"Sensationalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves idealists. Many have been induced to become "free-willists" because the name has suggested to them a proper regard for that freedom which is justly dear to all men. We can scarcely approach with an open mind an account of ideas and sensations which we hear described as "sensationalism," or worse yet, as "sensualism." When a given type of philosophy is set down as "dogmatism," we involuntarily feel a prejudice ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... some small movement happens to favour one of the million things suggested by some great man; whereupon the great man is turned into the running slave of the small movement. Thus certain sectarian movements borrowed the sensationalism without the sacramentalism of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents found it easier to imitate De Quincey's opium than his eloquence. Unless we grasp this plain common sense (that you or I are not responsible ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never, from personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its sensationalism is personally repellent to me. On the other hand, no matter how carefully the public prosecutor may preserve the legal viewpoint and the legal temperament, his work may lead him into situations where he ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... only been found, but proved to be the prisoner's own wife, who had been so active in his defense. This announcement was stupefying enough to over-shadow all other news of the day, and satisfied the most jaded palate for sensationalism. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... of the unreal abstractions of an effeminate sentimentalism—the paragons who prate platitudes and die young—and of the morbid specimens of youthful infamy only too frequently paraded by the equally unreal sensationalism of to-day to meet the cravings of a ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... originality in plot and characterization, but also a lowering of moral tone, which results largely from the closer identification of the drama with the Court party. There is a lack of seriousness of purpose, an increasing tendency to return, in more morbid spirit, to the sensationalism of the 1580's, and an anxious straining to attract and please the audiences by almost any means. These tendencies appear in the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose reputations are ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... moderate triumvirate—Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to reasonable people as 'Asian Mysteries,' tall ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... who had written the account of that first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last paragraph, too, which hailed Denny—"The Pilgrim," they called him in the paper, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... species of envy, we think may be more justly regarded as having its foundation in the love of sensationalism to which human nature is prone—sensationalism which appears to become all the racier when it finds its food in high quarters. The particular direction the tendency took was influenced by the blindness of George III. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... myself to a matter-of-fact description of this gloomy subject, and to avoid anything that could be construed into mere sensationalism. And yet deaf must be the ears, and hard must be the hearts, that can be insensible to the cries of agony that yearly ascend from thousands and tens of thousands of homes. In a recent Government report, I find that from cholera alone in one year there were reported no less than 300,000 deaths; and ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... sphere more has been written than on the subject of its own proper ideal. The effect upon philosophy has, in the past, been most notable, but most varied; in the seventeenth century, idealism and rationalism, in the eighteenth, materialism and sensationalism, seemed equally its offspring. Of the effect which it is likely to have in the future it would be very rash to say much; but in one respect a good result appears probable. Against that kind of scepticism which abandons the pursuit ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... an author who can deftly use sensationalism to his purpose without forcing it for mere effect, and who can also depict the character of a strong man as honest as determined in love with a sweet woman. He tells a story ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... to watch. She could see the Contessa's rapid, stoat-like sensationalism, Gudrun's ultimate but treacherous cleaving to the woman in her sister, Ursula's dangerous helplessness, as if she were ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... thinker who was destined to give direction to George Eliot's philosophy. Feuerbach was a disciple of Hegel, whose influence is deeply marked through all his earlier writings. He also was affected by physical science, and he found in sensationalism an element for his system. To him all thought is the product of experience; he founded his ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses. The external world affects the senses and generates feeling, feeling produces ideas. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... deepest nature is a moral being, and that only a play which satisfies the whole nature of man by showing the triumph of the moral law can ever wholly satisfy an audience or a people. Beaumont and Fletcher, forgetting the deep meaning of life, strove for effect by increasing the sensationalism of their plays; Webster reveled in tragedies of blood and thunder; Massinger and Ford made another step downward, producing evil and licentious scenes for their own sake, making characters and situations more immoral till, notwithstanding these dramatists' ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... dramatic poem, there is nevertheless infused into some of its chief numbers more potent dramatic expression than is found in any previous opera. Thoroughly cosmopolitan in subject, it is nevertheless German in that its lofty earnestness of tone offers a protest against all shallowness and sensationalism. The entire story of the opera is told in ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... sensationalism, the Shagreen Skin had a success of curiosity equal, and, if anything, superior to that of the Physiology. The author, however, had to defend himself against the charge of copying foreign literature—Hoffman's tales in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... story—l'anecdote, as a French critic calls it—over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. This feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to historical painting as the record of facts—in itself not the highest interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we shall see how ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... a moment," she concluded, lowering her voice and taking advantage of the very novelty of the situation she had created. "Such diseases are the product of civilization, of sensationalism. Naturally enough, then, woman, with her delicately balanced nervous organization, is the first and chief offender—if you insist on calling such a person an offender under your antiquated methods of ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... developed, with a naturalness beyond praise. . . . It must rank with 'Greifenstein' as the best work the author has produced. It fulfils every requirement of artistic fiction. It brings out what is most impressive in human action, without owing any of its effectiveness to sensationalism or artifice. It is natural, fluent in evolution, accordant with experience, graphic in description, penetrating in analysis, and absorbing in ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... too, it seemed to feed into flame that smouldering fury that possessed him. His life—or Whitey Mack's! Men, women, and the children who turned night into day in that quarter of the city were clustered thick around the signs, hiving like bees to the bald sensationalism. Almost savagely he began to force his way through the crowd—and the next instant, like a man stunned, had stopped in his tracks. His fingers had closed in a fierce, spasmodic clutch over an envelope that had been thrust suddenly ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... unforgettable original. It was Virginia Kingsley, who, two years before, had been Sheldon's assistant. The picture was labeled, "Death Ends Wanderlust of Mysterious Heiress," and the article was couched in a like style of curiosity-piquing sensationalism. Stripped of its fulsome verbiage, it told of the girl's recent death in Italy, after traveling about Europe with an invalid sister; during which progress, the article gloated, she was "vainly wooed by the Old World's proudest nobility ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... life have "to do with the case." These are all the offsprings of minds tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them to the great living fact of God's providence which is and has ever been ruling the lives of his ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... astrology; and while recognizing the validity of Galileo's system, predicted that this truth would involve its promulgator in serious difficulties with the Roman Inquisition. In his treatises on psychology and metaphysics, he originated a theory of sensationalism akin to that of Locke. There was, in fact, no field of knowledge which he had not traversed with the energy of a discoverer. Only to poetry and belles lettres he paid but little heed, disdaining the puerilities ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... mind to take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate true knowledge—to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism—that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge with the reception and association of sensory impressions. In John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties, like discernment or discrimination, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey |
