"Mendacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unmistakably Jewish names offer instruction in almost all the languages spoken, while a German young lady wants to exchange lessons in Russian with an orthodox Christian and one who hails from the mendacious little country, cautiously states, as an inducement to a prospective pupil in the Roumanian tongue, that the would-be instructor is a true Roumanian. Here you have a picture of Jewish life in the Berlin ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... "That that mendacious young cad who has bamboozled Grace," Lord Theign broke in, "tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... always been so famous, generosity.'' The scissors- and-paste compilers are peculiarly liable to such errors as these; and a writer in the Quarterly Review proved the Mmoires de Louis XVIII. (published in 1832) to be a mendacious compilation from the Mmoires de Bachaumont by giving examples of the compiler's blundering. One of these muddles is well worth quoting, and it occurs in the following passage: "Seven bishops—of Puy, Gallard de Terraube; of Langres, La Luzerne; of Rhodez, Seignelay-Colbert; of Gast, ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... fact, it is oftener venial than mortal. It becomes a serious fault only in the event of another malice being added to it. Thus, if I lie to one who has a right to know the truth and for grave reasons; if the mendacious information I impart is of a nature to mislead one into injury or loss, and this thing I do maliciously; or if my lying is directly disparaging to another; in these cases there is grave malice and serious guilt. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... people are dark, of course; and for my part I always liked dark eyes," said this mendacious person. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... kings, queens, abbes, soldiers, diplomatists, and pretty women. Projects of new alliances were shuffled and cut, like the actual cards which were seldom out of the hands of the players, when Casanova or Barry Lyndon held the bank, and challenged all comers. It was the age of adventurers, from the mendacious Casanova to the mysterious Saint-Germain, from the Chevalier d'Eon to Charles Edward Stuart. That royal player was warned off the turf, as it were, ruled out of the game. Where among all these attractive tables was one on which Prince Charles, in 1749, might put down his ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... 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 Gouraud's foible; ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them; and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... their moral condition is, 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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
... 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 ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... 291. Man, 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 long, audacious falsification, by virtue ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... historical insight. After having studied the sacred 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 ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... before is nothing to what I feel 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 ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... the extent 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 the power ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... pagans was not their idolatry, but 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 ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... dinner, and in his high spirits he exchanged chaff with her. She was a little cockney, of middle age, with an amusing humour and a quick tongue. Mildred had become great friends with her and had given her an elaborate but mendacious account of the circumstances which had brought her to the pass she was in. The good-hearted little woman was touched and found no trouble too great to make Mildred comfortable. Mildred's sense of propriety had suggested that Philip should pass himself off as her brother. They ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... my humble opinion, constitutes a piece of unwarrantable impertinence on the part of meddling Mrs. Grundy. The world might be more profitably engaged in mending its own tortuous and mendacious ways, and allowing poor solitary wretches to fondle their whims and caprices. If Mrs. Gerome does not choose to receive visitors, what right has the public to grumble, or ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... shown, and he gave them license to erect a church and residence at his court. Heaven assisted at the same time in behalf of the mission by sending abundant rain, thus leaving the superstition of the heathens confounded and mendacious, and the king despicable for this persecution. Two fathers of the mission and a lay brother went to a port of the same kingdom, Cochinchina, called Pullocambi, about fifty leagues from the court, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... 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 courage to do openly in his own person, but a ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... you first start from the breakfast- table at the sound of hoofs, and find the noble animal at the door, arching his neck and champing his bit, as if he felt proud to bear that other animal, bandy-legged, mendacious, and altogether ignoble who sits jauntily on his back, down to the moment when you walk round to the stable for a little quiet enjoyment of the sense of ownership, there is a high tide of mental elation running through the days. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... of the serious misunderstanding existing when he was last in port between his Emperor and the American consul. This story was too improbable to be believed, and Captain Bainbridge of the Philadelphia threatened to hang as a common pirate the mendacious Reis Ibrah[i]m Lubarez unless he showed his commission. When the rover saw this menace did not issue in idleness, he confessed he had been mistaken, and that he had been ordered by the Governor of Tangiers to capture American vessels. This made the matter one ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... times, for two of his sailors one morning when looking over the side of the vessel beheld what they declared was a mermaid—with a white skin and a tail like a mackerel, long, black hair, and a back and breast like a woman's. For a long time, these mendacious mariners insisted, the mermaid (who is believed to have been a seal) swam beside the vessel looking earnestly into their eyes, but at last a sea overturned her and she dove deep and ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... 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. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... brethren, in arguing with the Catholics about their own mendacious proclamation of the terms, said that "we proclaimed nothing which was not finally agreed upon, in word and promise, betwixt us and those with whom the Appointment was made. ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... husband, too, knew the responsibility and burden of "blood." And as, for a moment, they went before her, Imogen fancied that she heard the murmur of quite a new great name casting its agis about Mr. Potts. Very spiritual people could, she reflected, become strangely mendacious when borne along on the wings of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... redeeming 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
... Brentshaw 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
... the man whose very thought is a lie to him 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 ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... appeared, issuing as they did from 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 into the blank ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... PUNCHINELLO'S past life and present course, the assault is such as would provoke a retort from any honest man. The vile insinuation that PUNCHINELLO is printed and published for the sole purpose of making money out of its subscribers and the reading public in general, is too mendacious for refutation; and when the reckless editor of the periodical in question gravely announces that he can never read PUNCHINELLO without laughing at its contents, it will be readily seen that he goes so far as to make use of the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... They naturally, having been trained to look on every foreigner outside the Order of the Jesuits as an enemy, receive him as their King. Under the title of the 'Son of the Sun and Star of Liberty' he rules them, looked on as a God. The brief mendacious chronicle leaves him on the throne, just after having joined the empire of the Mamalucos to that of Paraguay, and promising to give the world more of his history when it comes ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... When, at rare intervals, he did drop in upon them, he pleaded important business engagements as the reason of his inability to accept their numerous invitations to dinners and theater parties. After these mendacious statements he would wend a gloomy way homeward to his Pine Street boarding-house, and there spend the evening pretending to read, and cursing the fate which had ever brought him within the light of Genevieve's beaux yeux. The fable of being the family ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... 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 it is essentially the last day of the week), ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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, jesuitical, pharisaical; tartuffish; Machiavelian; double, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rubbing together of tree-boughs in primeval forests, and the dusky redman incontinently roasted in his uncontaminated innocence. The longer I live the less faith I have that a man evolves any thing from his inner consciousness. Fancies are only the lies of the mendacious brain, which perceives one thing ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... lying message which April whispers to every living creature that is young,—then you will return to me, a slim, star-eyed Maenad, and will see that I am wrinkled. But do you go your ways, none the less, for April is waiting for you yonder,—beautiful, mendacious, splendid April. And I? Faith, April has no message for me, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... cause of this sudden emotion? The explanation may not be so difficult to any thoughtful reader of this story as it was to the two young girls who sought it. Tom Leslie had merely read over the mendacious advertisement, at first, with the same indifference given to thousands of corresponding humbugs; and at the first reading he had not noticed the place at all. At the second reading, his mind took in the direction: "No. — Prince Street, near Bowery," and at the same moment ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... made by it; finally the 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
... 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
... boy,' said this mendacious epistle, 'my head is still rather bad, and Dr. Jordan thought that it would be wiser if I were to have an undisturbed rest, but I will send down to you when I feel better. Until then I had best, perhaps, remain alone. Mr. Harrison ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... 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
... bigotry and historical ignorance; which may, we hope, be cured by the new bonds of alliance betwixt the Old and the New Englands. As Mr. McGavack well demonstrates, most of our Anglophobia is manufactured by the alleged "historians" who poison the minds of the young through mendacious textbooks. This species of false teaching, an evil potently fostered by the Fenians and Sinn Feiners who lurk serpent-like in our midst, is one which cannot too soon be eradicated; for the cultural ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 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 great ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because 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 ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 not ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... never forgave; continuing a hater of Friedrich all his days; and instilling the same sentiment into the Earl of Bute at a period which was very critical, as we shall see. This is my Author's, the often fallacious though not mendacious Dr. Zimmermann's, rather deliberate account; a man not given to mendacity, though filled with much vague wind, which renders him fallacious ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 literary forgeries which are to be met with in the whole ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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
... recommended as safer than others because the money goes into the hands of "the brethren." Church newspapers must be subscribed for, because all others are "unreliable"—although the Church's Deseret News (Joseph F. Smith, president) is one of the most dishonest, unjust and mendacious organs that ever poisoned the public mind. And so on, through the whole list of business concerns by which the Church authorities are to profit. The Mormons, having learned of old the value of a solid, community ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... 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, ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who had poured a gallant but mendacious tale into ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... to gather you in," announced the calmly mendacious detective. He continued to sip his ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... how it came into the world. The committee look forward to the time when parents will be so enlightened that they will not tell their children silly stories about babies being brought into the home by storks, but will give a simple account which the child in later years will not discover to be mendacious. The committee hope that the child, who is gradually taught more and more about sex hygiene as it passes from one school grade to another, will eventually become a parent wise enough to instil in the next generation a frank and healthy attitude towards sex problems. Parents, it is hoped, will ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... himself an unusual horror of lies. On seeing a liar, he says, he was corporeally affected. As a boy he already violently disliked mendacious boys, such as the little braggart of whom he tells in the Colloquies. That this reaction of aversion is genuine is not contradicted by the fact that we catch Erasmus himself in untruths. Inconsistencies, flattery, pieces of cunning, white lies, serious ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... I invented Colonel Flail and Mr. Bisland, and I contrived to render them quite as liberal in their patronage as the mythical Judge Trask himself. Occasionally a donation came in, by way of variety, from Smeaton and Holbrook and Caswell and other solitary creations of my mendacious imagination, when I used to blind poor dear Alice to the hideous truth. Touching myself, I gave it out that I had abandoned book-buying, was convinced of the folly of the mania, had reformed, and was repentant. ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... luckless Glugs Of the land of Gosh, where the sad seas wash The patient shores, and the great King Splosh His sodden sorrow hugs; Where the fair Queen Tush weeps all the day, And the Swank, the Swank, the naughty Swank, The haughty Swank holds sway— The most mendacious, ostentatious, Spacious Swank ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... 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, or of the Great Mogul in India), ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... as is the suffering of such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man, with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the 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 hugely. He would have liked to have been able to see the operations, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... shouted Captain Bumpus, 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 door of ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... became a daily occurrence, which the repeated reprobation of the Imperial power failed to check or punish. These inflammatory appeals to the ignorance and superstition of the masses, mendacious and absurd in their accusations and deeply hostile in their spirit, could not but work cumulative harm. They aimed at no particular class of foreigners; they were impartial in attacking ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... insult may rankle in their minds for months, until they have a chance to stab you in the back. They will lie to you at times with the most unblushing nerve, often when the truth would have served their ends so much better that it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them, carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself, makes ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... 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 effort to detain the Coroner to give ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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)
... hung heavy on their hands. Under these circumstances they began to take something more than a professional interest in their neighbours opposite. The curiosity was reciprocated. Items of news, more or less mendacious, were exchanged when the trenches were near enough to permit of vocal intercourse. Curious conventions grew up, and at certain hours of the day and, less commonly, of the night, there was a kind of informal armistice. In one section the hour of 8 to 9 A.M. was regarded as consecrated to "private ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... shouts of laughter over this description of the Father of his country, but Victoria continued in her gentle drawl to enlighten Lord Dunbeg in regard to other subjects with information equally mendacious, until he decided that she was quite the most eccentric person he had ever met. The boat arrived at Mount Vernon while she was still engaged in a description of the society and manners of America, and especially of the rules which made an offer of marriage necessary. According to ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... overlooked by the enemy. He is once more playing the old game of striving to promote discord between the Allies. At the very moment when the official communiques announced the capture of 45,000 prisoners, the Chancellor began a new peace-offensive, aimed primarily at France, and supported by mendacious reports that the French Government were starting for Bordeaux, Clemenceau overthrown, and Foch disgraced. But the campaign of falsehood has proved powerless to shake France or impose on the German people. Commandeered enthusiasm is giving place to grave ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Freemasonry has unfortunately been treated only by its panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious. I do not wish to pry into the mysteries of the craft; but it would be interesting to know more of their history during the period when they were literally architects. They are charged by an act of Parliament with fixing ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... disgust may be imagined when I found the noble beast to be a miserable 8-pointer, which I would never have fired at if I could have seen its head properly. Heartily consigning the shikari, together with the mendacious villager and all his kind, to a hot place, I dolefully stumbled away downhill again in the gathering dark, and finally deposited my weary and dejected self on board the boat, after fourteen hours of the hardest walking I have ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... down to us in regard to Washington's boyhood. For the former we are indebted to the illustrious Weems, and to that personage a few more words must be devoted. Weems has been held up to the present age in various ways, usually, it must be confessed, of an unflattering nature, and "mendacious" is the adjective most commonly applied to him. There has been in reality a good deal of needless confusion about Weems and his book, for he was not a complex character, and neither he nor his writings are difficult to value or understand. By profession a clergyman or preacher, by nature an adventurer, ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... before his countrymen a minute and accurate description of the 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 of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Gulliver, illustrating respectively the philosophical, the edifying, and the satirical type of fictitious travel, were all written in England, and at the end of the eighteenth century a fourth type, the fantastically mendacious, was evolved in this country. Of this type Munchausen was the modern original, and remains the classical example. The adaptability of such a species of composition to local and topical uses might well be considered prejudicial to its ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... at the hands of their lovers and husbands; and we all know what a common trick of trade it is with men who have been unsuccessful in their attempts to gain a woman's affections, or worse, in their evil designs on her honor, to give out such mendacious impressions! ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... concurred in the preceding eulogies. What 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 that as it might, he (Mr. Roebuck) was anxious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... undoubtedly gave and took 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 relations, in which the governments of neither were interested, and by which ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... nature of things that the course of a battle resembles rather a slow disturbance of equilibrium which commences soon, but as we have said almost imperceptibly at first, and then with each moment of time becomes stronger and more visible, than an oscillating to and fro, as those who are misled by mendacious descriptions ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... sea 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... 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 ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... the soups, and is 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 ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... exclaimed, proudly. "I do not speak of myself, but only of you. You swore eternal love to me at that time, but you did so as a mendacious Bavarian; I did not believe you, and knew full well that you had no honest intentions toward me. For this reason I laughed at you, and said the peasant-girl was no suitable match for you, and rejected all your oaths ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... not "publicly denounce the social and 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 men, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... other day to find bail, at a moment's notice, to the amount of L40,000. On the other hand, his enemies diagnose him after the manner of Lombroso, and find him to be a degenerate and an epileptic, ungovernably irritable, vain, mendacious, arrogant, sometimes quite irresponsible for his actions. A really strong man he can scarcely be; scarcely a man of true political insight, else he would not have tried to play the despot with no plausible ideal to allege in defense of his usurpation. Be that as it may, he agreed with the King that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... fragments from the 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 ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... funeral of old Mr. Bogle of Gilmourhill, near Glasgow; but when announcement was made that nothing was to be given, there rose a fearful howl of execration and cursing both of dead and living from the mendacious crowd. The village of Partick in both these cases was placed under a species of black-mail for several days by beggars, who would hardly take any denial, and in many instances appropriated what was not their own. I am ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... of Agriculture Inspector at the Chicago Stock Yards. He alleges that Detmers has reported that diseased and dying hogs are sold daily in Chicago, and then shipped as pork, bacon, and lard to Havre and Bordeaux. To this audacious or mendacious charge Dr. Detmers replies ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... not the slightest faith in the honor of men or the virtue of women; that he was silly enough to believe himself, with all his personal defects, actually irresistible to the most gifted and beautiful woman, and that he was mendacious enough to proclaim himself the successful lover of women who would not have given ear to his love-making for one moment. Yet we cannot believe that Chesterfield was by any means the monster of ugliness and selfish levity whom his enemies, and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... some umbrellas, from 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The mendacious young king had the audacity to deny this, in face of several witnesses; and he would at once have retired from the divan (and probably I should never have seen him again) had I not insisted upon his remaining until the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... presence 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 ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... all is repaired. Time will enable people to distinguish 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... a village-cur joins the hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... many dreams, half-waking, and not only of Olivia 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 tiny bird ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... an Old Person of Gretna, Who rushed down the crater of Etna; When they said, "Is it hot?" he replied, "No, it's not!" That mendacious ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... contribution. 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 of coats, the crack of shillelaghs on thick ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... poet tells us that, 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. If Carlyle's French Revolution ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... boy, you naughty, mendacious boy!" said a sprightly voice in Tressady's ear. "'Excellent time,' indeed! ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he commented, "but that defect is pardonable. After all, it is not absolutely mendacious, like a War Office telegram. Winter, go and bring joy to the heart of some penny-a-liner by giving him that item. The 'coincidence' will ensure its acceptance by every morning paper in London, and you can safely leave the reporter ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on one side, rubbed his chin with nice consideration, and condescended, "What would ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Aves, 1553; Julius Solinus, Polyhistor, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's acute and learned History of Greek Literature, New York, 1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the mendacious and medical Ktesias:—These stories have probably acquired a literary currency "by exercise of the habit, not unknown even to students of science, of indiscriminate copying from one's predecessors, so that in reading Mandeville we have the ghosts ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson |
