"Trickiness" Quotes from Famous Books
... large matters of business the English have been accused of trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious competition speaking; but in the small things they surely are most marvelously honest. Consider their railroad trains now: To a greenhorn from this side the blue water, a railroad ... — Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... disease, my life.' He was proud, vain, abnormally sensitive, suspicious, quick to imagine an injury, incredibly spiteful, implacable in resentment, apparently devoid of any sense of honesty—at his worst hateful and petty-minded beyond any other man in English literature. His trickiness was astonishing. Dr. Johnson observes that he 'hardly drank tea without a stratagem,' and indeed he seems to have been almost constitutionally unable to do anything in an open and straightforward way. Wishing, for ... — A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... year 1647 everyone was weary of Mazarin's rule. His bad faith, his weakness, and his trickiness were becoming known, provinces and towns alike were groaning under taxation, and the citizens of Paris were reduced to mere despair. Parliament tried respectful remonstrances in vain; the cardinal thought himself safe in the servility ... — The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various |