"Hard-headed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anyway. The new statesman from Leith is cutting a wide swath. Not a day passes but his voice is heard roaring in the Forum; he has visited all the State institutions, dined and wined the governor and his staff and all the ex-governors he can lay his hands on, and he has that hard-headed and caustic journalist, Mr. Peter Pardriff, of the State Tribune, hypnotized. He has some swells up at his house to hear his speech on national affairs, among them old Flint's daughter, who is a ripper to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior? It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt. As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical fancy had assigned to her, they had no existence in ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... apostrophized. Nothing was altered, neither the axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wall-paper, nor the insults shouted by the tricoteuses in the galleries to those about to die, nor yet the soul of Fouquier-Tinville, hard-headed, painstaking, zealously turning over his murderous papers, and, in his character of perfect magistrate, sending his friends of yesterday ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... It was fine acting; half into the night we talked, I leaving him every now and again to creep to the top of the stairs and listen to her breathing. He asked me my advice, I being the hard-headed partner of cool judgment. What would be the best way of approaching her after I was gone? Where should he take her? How should they live till the nine days' talk had died away? And I sat opposite to him—how he must have longed to laugh in my silly face—advising ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd men, whose practical wisdom became a world's tradition, enshrined in ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that it keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before us for explanation, we have to ask what the stimulus ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... circumstance which had been magnified and distorted into a weird and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, that seemed to indicate that the nyangas really possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... study at the universities in the intervals, perhaps, of agricultural labour; and if the learning was slight and the scholarship below the English standard, the young aspirant had at least to learn to preach and to acquire such philosophy as would enable him to argue upon grace and freewill with some hard-headed Davie Deans. It was doubtless owing in part to these conditions that the Scottish universities produced many distinguished teachers throughout the century. Professors had to teach something which might at least pass for philosophy, though they were more or less restrained by the necessity ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... men, Nathaniel and Demas, encountering a pretender to miracles, a Simon Magus of the scriptures. Nathaniel is guileless, sweet-hearted and of strong moral sense, but in worldly matters rather a simpleton. Demas is a sharp man, who gets on well in the world, quick of eye and shrewd of wit, hard-headed and not to be imposed upon by his fellows; but destitute of any high religious aspirations or deep moral insight. The juggleries of Simon are readily discerned by Demas, but thoroughly deceive poor Nathaniel: what then is the latter to do? To say that we are to receive true miracles and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... my cards on the table. You know me for what I am, a disgruntled dreamer. I know you for what you are, a hard-headed business man. We don't have to quarrel about it. Tell you what I'll do: I'll match you, horse-and-horse, for the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... facts, tangible, concrete, irrefutable facts, not hypotheses. The Protestant churches hand out a mess of incoherent guesswork, based on as many interpretations of the Bible as there are human minds sufficiently interested to interpret it, and then wax hot and angry when hard-headed business men like myself refuse to subscribe to it. It's preposterous, Lafelle! If they had anything tangible to offer, it would be different. But I go to church for the looks of the thing, and for business reasons; and then stick pins into myself to keep awake while I listen to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... so impossible to accept that it was not accepted by public opinion. The Queen, people could not but argue, must have taken his enormous gifts, and then robbed and denounced him. With the case before our eyes of Madame Humbert, who swindled scores of hard-headed financiers by the flimsiest fables, we can no longer deem the credulity of the Cardinal incredible, even though he displayed on occasion a sharpness almost as miraculous ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... heart's in the right place, Tom, and some day you'll come out and take dinner with me. One dinner, such as she'll give you, will bring you round. One of our steady dishes is a bunch of flowers and I enjoy 'em, too. What do you think of that for a hard-headed ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... feel how far this was from the truth, as I wept to think of you swept away on love's torrent. But my father has made me read one of the profoundest thinkers of these parts, the man on whom the mantle of Boussuet has fallen, one of those hard-headed theorists whose words force conviction. While you were reading Corinne, I conned Bonald; and here is the whole secret of my philosophy. He revealed to me the Family in its strength and holiness. According to Bonald, your father was ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the help of the New Mexican the situation was one which called for a thorough personal investigation. Gordon was a hard-headed American business man, though he held within him the generous and hare-brained potentialities of a soldier of fortune. He meant to find out just what the Moreno grant was worth. After he had investigated his legal standing ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... the criticisms made so lavishly upon Livy's story of the earlier centuries, it is well to recall the contention of the hard-headed Scotchman Ferguson, that with all our critical acumen we have found no sure ground to rest upon until we reach the second Punic war. Niebuhr, on the other hand, whose German temperament is alike prone to delve ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... to explain it," returned Blair, casually, "but I do know that lots of other equally hard-headed citizens are ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... the only oratory. Luke says of the Master that "he taught the people." In reporting the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew says that "he opened his mouth and taught them." Time and again I have heard hard-headed business men and sturdy farmers say of a particularly instructive sermon: "I like to hear that preacher; I always ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... ago at this time," began the Doctor, "I attended a course of lectures in a certain city. One of the professors, who was a sociable, kindly man,—though somewhat practical and hard-headed,—invited me to his house on Christmas night. I was very glad to go, as I was anxious to see one of his sons, who, though only twelve years old, was said to be very clever. I dare not tell you how many Latin verses this little fellow could recite, or how many English ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Englishman while these grand—But never mind; 'tis many proud things I will say about the English considering they are our neighbours in one way; I mean they are near enough to come over and harm us when they wish. But any how they are a remarkable hard-headed lot, and in time they may come to ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... over now. "K(1)"—hard-headed men of business, bountifully endowed with munitions—have arrived upon the scene, and the sylvan peace of the surrounding district is gone. ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... you were hard-headed? You won't admit you made a mistake even after what Orcutt told you to-day. But tell me ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... This is an incredulous age. People, particularly judges, are hard-headed practical men of affairs. My defence was suited more for an age of mystical tendencies. Why, will you believe it, sir, my own lawyer, the man to whom I paid eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents for championing my cause, told me the defence ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... playwright, I hadn't much of a choice between the two, or perhaps a journalist. Being a journalist, of course, was preliminary; a sort of makeshift. At any rate, I was going to be a writer. My Uncle Rilas, a hard-headed customer who had read Scott as a boy and the Wall Street news as a man,—without being misled by either,—was scornful. He said that I would outgrow it, there was some consolation in that. He even admitted that when he was seventeen he wanted to be an actor. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Gawd' in the court-house. He fairly stamped on my feelin's, in that Jenkins case, ter make me agree with him; but I couldn't agree, an' it hung the jury, ez they say. I wisht they hed hung the foreman! By Hokey, I despise a hard-headed, 'pinionated man." ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... each policeman cleverly insulted as such. But the testimony of all four remained unshaken; and the judge himself soothed the young women's feelings with a fatherly word, while wigs were shaken in the well of the court. That was no road to the soft side of a decent, conscientious, hard-headed jury, of much the same class as these witnesses themselves; even the actors and authors had a sound opinion on the point, without waiting to hear one from the professional gentlemen in the well. But the man in front with the very white hair—the man who was always ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... There 's too many of those swindling concerns in the country. People ought to take care where they place their savings, and keep to old-established institutions. We 're pretty hard-headed up here, and I 'll wager that nobody in the Glen has lost a penny in any of those ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... which I do not explain, for that I can not. In plain fact, these two were obviously runaway boys, not the first, nor perhaps the last of runaway boys; and I was a man of means, a retired man, supposedly somewhat of a hermit, although really nothing of the sort; lately a lawyer, hard-headed and disillusioned, always a man of calm reason, as I prided myself; subject to no fancies, a student and a lover of science, a mocker at all superstition and all weak-mindedness. (Pardon me, that I must say all these things of myself.) Yet, let me be believed who say ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... Writing-Stone or not. I wondered if he took any stock in Rutter's story, or thought it merely one of the queer turns a man's brain will sometimes take when he is dying. It had sounded off-color to me, at first; but I knew old Hans pretty well, and he always seemed to me a hard-headed, matter of fact sort of man, not at all the flighty kind of pilgrim that gets mixed in his mental processes when things go wrong. Besides, if there wasn't some powerful incentive, why that double killing, to say nothing ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mrs. Cary died, and two years later the father married again. The stepmother, a hard-headed, practical woman, could see nothing but laziness in the desire of Alice and Phoebe to read and write. During the day she insisted that they must keep busy about the house; in the evening she refused to allow them ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... movement and the Wells raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... poor Polly sadly. "Jo hates me for it and refuses to think I am sincere or that there is any good in the movement, but I declare that she is the insincere one in not trying to see the good in the cubist movement. Jo is very hard-headed and conventional at heart, in spite ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... Court!" After the impressive ceremonies had been observed, the jury was quickly empaneled, I making several challenges. Twelve years in the Secret Service naturally has made me know something of men. I knew that those twelve hard-headed, cautious Scottish jurymen would demand pretty substantial proof before convicting. At the time I am frank to say that I did not think there was a chance of a verdict of guilty being brought in. The evidence ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... also sent to Tehran for wine purposes there. Persia keeps up the character for strong wine which it had 600 B.C., when the Scythian invaders took to it so eagerly as to establish the saying, 'As drunk as a Scythian.' It was said that these hard-headed, deep-drinking, wild warriors were always thirsting for 'another skinful,' and were ever ready to declare that the last was always the best. Eighteen hundred years later, Hafiz, the merry poet, sang aloud the ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... be above suspicion; while Donald believed Nan Brent to be virtuous, or, at least, an unconscious, unwilling, and unpremeditating sinner, non-virtuous by circumstance instead of by her own deliberate act, he was too hard-headed not to realize that never, by the grace of God, would she be above suspicion. Too well he realized that his parents and his sisters, for whom he entertained all the affection of a good son and brother, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... be computed. We shall not have it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of business ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... different order of person—men and women, too, passionately, strenuously in earnest. They were well-fed, prosperous individuals, these whom he had just dismissed. Their politics were their business, their position as Members of Parliament a source of unmixed joy to all of them; hard-headed men, very likely, good each in his own department; ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... importance whatever were attached to my opinion in this house I might be saying a few things; but, as it is, it is much more agreeable, all around, to let you go your own hard-headed way and find out by experience that what I say is true. So now, Manuel, if you do not mind, I think we had better be talking about something ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... my chance of that!" Mr. Vance laughed. "You see, being a hard-headed cockney, I am not superstitious. It is only you Highlanders, and your first cousins the Irish, who believe nowadays in bogles, omens, and such-like"; and, packing the hand carefully in his knapsack, Mr. Vance bid the strange-looking ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... from it. She is a self-controlled, efficient, hard-headed woman. Her loveliness is a curtain. You have not yet got behind that. You loved her, but she did not love you. She loved me and married me. And it is I who know her character, not you. She is very clever and ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... alone, many western landholders—shrewd, hard-headed, business men—have reason to be thankful that they secured the services of a genuine and expert diviner, whose "magic wand" quickly disclosed the whereabouts of sub-artesian water. Thus, it has happened as a result of the diviner's visit that a bore is driven, and ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... the eyes of the multitude, Bismarck is a great but unscrupulous statesman, intent upon uniting Germany and making it the leading nation of Europe. As a man, he seems hard-headed, self-willed, and iron-handed. As a ruler, he is looked upon as the incarnation of the despotic spirit,—a believer in force, an ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... history, the great Communipaw, like Babylon, Carthage, Nineveh, and other great cities, might be perfectly extinct—sunk and forgotten in its own mud—its inhabitants turned into oysters,[25] and even its situation a fertile subject of learned controversy and hard-headed investigation among indefatigable historians. Let me, then, piously rescue from oblivion the humble relics of a place which was the egg from whence was hatched the mighty city ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... somebody. His first measure was to walk down one evening to the Wynns' farm. A thoroughly good understanding had always existed between these neighbours. Even patrician Mr. Wynn relished the company of the hard-headed Lanark-weaver, whose energy and common sense had won him the position of a comfortable landholder in Canada West. Added to which qualifications for the best society, Davidson was totally devoid of vulgar assumption, but had sufficient ballast to retain just his ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... practical matters—knowledge of men and things, and of the many places about the world which he had seen, and of the management of a ship in all weathers—he was one of the best-informed men that ever I came across: being naturally of a hard-headed make, with great acuteness of observation, and with quick and sound reasoning powers. I found his talk always worth listening to; and I liked nothing better than to sit beside him, or to walk the deck with him, while we smoked our pipes together and he told me in his shrewd way ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... city children be saved to lead the civilization of America by their superior manhood and womanhood? or shall they be buried out of sight, or mustered into the 'invalid corps' before they are thirty years of age, and hard-headed Patrick, slow and sturdy Hermann, and irrepressible Sambo, walk in and administer the affairs of the country over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... deities the ordinary people were prepared to accept as many more as you chose to offer them, especially if the worship attaching to them contained mystic or orgiastic ceremonies. By this date the populace had become exceedingly mixed, especially in the capital, and the cool hard-headed Roman stock had been largely replaced or leavened by foreign elements, especially from the East. The official worship of the state was formal and frigid; it offered nothing to the emotions or the hopes. Many among ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... literature may be a hard-headed essay of Bacon or an impassioned lyric of Shelley; its sound may be the majestic organ-peal of Milton or the sumptuous flute music of Keats; its mood may be the scathing fervour of Carlyle or the genial ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the monasteries. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... coerce &c 744; give no quarter &c (pitiless) 914.1. Adj. severe; strict, hard, harsh, dour, rigid, stiff, stern, rigorous, uncompromising, exacting, exigent, exigeant^, inexorable, inflexible, obdurate, austere, hard-headed, hard-nosed, hard-shell [U.S.], relentless, Spartan, Draconian, stringent, strait-laced, searching, unsparing, iron-handed, peremptory, absolute, positive, arbitrary, imperative; coercive &c 744; tyrannical, extortionate, grinding, withering, oppressive, inquisitorial; inclement ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the edifice. The style is severe and prosaic. Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento. Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut the spirit up in a tight box. We seem unable to breathe, and lack that element of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues of nobles ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... hard-headed little captain of the Puritan guard at Plymouth, never knew the meaning of fear until he went a-courting Priscilla Mullins—or was she a Molines, as some say? He had fought white men and red men and never reeked of danger in the doing it, but his courage ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... little history now, as I have a hundred times before, merely because I would wring some sense out of it. Turn, then, thy sharp, wire-drawing, lawyer-like ingenuity to the same task—make up my history as though thou wert shaping the blundering allegations of some blue-bonneted, hard-headed client, into a condescendence of facts and circumstances, and thou shalt be, not my Apollo—QUID TIBI CUM LYRA?—but my Lord Stair, [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile, I have written myself out of my melancholy and blue devils, merely by prosing about them; so ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... opinion on the subject. One set of persons, emotionally touched at hearing the names of their loved ones given, and consoled by assurances that they are "happy," accept the revelation, and consider spiritualism "beautiful." More hard-headed subjects, disgusted by the revelation's contemptible contents, outraged by the fraud, and prejudiced beforehand against all "spirits," high or low, avert their minds from what they call such "rot" or "bosh" entirely. Thus do two opposite sentimentalisms ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... record. The agency which offers you the services of a Sherlock Holmes is a fraud, but you can accept as genuine a proposition to run down any man whose picture you may be able to identify in the gallery. The day of the impersonator is over. The detective of this generation is a hard-headed business man with a stout ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... had no fibre of his being that responded to what were called civic claims, political urgencies, social reforms, definite organisations; he felt increasingly that these things were but the cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with the bewildering problems, the unsatisfactory debris of life. Hugh felt that the only possible hope of regeneration and upraising lay in the individual; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be purified and strengthened, these organisations would become ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... relieved sigh. "I was afraid they'd have spoilt the dear old heath for a certainty. Only don't say it's Down Wood they've gone to, for that'd be more than I could stand. I thought there were fairies there long after I ought to have been a hard-headed young man of six, and if they've gone and desecrated that wood ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... Washington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Matthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was a rainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was made up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales and ghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case the conversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, or something hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mind reading came up, and I said ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... produced at first, a gloom on every countenance, and silence reigned for a few minutes. Then Mothibi, in the name of the assembly, said he was exceedingly thankful that their missionary had been "hard-headed" and pursued his journey, thus discovering to ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... his readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may challenge any literature to surpass. Of "The Biglow Papers," in which there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and earnestness, we have but one, and that not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... his words, of the very words he spoke, fanned the spark of divine folly in his breast, the spark that made him—the hard-headed, heavy-handed adventurer—stand out from the crowd, from the sordid, from the joyous, unscrupulous, and noisy crowd of men that were so much ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... you are crying," exclaimed Samuel, thoroughly angry, "you are not only hard-headed, but also silly, simply silly! 'Long of hair but short of sense.' To cry and cry, and not know wherefore!" With this Samuel turned towards us, and ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... a man of about fifty years of age, tall, straight, bony and angular, with a square, pale face, light gray eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some faint resemblance to that of a terrier—a sharp, uncompromising, hard-headed terrier—a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest dog-stealer who ever ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... than to the presence of a captain of dragoons. She therefore glanced at a tablecloth not quite clean, and conned over her proposed supper a minute or two, before, patting her husband on the shoulder, she bade him sit down for "a hard-headed loon, that was aye bringing himself and other folk ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... traceable connection between Lady Waterham and the unknown woman whose property it had been. Jim was not shaken in his own private conviction (strengthened as it had been by his dream), but he was too hard-headed not to admit the reasonableness of Mr. Hendrick's arguments; and the more he heard of the tales that had been circulated, the more deeply he regretted his pride and misplaced confidence. He finally made no objection to Hendrick's proposal that the matter should ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... corporal in charge—Corporal Campbell, an ex-salt, a hard-headed, kind-hearted Scotsman. Corporal Campbell had to his credit some thirty-five years of mounted police work in South Australia. The greater number of those years he had spent in the northern districts of the then young colony. In those early days the duties of the mounted police ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... on the girl as she sat before him in the fresh bloom of her maidenhood, and he realized what he knew she did not—that unsentimental, hard-headed, and practical as Absalom might be, if she allowed him the close intimacy of "setting-up" with her, the fellow must suffer in the end in not winning her. But the teacher thought it wise to make no further comment, as he saw, at any rate, that he could not move her in her resolution ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... abode of "rough-necks." A "rough-neck," it may be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same table with one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night through with various starred Hennessey and its rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without once failing to turn up to straddle his beam in the morning. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... the great swindlers show how the lust for gain plus the wiles of the swindler overcome the caution and suspicion of the "hard-headed," The Ponzi case is the latest contribution to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... spoke, pronouncing in his strong Scotch accent the most carefully selected English I had ever heard. A hard-headed, square-shouldered, pertinaciously self-willed man—it was plainly useless to contend with him. I turned to my mother's gentle face for encouragement; and I let my doctor have his ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... rumors, for he had, in truth, come to England with no deep-laid scheme or motive, but simply because his daughter had ordered his doing so; for while Abraham Windsor ruled the shares market and the world of speculation, a certain young woman ruled him, and the hard-headed man of affairs, who could outwit an Israelite banker, was as wax under her dainty fingers. At the close of the last season at Newport, Miss Margaret had ordered her father, as she poured out his coffee at breakfast, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk. He still had his ideas about the association of the pair. 'Hard-headed player of his own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Hard-Headed Man"—the Iron-skulled individual now exhibiting at the Aquarium. If his will is as iron as his head, what a despot he would be! If France is tired of her Republic, she might try the Iron-Headed Man as a ruler. There is the chance, of course, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... the candles came, and I was expected to employ myself, but, not daring to read an entertaining book, pored over some hard-headed, harder-hearted treatise on arithmetic; when the tables of weights and measures set themselves to tunes, as 'Rule Britannia', or 'Away with Melancholy'; when they wouldn't stand still to be learnt, but would go threading my grandmother's needle through my unfortunate head, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... I have first confessed that my ideas are not entirely original. I have been studying political economy under that hard-headed Sandy, our friend the doctor. In the first place, from to-morrow, we must cease to GIVE any thing whatever, and both announce that determination ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... child recovered immediately, and the idea started that he was a healer. People waited for him that they might touch his hand. Sometimes after service he had to stand half an hour while the congregation filed past him. Hard-headed persons, sane and acute in other relations of life, were heard to protest that on shaking hands with him an electric current passed through them. Sick people declared themselves cured by the sight of him, and charlatans sold handkerchiefs on pretence that he had blessed them. He repeatedly protested ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... done it once too often—and she was wrong for the first time, so that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he went right straight out to the post-office and spent several hours in coding a telegram to his solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man to threaten to take out at once a warrant against the fellow who was on his track. He said afterwards that it was a bit too thick on poor old Leonora to be ballyragged any more. That was really the last of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready to take his personal ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... doing something; everlastingly getting herself into trouble with some of the neighbors. She is the most mischievous and hard-headed child I ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... perhaps, be received without cavil by most readers; but the reasoning on which it depends is the weakest part of the book, and we shall be surprised if some hard-headed divine, who fears that this doctrine of Intuition will pester his Church, does not find out the flaws in the argument. It will be urged, for instance, that, in confessing that the Science of Morals ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... apparently imposed equally upon the practical Sir James. The thought of this sham ideal of feudal and privileged incompetency being elevated to actual position by the combined efforts of American republicans and hard-headed Scotch dissenters, on whom the soft Scotch mists fell from above with equal impartiality, struck him as being very amusing, and for some time thereafter lightened the respectable gloom of his office. Other engagements ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... these youths was named Socht, son of Fithel. Socht had a wonderful sword, named "The Hard-headed Steeling," which was said to have been long ago the sword of Cuchulain. It had a hilt of gold and a belt of silver, and its point was double-edged. At night it shone like a candle. If its point were bent back to the hilt it would fly back again and be as straight as before. If it was ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... be against him. He was too outspoken and hard-headed to suit the reckless and effusive boasters of those early days of the war, which he insisted would be long and bloody, unless the whole military power of the Republic was put into the field to crush the rebellion before it could grow into a revolution. He was as disgusted as Washington had been ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... you why I am so curious to know what she is like, old boy; I just caught sight of her in the Bois, in an open carriage—but a long way off. She is a most accomplished harpy, Carabine says. She is trying to eat up Crevel, but he only lets her nibble. Crevel is a knowing hand, good-natured but hard-headed, who will always say Yes, and then go his own way. He is vain and passionate; but his cash is cold. You can never get anything out of such fellows beyond a thousand to three thousand francs a month; they jib at any serious outlay, as a donkey does ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Massachusetts Bay Colony was hard-headed as well as pious, and several naive hints creep into the early records of sharers of the Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the salt land of Cohasset. A real estate transfer of 1640 has this potential flavor: "Half ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Greenthorne, and our parson, all say, sir, as how he shouldn't be bailed at all. And then, sir, if one has a misfortune belonging to one, one doesn't want to flaunt it in everybody's face, sir." And there was trouble, too, with George Brattle from Fordingbridge. George Brattle was a prudent, hard-headed, hard-working man, not troubled with much sentiment, and caring very little what any one could say of him as long as his rent was paid; but he had taken it into his head that Sam was guilty, that he was at any rate a thoroughly bad ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... it is difficult to see what Dr. Baker is up to. For many years he has had an enviable record as a tight-fisted, hard-headed administrator of these important funds. Congress intends to find out what's going on. The watchdog committee of Senator Landrus is expected to call an investigation early ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... one a black mare that I called Soda, which means black in Arabic, and the other a hard-headed bay gelding that was game to go all day, totally unaffected by shell-fire, but exceedingly stubborn about choosing the direction in which he went. After numerous changes I came across an excellent syce to look after them. He was a wild, unkempt figure, with a long black beard—a ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... discipline, and a dozen respectable lawyers and orators, whose sole idea of Government is, as Blanqui truly says, to issue decrees and proclamations, and to make speeches. The only practical man among them is M. Dorian, the Minister of Public Works, M. Dorian is a hard-headed manufacturer, and utterly ignoring red tape, clerks, and routine; he has set all the private ateliers to work, to make cannon and muskets. I have not yet heard of his making a single speech, or issuing a ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... go on, go on, it is not necessary to say that if—five or six times in succession, is it, before telling me what's the matter with you, you nonsensical, giddy, hard-headed girl. I believe you have fallen in love so with Bob McNeal, that you are worrying yourself to death because you know he is too poor to marry you and you are afraid some rich girl will fall in love with him, and that he will marry her and give you the cold shoulder. ...
— The Haunted House - A True Ghost Story • Walter Hubbell
... after. They reported prices very high at Sutter's Fort, and a great congestion of people there; both of those ascending the river from San Francisco, and of overlanders. Prices had consequently gone up. Indeed, so high were all provisions that our hard-headed partners had contented themselves with buying only some coffee, dried beef, and flour. They had purchased also a further supply of powder and balls, and a rifle apiece for such of us as already had none. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... after swearing that he saw a tear in his eye, writes the following: "Up to this time I observed in my friend only the dominating traits of a hard-headed, hard-hearted boy, stubborn, impetuous, intractable. But from the time he related to me his dream, a change in his character was become manifest. In fact a new phase was being gradually unfolded. Three things I must emphasise in this connection: ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... profoundly modified to suit the peculiar needs of backwoods life, the intensely democratic temper of the pioneers and above all the military necessities of their existence. They had certain theories of liberty and justice; but they were too shrewd and hard-headed to try to build up a government on an entirely new foundation, when they had ready to hand materials with which they were familiar. They knew by experience the workings of the county system; all they did was ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... poet's friends were very much opposed to this publication, for the reason that a rising young lawyer is not helped on in his profession at all by being known as a poet. Who would employ a poet to defend his business in a court room? No one! A hard-headed business man is wanted. Walter Scott was a lawyer of much such a temperament as Lowell's, and when he put forth a similar volume he suffered as it was certain that Lowell would suffer. But it is probable ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... complete list of names recorded in the books there; but Barney's was not among them. At the Spottswood Hotel, the day after his coming, he met Elisha Boone, haggard, depressed, almost despairing. Dick had no love for the hard-headed plutocrat, but he couldn't resist making ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... business manner that one gets nearer to the innermost secret of his nature. He is before everything else a superb man of business, far-seeing, practical, hard-headed, an organiser of victory, a statesman of the human soul. You cannot speak to him in this practical sphere without feeling that he is a man of ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... haunted house with a smile, and gone to sleep myself with an easy conscience, confident that a noisy wind, or a hooting owl, was the sum and substance of all the trouble. But Bill Coombs was a very different proposition. He was of the hard-headed kind, not to be easily alarmed by visionary terrors, and yet he was manifestly afraid to sleep in the house. I was sufficiently acquainted with his type to comprehend there must be some real cause driving him to retreat to the negro ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple, profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed, strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... too quickly, thanks to Miss Cullen, and by the end of that time I began to understand what love really meant to a chap, and how men could come to kill each other for it. For a fairly sensible, hard-headed fellow it was pretty quick work, I acknowledge; but let any man have seven years of Western life without seeing a woman worth speaking of, and then meet Miss Cullen, and if he didn't do as I did, I wouldn't trust him on the tailboard of a locomotive, for I should ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... done so, I was aware; and people, probably, would continue to do so; but not hard-headed, hard-hearted men, such as Robert Elmsdale was reputed to have been. He was not so old that the achievement of a second success should have seemed impossible. His credit was good, his actual position unsuspected. River Hall, ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... conflict. Any ideal whatever strains our digestions if it is hard to assimilate: but when two at once act on us in different ways, it is unbearable. In such a case, the poets will prefer the ideal that's idealest: the hard-headed instinctively choose ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... that Charles Frohman is a hard-headed American man of business who would not look at anything that is not likely to pay. On the contrary, he is the most wildly romantic and adventurous man of my acquaintance. As Charles XII. became an excellent soldier because of his passion for putting himself in the way of being ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... head or blind her to her shortcomings as an actress. She realized that in order to maintain her position she must have some influence outside of her own ability, so she laid plans to entangle in her net a hard-headed, blunt and supposedly soubrette-proof theatre manager. He fell victim to her charms, and in his cold, stolid way, gave her what love there was in him. Still not satisfied, she played two ends against the middle, and finding a young man of wealth and position, who could give ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... was a hard-headed, busy individual, who was quite unable to sympathize with his wife's finer aspirations. Her first husband had been clever and dissipated; this one was worthy and dull. And thus deprived of congenial friendships, without books or art or that social home life which ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... infinite mischief. Of course he was to be consigned immediately to the "fiery furnace below." And the greatest of American preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, in the same revival, gathered about him the hard-headed business men of New York City and together they prayed that wicked playwrights and worldly-minded theater-goers might be brought to a realizing sense of the shame of their conduct, and that the houses of their frivolous ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... when he learned that his favorite son, John, was conspiring against him. He turned his face to the wall and died (1189), the practical hard-headed old king leaving his throne to a romantic dreamer, who could not even speak the language ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... Mr Pearce, the master, is the next to be introduced to the reader: in external appearance, a rough, hard-headed north-countryman; but, with an unpromising exterior, he was a man with sense and feeling. He had every requisite for his situation: his nerves were like a chain-cable; he was correct and zealous in his duty; and a great favourite of the captain's, who was his countryman. He was about fifty ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... not hard-headed fellow, Plornish took his fortune as smoothly as could be expected; but it was a rough one. It so rarely happened that anybody seemed to want him, it was such an exceptional case when his powers were in any request, that his ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of inspiration was the powerful north express as it thundered over the sleeping plains of Germany and France on its night journey from Cologne to Paris. A thing of possibilities indeed, with its varying human freight—stolid Teutons, hard-headed Scandinavians, Slavs whom expediency or caprice had forced to descend upon Paris across the sea of ice. It was the month of January, and an unlikely and unlovely night for long and arduous travel. There were few pleasure-passengers on the express, and if one could have looked through the carriage ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... meet one day in Melbourne, one of them, presumably not long arrived, "speered" of the other, "Did ye ken ane Weelum Kerr here aboot?" "Weelum Kerr!" replied the other, in reproachful astonishment; "No ken Weelum Kerr, the greatest man in a' the toon!" That a hard-headed, liberal-minded commonsense Scot, as Kerr was in most things, should have had the Orange infirmity, may be excused, or at least explained, by the fact of his being of Stranraer, a Scotch town almost within hail of Ulster. That small, and not overmuch known place, has ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... generally err by being too bold and too fast. Instead of studying the art in the way the best men out perform, they are hiding their nervousness by going full speed at everything, or trying to rival the whips in daring. Any hard-headed fool can ride boldly. To go well when hounds are running hard—to save your horse as much as possible while keeping well forward, for the end, the difficult part of a long run—these are the acts a good sportsman seeks to acquire by observation ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... I opened with much stronger interest—was from Mordecai. I glanced over it for some mention of the "ane braw name," and bitterly laughed at my own folly in expecting to find such communications in the letter of the hard-headed and busy Jew. All was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... sequence of flowers without a gap is not the result of chance, or even of California's floral prodigality, but of McLaren's hard-headed calculation. He actually rehearsed the whole floral scheme of the Exposition for three seasons beforehand. To a day, he knew the time that would elapse between the planting and the blooming of any flower he planned to use. Thus he scheduled his gardening for the whole season so that the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... "I'm a hard-headed old cuss, harder'n brass tacks. I been made so by just such men as Andy Bishop—" He paused, and during his short hesitation, pregnant with meaning, Tessibel kept her eyes on him. "I was wonderin', little one," he finished, shame-faced, "when you say your prayers, if you'd pipe one ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it in the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... should fain hope; less blinded by a superstitious awe of the Church. 'Nothing could have been more unfortunate,' he continues, 'than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men.' Surely this zeal for the Church has carried him too far. Were these men all coarse minded? Nobody believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr, and the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon! This is not argument. Besides, it is perfectly gratuitous. The question, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... heavily upon his son's head, in a blow which would have stunned a lad less hardy and hard-headed. Res Vychan was not one to be defied with impunity by his own sons, and he had had hard encounters of ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from that balcony I had looked on something all the more historic because it may never be seen again. As the dusk fell and the moon brightened above that great ghostly city of canvas, I had fallen into talk with three or four of the officers at the base; grizzled and hard-headed men talking with all the curious and almost colourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective; one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. I think there is something in this of a sympathy between the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... ran around the laboratory, it is true, but the more hard-headed of his spectators charged him with having invented the apparatus himself. Though they didn't come right out and say so, they seemed to imply that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... could be more impressive than the manner of the preacher. His voice often trembled with emotion, and he spoke as one who had a solemn message of vast importance to mankind. But what was the message which could reach a hard-headed young 'lawyer by nature' with a turn for Benthamism? Fitzjames gives a kind of general form of Maurice's sermons. First would come an account of some dogma as understood by the vulgar. Tom Paine could not put it more pithily or expressively. Then his hearers were invited to look at the plain ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... least," said the lawyer, with fine earnestness. "He was just the man for his place and his time; 'twas his business to explain the new order of things to the hard-headed Jews, of whom he had been so notable a representative, that to convert him it was necessary that he should be knocked senseless and remain so for the space of three days: you remember the circumstance? He was just the man, too, to explain the ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... city of Lowell, and, amid fiery speeches, Lamson was told to choose between refuting my charges of fraud and being deposed from the presidency of the institution. Lamson attempted explanations, but the hard-headed stockholders did what the Amalgamated stockholders will some time do, passed resolutions that Lamson must punish me for libel or that they would punish him. The gathering then adjourned to a future date, at which Lamson was to report what action he had ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... The wisdom of this hard-headed old son of the soil—who abandoned agriculture for art at seventy—is exemplified in the fact that during the year just past, over twenty-eight thousand pilgrims have visited the Roycroft Shop—representing every State and Territory of the Union and every civilized country ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... and wherever a public building demands an ornament, a fir-shaped cone of straight lines rises in stoic severity. In vain one seeks for a refuge from Euclid—for an odd turning or a crooked by-way. To match the straight-ness of their streets and the granite of their structures the Aberdonians are hard-headed, close-fisted, and logical (there is a proverb that no Jew can settle among them), and when they die they are laid out neatly in a rectangular cemetery with parallel rows of graves. Even when they stand about gossiping they fall naturally ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that her reinstatement will cost her, will consume all her earnings from the beginning. Gurreeb-purwan, O munificent and merciful! what shall she do? She strikes for higher wages.—But you are hard-hearted and hard-headed; you will not pay,—by Gunga, not another pice! by Latchtmee, not one cowry more!—Oh, then she will leave; with a heavy heart she will turn her back on the blessed baby; she will pour dust upon her head before the Mem Sahib, at whose door her disgrace shall lie, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... afraid a hydraulic proposition would not interest such a hard-headed business man as you." To himself he added: "Good heavens! I am worse than Fraser ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... more favorable soil in the rural regions than in the cities. The demagogue and the "boss" find farmers impossible to control to their selfish ends. Vagabonds and idlers are out of place among them. They are a hard-headed, capable, and industrious class. As a rule, American farmers are well-to-do, not only earning a good living for their families, but constantly extending their holdings. Their farms are increasingly well improved, ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... a practical, hard-headed people. That is our national boast. You are a Yankee of the good old Massachusetts stock, I understand, proud of the fact that you can trace your descent right back to the Pilgrim Fathers. But with all our hard-headed practicality, Jonathan, ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... discovered from the peril. Else the mud of it would cling to Joan all her life. She would be spoilt. Harry Luttrell, too! If he married her, if he did not. But Martin could not think of a way out. The whole plan was an artful, devilish piece of hard-headed cunning. Martin fell to wondering where was Jenny Prask's weak joint. She certainly looked, with her quiet strength, as if she had not ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... free use of cocoa-nut oil, his head had become proof against shot. The distance from the place whence he was projected, to that where he was picked up, measured three miles, two furlongs, three yards, and eleven inches. A hard-headed fellow, Sir.—In his career he upset his colonel and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... Rubinstein's short orchestral commonplaces, were played with the usual brilliant finish. With the intermission came palpitation, a dry mouth, and a vague impression of Laroche's biting truths anent Anton's stupidity as a composer, and his strange influence over hard-headed Nicholas. Then there was one, last, terrible moment of dread, as the conductor remounted his dais and paused. Obviously he was addressing his men. More than that, he was pleading and admonishing; for yesterday's rehearsal ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... "YOU hard-headed, dunder-headed, obstinate, rusty, crusty, musty, fusty, old savage!" said I, in fancy, one afternoon, to my grand uncle Rumgudgeon—shaking my fist at ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... complacently. "So the lawyer thinks, as I do, that you will be highly imprudent if you go back to Mr. Dexter? A hard-headed, sensible man the lawyer, no doubt. You will listen to Mr. Playmore, won't you, though you wouldn't ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... illustrations of the noble art of butting, in a fashion that would have cracked, crushed and demolished the thickest craniums belonging to the Caucasian family, but which seemed to produce little effect on these hard-headed sons of sires born on the banks of the Niger, one of the belligerent parties watched an opportunity when his opponent was off his guard, dexterously evaded the favor intended for him, and drove his own head with tremendous force against the bosom ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... corresponds with this Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... that the reader is at once hard-headed, rational, I mean, and interested in the welfare of mankind. If he is not, he will not be a "reader" of this book. He, therefore, knows that the third task—the task of detecting and exposing the fundamental ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... was easy to hoodwink this hard-headed man in aught that affected Cynthia. Count Edouard displayed a good deal of tact when he called at the Savoy Hotel late the previous night, but his obvious relief at finding Vanrenen in London had induced the latter to depart ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... impress this on Miriam all the time," said Mrs. Austin, coming as usual to aid in the assault, "but she is so hard-headed, it is next to impossible to make her mindful of what I tell her. Miss Glen is the only one that seems to have any influence over her nowadays." She said this with a slight, impatient toss of the head, as she paused in her progress through ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... were vastly superior to their opponents, but Sullivan and Bartlett were nevertheless strong men and thoroughly prepared. Sullivan was a good lawyer and a fluent and ready speaker, with great power of illustration. Bartlett was a shrewd, hard-headed man, very keen and incisive, and one whom it was impossible to outwit or deceive. He indulged, in his argument, in some severe reflections upon Mr. Webster's conduct toward Wheelock, which so much incensed Mr. Webster that he referred to Mr. Bartlett's argument in a most contemptuous ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... These hard-headed, adventurous Western pioneers, indignant at the thought of any curtailment of their freedom; resentful of interference in what they were pleased to call their "inalienable right" to do as they pleased with the country they had conquered; utterly ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... sure the ocean will return and float your bark?" queried the scientist, patiently, for he saw that it was quite as useless to explain what had happened to this hard-headed old sea-dogas it was to ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... necessary preliminaries to any enterprise. This is the case in all four provinces, which is one of the things which goes to show that the Irish are really a single people and not two or three different peoples, as some writers assert. The hard-headed, commercially-minded Ulsterman is just as fond of public meetings as the Connacht Celt. He would hold them, with drums and full dress speechifying, even if he were organising a secret society and arranging for a rebellion. He is perfectly ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... had such travellings through the Naphtha Countries, sailings on the Caspian; such difficulties, successes,—ultimately, failure. Owing to Mr. Elton and Thamas Kouli Khan mainly. Thamas Kouli Khan—otherwise called Nadir Shah (and a very hard-headed fellow, by all appearance)—wiled and seduced Mr. Elton, an Ex-Naval gentleman, away from his Ledgers, to build him Ships; having set his heart on getting a Navy. And Mr. Elton did build him (spite of all I could say) a Bark or two on the Caspian;—most hopeful to the said Nadir Shah; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... that Hitler is not interested in the Western Hemisphere, no soporific lullabies that a wide ocean protects us from him—can long have any effect on the hard-headed, ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental brakes—when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,—not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, "Are the Gospels true?" "Presumably no, according to modern science and historical research." "Then away with everything founded on the Gospels," he replies; and begins ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... penny in the coffee-houses. It is incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will fall upon his employer and upon the nation. For some time, now, statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!" It would show more hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... unlikely things than that have happened,' Joan said neutrally. 'But really, Colin,' she went on with strenuous emphasis, 'I can't understand this phase of you. You—a hard-headed Bushman, to be dreaming romantic dreams and falling all of a sudden over head and ears in love with—with a figment of your imagination—just because you happen to have read by mistake some sentimental outpourings of a woman you know nothing about and who would never forgive me if she knew ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... doubt. I have, also, never lost faith in the legend myself, and in so doing have profited much from the examples of divers grant-claimants, who have often jostled me in their more practical researches, and who have my sincere sympathy at the skepticism of a modern hard-headed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various |
