"Mendacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prayers, praise and manifold acts of devotion, a substitute, at least in part, for moral conduct? Look at England, where by an audacious piece of priestcraft, the Christian Sunday, introduced by Constantine the Great as a subject for the Jewish Sabbath, is in a mendacious way identified with it, and takes its name,—and this in order that the commands of Jehovah for the Sabbath (that is, the day on which the Almighty had to rest from his six days' labor, so that ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... on one occasion "lodged some pellets in Massena's left eye while letting fly at a pheasant," and then without the least hesitation accused "the faithful Berthier" of having fired the shot, an accusation which was at once confirmed by the mendacious but courtierlike victim of the accident. Wellington also, Lady Shelley records, "after wounding a retriever early in the day and later on peppering the keeper's gaiters, inadvertently sprinkled the bare arms of an old woman who chanced to be washing clothes at her cottage window." Lady ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... lock of Fiddles's bedroom door), his Honor could still be made to believe the perjured testimony of the cobbler—Fiddles's enemy, as had been abundantly proved in the previous rabbit case, when the same mendacious half-soler and heeler had informed on my friend—well and good; but if not, then, the resources of my Government would be set in motion for the ...
— Fiddles - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... no use hiding from the truth. Somebody had blundered—a fatal blunder—and they were going to pay for it! Mark Forepaugh kicked the pile of hydrogen cylinders. Only a moment ago he had broken the seals—the mendacious seals that certified to the world that the flasks were fully charged. And the flasks were empty! The supply of this precious power gas, which in an emergency should have been sufficient for six ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... French play because he wanted to perfect himself in the language, and there was no such good lesson as a comedy or vaudeville—and when one night the astonished Lady Agnes saw him stand up and dance, and complimented him upon his elegance and activity, the mendacious little rogue asserted that he had learned to dance in Paris, whereas Anatole knew that his young master used to go off privily to an academy in Brewer-street, and study there for some hours in the morning. The casino ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the trusty Polton, returned somewhat feverishly to my professional duties. To my profound relief, the influx of patients ceased, and the practice sank into its accustomed torpor; whereby I was able, without base and mendacious subterfuge, to escape in good time to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... writings of those who took part in the struggle have been already quoted, and the most spirited description of the defeat of the armada which ever was penned may perhaps be taken from the letter which our brave vice-admiral Drake wrote in answer to some mendacious stories by which the Spaniards strove to hide their shame. Thus does he describe the scenes in which he played so ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... an adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who had poured a gallant but mendacious ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... continued excess in drink are, of course, identical in both cases: moral sensibilities blunted; manhood degraded; mind wrecked; worldly substance dissipated; health shattered; strength sapped; every mendacious and tortuous bent of one's nature stimulated, and given ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... of sisterly affection so frequent in her correspondence with Francis the First (see M. Genin, Supplement a la notice sur Marg. d'Angouleme, prefixed to the second volume of the Letters). Nor do I make any account of the vague statement of that mendacious libertine, Brantome, who doubtless imagined himself to be paying the Queen of Navarre the most delicate compliment, when he said, that "of gallantry she knew more ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... had not PUNCH done for him? Had not PUNCH extinguished the Times by the honest way in which he had advocated his (Roebuck's) injured genealogy? Had PUNCH not proved that he (Mr. Roebuck) had a father, which the "mendacious journal" had asserted was impossible? Had not PUNCH traced the Roebuck family as far back as 1801?—that was something! But he (Mr. Roebuck) believed that he had been injured by an error of the press, and that PUNCH had written the numerals 1081. Be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... texts for purposes of writing or having translated other men's studies on Moses, David, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, the Christian theologians and saints, miracles, etc., he concluded that these accounts were untrustworthy and mendacious. He knew ancient and modern philosophy and found in the greater part of it an unwarranted romantic or theological trend which his scientific training had caused him to suspect. It must be admitted that however false or illogical Holbach's ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... then, to her personal history, Miss Vaughan's memoirs contain:—I. A mendacious biography of the English mystic, Thomas Vaughan. II. A secret history of the English Rosicrucian Fraternity, and of its connection with Masonry, which is also an impudent fraud. The two constitute one of the most curious ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... say that we can attain culture through antiquity alone. We may learn something from it, certainly; but not culture as the word is now understood. Our present culture is based on an emasculated and mendacious study of antiquity. In order to understand how ineffectual this study is, just look at our philologists . they, trained upon antiquity, should be the ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of peoples and customs, let us return to our natives of these islands, who, besides having been exceedingly barbarous, living without a ruler, and in a confused monarchy, [111] have the vices of the islanders; for they are fickle, false, and mendacious, and [that] by the special influence and dominion which the moon exercises upon all the islands, isthmuses, and peninsulas [Chersonesos], of which much will be found in the Theatrum vitae humanae of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... learns the cunning tricks, delays, concealments, and frauds, by which slaves evade or cheat their master. He is tempted to make ambiguous statements; pledges, with secret passages of escape; contracts, with fraudulent constructions; lying excuses, and more mendacious promises. He is tempted to elude responsibility; to delay settlements; to prevaricate upon the terms; to resist equity, and devise specious fraud. When the eager creditor would restrain such vagrancy by law, the debtor then thinks himself released from moral obligation, and brought ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues circulated a report that we communitarians were exterminated, to the last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own scythes! and that the world had lost nothing by ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cooly, who had been summoned from the ricefields, appeared upon the scene and took up my Gladstone bag. Nothing remained for me but to pay my mendacious Malay half the number of florins he demanded ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... report in which his statements are embodied, that he betrayed all our preparations on the Piave and provided the enemy with a great deal of most important information. Let us mention further that Stiny in his mendacious statements to the Italian command about the Austro-Hungarian situation at the front and in the interior, followed the line of all traitors in order to appear in a favourable light. It is characteristic that in his declaration about ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... She recorded nothing, but her daily doings were so many works of her imagination. She was generally somebody else in these days, seldom herself; and people who did not understand this might have supposed that she was an exceedingly mendacious little girl, when she was merely speaking consistently in the character which she happened to be impersonating. She would spend hours of the afternoon alone in the drawing-room, standing in the window looking out while ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... privity by one of his graceless subordinates, I knew to be the only satisfaction I was to look for. A request for revision of judgment would have been received with silent scorn, and appeal there was none. Digesting my disgust as best I could, I lighted my cheroot with the mendacious foolscap and blushed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... awhile and digested this mendacious invention and seemed to be irresolute in her summing up of ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... carelessness in selection, are not strikingly characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition. A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up to be a perfect man of business. The world took him at his word, for he was bold, acute, and voluble; with no thought, but a good deal of desultory information; and though destitute of all imagination and noble sentiment, was blessed with a vigorous, mendacious fancy, fruitful in small expedients, and never happier than when devising shifts for ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... mask, clean the outside of the platter, lie like a conjuror; hand out false colors, hold out false colors, sail under false colors; "commend the poisoned chalice to the lips" [Macbeth]; ambiguas in vulgum spargere voces [Lat]; deceive &c 545. Adj. false, deceitful, mendacious, unveracious, fraudulent, dishonest, faithless, truthless, trothless; unfair, uncandid; hollow-hearted; evasive; uningenuous, disingenuous; hollow, sincere, Parthis mendacior; forsworn. artificial, contrived; canting; hypocritical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and is alluded to by Mr. Huelsemann, of obtaining accurate information. But this difficulty is by no means to be ascribed to what Mr. Huelsemann calls, with little justice, as it seems to the undersigned, "the mendacious rumors propagated by the American press." For information on this subject, and others of the same kind, the American press is, of necessity, almost wholly dependent upon that of Europe; and if "mendacious rumors" respecting ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... not resist this last mendacious opportunity, although he was perfectly sincere in his renunciation, touched in his sympathy, and there was even a film of ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... and romance, and adventure—all that was denied the feeble flicker of life that was in him. And yet I could not forbear, once or twice, from wondering if he saw through me down to the bottom of my mendacious heart. ...
— The Road • Jack London
... to be a form of prayer and humiliation for the use of the persecuted Church. It was impossible to doubt that a considerable sum had been expended on this work. Ten thousand copies were, by various means, scattered over the kingdom. No more mendacious, more malignant or more impious lampoon was ever penned. Though the government had as yet treated its enemies with a lenity unprecedented in the history of our country, though not a single person had, since the Revolution, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... crept into his phraseology from associations with other boys, chance acquaintances, who had evolved them among themselves, nourishing them from the corruption of their own hearts. As soon as Michael—deceived by the mendacious dialogue of the Coroner and the Inspector, and under the impression that the particulars he was giving, whether true or false, were not evidence—had told with some colouring about the two men in the garden and what they said, the old lady made a powerful ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... bribes, and promised to intrigue against his own country for pecuniary reward; but exactly what the different agreements were, and exactly how far he tried or intended to fulfil them, is, and must always remain, uncertain. He was so ingrainedly venal, treacherous, and mendacious that nothing he said or wrote can be accepted as true, and no sentiments which he at any time professed can be accepted as those he really felt. He and the leading Louisiana Spaniards had close mercantile ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... in a voice of thunder. "My wig, you anatomy, you mendacious inventor of outrageous impossibilities. Begone out of the cabin, out of the ship, overboard with you, the instant dinner is served!" And he gave the unhappy barber a kick which sent him flying across the after-cabin, through the ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... lyric portions of the lesser poet's work—that the players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers who plundered Middleton—must be obvious to all but those (if any such yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing the unspeakably impudent assertion of those mendacious malefactors that they have left us a pure and perfect edition of Shakespeare. These passages are all thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of the lesser work: it would be tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping with the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... poured, with an equally nauseating result, over the hard veal, the tough chicken, the "mousey" quails, and the tasteless beef and mutton, which are never roasted, but are baked or stewed in boiling fat—though shamelessly described as "rotis" in the pretentious and mendacious "menu" placed on the dinner-table. The consequence is that the tourist, who has been overfed at home, eats very little, and his health benefits. But in such an hotel the man who lives carefully when at home, and desires a simple but properly cooked meal, is reduced to ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... from any obvious purpose. Like the swindling of pathological liars, it appears objectively more pernicious than the lying, but it is an expression of the same tendency. The most striking form of this type of conduct is, of course, self-accusation. Mendacious self- impeachment seems especially convincing of abnormality. Such falsification ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... this must be added the contempt for one another's character which had arisen among the adherents of the two churches, for the Easterns had learned to regard the people of the West as ignorant and barbarous, and were esteemed by them in turn as mendacious ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... mendacious keeper. Jack had evidently paused for breath. Barrett began quite to sympathize with him. The thought that the animal was getting farther away from the object of his search with every ounce of earth he removed, tickled him ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... striking feature in this matter is the audacity of the king. He trusted that the people generally would not have access to the documents which we now possess to contradict him. After issuing this mendacious letter, he approached the Stockholm merchants, and, by certain persuasive arguments whose nature it is easy to conceive, prevailed upon them to deposit all their "klippings" in the treasury, to be weighed and bought by the Government at their actual bullion value. He then began ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... me to know and to care; and assuming for the moment as a fact that which is one of the greatest lies in this mendacious world—namely, that all men are brothers—you will consider me as an elder brother, who will counsel and control you as he would an imprudent young—sister. I see very well how it is. Somehow or other you, having first admired Mr. Compton ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... striking old legend, preserved by the somewhat mendacious historian of the Jewish people, that, before Jerusalem fell, the anxious watchers heard from within the sanctuary a great voice saying, 'Let us depart hence!' and through the night were conscious of the winnowing of the mighty wings ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... The speakers hurled at the Gazette the pet terms they usually and properly reserve for each other. The too flattering terms which in a moment of weakness I applied to Tuam and its people are described as "lying, hellish, mendacious misrepresentations." Misther MacCormack said the English people would know there was "not a wurrud of thruth in these miserable lies." The report of the Tuam Herald reads like a faction fight in a whiskey-shop. You can hear the trailing ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... ever come? Will it have time to come, while hollow-eyed humanity makes such haste to die? For all this advertisement of war, radiant in the sunshine, all these temporary and mendacious reasons, stupidly or skillfully curtailed, of which not one reaches the lofty elevation of the common welfare—all these insufficient pretexts suffice in sum to make the artless man bow in bestial ignorance, to adorn him with iron ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... New World and its inhabitants that should vindicate the latter's right to equitable treatment at the hands of their conquerors. Misrepresented and defamed, as he maintained the Indians were, by the mendacious reports sent to Spain, Las Casas composed this interesting apology as one part of his scheme of defence. As a monument to his vast erudition, his powers of observation, and his talents as a writer, the Apologetica is perhaps the most remarkable ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... he told me last night, I suppose, was mendacious: he delivered himself of a series of the stiffest statements. They stuck, when I tried to swallow them, but I never thought ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... fragile tissues of culture are dislocated, and its delicate edges defaced, by such persistive governmental brutalization as the inhabitants have undergone. None but the grossest elements in a people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile nature will survive its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a few years ago the nobler qualities which we associate with those old Hellenic colonists—their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook upon life, their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature—all these ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that within the whole Synod of Pennsylvania there were hardly ten preachers who, in their faith and teaching regarding the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, deviated from the views of the General Synod. Dr. Walther remarked with respect to this statement, which he was inclined to regard as mendacious: "Since the [Pennsylvania] Synod was not ashamed to conclude its Centennial Jubilee by declaring this miserable paper [of Weyl] its organ and thereby publishing to the world its spiritual death [as a Lutheran Church], it serves ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... more of such exceptions to the rule of inconsiderate, exaggerated and recklessly mendacious talk that wounds ear and heart, the "society lie" would be no more, and this flimsy excuse for falsehood would be voted an article too tenuous and threadbare ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... first lures and then robs the trustful buyer. "Pools," open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. "Points" are given by one operator to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it besides. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... and fear not death," answered Babalatchi, with a mendacious assumption of indifference. "But what will ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... Southerners (another reason for Benson's dislike of him), mingled among them, and partook of the inspiring beverage. In vino veritas is true as gospel, if you understand it rightly as meaning that wine develops a man's real nature. Hunter, being by nature gossipy and mendacious, waxed more and more so with every glass of Heidseck he took down. Ashburner chancing to pass near the group, had his attention arrested by hearing Benson's name. He stopped, and listened: Hunter was going on with a prolix ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... what we have thought from what we have said."[122] This last is a bitter and humiliating word, but before any man hastens to cast a stone, let him first make sure that his own life is free from every trace of hypocritical conformity and mendacious compliance. Condorcet seems to make the only remark that is worth making, when he says that the true shame and disgrace of these dissemblings lay not with the writers, whose only other alternative was to leave the stagnation of opinion undisturbed, but with the ecclesiastics and ministers ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... with more good stories and wit, original and vicarious. Despite some entertaining extracts from his commonplace book I doubt if this side of him is quite worthily represented; at least nothing here quoted beats Lady TREE'S own mot for a mendacious newspaper poster—Canard a la Press. Possibly we are still to look for a more official volume of reference; meantime the present memoir gives a vastly readable sketch of one whose passing left a void perhaps unexpectedly hard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... pass over all the trans-shipments of Jack until he was eventually shipped on board the Mendacious, then lying at Malta with the flag of Sir Theophilus Blazers at the fore—a splendid ship, carrying 120 guns, and nearly 120 midshipmen of different calibres. (I pass over captain, lieutenant, and ship's company, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... here; this observation is quite in keeping with the general veracity of his account of his travels in Guiana, one of the most mendacious accounts of adventure ever told. Naturally, the scholarly researches of Westermarck have failed to discover this people; perhaps Lady Helen might best be protected among the Jibaros of Ecuador, where the men marry ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "Ah, well," the mendacious little creature replied, with an indifferent shrug of her soft shoulders, "mostly I'm not rosy at all, but there's days when I is. I'm sorry you're offended by rosy cheeks like mine. I'll try not t' have it happen again ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... steeped in iniquity or has dined badly. In either case he is no true man. We stoutly contend that that worthy personage Epicurus has been shamefully misrepresented by abstemious, and hence envious and mendacious, historians. Either his philosophy was the most gentle, genial, and reverential of antique systems, or he was not an Epicurean, and to call him so is a deceitful flattery. We hold that it is morally impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of the land in courses, and yet deny ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... a liar without a peer among the adventurers of early American history. If it were not that his life was known to the famous men of his time, his entire memoirs from 1741 to 1771 might be rejected as fiction of the yellow order; but the comical thing is, the mendacious fellow cut a tremendous swath in his day. The garrisons of Kamchatka trembled at his name twenty-five years after his escapades. Ismyloff, who became a famous trader in the Russian Fur Company, could not be induced to open his mouth about the Pole to Cook, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... say, the youthful pupil is suddenly delighted to hear that there is no call upon her to choose between Grecian and Roman guides. Fortunately, and as if expressly to save her from any of those fierce disputes which have risen up between the true Scriptural chronology and the chronology of the mendacious Septuagint, it is laid down that the Greek and Roman history, soon after both had formally commenced, flowed apart for centuries; nor did they so much as hear of each other (unless as we moderns heard of Prester John in Abyssinia, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... upon Napoleon's defeating the sections around the Convention, "the hour had come and the Man," and that the thing called the French Revolution was thereby "blown into space," nothing more silly, mendacious, and "phantasmic" was ever stated by sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it, increased its authority and confidence. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanity—not excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseau—falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some very disagreeable truth of some other person; and then, re-established ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... a priori every statement of an author, for he cannot be sure that it is not mendacious or mistaken. At the best it affords a presumption. For the historian to adopt it and affirm it afresh on his own account implies that he regards it as a scientific truth. To take this decisive step is what he has no right to do without ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... political evils" of Judaea? was he not "summarily dealt with"? Did he not know that his doctrine would send on earth "not peace, but a sword"? and was he mendacious in saying, "Peace I leave unto you?" or were the angels mendacious in proclaiming, "Peace on earth, goodwill among men"? Was not "every syllable that Jesus uttered" in the discourse of Matth. xxiii., "an incentive to sedition?" and does this writer judge it to be mendacity, that Jesus opened by advising to OBEY the very ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Stukely, a kinsman both of Grenville and of Ralegh, was with Grenville on board the Tiger. For some unintelligible reason he thought himself entitled to L10,000 of the booty. According to his estimate, as reported by his mendacious son, Sir Lewis, the whole was worth L50,000. Much of the treasure consisted of a cabinet of pearls. Sir Lewis Stukely alleged that Ralegh charged Elizabeth with taking all to herself 'without so much as even giving ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... culture, even if of much intelligence, the difficulty of discerning what is true or false in the histories they read makes it a matter of the highest duty for those few persons who can give us criticism on historical works, at least to save us from insolent and mendacious carelessness in historical writers, if not by just encouragement to secure for nations some results not altogether unworthy of the great enterprise which the writing of history holds out itself to be. "Hujus enim fidei exempla majorum, vicissitudines rerum, fundamenta prudentiae ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... was all he had to be a defence to his own consulate. And Knappe himself, in his despatch of March 21st, 1889, castigates the practice with much sense. But this was after the tragi-comic culmination had been reached, and the burnt rags of one of these too-frequently mendacious signals gone on a progress to Washington, like Caesar's body, arousing indignation where it came. To such results are nations conducted by the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious traveller, a harmless, devout pilgrim, as careless in all matters of fact as Antonine the Martyr. But, as representing the beginnings of Russian expansion, he is of almost unique interest and value. His tract upon ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... their servility.[3] The young Jewish democrat agreeing on this point with Judas the Gaulonite, and admitting no master but God, was hurt at the honors with which they surrounded the persons of sovereigns, and the frequently mendacious titles given to them. With this exception, in the greater number of instances in which he comes in contact with pagans, he shows great indulgence to them; sometimes he professes to conceive more hope of them than of the Jews.[4] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... vice. If I could have induced him to smoke, take snuff, or indulge in a little innocent gambling, I believe it would have given me a good deal of satisfaction. Once, I remember, I exerted myself to the utmost to beguile him into taking a humorous view of a mendacious tramp, who, after having treated us to a highly pathetic autobiography, importuned us for a quarter. But no, Storm could see nothing but the moral hideousness of the man, lectured him severely, and would have sent him away unrewarded, if I had not ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... jumped Gort an' tried t' kill 'im!" one of the guards yelled, but was shouted down by the engineers, the checkers and the cook before the other slow-witted guards came to their senses enough to corroborate their fellow's mendacious claim. ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... a COMPLEX, mendacious, artful, and inscrutable animal, uncanny to the other animals by his artifice and sagacity, rather than by his strength, has invented the good conscience in order finally to enjoy his soul as something SIMPLE; and the whole of morality is a ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Some of these, at least, were men whom no pressure of outward circumstances could have induced to stab their bitterest foe in the dark, as this eminently respectable vice-regal assassin was in the frequent habit of doing in his despatches, and as he did when he wrote the mendacious words above quoted. Judge Willis doubtless associated with these men because he found them more to his taste than anyone else with whom he became acquainted in York. And his doing so was made much more of than the facts warranted. His acquaintance with the persons named was ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the misery inseparable from human existence itself; which is, to speak mythically, the curse that was laid on Adam, and through him on the whole race. But never has that delusion been proclaimed in a more mendacious and impudent manner than by the demagogues of the Jetstzeit—of the day we live in. As enemies of Christianity, they are, of course, optimists: to them the world is its own end and object, and accordingly in itself, that is ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Master of Arts who was trying to detain him at the order of the Vice-Chancellor. For this he was sent to prison, and fined 26s. 8d.; but he was released the very next day, and his fine cut down to 4d. He lived to be elected Master of University College nine years later, and to be the mendacious champion of the antiquity of Oxford against the Cambridge advocate. This was his namesake Dr. Caius, equally mendacious but more reputable, the pious 'second founder' of a ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... I fear that our chance is to persuade the jury that the man was insane or mendacious—in a word, to impeach his rationality or his truthfulness, one or the other; we must decide which stand we are to take, which ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... abandoned the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), alias (a mendacious person ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... with no information whatever to afford an excuse, alleged in a formal note to the Belgian Government that the French army intended to invade Germany through Belgian territory. This hypocritical and mendacious note ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on one side, rubbed his chin with nice consideration, and condescended, "What ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... "Mendacious?" Diavolo repeated; "that's do I tell lies, isn't it? Well, you see, sir, it's like this. If I'd been up to something, and you asked me if I'd done it, I'd say 'Yes' like a shot; but if Angelica had been up to something, and I knew all about it, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and beautiful teeth; temperate; quietly, even meanly, clad; generous, grateful for any favor, however small; masterful, courageous, impassive, shrewd, resolute, fluent of speech; profoundly religious, even superstitious; hot-tempered, inscrutable, mendacious, revengeful sometimes and ofttimes forgiving, disdainful of woman and her charms; above all, boastful, conceited, and with a passion for glory. His pride and his imagination were to be barbaric in their immensity, his clannishness was to be that of the most primitive civilization. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... mendacious local schoolmaster began comparing these villains to the patriotic Dutch who flooded their land rather than permit it to be conquered ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Chichele, naive and frank in divers rural circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect piece of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in every movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips of her polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... sinecure by any means. Which post, like every other, always had a tendency to become hereditary, if the kindred did not fail in fit men. And hence have come the innumerable Markgraves, Marquises, and such like, of modern times: titles now become chimerical, and more or less mendacious, as most of our titles are,—like so many BURGS changed into "Boroughs," and even into "Rotten Boroughs," with Defensive BURGhers of the known sort: very mournful to discover. Once Norroy was not all pasteboard! At the heart of that huge whirlwind ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... independence. As there is no reason to suspect Herodotus either of partiality toward the Medes or of any wilful departure from the truth, we must regard him as imposed upon by his informants, who were probably either Medes or Persians. These mendacious patriots found little difficulty in palming their false tale upon the simple Halicarnassian, thereby at once extending the antiquity of their empire and concealing its shame behind a halo ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... of those jesters, Beauchene and Seguin, quite a flood of words rose to Mathieu's lips. He would have liked to answer them; he would have liked to triumph over the mendacious theories which they still dared to assert even in their hour of defeat. To fear that the earth might become over-populated, that excess of life might produce famine, was this not idiotic? Others only had to do as he had done: create the necessary subsistence ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... forgot Pontianus, his own brother's son, of whose death he had been continually accusing me only a few days previously. He made absolutely no mention of the death of his young kinsman[6]; he abandoned this most serious charge, but—to avoid the appearance of having totally abandoned his mendacious accusations—he selected, as the sole support of his indictment, the charge of magic—a charge with which it is easy to create a prejudice against the accused, but which it is hard to prove. Even that he had not ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... excitement that terminated in the disastrous railway panic, were ready to give scientific evidence on engineering questions, with less regard to truth than to the interests of the persons who paid for their evidence. Having by mendacious evidence gravely injured a cause in which Mr. Hill was interested as counsel, and Mr. Tite, the eminent architect, and present member for Bath, was concerned as a projector, this witness was struck with apoplexy and died—before he could complete ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... downright fraud, simply enter the commercial field against the whole world, using ruthlessly whatever inventive skill and knowledge the original patentee may have disclosed, and trusting to the power of money, rapid movement, and mendacious advertising to build up a business which shall presently assume such formidable proportions as to force a compromise, or stave off an injunction until the patent has expired. In nine cases out of ten ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... civilising ideals of the first Republic, as if Germany were now going to be civilised for the first time, and as if he, who had made an end of the second Republic by a coup d'etat, could speak in the name of Republican freedom. His whole attitude was mendacious and mean, and the wretched pretext under which he declared war could not but prejudice Europe against him. In addition to this, as they knew very well in England, from the earlier wars of the Empire, he had no generals; his ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... reigned supreme in the Rogron household while he, the colonel, had no hold there except by the extremely hypothetical tie of his mendacious affection for Sylvie, which it was not yet clear that Sylvie reciprocated. When the lawyer told him of the priest's manoeuvre, and advised him to break with Sylvie and marry Pierrette, he certainly flattered ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... end of sympathetic exaggerations. Report ran in Berlin, for example, that the poor Princess was killed, beaten or trampled to death; which we clearly see she was not. Voltaire, in that mass of angry calumnies, very mendacious indeed, which he calls VIE PRIVEE DU ROI DE PRUSSE, mentions the matter with emphasis; and says farther, The Princess once did him (Voltaire) the "honor to show him a black mark she carried on her breast ever after;"—which is likelier to be false than true. Captain Guy Dickens, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... to the Reader, or the set of Iambic verses, is not the Regii Sanguinis Clamor. Take now this in brief, therefore, that you may not be able so to wheel about or prevaricate in future, or hope for any escape or concealment, and that all may know how far from mendacious, how veritable on the contrary, or at least not unfounded, was that report which arose about you: take, I say, this in brief,—that I have ascertained, not by report alone, but by testimony than which none can be surer, that you managed the bringing out of the whole book entitled Regii Sanguinis ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of their own culpability, does seem to us almost incredible. Yet so it is. Irish grievances are now in fashion. The most glaring fabrications are swallowed with anxiety if they only profess to be recitals of Irish sufferings; and the British people seem ready to yield to the clamours of mendacious and designing demagogues, measures not only detrimental to the interests of the country for whose welfare they profess so much anxiety, but absolutely ruinous to the glory and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... him which county, because one should never goad a willing horse. The Fourth Officer had been in a thoroughly mendacious vein ever since we left St. Kitts; the fault grew upon him, and now he began to utter transparent inaccuracies at all hours, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... good; she wouldn't sacrifice us that way!" Biddy protested. "Besides, I'm the one to stay with mamma; not that I can manage and look after her and do everything so well as Grace. But, you know, I want to," said Biddy with a liquid note in her voice—and giving her lump of clay a little stab for mendacious emphasis. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... viz. the protest made by Dr. Krause at the presence of the two civilians who accompanied Major Davis. Lord Roberts asked for the reason of this protest, and was informed that, according to the view of the people in Johannesburg, these men, through the part they played in the mendacious political agitation which was carried on prior to the war, were partly responsible for the war, and further that he (Dr. Krause) had in his possession a warrant for the arrest of one of these men for high treason, issued prior to the commencement ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... universal force. In nature this force or principle appears confounded with particular interests and transitory circumstances, mixed up with what is arbitrary in the passions and in individual wills. Art sets the truth free from the illusory and mendacious forms of this coarse, imperfect world, and clothes it in a nobler, purer form created by the mind itself. Thus the forms of art, far from being mere appearances, perfectly illusory, contain more reality ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... inveterate in man. The artist in his studio, the writer in his study, strive to tell their soul's secret; the peasant throws himself at the feet of the priest, for, like them, he would unburden himself of that terrible weight of inwardness which is man. Is not the most mendacious mistress often taken with the desire of confession ... the wish to reveal herself? Upon this bed rock of human nature the confessional has been built. And Owen admired the humanity of Rome. Rome was terribly human. No Church, he reflected, was so human. Her doctrine ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... continuation of the first, opens with an elaborate refutation of Apion. Josephus questions whether he should take the trouble to confute the scurrilous stories of the Alexandrian grammarian, "which are all abuse and vulgarity"; but because many are pleased to pick up mendacious fictions, he thinks it better not to leave the charges without an answer. He disposes first of Apion's tales about Moses and the Exodus, which are of the same character as those of Manetho and Chaeremon. Loaded abuse and unmeasured invective color the refutation, but Apion apparently ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... mendacious statement was contradicted by Carmel herself, who came running over the lawn with an agility that put crutches out of all question, and a complexion that was certainly ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... long, O mendacious Greece, wilt thou tell us of Doriscus,[96] the Thracian town, and of the army counted there in battalions in a fenced space, when we careful, or to speak more truly, cautious historians, exaggerate nothing, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... later popular volume of travels, passing under the name of Sir John Mandeville, managed, by making use of a slight acquaintance with Asia, of a fuller knowledge of the writings of other travellers, and, most of all, of the resources of a fertile imagination, to weave a tissue of mendacious description which really lessened knowledge. [Footnote: Travels of Sir John Mandeville (ed. ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... now! That in his depravity he should have stolen was bad enough; but that now, to cover his tracks, he should accuse and defame a defenceless woman is infamy! Look at his story, and tell me could anything be more pitiful and mendacious? Her handkerchief was found in his bureau the night of the robbery. Where is the handkerchief now? He burned it! He found a note on a card from her hidden in the handkerchief she had given Hatton to replace in the drawer. Where is the card? He burned it! He 'purposely destroyed all evidence against ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... informed me to my face that any man situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the spot. Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the hotels is female entanglements—mendacious, unwifely, and for ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... blistering night in August. All day long the mercury in the thermometer had been flirting with the figures at the top of the tube, and the promised shower at night which a mendacious Weather Bureau had been prophesying as a slight mitigation of our sufferings was conspicuous wholly by its absence. I had but one comfort in the sweltering hours of the day, afternoon and evening, and that was that my family were away in the ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... which was meant as much for the public ear as for that of the judge, he said: "These paltry charges, may it please your Honor, these foul and slanderous charges, the filthy ooze of an irresponsible newspaper, are incredible, preposterous—nay, mendacious! They are not made in good faith. The purpose of those who are fomenting mischief, under the pretence of performing public duty, is not what it professes to be. The motives underlying this show of public virtue ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... school for very nearly three years, and I shall divide that memorable period into three distinct epochs—the desponding, the devotional, and the mendacious. After I had been flogged into uncertain health, I was confined, for at least six weeks, to my room, and, when I was convalescent, it was hinted by the surgeon, in not unintelligible terms, to Mr Root, that if I did not experience the gentlest treatment, I might ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Dog. We will hereafter publish a paper in Tucson; and if we have been weak and mendacious enough to speak in favor of a party of the name of Bland, who misconducts a low beanery which insults an honourable man by stealing his name—we refer to that feed-trough called the Abe Lincoln House—we will correct ourselves in its columns. This person harbours a vile goat, for whose ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... he is apt to consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon's Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in 8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he revels in those books which are the material for historians, the scattered stones out of which he ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... the open mouths of beer and wine-cellars. Quiet coffee-houses there were, in which grave citizens smoked and read; and admirable concerts in saloons, and in the open air. To one of these latter I was seduced by the mendacious announcement of a certain Wagner of Berlin, that a whole troop of real Moors would perform fantastic tricks before high heaven; and on paying the price of admission, I had to run the gauntlet through a score of black-headed Teutons, who salaamed and grinned as they ushered me ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... opposed abilities more finely forensic; in bidding for purchasable favors he offered prices which utterly deranged the market; the judges found at his hospitable board entertainment for man and beast, the like of which had never been spread in the Territory; with mendacious witnesses he confronted ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... and to us! He too is a frightful man; repeating about this Universe on every hand what is not, and driven to repeat it; the sure herald of ruin to all that follow him, that know with his knowledge! And would you learn how to get a mendacious thought, there is no surer recipe than carrying a loose tongue. The lying thought, you already either have it, or will soon get it by that method. He who lies with his very tongue, he clearly enough has long ceased to think truly in his mind. Does he, in any sense, "think"? ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... and first elements characterize all countries more or less alike—we ask for examples, for one example only, of the successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry. The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!—nothing? Were general restrictive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... confirmed by further critical reading of his treatise. In that skilful tractate one comes across, every here and there, a suggestio falsi [suggestion of a falsehood], or a suppressio veri [suppression of the truth], or a fallacious analogy nebulously expressed, or a mendacious metaphor, or a passage which is contrived to lead off attention from some weak point in the feminist case.[1] Moreover, Mill was unmindful of the obligations of intellectual morality when he allowed his stepdaughter, in connexion with feminist ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright |
