"Sophistry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were afterwards performed. Medals were distributed to all the officers, and to the men who had distinguished themselves. Poets and painters vied with each other in celebrating a battle which, disastrous as it was, had yet been honourable to their country: some, with pardonable sophistry, represented the advantage of the day as on their own side. One writer discovered a more curious, but less disputable ground of satisfaction, in the reflection that Nelson, as may be inferred from his name, was of Danish descent, and his actions therefore, the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... the most murderous "dynamite toys"—who, called before the Senate of the United States anxious to adopt means for the repression of a too free trade in such implements, found an argument that ought to become immortalized for its cynical sophistry—"My machines," that expert is reported to have said—"are quite harmless to look at; as they may be manufactured in the shape of oranges, hats, boats, and anything one likes.... Criminal is he who murders people by means of such machines, not he who manufactures ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... Character, the Character of an honest Man, that I have not Patience to reason upon such an uncharitable Supposition. I know very well, Sir, that I am addressing my self to a Man of Parts, a Master in Logick, and a subtle Metaphysician, not to be imposed upon by Sophistry or false Pretences: Therefore I beg of you, carefully to examine what I have said hitherto, and you'll be convinced; that my not believing you to have read The Fable of the Bees, can proceed from ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... evident to me that a bachelor's life in lodgings again would be dreary and lonely. And all this time the fear that I had offended God troubled me more than I have said, and it occurred to me (there may have been a touch of sophistry in this, or not) that if I were a true husband to her for the future—stuck to her and worked for her for the rest of my days—perhaps it would find favor in God's sight and be an atonement for my sin. Had she been free I would have married her, I believe. But she began to be harassed by her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... topic which Cicero and his friends discuss is, the endurance of pain. Is it an unmixed evil? Can anything console the sufferer? Cicero at once condemns the sophistry of Epicurus. The wise man cannot pretend indifference to pain; it is enough that he endure it with courage, since, beyond all question, it is sharp, bitter, and hard to bear. And what is this courage? Partly excitement, partly the impulse of honour or of shame, partly the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... satisfied, however, with the sophistry of his councilors, and as a quietus to it, the well-meaning ordinances just cited were enacted. They, too, remained a dead letter, and not even the scathing and persevering denunciations of Las ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the degradation of morals, for they dissected and represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, What is there in it?—and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast. Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... small importance if a presiding judge of lofty qualifications guided, as with us, the minds of the jury through the mazes of argument and sophistry, and set the real issue plainly before them. But in Rome no such prerogative rested with the presiding judge, [3] who merely saw that the provisions of the law under which the trial took place were complied with. The judges, or rather jurors, were, in Rome as in Athens, [4] both ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... little sophistry in that argument," replied I; "but we had better wait till we find whether we shall have the opportunity afforded us of trying our powers of fascination before we quarrel about the effects to be produced by them. I ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals; I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say, 'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong; everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is not the rightful king who has ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... we are so ready to say,' she answered, her breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it belongs to them, not to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whose tool he found himself forced to be. Without trial Rizal was ordered deported to Dapitan, a small settlement on the northern coast of Mindanao. The decree ordering this deportation and the destruction of all copies of his books to be found in the Philippines is a marvel of sophistry, since, in the words of a Spanish writer of the time, "in this document we do not know which to wonder at most: the ingenuousness of the Governor-General, for in this decree he implicitly acknowledges his weakness ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... The sophistry about the inalienable right of one man to crush another has had its day, and their hypocritical wail about civilization and this inalienable right, when these conscienceless rascals find their race is run, will be like the ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... and harassed condition, the sophistry illuded her; she was sensible only of the menace his words distilled. She saw herself tricked and trapped, meshed in a web of damning circumstance; everything was against her—appearances, the hands of all men, the cruel accident that had placed the necklace in her keeping, even her ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... noted that he turned aside from the worm in his path,—so I have allowed to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowledge, and not generally inhumane; allowing that the crime came upon him in the partial ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spite of the disasters of Charles XII., Napoleon tempted fortune too often and too long. It is not, then, by the mere knowledge of separate facts that history can contribute to our improvement or our happiness; it would then exchange the character of philosophy treated by examples, for that of sophistry misleading by empiricism. The more systematic the view of human events which it enables us to gain, the more nearly does it approach its real office, and entitle itself to the splendid panegyric of the Roman statesman—"Historia, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... cannot be justly punished, but is answerable only to God: Or should the same be offered in behalf of a divine, who would preach against religion and moral duties; in either of these two cases everybody would find out the sophistry, and presently answer, that although common men are not exactly skilled in the composition or application of medicines, or in prescribing the limits of duty; yet the difference between poisons and remedies is easily known by their effects, and common reason soon distinguishes ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... for the folly or injustice with which he might be charged, by writing another poem, called the Progress of a Freethinker, whom he intended to lead through all the stages of vice and folly, to convert him from virtue to wickedness, and from religion to infidelity, by all the modish sophistry used for that purpose; and, at last, to dismiss him by his own ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... brought into relation with Miss Lant, and, if possible, with certain of Miss Lant's friends. All very well, had not the reasoning been utterly insincere. It might have applied to another person; in Jane's case it was mere sophistry. Her nature was home-keeping; to force her into alliance with conscious philanthropists was to set her in the falsest position conceivable; striving to mould herself to the desires of those she loved, she would suffer patiently and in secret mourn ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... fellow citizens of Massachusetts. I offer them freely, without undertaking to specify, to all who have supported the great cause of the supremacy of the law. The heart of the people has proven again sound and true. No misrepresentation has blinded them, no sophistry has turned them. They have listened to the truth and followed it. They have again disappointed those who distrusted them. They have turned away from those who sought to play upon their selfishness. They have justified those who trusted them. They have justified America. The attempt ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... reached his home, nor was there hanging on the wall, as in so many German homes, the famous order of the day of Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria, which commences with "Soldiers of the army! Before you are the English!" in which he exhorts his troops with all the tricky sophistry of hate. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... discussion to use that mode of reasoning. The framework of his mental and moral being was honesty, and a wrong cause was poorly defended by him. The ability which some eminent lawyers possess, of explaining away the bad points of a cause by ingenious sophistry, was denied him. In order to bring into full activity his great powers, it was necessary that he should be convinced of the right and justice of the matter which he advocated. When so convinced, whether the cause was great or small, he was ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... now? Was there any other thing to expect? Was he, of all men, going to her with platitudes about courage and faith? And even so, would sophistry avail anything? Did he not know Ernestine far ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... I eat good children—why? Because I love them so!" (But this was empty sophistry, As your ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... What book contains one of his maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him, and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and fury, so much intrigue and sophistry, and self-seeking, and now the silence of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... part of the essay to pieces; but Bolingbroke supplies throughout the most characteristic element. The fragments cohere by external cement, not by an internal unity of thought; and Pope too often descends to the level of mere satire, or indulges in a quaint conceit or palpable sophistry. Yet it would be very unjust to ignore the high qualities which are to be found in this incongruous whole. The style is often admirable. When Pope is at his best every word tells. His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning into a ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... salubrious, sardonic, satellite, saturnine, schism, scurrilous, sectarian, secular, sedative, sedentary, seditious, sedulous, segregate, seismograph, senescent, sententious, septuagenarian, sequester, sibilant, similitude, sinecure, sinuous, solicitous, solstice, somnolent, sophisticated, sophistry, sorcery, spasmodic, specious, spirituelle, splenetic, spontaneity, sporadic, spurious, stipend, stipulate, stoical, stricture, stringency, stultify, stupendous, sublimity, suborn, subpoena, subsidiary, subsidy, substratum, subtend, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... frightened" if anything came of their "foolish and wicked words." The letter was lengthy, and contained some telling phrases such as Mr. Churchill has always been skilful in coining; but the "turgid homily—a mixture of sophistry, insult, and menace," as The Times not unfairly described it, was less effective than the terse and simple rejoinder in which Mr. Bonar Law pointed out that Mr. Churchill's onslaught wounded his father's memory ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... such concurrent verdicts, a strain of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... inhabitants—such studies cannot fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. They promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline, as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric. The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air of a mountain top—thin, but pure and bracing. And as a subject of education science has a further advantage which can hardly be overestimated. It is in science that most ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to degrade and besmirch oneself," we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... us, and make us perceive the falshood of this proposition, though it be true with relation to that idea, which we had formed. If the mind suggests not always these ideas upon occasion, it proceeds from some imperfection in its faculties; and such a one as is often the source of false reasoning and sophistry. But this is principally the case with those ideas which are abstruse and compounded. On other occasions the custom is more entire, and it is seldom we run ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... hate, Anselmo—'tis a bitter word; Say rather fear—of what belongs to Heav'n. Was there no crime, Anselmo, when thou stol'st, Like a disguised thief, this trusting heart? What sophistry can'st thou put forth to show Thou should'st ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... exclaims Jean Jacques, "have the arrogance to say, 'I built this wall; I earned this land by my labor.' Who set you the tasks? we may reply, and by what right do you demand payment from us for labor which we did not impose upon you?" All sophistry falls to the ground in the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... it fair to persecute, in this way, at the instigation of a proud aristocrat (he had already learned this slang sophistry), a young man, who is almost a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at a time when the minds of the rest of Europe were tolerably pacified in a religious respect, became the scene of theological controversies full of sophistry and bitterness, the natural consequence of the incipient oppression of the dissidents. The literature was overwhelmed with pamphlets, stuffed with a shallow scholastic erudition, and written in a style both bombastic and vulgar. But the ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... sensible, though I dare say it is full of sophistry; but I have made up my mind to go into the country and paint while Salemina and Francesca are on the Continent. One cannot think in this whirl. A winter season in Washington followed by a summer season in London,—one wants a breath of fresh ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was to confound the wretch, meaning Jesus Christ. Hence their secret watchword was 'Crush the wretch.' The following are some of their doctrines, as found in their books expressly designed for general circulation. Sometimes standing out in their naked horror, at other times enveloped in sophistry and disguise. The Universal Cause, that God of the philosophers, of the Jews, and of the Christians, is but a chimera and a phantom—The phenomena of nature only prove the existence of God to a few prepossessed men—It is more reasonable ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... Englishman discovers some productive germ that with his indefatigable energy brings forth a thousand fold. Nor is Colonial work, industrial activity and commercial thrift disturbed by bureaucratic sophistry or immoderate fiscal pretentions, that so frequently suffocate the most promising and audacious undertakings ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... talks philosophy, well, it is philosophy or at any rate sophistry; but when a woman, or two women, talk philosophy—it's ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief's costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn't hand out the Indian Remedy ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... adopted, I would say—destroy the facility of spirit-drinking, by laying on a heavy duty. It is in vain that interested sophistry would plead its benefits in particular cases—such, for instance, as the ludicrous plea of the needfulness of drams for market-women on wet and frosty mornings.[A] Set these specious benefits against the dreadful results to men's health and ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... applied to our complex government, is inconsistent with reason, and has often been effectually refuted by argument. But sophistry, stimulated by ambition, was ever ready to renew the controversy, and to perpetuate it in all the forms of vicious logic and plausible ratiocination. The appeal to force, however, has done something more than refute an argument; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would never offer other than reverence to any woman again. He further added that his action had not intended any insult to her, that he was merely expressing his natural admiration for a spirit so good and true, and that his soul was innocent of any intention of evil. With sophistry in the use of which he was an adept, he closed his epistle, fully clearing himself, and assuring her that he could have made her understand it that day if she had not left so suddenly, and he had not been almost immediately called away to the dying bed of his dear ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... our power behind the throne; he left out our copy on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the texts before me. Such obedience is a religious duty. It is the will of God. I appeal to the texts. They proclaim the Law of God. Peaceful subjection to government is his law; and men are guilty of sophistry and falsehood, when, to excuse wicked evasion of Law or violent resistance, they pretend to appeal to what they call "the higher laws of God." There are no such higher laws. The texts before me are his law. If one man has a moral right, either ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... heard him thus argue, adroitly stole an arrow out of his own quiver, and addressed him as he had frequently heard him address others. And there was just enough truth mixed with the sophistry of his argument to carry conviction to the mind of one as unstable as Ashton; for he did feel all unnerved. He had broken off suddenly from a long-continued drunken spree, and was beginning to have premonitions of something which he dreaded ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... circumstances, Romola would have been sensitive to the appeal at the beginning of Savonarola's speech; but at this moment she was so utterly in antagonism with him, that what he called perplexity seemed to her sophistry and doubleness; and as he went on, his words only fed that flame of indignation, which now again, more fully than ever before, lit up the memory of all his mistakes, and made her trust in him seem to have been a purblind delusion. She ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the habitual first duty of generations of British noblemen on coming into their estates and titles was to ship their heirs and next of kin to America, and then forget all about them. He had listened patiently to claims to positions more or less exalted,—claims often presented with ingenuous sophistry or pathetic simplicity, prosecuted with great good humor, and abandoned with invincible cheerfulness; but they seldom culminated more seriously than in the disbursement of a few dollars by the consul ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... NATURE. A moral theory that is merely coercive and arbitrary, therefore, is not in a genuine sense moral. A morality, to justify itself, must appeal to the heart of man. The good which it recommends must be a good which man can without sophistry approve. And the good for which man can whole-heartedly strive is not determined by logic, but, in the last analysis, by biology. Human beings cannot freely call good that to which they have no spontaneous ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... was about Mary that made her little speeches, half argumentative, all-pleading, so wonderfully persuasive. Her facts were mere fancies, and her logic was not even good sophistry. As to real argument and reasoning, there was nothing of either in them. It must have been her native strength of character and intensely vigorous personality; some unknown force of nature, operating through her occultly, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... Douglas, says Mr. Blaine, "was everywhere known as a debater of singular skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was a master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... sarcastic slang, which for me was so captivating, that I soon lost all reserve, and found myself listening and suggesting by turns—acquiescent and pleased—sometimes hazarding dissent; but whenever I did, foiled and floored by a few pointed satirical sentences, whose sophistry, for such I must now believe it, confounded me with a rapidity which, were it not for the admiration with which he had insensibly inspired me, would have piqued and irritated my vanity ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... through the darkness upon me. Hunched up in the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine my mental balance with his sophistry. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... affected the humorous and almost conversational tone of the work before us. In the conscious pride of mental might and in the easier moments of conversations, that illuminated the minds of Reynolds[10] and of Burke, Johnson delighted to indulge in a lively sophistry which might sometimes deceive himself, when at first he merely wished to sport in elegant raillery or ludicrous paradox. When these sallies were recorded and brought to bear against him on future occasions, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... forged on, "the work should be its own reward, its own justification. At least would-be artists are told so repeatedly. Whenever one rebels at the injustice the world is there with this sophistry, feeds him with it as a nurse feeds pap to a crying child, until he's full and temporarily comatose. But just suppose for an instant that the same argument were used in any other field of endeavor. Suppose, for instance, you told the prospector who'd spent years searching for and ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... the principles of religion, and grown up in the practice of virtue under the control of a well regulated restraint, have not only deviated lamentably from the paths of rectitude, but been willing to call in sophistry to disarm conscience, or as doctor Johnson says, to lull their imaginations with ideal opiates. Can it appear surprising then that a hot-brained giddy youth like Hodgkinson should find it easy to compound that affair, immoral as it was, with his conscience, and to let ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... shake our heads at the transparent sophistry of the plea, which requires no exposure. For Chaucer knew very well how to give life and colour to his page without recklessly disregarding bounds the neglect of which was even in his day offensive to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... of a conscientious scruple. I went straight to my traitor, to confide In him; his sophistry made me believe That I must give the box to him to keep, So that, in case of search, I might deny My having it at all, and still, by favour Of this evasion, keep my conscience clear Even in taking oath ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... utterance for feeling, deep, intense, And for my frenzy finding no fit name, Sweep round the ample world with every sense, Grasp at the loftiest words to speak my flame, And call the glow, wherewith I burn, Quenchless, eternal, yea, eterne— Is that of sophistry a devilish play? ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... upon the other, be you the witnesses. Do you attest of everything that is liberal and free in spirit, that is "so nominated in the bond;" and of everything that is grudging, self-seeking, unjust, or unfair, that it is by no sophistry ever to be found there. I beg to move the resolution which I have already had the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... did not know how to answer so ridiculous a sophistry; and, truth to tell, she was more than pleased to hear from the lips of Roger de Conde what bored her on ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... without criminality, which Reuben suggested, is an instance of the shallow pretexts with which the sophistry of sin fools men before they have done the wrong thing. Sin's mask is generally dropped very soon after. The bait is useless when the hook is well in the fish's gills. 'Don't let us kill him. Let us put him into a cistern. He cannot climb up its bottle-shaped, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... these simple folk quite obtuse to the true and adequate solution of their problems (I am speaking of cases where such solutions are possible), makes them perfectly ready to accept any sort of counter-sophistry or paralogism. A most excellent and genuine "convert" of that class told me that he had stood out for years against the worship of the Blessed Virgin, till one day it had occurred to him that, as a ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... a wretched vagrant pioneer; later he gave expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching or misrepresentation or sophistry, the ugliness of his youth ceases to be his own and becomes only the presentation of a curious social condition. In his youth he expressed a low condition, in later life a noble one; at each period he expressed correctly ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... supreme there cannot be a concurrent authority; and further, that where the laws of the Union are supreme, those of the States must be subordinate; because there cannot be two supremes. This is curious sophistry. That two supreme powers cannot act together is false. They are inconsistent only when they are aimed at each other or at one indivisible object. The laws of the United States are supreme, as to all their proper, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... plausible argument. The Catholics say that no Protestant can be saved, but the Protestants admit that a Catholic may be, if in heart honest, just, and true. The sophistry of the plea in behalf of an insincere renunciation of faith is too palpable to influence any mind but one eager to be convinced. The king was counseled to obey the Decalogue, which forbids false witness, while at the same time he was to ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... of time. Side by side for seven years we had mined, ranched, sold patent churns, herded sheep, took photographs and other things, built wire fences, and picked prunes. Thinks I, neither homocide nor flattery nor riches nor sophistry nor drink can make trouble between me and Paisley Fish. We was friends an amount you could hardly guess at. We was friends in business, and we let our amicable qualities lap over and season our hours ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... the interest of Philip, assumed to be identical with the welfare of his people, he took up arms against the tyrant who was sacrificing both. This mask of loyalty would never save his head from the block, as he well knew, but some spirits lofty as his own, might perhaps be influenced by a noble sophistry, which sought to strengthen the cause of the people by attributing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Christendom; and Stephen boldly renewed the attempt at domination commenced by his predecessor Victor. His opponents deserved far greater credit for the sturdy independence with which they upheld their individual rights than for the scriptural skill with which they unmasked the sophistry of a delusive theory; for all their reasonings were enervated and vitiated by their stupid admission of the claims of the chair of Peter as the rock on which the Church was supposed to rest. [358:3] This second effort of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... solemnly, and with no pretense of sophistry, "is the string of death, and he who plays upon it ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... money. Is this an unjustifiable imputation of bad motives? In the name of outraged Morality, I deny it. These men have combined together, and have stolen a woman. Why should they not combine together and steal a cash-box? I take my stand on the logic of rigid Virtue, and I defy all the sophistry of Vice to move me an inch ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... curtain, screen; blinder, blinker; subterfuge, pretext, ruse, stratagem, pretense, feint sophistry. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... his cousin was too simple-minded and clear-headed ever to entertain for an instant: and he was singularly ingenious in discovering blunders in all the acts of the republic, when they conflicted with the policy of Great Britain. In short, his talents were necessary, perhaps, to reconcile so much sophistry, or to render that reasonably plausible that was so fundamentally false. After the peace of 1815, John Effingham went abroad for the second time, and he hurried through England with the eagerness of strong affection; ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... except by his own choice. You might have been master of the vineyard, but you have preferred to have the vineyard master you. Confronted with an uncongenial task, you slunk away from it and shielded yourself behind the sophistry that the work was unworthy of you. As if any work ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."[55] ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... crafty words shall mar, Nor sophistry distract; No parrying counsel jar With the eternal fact;— Keep watch, my soul, in fear, The Judge ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... honoured fools! Yes, Honour decks the turf that wraps their clay! Vain Sophistry! in these behold the tools, The broken tools, that tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human hearts—to what?—a dream alone. Can despots compass aught that hails their sway? Or call with truth one span of earth their ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... inhabitant, the survivors would still be bound meekly to submit, and to be torn in pieces or roasted alive without a struggle. The arguments in favour of this proposition were futile indeed: but the place of sound argument was amply supplied by the omnipotent sophistry of interest and of passion. Many writers have expressed wonder that the high spirited Cavaliers of England should have been zealous for the most slavish theory that has ever been known among men. The truth is that this theory at first presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite of slavish. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dispensation, will do the rest. Our internal manufacturing and agricultural elements at the North, already powerful and irrepressible, will soon exercise a tremendous influence in our government. Shall it be the influence of ignorance played upon by the sophistry of demagogues and helping to rebuild the vicious doctrines that have stood firmly for so many years, or the healthful influence of intelligent industry tending to our greatness and prosperity? This our war is to decide. No peaceful ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... same earnest ardor and devotion to the old cause of the old country, the same solid fervor of enthusiasm and indignation, which animated the third great poet of Athens against the corruption of art by the sophistry of Euripides and the corruption of manhood by the sophistry of Socrates. The delicate skill of the workmanship can only be appreciated by careful and thorough study; but that the infusion of poetic fancy and feeling into the generally ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... these two noble men, who would have done anything for my happiness, actually overweighted my conscience and turned the sweetest dream of my life into a tragedy. How little strong men, with their logic, sophistry, and hypothetical examples, appreciate the violence they inflict on the tender sensibilities of a woman's heart, in trying to subjugate her to their will! The love of protecting too often degenerates into downright tyranny. Fortunately all these sombre pictures of a possible ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... there. It will be vain to argue that gathered fruit is only nature under a certain phase, and that a dead sheep or a dead pheasant is only a dead animal like a dead ass—it will be pitiably vain and miserable sophistry, since we know that the dead pheasant in a picture will always be as food, while the same at he poulterer's will ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... sank. I was not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis—to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry—to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view to their resolution. The aim of the dialogue is to show how the few elemental conceptions of the human mind admit of a natural connexion in thought and speech, which Megarian or other sophistry vainly ...
— Sophist • Plato
... sophistry of this reasoning—heartless because of its pitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women—is exposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions of the men. He does not deny that after the women have harvested their corn or maple sugar the men ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... while to think, not pausing that she might answer her aunt's sophistry, which she hardly noticed, but that she might consider, if it were possible, what it was that she was about to do;—that there might be left a moment to her before she had surrendered herself for ever to her doom. And then she spoke. ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... convicted in the eyes of the world of a great crime. No elaborate vindications, by their sophistry, or by barefaced misstatements of facts, could clear him, in the judgment of impartial men of either creed, from the guilt of such a butchery of his subjects as scarcely another monarch on record had ever perpetrated. Medals were ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... sweeping out of the way a noisome creature who spreads evil and misery. And Elsa's was also a simple and untutored soul, even though in her calmer temperament the wilder passions of men had found no echo. True and steadfast in love, her mind was too simple to grasp at sophistry, to argue about right or wrong; her feelings were her guide, and even while Andor—burning with love and impatience—argued and clung desperately to his own point of view, she felt only the desire to comfort and to succour—above all, to love—she was just a girl—Andor's sweetheart and not his judge. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is not to say that because it is over we are to deny that it ever existed. You may not feel anything now, but that is no reason for declaring that you did not feel it then. You thought you were in love, and therefore you were. It is sophistry to try to persuade oneself of the contrary in ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... very sagely, "is like any other sin, it's only sinful when it is. That's elementary sophistry, but I invented it, and I'm strong for it. Besides, we've got just twenty minutes now to get aboard the Owl—and I've got to beg, borrow, or buy transportation on it, because there wasn't a room left but the two I bought for you ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... question to decide which involved not only the heart but the mind: if she made a mistake now, she would be at odds with her higher faculties for the rest of her life. She dreaded the sophistry which sat on either side of the subject; and it was a question whether the very strength of her impulse toward the man she had loved for a year was not the strongest ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... mountain woman," he wrote. "None of your puny breed of modern femininity, but a remnant left over from the heroic ages,—a primitive woman, grand and vast of spirit, capable of true and steadfast wifehood. No sophistry about her; no knowledge even that there is sophistry. Heavens! man, do you remember the rondeaux and triolets I used to write to those pretty creatures back East? It would take a Saga man of the old Norseland to write for my mountain woman. If I were ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... of this exposition, the ardent advocates of the Colonization Society will undoubtedly attempt to evade the ground of controversy, and lead uncautious minds astray in a labyrinth of sophistry. But the question is not, whether the climate of Africa is salubrious, nor whether the mortality among the emigrants has been excessive, nor whether the colony is in a prosperous condition, nor whether the transportation ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... you are a victim of sophistry—sophistry of the most dangerous kind. I can't argue with you, but I pity you, and fear ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... with admiration, and to which he seems to have applied for relief whenever he felt harassed and discouraged in public business. But here this great man was interested by the subject he discusses, and by the whole course of his experience and conduct, to refute the dogmas of that pusillanimous sophistry and selfish indulgence by bringing forward the most glorious examples and achievements of patriotism. In this strain he had doubtless commenced his exordium, and in this strain we find him continuing it at the point in which the palimpsest becomes legible. He then proceeds to introduce ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... creature, the epitome of his intellect and character, of his strength and his weakness. Half a million circulation daily, three quarters of a million on Sunday—how mighty as a direct influence upon the people! Its clearness and vigour, its intelligence, its truth-like sophistry—how mighty as an indirect influence upon the minds of other editors and of public men! "Power—Success," he repeated to himself in an exaltation ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... has been a mystery to another woman. Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sifts her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and fingers before letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago Eve's son rang the door-bell of ...
— Options • O. Henry
... deficiency; and though he frequently was conscious that his ideas were more just, and his arguments better, than those of his companions, yet he could not at first bring out his ideas to advantage, or manage his arguments so as to stand his ground against the mixed raillery and sophistry of his school fellows. He had not yet the tone of his new society, and he was as much at a loss as a traveller in a foreign country, before he understands the language of a people who are vociferating round about him. As fast, however, as he learned to translate ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... surprising to Amherst; for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of faith in her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony that her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate and complete each other; that it needed no moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her appearance, her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate confidence in him, her resolve to support him in his avowed insubordination, to ignore, with the royal license of her sex, all that was irregular and inexpedient in asking his guidance ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... them and asked their mission among us. He did it briefly, and I hoped they would answer with equal bluntness, for I dreaded this part of the council. All of the Iroquois nations were trained rhetoricians, and I would need a long ear to catch their verbal quibbles and see where their sophistry ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives of the people. Books tell me so much that they inform me of nothing. Sophistry, the bane of freemen, launches forth in all her deceiving attire! After all, most men reason from passions; and shall such an ignorant individual as I am decide, and say this side is right, that side ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... informs may be crushed; the spirit in passing breathes on other souls, and other hearts are fired to action, and the fight goes on to victory. To the man whose mind is true and resolute ultimate victory is assured. No sophistry can sap his resistance; no weakness can tempt him to savage reprisals. He will neither abandon his heritage nor poison his nature. And in every crisis he is steadfast, in every issue justified. Rejoice, ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... all absolute Atheists. The notion that false religion implies the true, just as base coin implies the pure, will have weight with those, and only those, who cannot detect the sophistry of an argument a rubii toto caelo differentibus; or in plain English, from things entirely different presumed to be similar. Between coin and religion there is no precise analogy. False coin implies true coin, because none are sceptical as to the reality ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... himself the party aggrieved by the groundless accusation brought against him, he could not, without impairing the dignity due to his position, personally declare his regret for an act which he had never committed. He then counselled the Duke to place the affair in his hands, alleging with a sophistry which it is difficult to reconcile with reason that an apology made for him, instead of by him, would at once answer every purpose, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... at the hideous sophistry. For Nino is a good boy, and believes very much in heaven, as well as in a couple of other places. Benoni's quick brown eyes saw the movement, and understood it, for he laughed ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... camp with a letter addressed to "George Washington, Esq." Washington refused to receive it. The address was afterward changed to "George Washington, &c., &c." The messenger endeavored to show that this bore any meaning which might be desired. But Washington understood the sophistry and refused any communication which did not distinctly recognize his position as ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... cases clustering about individuals, the deadly results of autopsies, the inoculation by fluids from the living patient, the murderous poison of hospitals—does there not result a conclusion that laughs all sophistry to scorn, and renders ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... against whom she could never seriously offend. Was it so great a sin if the friendship of George Fairfax was dear to her? if the few happy hours of her life were those she spent in his company? But such special pleading as this was the poorest sophistry; at heart she was conscious that it was so. A woman has a double conscience, as it were—a holy of holies within the temple of her mind, to which falsehood cannot enter. She may refuse to lift the screen, and meet the truth face ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that 'continuates' society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,—not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Plato and Christ created angles by running vertical lines through the ecclesiastical and hypocritical conventionalities of their day. The new angles and curves thus produced by the bold philosophy of the humble Nazarene have confronted with impregnable firmness during the intervening ages the sophistry of the Pharisees. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Heaven lets fall its choicest gifts into hands that must be taught to hold them. Listen again. You forgot that repentant sin must not compromise, but look up, for redemption, to the purest and best. You went to her with the fine-spun sophistry that peace could be found in a mutual guilt; and she, fearful of losing what her heart so craved, thought it worth the price to buy it with a desperate, pure, beautiful lie. I have known her since the day she was born; she ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... disguise, using 'general principles' for showy perorations, or to be a string of platitudes with no definite application to facts. They are fit only for the platform, or only for the professor's lecture-room. Mill's treatise, according to his most famous antagonist, was a mere bundle of pretentious sophistry. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... was too accurate not to see the sophistry of this argument, "I shall be man-sworn in the very thing in which my testimony is wanted, for it is the concealment for which poor Effie is blamed, and you would make me tell a falsehood ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... appeared to listen with attention, and offered nothing against the reasoning of OMAR, yet secretly despised it as sophistry; which cunning only had rendered specious; and which he was unable to confute, merely because it was subtil, and not because it was true: he had been led, by his passions, first to love, and then to ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... was not a fool. In the discussion of graver matters—politics, law, and history—that arose in the smoking-room, he was not to be put down by more fluent tongues; demolished sophistry by solid reasoning, impregnable assertions, and an array of facts that might be prolix, but was always formidable—in short, sustained fully the character ascribed to him by his brother-in-law, of a "thoroughly ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... society would have branded him eternally for a coward had he held back; that he took up his weapon in self-defence precisely as a man levels his gun at the house-breaker or the midnight assassin;—the expounder of the law has still been proof against sophistry which, once accepted, must tend inevitably to social disorganization. The deliberate resolution to kill a fellow-creature has nothing to do with self-defence. To destroy another in cold blood is murder in the sight of the law, and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... they will take refuge up this tree, that all women who ever have had success have been actually mannish of mind,—a dodge in question-begging that is one of the most ingenious ever devised; a piece of masculine logic that puts to shame all historic examples of womanly fallacy and sophistry. It seems to me that the question is easily settled on this wise: it is impossible for a rational mind to deny that the best work done in the arts by women is of better quality than the average work done by men. This lets the cat's head out of the bag, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak; moreover, the wrong does not seem so great with an unmarried man, as with one who has a wife to be made unhappy. There may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... gleam of conscience in the shame and terror of this hasty action, which, in one short moment, tore the thin covering of sophistry from the cruel design, and laid it bare in all its meanness and heartless deformity. The father fell into his chair pale and trembling; Arthur Gride plucked and fumbled at his hat, and durst not raise his eyes from the floor; even Ralph crouched for the moment like a beaten hound, cowed by the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... had a fault, it was that he regarded all modern philosophy as sensuous naturalism; and if reason sometimes seemed to him suspicious, it was because he often confounded it with sophistry, which reasons indeed, but is far from ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... sophistry, Catherine," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Because you don't wish to marry a nobleman, you are not obliged to marry a mountebank ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... his very pride. A generous aspect is, however, sometimes assumed by pride; but vanity is inalterably contemptible in its selfish littleness, its restless greediness. Who shall tell its victims—who shall set bounds to its triumphs? Reason is more easily blinded by vanity than by sophistry; time and again has vanity misdirected feeling; often has vanity roused the most violent passions. Many have been enticed on to ruin, step by step, with the restless lure of vanity, until they became actually guilty of crimes, attributed to some more sudden, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... a good courage." Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. Above all let us dream no dreams and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever we may land, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter the next scene with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... facts existing relative to the island of St. Brandan: Its reality was for a long time a matter of firm belief. It was in vain that repeated voyages and investigations proved its nonexistence; the public, after trying all kinds of sophistry, took refuge in the supernatural, to defend their favorite chimera. They maintained that it was rendered inaccessible to mortals by Divine Providence, or by diabolical magic. Most inclined to the former. All kinds of extravagant fancies were indulged concerning it; [361] some ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... peradventure Callias, Thrasimachus, Polus, Aristophanes, or some of his adversaries and emulators might object; but neither they nor [4425]Anytus and Melitus his bitter enemies, that condemned him for teaching Critias to tyrannise, his impiety for swearing by dogs and plain trees, for his juggling sophistry, &c., never so much as upbraided him with impure love, writing or speaking of that subject; and therefore without question, as he concludes, both Socrates and Plato in this are justly to be excused. But suppose they had been ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the accidents of acts. But one thing may be subject to an infinity of accidents; hence the Philosopher says (Metaph. vi, 2) that "no art or science considers accidental being, except only the art of sophistry." Therefore the theologian has ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... a scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain, The creature's at his foolish work again, Throned in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... dwellings smoking round. The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside, To deeds of charitable intercourse, And bare fulfilment of the common laws 105 Of decency and prejudice, confines The struggling nature of his human heart, Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds A passing tear perchance upon the wreck Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door 110 The frightful waves are driven,—when his son Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion Drives his wife raving mad. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Amendment, if it were to be accepted by the people; and added that Negro suffrage was all the strain that the Republican party could bear at this time; but neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton were fooled by this sophistry. They knew that Republican politicians saw in the Negro vote in the South the means of keeping their party in power for a long time to come, and could entirely overlook justice to Negro women since they were assured of enough votes ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... loving the world and self, rendering evil for evil, backbiting, reveling, and professing to be traveling the narrow way that leads to eternal rest the same as if there was no Bible. Such have no examination of their lives, and should they have they use some satanic sophistry to gloss their sin. "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge?" It is he that shows out of a godly life that he is a Christian. It is he that carefully examines every act and thought and word and by Heaven's grace tolerates nothing in his life ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... wrong, or one which more loudly demanded a remedy; but the wrong was one by which they largely benefited, and the correction of it would have the effect of augmenting the power of their opponents. Accordingly, by every species of sophistry, by falsehoods of all kinds, by vehement denunciations and endeavours to arouse the passions of the Irish people, they moved Heaven and earth to thwart and defeat the measure. There was, however, only one moment at which the Government were ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... mental discomforts, he would have discovered there and then that the matter of his speech, not the manner of his delivery, was what held his wife's attention. No longer could rounded periods and eloquent sophistry hide from her ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' is foolish enough in these days. The speculation ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... integrity of their early opinions—for one unshackled, uncontaminated strain—one Io paean to Liberty—one burst of indignation against tyrants and sycophants, who subject other countries to slavery by force, and prepare their own for it by servile sophistry, as we see the huge serpent lick over its trembling, helpless victim with its slime and poison, before it devours it! On every stanza so penned would be written the word RECREANT! Every taunt, every reproach, every note of exultation at restored ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of shallow sophistry—because they often prefer Romeo and Juliet to the 'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at Coutts's—that we still preserve some vitality and some individual features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men who marry balances, as ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the issue of an unlimited quantity of paper bills, the predecessors of the assignats of the mother country, was strongly advocated by Bigot, who supported his views with a degree of financial sophistry which showed that he had effectively mastered the science of delusion and fraud of which Law had been the great teacher in France, and the Mississippi scheme, the prototype of the Grand Company, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... magnificently inconsistent. Let him set his mind and heart upon a given pursuit, pleasure, or line of conduct not altogether advisable at the moment, and the ingenuity of the excuses by which he justified himself were monuments of elaborate sophistry. Yet, if later he lost interest, he reversed his arguments with supreme ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... an honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the North as to lose sight of the materials for misleading which were their stock in trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which is to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with it to make it specious,—that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much as the honesty of the followers they may seduce, that gives them power for evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... clearly perceived and fully acknowledged by all the virtuous and the candid, that in principle it is as sinful to hold a human being in bondage who has been born in Carolina, as one who has been born in Africa. All that sophistry of argument which has been employed to prove, that although it is sinful to send to Africa to procure men and women as slaves, who have never been in slavery, that still, it is not sinful to keep those in ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... heart is, after all, the best reply to the sophistry just noticed. No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question. It is not more incomprehensible than distinctive. There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for hoarding or expending, but lived in strict and economical retirement, to justify the name of the Incorruptible, with which he was honoured by his partizans. He appears to have possessed little talent, saving a deep fund of hypocrisy, considerable powers of sophistry, and a cold exaggerated strain of oratory, as foreign to good taste, as the measures he recommended were to ordinary humanity. It seemed wonderful, that even the seething and boiling of the revolutionary cauldron should have sent up from the bottom, and long supported on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... obloquy, and spite Expire e're morn, the mushroom of a night! Transient as vapours glimm'ring thro' the glades, Half-form'd and idle, as the dreams of maids, Vain as the sick man's vow, or young man's sigh, Third-nights of Bards, or H——'s sophistry. ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... not improper to add that all this talk about expenditure of vitality is full of sophistry. Lecturers and writers speak of our stock of vitality as if it were a vault of gold, upon which you cannot draw without lessening the quantity. Whereas, it is rather like the mind or heart, enlarging by action, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... great rules of duty and the fundamental principles of morals. On such matters, poets and orators are the most unexceptionable of all witnesses; for they address themselves to the general feelings and sympathies of mankind; they are neither warped by system, nor perverted by sophistry; they can attain none of their objects; they can neither please nor persuade if they dwell on moral sentiments not in unison with those of their readers. No system of moral philosophy can surely disregard the general feelings of human nature and the ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... our modern Caesars have most liberally construed! I am a poor casuist, Sir; nor do I think the loyal commander of the Coquette would wish to uphold all that sophistry can invent on such a subject. If we begin with potentates, for instance, we shall find the Most Christian King bent on appropriating as many of his neighbors' goods to his own use, as ambition, under the name of glory, can covet; the Most ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Christians; and that it was the duty of a Christian prince to suppress pagan ceremonies. In the epistles of Symmachus and of Ambrose both the petition and the reply are preserved. They are a strange blend of sophistry, superstition, sound sense and solid ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to conceive how Dona Leonor de Cisneros had been induced apparently to abandon the faith to which she had so long adhered. Falsehoods and devices of all sorts had been employed to induce her to make her peace with Rome. Every argument which sophistry could invent had been brought forward to shake her belief. There was a rack, with other fearful tortures, and the stake, on the one hand, and forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church on the other—ay, and a happy life ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... in part, of the sage who had seen his natural genius, and who had urged him to exert it in examining, detecting, and declaring for himself, and thus flattery gave proselytes to infidelity, which could not have been gained by all the powerful eloquence or artful sophistry of the infidel. ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment, this ultimate ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... very account the privilege of influencing an assembled crowd is exposed to most dangerous abuses. As one may disinterestedly animate them, for the noblest and best of purposes, so another may entangle them in the deceitful meshes of sophistry, and dazzle them by the glare of a false magnanimity, whose vainglorious crimes may be painted as virtues and even as sacrifices. Beneath the delightful charms of oratory and poetry, the poison steals ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... to show exactly how far the United States Supreme Court, supposed to be an impartial tribunal and generally held in such high esteem and treated with such reverential fear, has been guilty of inconsistency and sophistry in its effort to support this autocracy in defiance of the well established principles of interpretation for construing the constitutions and laws of States and in utter disregard of the supremacy of Congress in the exercise ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... your ears against the arguments of the heresiarch, when circumstances permit you not to withdraw the foot from his company. Anchor your thoughts upon the service of Our Lady, while he is expending in vain his heretical sophistry. Are you unable to maintain your attention on heavenly objects—think rather on thine own earthly pleasures, than tempt Providence and the Saints by giving an attentive ear to the erring doctrine—think of thy hawk, thy ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott |
