"Pettifogging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thinks will aid the Union cause. But the country was never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe—and their name is legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has been obliged to call them in, and substitute another device, since so many of the bills were marked ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Pitt, the greatest of all civilian ministers of War, was dismissed from office and not reinstated till the British Empire had been without a cabinet for eleven weeks. The French overran the whole of Hanover and rounded up the Duke of Cumberland at Kloster-Seven. Mordaunt and his pettifogging councils of war turned the joint expedition against Rochefort into a complete fiasco; while Montcalm again defeated the British in America by ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... said, with a harsh laugh. "You must remember there are two sides to the question. I should say that the interests of a husband and wife were identical, but that is not the view taken by those wretched little pettifogging ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the impression of vibrating with impatience and cried out, "That's pettifogging. Of course there are times when we are sure. Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Overstone with an affectation of tone and manner different from that in which he had addressed his previous companions, "have the Ninth United States Cavalry helped to serve a State court's pettifogging process?" ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... good fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before my ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... that all that was possible to accomplish that way had been done. The Cause hadn't moved an inch for years. It was even doing the other thing. Yes, it was going backward. Even the miserable little pettifogging share women had had in Urban and Borough Councils—even that they were deprived of. And they were tamely submitting! Women who had been splendid workers ten years ago, women with the best capacities for public service, had fallen into a kind of apathy. They were utterly disheartened. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the limit!" she reported to her confederates. "For calm self-complacency I've never seen anybody to equal her. The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school! Oh, it's too precious! She'd patronize the Queen herself! The Poplars must be executing a war-dance for joy to have got rid of her. Probably they'd have subscribed for more than a bracelet to pass her ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... Gourlay has remarked, "we should have seen, perhaps, the Duke of Ontario leading in a cart of hay, my Lord Erie pitching, and Sir Peter Superior making the rick; or perhaps his Grace might now have been figuring as a pettifogging lawyer, his Lordship as a pedlar, and Sir Knight, as a poor parson, starving on five thousand acres of Clergy Reserves."[31] We were spared the spectacle of such absurdities, and life members of the Legislative ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the Temple, where he lived gayly for some years, observing the humors of the town, enjoying its pleasures, and picking up just as much law as was necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or of a litigious client entertaining ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... himself. It will be seen, despite of all that has been said to the disadvantage of the devil, that he has very much improved in his management of worldly affairs; so much so, that, instead of an administration of witches, wizzards, magicians, diviners, astrologers, quack doctors, pettifogging lawyers, and boroughmongers, he has selected some of the wisest men as well as greatest fools of the day to carry his plans into effect. His satanic majesty seems also to have considerably improved in his taste; owing, no doubt, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... feel that fact at Bremen. The great ships, mishandled and in many cases disabled, now swell the numerical tonnage of other countries without adding so very much to their shipping power. The Hamburg-America line and Nord-deutscher Lloyd and others, shorn of their real glory, still continue a pettifogging existence booking tickets for passengers on the ships of foreign lines. What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British and American ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... a sacrificial feast, and otherwise pay him marked attention. Archedemus, feeling that he had in Crito's house a harbour of refuge, could not make too much of his patron, and ere long he had hunted up a long list of iniquities which could be lodged against Crito's pettifogging persecutors themselves, and not only their numerous crimes but their numerous enemies; and presently he prosecuted one of them in a public suit, where sentence would be given against him "what to suffer or what to pay." (5) The accused, conscious as he ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... arithmetic for computing fingers than any perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Euripides, in the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist, who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the "Helena," again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... repeated the senseless pit-digging and refilling programme for the priests, his invention was by no means exhausted. Direct incentive to rebellion proving completely abortive he now resorted to indirect pettifogging and pin-pricking tactics, harassing the unfortunate priests at every turn, depriving them of food or something else, reducing their rations, giving them the most repulsive work he could discover, and so forth. But it was all to no purpose. Those twenty-two priests beat him at every ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... commander-in-chief could loose the bonds; either by his personal initiative alone, and vigilant supervision, as did Hawke and Rodney, or by adding to this the broad view of discretion in subordinates which Nelson took. Before leaving this subject, note may be taken of a pettifogging argument advanced by Lestock and adopted by the Court, that orders to these three ships to press ahead would have resulted in nothing, because of the lightness of the wind then and afterwards. True, doubtless, and known after the fact; but who before the event could predict the uncertain Mediterranean ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... injunction implies a great deal, and has in its sound so much of the terrific, as in many instances to paralyze exertion on the part of the supposed offending person or persons. It has been made the instrument of artful, designing, and malicious persons, aided by pettifogging or pretended attorneys, to obtain money for themselves and clients by way of compromise; and in numerous instances it is well known that fear has been construed into actual guilt. Injunctions are become so common, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. But it was on condition that she should give up her babe and allow him to place it in a foundlings' ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... declaring that "He never knew fairer or more noble conduct in a pleader than in Otis; that he always defended his causes solely on their broad and substantial foundations." Among other stories and items of fact put forth in evidence of his contempt of the pettifogging and professional lying so common in these degenerate days, is the following: Being engaged on one occasion to recover the amount of a bill which was alleged by the defendant to have been paid, he discovered, quite accidentally, among his client's ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... to run off to London to get married, are you, miss?" he said ferociously. "Well, we'll see. You don't go out of my sight until we sail, and if I catch that pettifogging lawyer round at my gate again, I'll break every bone in ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... sequitur [Lat.], it does not follow. deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum [Lat.], evasive; irrelevant &c 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c (absurd) 497. foolish &c (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; finespun^, overrefined^. at the end of one's tether, au bout de son latin. Adv. intuitively &c adj.; by intuition; illogically &c adj.. Phr. non constat [Lat.]; that ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... a whole day, and at the end of it I may find that I have got nothing for my pains. These justices always try to find some excuse for the peasant, and when they do condemn, by way of exception, the affair does not end there. There is pretty sure to be a pettifogging practitioner prowling about—some rascally scribe who has been dismissed from the public offices for pilfering and extorting too openly—and he is always ready to whisper to the peasant that he should appeal. The peasant knows that the decision is just, but he is easily persuaded ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... infantry. Had these companies been maintained on a war-footing of 100 men each, as all companies and regiments should be, his force would have been 600 men, instead of less than 200. With such a force, he could easily have surrounded the Indians while they slept and have killed them all; but a pettifogging Congress had cut down the strength of the army to such an extent that the companies numbered less than twenty-five men each, and with this force Gibbon was unable to deal with the Indians as he could have done with ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, badly wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the desert side of the river. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham |
