bretonne, who applied Rousseau's theories ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... reasoning, but very fallacious notwithstanding; indeed, it is this description of logic which conceals the full extent of a man's errors from, himself, and which has sent thousands forward on their career to ruin. Had Art, for instance, been guided ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... premise being erroneous their whole argument fails. But if they were correct in their premise, we yet claim that their second position is not sustained by the authorities, and is shown to be fallacious by a consideration of the principles of free government. We claim that from the very nature of our Government, the right of suffrage is a fundamental right of citizenship, not only included in the term "privileges ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... habited in boiled shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well armed with a commodity which is said to be synonymous with yourself—money—they seek to outwit you by crowding a month of merriment into half a dozen hours. Yet their victory is brief and fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by night they will move grindingly on the axle the next morning. None of us can beat you in the end. Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray and dies ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... which fallacious and absurd objections are pressed against their enfranchisement—as if they were anomalous beings, outside all human laws and necessities—is most humiliating and insulting to every black man and woman ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... how tired Eve might well become (even before the fallacious fruit was tasted) of Adam's carefully maintained superiority. On thinking, however, of the judgment that she may have to suffer, and of her own death, she resolves to draw him in, her motive being not fear, but a sudden movement of jealousy at ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... result; a single act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom. Scientific discovery is not advanced by a multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly. Whether the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning, gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... dense, compact, hard, impenetrable, firm, unyielding, imporous, concrete, substantial; unanimous, united, undivided. Antonyms: porous, incompact, hollow, spongy, soft, plastic, unstable, fallacious. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... required by trade. The competition of those who speculate at random would then cease, or what is the same, as money obtained at a premium could not then be laid out with the same advantages by the merchants as if it was their own, it will be necessary to renounce the fallacious profits held out by the public charities, till at least they are placed on a level with existing circumstances, and brought in to be of real service to the honorable planter and laborious merchant, in their accidental exigencies, ceasing to be, as ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Texas, and in its suborned press in New-York, Baltimore, Charleston, and New-Orleans. It had bargained with the politically vitiated portion of the Northern Democracy for assistance, and had received a wicked though fallacious assurance from the Northern kidnappers, to the effect, that the Democracy of the North would neutralize any attempt to oppose secession by force. They had arranged for their diplomatic influence on the other side of the Atlantic, and bargained for the subversion of Democracy in the South. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried along by the current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness or fallacious hopes. How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but the fear of annihilation—the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread. I cannot bear to think of being no more—of losing myself—though existence is often but a ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... perfect soever as may have been his knowledge of their manners, customs, religion and traditions, yet it must be admitted that any inquiry into these, with a view to discover their origin, would most probably prove fallacious. A knowledge of the primitive language, alone can cast much light on the subject. Whether this knowledge can ever be attained, is, to say the least, very questionable—Being an unwritten language, and subject ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... distinctions of a special pleader; in short, without BUTS or IFS, to state the real object; and affirms that in spite of these buts and ifs, the restoration of monarchy in France is the real and sole object of ministers, and that all else contained in the official notes are unmeaning words and distinctions fallacious, and perhaps meant to deceive. Is it, Sir, to be treated as a fallacious distinction, that the restoration of monarchy is not my sole or ultimate object; that my ultimate object is security, that I think no pledge for that security so unequivocal ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... with regard to that familiar but most fallacious expression, "the extension of slavery." To the reader unfamiliar with the subject, or viewing it only on the surface, it would perhaps never occur that, as used in the great controversies respecting ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... pleased with the reception accorded him and the missionaries, and hoped the time was coming for again using the lots in Savannah, but the hope again proved to be fallacious. The missionaries all suffered greatly from fever, always prevalent on the rice plantations in the summer, and on Oct. 11th, 1775, Mueller died. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War made Wagner's and Broesing's ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... year, or sign of the Zodiac. It would be foreign to the nature of this work to investigate the evidence which may be adduced on this subject, or to collect those various and scattered hints which have given rise to the opinion, and with a faint, but not fallacious ray, have penetrated that obscure region of antient history, between the period when the devotion of mankind, withdrawn from the worship of the Deity, was transferred to the adoration of the stars, and prior to the still greater degradation of the ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... fallacious reasoning. I was sure, for once, that I had the best side of the argument. I boldly maintained the just distinction between a tragedian and a mere theatrical droll; between those who rouse our terrour ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... counsel, I persuaded HAMET to destroy himself; and, in the very act, I was betrayed to drink the potion, by which I shall be destroyed: I have been led on, from misery to misery, by ineffectual expedients, and fallacious hopes. In this crisis of my fate, I will not trust, with implicit confidence, in another: I will be present at the interview of this powerful, but suspected Being, with HAMET; and who can tell, but that if I detect a fraud, I may be able ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... fixing the exact moment when to make use of it, and when to say that I can no longer in justice to you give credit to assurances of an immediate determination so often repeated and so often found fallacious. With you, who have received none such, there is no such difficulty. Besides, the letter in my hands can only operate as an actual resignation on your behalf, and authorized by you; whereas the letter from ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... Mount on the one side, and these execrable examples on the other) know the right hand from the left; and so much the rather, because those things which do not conduce to the good of the governed are fallacious, if they appear to be good for the governors. God, in chastising a people, is accustomed to burn his rod. The empire of these oligarchies was not so violent as short, nor did they fall upon the people, but in their own immediate ruin. A council without a balance ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... mitigation, however superficial, does something to break down that windowless isolation which is the essential cause of violence between two independent moral entities. Pacificists of the democratic school sometimes present a fallacious view of international diplomacy, and almost imply that the present war was made inevitable by the fact that Viscount Grey was educated at Harrow, or that peace could have been preserved with Germany if only Sir Edward Goschen had begun life as a coal heaver, or had at least ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... comptroller of the fleet, all three saw it in motion, as if it were carried from place to place. A little after midnight, the joyful sound of "Land! Land!" was heard from the Pinta, which kept always ahead of the other ships. But, having been so often deceived by fallacious appearances, every man was now become slow of belief, and waited in all the anguish of uncertainty and impatience for the return of day. As soon as morning dawned, all doubts and fears were dispelled. From every ship an island was seen about two ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston's Pigmalion's Image, published in 1598, where 'stanzas' are said to 'march rich bedight in warlike equipage.' The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and logical deduction, that, if the system of administering drugs is founded upon a wrong conception of their relation to the human organism, then any theoretical "law of cure" predicated upon drug action must necessarily be equally fallacious ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... it is, therefore, a matter of importance that they should think aright. It is of importance, that they should be guarded against fallacious Utopian promises. Henceforth, there is no security for the stability of the world but in the contentment of minds. There is no rest for mankind, unless men will understand the conditions of their destiny; unless, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... had left it, carrying away with him a considerable share of the property. With the remainder, John, after many expenses and delays, returned to the island, and resumed his business. But he soon discovered to his cost, that the calculations he had made were quite fallacious, owing to his having neglected to inquire whether the late prosperous season had been a normal or an exceptional one. Unfortunately, it was the latter; and several very unfavourable ones that succeeded, reduced the family to great distress, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... to sustain the heroic role long after the appropriate circumstances had passed away. Yet, in spite of the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this impulse urged her now to help Patty's pathetic romance in every way in her power. It would be very ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... action in the rod, and prevents a clear satisfactory cast. In England this quality was made a specialty for salmon rods some years ago, it being supposed that it increased the length of the cast. Recent experiences proved this to be a fallacious idea, and such a rod required quite an education to use with ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... earth in its developments has passed, was pernicious in its influence in diverting the minds of investigators from other and truer channels. To the blind confidence with which that hypothesis has been universally accepted and perpetuated, and to the fallacious theories thus directly and indirectly engendered, we owe our false position ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... The fallacious views about the nature and sphere of politics, which the Irish bring with them from Ireland, and which are perpetuated in America, have the effect not only of debarring the Irish from real political ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... between body and mind; psychologists see in many of these games of physical activity the evolution of the race: drill pure and simple has its place partly in the same sense as "practice" in number or handwork, and partly as a corrective to our fallacious system of education by listening, instead of by activity: and we cannot in a lifetime acquire the powers of the race except by concentrated practice. But no amount of drill can give the all-round experience necessary ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... that the atmosphere is akin to the salt seas; that an aerial vessel in its particular element is confronted with dangers identical with those prevailing among the waters of the earth. But such an analogy is fallacious: there is no more similarity between the air and the ocean than there is between an airship and a man-of-war. The waters of the earth conceal from sight innumerable obstructions, such as rocks, shoals, sandbanks, ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... the presence of the Registrar) is every bit as legally indissoluble as marriage in a church. The not uncommon argument: "I was only married in a Registry Office, and can therefore take advantage of the Divorce Act," is fallacious ab initio.[4] ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... until I perform them. But if [thou wilt have it thus], so be it; I will nod to thee with my head, that thou mayest feel confidence. For this from me is the greatest pledge among the immortals: for my pledge, even whatsoever I shall sanction by nod, is not to be retracted, neither fallacious nor unfulfilled." ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... men, trusting themselves, their knowledge of law, their use of law-abiding forces, their power to produce change and to improve conditions, should find less need of trusting any one except themselves, was inevitable, but for all that it is fallacious. Already we have seen that a stumbling and uneven progress, precarious and easily frustrated, taking place upon a transient planet, goes but a little way to meet those elemental human needs with which religious faith has dealt. In our present lecture we propose a more specific consideration ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the example of the provincial militia at that battle, it would be better for the country, the people, science, and last, but not the least, for the profession. The theory that we should not counsel with quacks is altogether mischievous and fallacious, although right and rigidly orthodox in its intent; were we to counsel and meet these gentry, we should expose their ignorance and assumption, and we should not be exposed to the charge of jealousy and of fear to meet them in consultation. I remember on one occasion a client went to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... to Putnam's the night before for the first time, but he and Billy Bluff were friends already. Boy Woodburn noticed it with swift appreciation. In her young and entirely fallacious judgment there were few shrewder judges of character than ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. Signor Tombola had endeavoured to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... real quality, that every scope is afforded to the malpractices of the adulterer. There are many dye and print works in which large quantities of these extracts are used without being subjected to trustworthy tests. Moreover, much of the testing is done by fallacious methods and often by biased hands. So fallacious, indeed, are some of these tests, that grossly adulterated extracts are often declared superior to the purer ones, the cause of this being the application of an insufficient proportion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... many years, perfectly harmless and tractable, and behaving pretty much the same as other idiots. The idea, therefore, of a race of men, in a healthy, natural condition, having ever existed without the possession of reason, is now deemed wholly fallacious. It is even maintained by Schlegel, and other authorities of great weight, that the civilized state is the primitive one, and that savage life is a degeneracy from it, rather than civilized society being a graft upon barbarity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... eradicate. Your very nurseries are seminaries of falsehood; and what is called Fashion in manhood completes the system of avowed insincerity. Mankind, in the gross, is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed: nor is their vanity less fallacious to your philosophers, who adopt modes of truth to follow them through the paths of error, and defend paradoxes merely to be singular in defending them. These are they whom ye term Ingenious; 'tis a phrase of commendation ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... diminution in the fury of the gale; a change productive of such profound relief to us, worn out as we all were by long-protracted toil and anxiety, that we actually greeted it with a feeble cheer! Nor was the hope thus aroused fallacious; for from this moment the sky began to clear, until within a couple of hours the storm-clouds had all swept away to leeward, leaving the sky a clear, pure blue, streaked here and there, it is true, with ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... manufacturing towns, and thrown throngs upon the 'pave' for want of employment, yet M. de Calonne either did not see, or pretended not to see, the errors he had committed. Being informed that the Comte de Vergennes had attributed the public disorders to his fallacious policy, M. de Calonne sent a friend to the Count demanding satisfaction for the charge of having caused the riots. The Count calmly replied that he was too much of a man of honour to take so great an advantage, as to avail himself of the opportunity offered, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... him, and which must be, in a greater or less degree, connected with the distinctive qualities of his literary genius. For in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author has written by something which the MAN has done or been inclined to do. What true poet has sought to hide, or succeeded in hiding, his moral nature from his muse? None in the entire band, from Petrarch to Villon, and least of all the poet whose ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... up to them" in every way, until they become so impressed that they are ready to accept as truth anything he chooses to tell them. Any daily paper will provide examples of the sad results of the power of this kind of fallacious reasoning. The get-rich-quick schemes, the worthless stock deals, the patent medicine quacks, the extravagantly worded claims of new religions and faddist movements, all testify to the power this form ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Hon. WM. H. SEWARD would be present at the dedication of the Geological Hall, excited great interest among the citizens; but the hope of his appearance proved fallacious. His place was occupied by seven picked men of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of whom (Prof. HENRY) declared his inability to compute the problem why seven men of science were to be considered ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... Paul Auguste not only howled indignantly, but didn't swing up again after he was overturned. He remained supine, and had to be reinstated by Hadria and Hannah, and comforted with sweetmeats. Martha's logic received one of its first checks. She evidently made up her mind that logic was a fallacious mode of inference, and determined to abandon it for the future. These rebuffs in infancy, Hadria ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... last few years, been recognized and defended by two eminent breeders, W.A. Hays in this country and Von Lochow in Germany. Both of them have started from the experience of breeders of domestic animals. Von Lochow applied the principle to rye. He first showed how fallacious the visible characters often are. For instance the size of the kernels is often dependent on their number in the head, and if this number is [822] reduced by the injurious varietal mark of lacunae (Luckigkeit), the whole harvest will rapidly deteriorate by the selection ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... advocate the system of slavery; I conceive it to be essentially wrong; but so far as my observation has extended, I think its influence is far less injurious to the manners and morals of the people than the fallacious ideas of equality, which are so fondly cherished by the working classes of the white population in America. That these ideas are fallacious, is obvious, for in point of fact the man possessed of dollars ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... fallacious as prophecies against second marriages, but I don't believe they will. She is too quietly dignified for the full brunt of reports to reach her, and too much concentrated on her children ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wherefore indulge in such fallacious hope?" said her husband, tenderly, for he saw ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... In the past we have seen Christian peoples, transplanted in America, maintain the necessity of slavery, and we have seen, and continue to see every day, methods of reasoning which, when used by the defeated enemy were declared to be fallacious and wrong, become in turn, when varied only in form, the ideas and the customary life of the conquerors in the War—ideas which then assume the quality of liberal expressions ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... a private little grimace. "No young man who contemplates marrying should allow himself to launch into extravagance on the strength of prospects which, for all he can tell," said the Professor, genially, "may prove fallacious. On the contrary, if his affection is sincere, he will incur as little expense as possible, put by every penny he can save, rather than subject the girl he professes to love to the ordeal of a long engagement. In other words, the truest lover is ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... to the fatality of crotalus poison advisedly. I know the belief is very common that the poison of a rattlesnake is readily combated by full doses of whisky. This is fallacious. I have taken the pains to investigate a number of instances of cure resulting from the employment of free stimulation. In each case the fangs did not penetrate deeply into the tissues, but either scratched over the surface or tore ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... access to all surviving Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect without difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It will be seen(2) that Don Garcilasso de la Vega could estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods and fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garcilasso de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son of an Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His book, Commentarias Reales,(3) was expressly intended to rectify the errors of such Spanish ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra Angelico's works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently, when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant Saints, on a gold ground—very ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... legal phrase-books bore witness to the existence of the custom. The discovery of the Code of Hammurabi has shown that the practice not only existed, but was regulated by statute in his time. Hence the argument from silence is once more shown to be fallacious. ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... by defining supernatural Revelation as revelation necessarily evidenced by miraculous divine intervention, then, of course, denial of this is denial of that, and how is the argument advanced? But, besides this, the question-begging definition is a fallacious confusing of the contents of the Revelation with its concomitants, and of its essentially spiritual character with phenomena in the sphere ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... went out. They would not be long—and he could hardly face the thought of their return. Never in his long experience had he found himself in such a desperate situation. Heretofore there had always been some argument, some construction of the facts upon which he could make an appeal, however fallacious or illogical. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... jeers, cat-calls and laughter. He never made his address, for the audience was unwilling to hear anything about "human nature." No Socialists in general are willing to do so, for human nature, with the mental and spiritual sides of life, is just the element with which their fallacious creed cannot deal, and they know it. But the human element must enter into business and trade in the problems of direction, management, even in the form of competition itself, and cannot ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... arrived at San Domingo without an ounce of gold, half-famished, downcast, and despairing. [205] Such is too often the case of those who ignorantly engage in mining—of all speculations the most brilliant, promising, and fallacious. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving |
