"Shibboleth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presented in the spring of 1812 was not an unattractive one. A new party, controlled by a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men from the South, whose shibboleth was war with England, had sprung up in Congress, and, by sheer force of will and intellect, had dragged to the support of its policies the larger part of the Republican majority.[164] President Madison was thoroughly in sympathy with these members. He thought ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... disinclination as evidence of unworthiness. Poor little Susan! As we look back with the knowledge of our later life, we translate the heart-burnings as unconscious protests against labeling your free soul, against testing your reasoning conviction of to-morrow by any shibboleth of to-day's belief. We hail this child-intuition as a prophecy of the uncompromising truthfulness of the mature woman. Susan Anthony was taught simply that she must enter into the holy of holies of her own self, meet herself, and be true to the revelation. She first found words ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Father in the Gosple," the mask seems to be torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly. Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law. Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my grandmother ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and in this manner they paraded round the green, carrying a huge white flag, which had been embroidered in the village, and which bore in its centre, in conspicuous letters of gold, those three words, the loyal Shibboleth of La Vendee, ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in a crisis. "I shall ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... not the heart, made man, and is continuing to make him—ah, slowly, Dane, for life creeps slowly upward. The "Advanced Margin" is a favourite shibboleth of yours. And I take it that the Advanced Margin is that portion of our race which is more dominated by intellect than the race proper. And I, as a member of that group, propose to order my affairs in a rational manner. My ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of the spoken word over the written, a thing he could well afford to do, since he was a remarkably good writer. This for the same reason that the only man who can afford to go ragged is the man with a goodly bank-balance. The shibboleth of the modern schools of oratory is, "We grow through expression." And Plato was the man who first said it. Plato's teaching was all in the form of the "quiz," because he believed that truth was not a thing to be ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... not clear gold all through, Leam had not the grace of even the thinnest layer of varnish, and might well take lessons in the religion of appearances and that thing which we call "manner." Madame did know at least how to bear herself with the seeming of a lady, and could say her shibboleth as it ought to be said. Thus, she ate with delicacy and held her knife nicely poised and balanced, but Leam grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as not she took from the point. Mamma had eaten with her knife grasped also like a whanger, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... poems with a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement the renaissance of mediaeval feeling, but at the outset it acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the truths which unite are the most important ones—that they shall bulk largest in our hearts and minds. And if they do, we shall know our brother in every man that is like-minded with us towards them, whatever shibboleth may separate us. I spoke a moment ago about the separate pools on the beach, and the tide rising. When the tide goes down, and the spiritual life ebbs, the pools are parted again. And so ages of feeble spiritual vitality have been ages of theological controversy about ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... sins, which are thereupon no longer "imputed" to him. In other words, he is outwardly accounted and declared righteous in the sight of God, though inwardly he remains a sinner. With the exception of "sola fides" there was probably no shibboleth in the sixteenth century so persistently dinned into the ears of Catholics and Protestants alike as "iustitia Christi extra nos." It is found in the Apologia written in defence of the Augsburg Confession(905) and ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... to you, my dear Gelimer, that you have cast, not yourself alone, but your whole family besides, into this pit? Is it, forsooth, that you may avoid becoming a slave? But this is assuredly nothing but youthful folly, and making of 'liberty' a mere shibboleth, as though liberty were worth possessing at the price of all this misery! And, after all, do you not consider that you are, even now, a slave to the most wretched of the Moors, since your only hope of being saved, if the best happens, is ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... in the fifteenth century was not unlike that of the present day. There was strife, turmoil and dissension everywhere, a mighty power—that of Rome—opposing all free expression of opinion, an obsolete shibboleth called the Holy Roman Empire, and a ruthless enemy active in the East. In the midst of all this trouble George Podiebrad worked diligently at his League; he gained the adhesion of King Louis of France; Burgundy and Bavaria also joined, and Venice, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... with people of our world—people who know England and its great houses well enough to have made her familiar with the knowledge of where certain pieces of famous furniture are.—The very phrasing of her sentences is the phrasing of our Shibboleth, and not the ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... longer answer to "Peace be with (or upon) thee! " is still universally the custom. The "Salem" is so differently pronounced by every Eastern nation that the observant traveller will easily make of it a Shibboleth. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... in the West, Jake Studley took the view that all men are equal, and that the interests of one are the concerns of all. A civil answer to what in other climes would be considered impertinent curiosity was the unmistakable shibboleth of the coequal fraternity. Hartwell's manner had been interpreted by Jakey as a declaration of heresy to his orthodox code and the invitation to mind his own business as a breach of etiquette which ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... found or made,—and presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and drink together, play and work together,—then they will intermarry, and the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the conviction, the creed, the shibboleth, of the Southern whites,—race purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social intimacy, especially as symbolized by the common meal. And the prohibition was enforced among the whites by the penalty of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... own shibboleth the hardest of all, the most shifting, the most inaudibly pronounced by themselves, if it be not a universal "No," and yet the most rigorously insisted upon? Is there not a "cant" of the vague and complacent denial, quite ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... Hay, proceeding calmly down the somewhat steep stairs; "a man-on-the-market means one who wants to marry and is eligible for any heiress who comes along with a sufficient rent-roll. But why should a fellow like that talk the shibboleth of Society?" ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... who consider themselves Christian brethren; but the number taking up the name specifically, with a determination to stick to it denominationally, is small. In all large towns a few of this complexion may be found; and in Preston odd ones exist whose shibboleth is "Christian Brethren." We had a spell with them, rather unexpectedly, on a recent "first day"—"Christian Brethren" always call Sunday the first day. And it came about in this way: we were on the point of entering a Dissenting ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... said, completing the little interchange that had been reiterated so often that it had become almost a shibboleth. ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... squadron, and were very proud of the successes it had gained in the quasi-war with France just ended. They were tired also of a policy which was utterly at odds with their boast that all men were born free and equal, and the nation was roused with the shibboleth that there were "millions for defence, but ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... days they and their tittle-tattle will pass out of my existence, admitting that they have ever entered it. I repeat, my life is all my own, and that I am concerned only with those whom I wish to retain as my friends. Gossip is the shibboleth of the mediocre, and, thank heaven, I am ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful spirits take enlargement under the consciousness of brotherhood. There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in their own ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... universities beyond our borders, and I crave your indulgence for putting some of my larger views before you ere I speak on purely local topics. Friends and fellow citizens, we must make the world free for democracy. Let freedom of the seas be that shining shibboleth which through its ulterior meaning, when considerately scrutinized to its utmost and ultimate, and defined as we Americans who are fully cognizant of our grave responsibilities toward humanity and the affairs ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... note in this paean. Was this a necessary implication from the Dred Scott decision? Was it the intention of the Court to leave the principle of popular sovereignty standing upright? Was not the decision rather fatal to the great doctrine—the shibboleth of the Democratic party? ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the editor and publisher had been changed more than a year before; but this was not of much force. Though one swallow does not make a summer, I have generally found it show that summer is coming. However, thought I to myself, if this be Little Shibboleth, we shall have Big Shibboleth by-and-bye. At last it came. About a twelvemonth afterwards, (3d S. vii. p. 36) the following was the editorial answer to the question when the establishment was first called the "Church of England ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... obtain a certain breadth of view. For obvious reasons the component parts are not altogether similar, but their governing idea is as much the same as the difference of circumstances will permit. It would be difficult to define exactly what opens the doors of Australian society, but is the shibboleth any more definite in London? Distinction of some kind or other must be presupposed. If that of birth, it must either be allied to rank or have strong local connections. Is it not the same in London, though, of course, on an infinitely ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... is that Theology, at the age of seven, is not commendable—setting aside the question of whether (at any age) Theology is a web of words, ritual, dogma, tradition, invention, shibboleth; a web originally spun by interested men to ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... exchanged by the three gentlemen. I had stumbled upon their shibboleth, and proclaimed myself an Ephraimite, and not of Gilead. I have no doubt that up to that moment they had considered me as one of themselves—a member, and perhaps a priest, of their own ancient, grand, and imposing religion, for such ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Graham, Commander of the Wolf,—the same The Mess call'd Joseph,—with his Wife Under his arm.' He 'lays his life, The fellow married her for love, For there was nothing else to move. H is her Shibboleth. 'Tis said Her Mother was a Kitchen-Maid.' Poor Fred! What will Honoria say? She thought so highly of him. Pray Tell it her gently. I've no right, I know you hold, to trust my sight; But Frederick's state ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... localities, and were not readily to be caught by a cross-examination as to the topographical features, public institutions, or prominent inhabitants of the places where they pretended to belong. The best shibboleth I ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of the word "been," which the English invariably make to rhyme with "green," and we Northerners, at least (in accordance, I think, with the custom of Shakespeare's time), ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... may be their other characteristics, are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether right or wrong) to recognise the shibboleth of Toryism. We shall endeavour, however, in the expression of our opinions, to remember the respect we owe to our readers and to Mr. Macaulay's general character and standing in the world of letters, rather than the provocations ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... struck up an acquaintance with the portress, and traversed all distances in a brief space. There is a sort of freemasonry among the porter tribe, and, indeed, among the members of every profession; for each calling has its shibboleth, as well as its insulting epithet and the mark with which it brands ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... able to repeat Aitchison's Treaties and Sunnuds backward in his sleep. What he did with his stored knowledge only the Secretary knew; and he, naturally, would not publish the news abroad. This man's name was Wressley, and it was the Shibboleth, in those days, to say—"Wressley knows more about the Central Indian States than any living man." If you did not say this, you were considered one ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... aggrandizement of the individual is the exclusive or the dominant standard of success, so long as material prosperity, regardless of the conditions of its cost, or the civilization which results, is the shibboleth, American democracy, that faith in the common man which the pioneer cherishes, is in danger. For the strongest will make their way unerringly to whatever goal society sets up as the mark of conceded preeminence. What more effective agency is there for the cultivation of the seed wheat ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... "unity in the pure doctrine of the Gospel," such was the shibboleth of the faithful Lutherans over against the Melanchthonians and other errorists. But this was neither reprehensible doctrinalism nor a corruption of original Lutheranism, but the very principle from which it was born and for which Luther ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... More Babels, without new dispersion, than The stammering young ones of the flood's dull ooze, 110 Who failed and fled each other. Why? why, marry, Because no man could understand his neighbour. They are wiser now, and will not separate For nonsense. Nay, it is their brotherhood, Their Shibboleth—their Koran—Talmud—their Cabala—their best brick-work, wherewithal ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... undesirable for Washington to have sought the Presidency. But if Abraham Lincoln had not sought the Presidency he never would have been nominated. The objection in such a case as this lies not to seeking the office, but to seeking it in any but an honorable and proper manner. The effect of the shibboleth in question is usually merely to put a premium on hypocrisy, and therefore to favor the creature who is willing to rise by hypocrisy. When I ran for Speaker, the whole body of machine politicians was against me, and my only chance lay in arousing the people in the different districts. To do ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of every one to rise. A man may be born rich and noble—he is not born a gentleman. This word is the Shibboleth of England; it divides her into two halves, and civilized society into two castes. Among gentlemen—courtesy, equality, and politeness; toward those below—contempt, disdain, coldness and indifference. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never beat,—but, to be sure, it beat to a strange, restless, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Candidates have swallowed, and daily do swallow, many a worse one. As might be this doctrine of a great triangle, so is the doctrine of Home Rule. Why is a gentleman of property to be kept out in the cold by some O'Mullins because he will not mutter an unmeaning shibboleth? "Triangular? Yes,—or lozenge-shaped, if you please; but, gentlemen, I am the man for Tipperary." Phineas Finn, having seen, or thought that he had seen, all this, began, from the very first moment of his appointment, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... appreciable aid to a virtuous life, in a dogma such as this! And, in the hands of Seneca, it becomes a very empty formula. He entirely lacked the keen insight and dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler; and, in his explanation of this Stoical shibboleth, any real meaning which it may possess is evaporated into a gorgeous mist of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... things were estimated only by their value to commerce or to speculation; that there was neither space nor patience amongst men for what was, in their reckoning, useless; that the conqueror was now but a trader in disguise; that civilisation was but the shibboleth of traffic; that because trade follows the flag, therefore to carry the flag afar, thousands of young soldiers of every nationality are slaughtered annually in poisonous climes and obscure warfare, because such is the suprema lex and will of the trader. If the waters of Edera ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... loved, to have triumphed!—what more can the world bestow? I stand at the close of the conflict, my foot on the neck of my foe. Prone in the dust lies the demon Despair, still shouting his shibboleth To the treacherous Amazon dark-browed Fate, and her grisly comrade, Death. To have lived! To have felt in my veins the surge of the rich, red tide of life, The quickening stir of the strong man's heart that thrills to the sound of strife; To have wrested success from ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day—in Spain, at any rate—what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (vide my Tres Ensayos). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it—Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia—and hence it is reduced ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... cruel in the pestilence that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian soldier was revealed amongst them ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... upright." Why, that statement of the "Autocrat" appears to me at least as certain as that two and two make four. It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all the Earth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... System. He could take a muddle of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent workers, and of them make a smooth-running and effective unit. Untangling snarls was his pastime. Esprit de corps was his shibboleth. Order and management his idols. And his war-cry ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... present form of property-holding, and for it there can be neither truce, quarter, nor ending, save by the extinction of the class system itself. The identity of interests between capitalism and labour is a shibboleth that can only be given any sane meaning at all in the cynical sense that the interests of the wolf and the lamb are also 'identical' when the wolf has got the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... insulted. The translation of it is this: The man questioned, who is aware that as regards coat, hat, boots, and outward cleanliness he is below him by whom he is questioned, unconsciously feels himself called upon to assert his political equality. It is his shibboleth that he is politically equal to the best, that he is independent, and that his labor, though it earn him but a dollar a day by porterage, places him as a citizen on an equal rank with the most wealthy fellow-man that may ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Knowing everyone in all classes of society, he as an artist to whom all doors were open, she as the elegant wife of a Conservative deputy, they were experts in that sport of brilliant French chatter, amiably satirical, banal, brilliant but futile, with a certain shibboleth which gives a particular and greatly envied reputation to those whose tongues have become supple in this ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... they were termed? Like the Democracy, it died a natural death, so far as the active enforcement of its principles was concerned, after those principles had no longer a foundation in the social developments of the age. Here and there, an old and incurable devotee to mere forms or party shibboleth, who could not comprehend the new order of thought, went over to the 'Democratic' conservatives. Of such were the old gentlemen who, in Philadelphia, voted for the white waistcoat and immaculate snowy neck-tie of James Buchanan. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the most painstaking and patient efforts to avoid conflict, during which he was subjected to humiliation and insult, we see him grasp the sword, calling a united nation to arms in clarion tones, like some Crusader of old; his shibboleth: DECENCY, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... when the king took all this responsibility from the shoulders and said to the artists and artisans, "Art for Art's sake," or whatever was the equivalent shibboleth of that day. Here was comfort assured for the worker, with a housing in the Gobelins, or in that big asylum, the Louvre, where an apartment was the reward of virtue. And now was a market assured for a man's ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... most open. I had learnt, after no little application, a Welsh toast—a happy specimen of the language; it was but three words, but they were truly cabalistic. No sooner had I, after a "neat and appropriate" preface, uttered my triple Shibboleth, (it ended in rag, and signified "Wales, Welshmen, and Welshwomen,") than the whole party rose, and cheered at me till I felt positively modest. My pronunciation, I believe, was perfect, (a woman's lips and an angel's voice had taught it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... devil take the hindmost; the three or four hindmost if you will; nay, all but those strong-running horses who can force themselves into noticeable places under the judge's eye. This is the noble shibboleth with which the English youth are now spurred on to deeds of—what shall we say?—money-making activity. Let every place in which a man can hold up his head be the reward of some antagonistic struggle, of some grand competitive examination. Let us get rid of the fault of ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... important protective duty. It is a curious historical fact that this article, wool, seems to be the chief bone of contention ever since; in our tariffs nothing has been more bitter than the dispute on wool; the duty on wool is the shibboleth of the extreme protectionist.[1] Ohio, which is the home of the strong protection feeling, regards the duty on wool as the corner-stone to the whole fabric. It is argued that "a cheap coat makes a cheap man." In the East the feeling is that the duty on wool makes ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... could talk without being understood by the common crowd. You find velgar criminals thet know some French, German, Spenish or Portegese, bet none thet know Letin. In dealing with higher class criminals we used our own gibberish or artificial shibboleth." ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... and true men are required to maintain its teachings. "The assassins of liberty are now in power, but a reaction is coming. Stand firm, make no compromise, have nothing to do with men who talk of dead issues. It is the shibboleth of ruin. Push forward, and make a square fight for ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... only response was the bitter shibboleth—"Carajo!" showing that both were uneasy about the dog. Long before this time both had heard of the fame of Cibolo, though neither had a full knowledge of the perfect training to which ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... Rights....'" The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"—there was a sombre shadow in her glance—"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... second, striving for the interests of all, builds up, strengthens and purifies the weaker units; unmistakably making for good. The results seem to marshal themselves on the side of co-operation, for the purpose of demonstrating the truth of its shibboleth, that the injury or weakness of one, is the concern of all. In other words, to raise the lower strata of society, means a corresponding elevation for the upper. The average morality, happiness and prosperity of society, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... a nation, as a fan to the floor, which purges away the chaff and purifies the wheat. It is like the furnace to the metal, which takes away the dross and shews you a refined lump. It is a Shibboleth, to distinguish Ephraimites from Gileadites. And who knows not how great an advantage it is for the successful carrying on of any honourable design, to know friends from enemies, and the faithful from false ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... sides as to the progress of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us that he was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily judged when he can be brought on to the ground of immediate difficulties: there is a certain Shibboleth for men of superior talents, and we were of the tribe of modern Levites without belonging as yet to the Temple. As I have said, our frivolity covered certain purposes which Juste has carried out, and which ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... or four class-leaders, Anxious inquirers, and renewed backsliders, A score in all—to watch the river ferry, (As they of old did watch the fords of Jordan,) And cut off all whose Yankee tongues refuse The Shibboleth of the Nebraska bill. And then, in answer to repeated calls, I gave a brief account of what I saw In Washington; and truly many hearts Rejoiced to know the President, and you And all the Cabinet regularly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of triumph shot over Sissy's face. It leaped like a sunrise from peak to peak in a mountain-range of obstinacy. "I don't know"—"I don't know"—"I don't know"—the shibboleth of the strikers' cause went down the line. The master was shamed in public by the banner pupils of his school. He writhed, but he put the question steadily to every girl till he came to Irene, last ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... assumption of heartiness in resenting his former treatment of the King, and his early sympathy with the rebels. As Clarendon himself says, [Footnote: Life, i 425.] "They were all, or pretended to be, the most implacable enemies to the Marquis of Argyle; which was the 'Shibboleth' by which the affections of that whole nation ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... politician who sat in the British Parliament for English, Irish, and Scotch constituencies as Tory and later as Radical. Chief author of the Radical shibboleth, "Peace, ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the deeper cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... are dealing with science or with history we must beware of the ignorance which takes shelter under the shibboleth of fatalism Nature was formerly full of a host of fatalities which science is slowly contriving to avoid. The function of the superior man is, as I have shown elsewhere, to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... could not. By no mere shibboleth of words, no waving of a wand, could she restore the past, reconstruct what had been out of what was. Love she could give him in full measure, the same enduring love which would be his for ever, believing or unbelieving, living or dead. And his love she would take again—only ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... chance. You are the pickpocket of the happiness of which they are the proprietors. They are the legitimate possessors; you are the intruder. You live in concubinage with luck. What do you want that you have not already? Shibboleth help me! This fellow is a rascal. To multiply himself by Dea would be pleasant, all the same. Such happiness is like a swindle. Those above who possess happiness by privilege do not like folks below them to have so much enjoyment. If they ask you what right you have to be happy, you will ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... leading ideas in which work are the following: The suppression of competition by the establishment of state industries; equality of remuneration for labor; equality and legislative determination of the rate of interest; the choice of superintendents by the workmen. With many modern socialists, the shibboleth is not so much liberte as solidarite. Besides, Fichte's Naturrecht (1796), and his geschlossener Handelsstaat, are, without doubt, among the most remarkable works favoring an "organization of labor." They aim at the destruction of the present social system, which, at most, needs ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of linen, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... time host and guest Discussed, alone, in deepest interest, Some vague, mysterious matter that defied The wistful children, loitering outside The spare-room door. There Bud acquired a quite New list of big words—such as "Disunite," And "Shibboleth," and "Aristocracy," And "Juggernaut," and "Squatter Sovereignty," And "Anti-slavery," "Emancipate," "Irrepressible conflict," and "The Great Battle of Armageddon"—obviously A pamphlet brought from Washington, D. C., And spread among such friends as might occur Of like views with "The ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." The child tried its best, but could get no nearer than "tepasses," and "trepasses." "Alas!" says Fuller, it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue wherein there is a confluence of hard consonants together; and then he continues, "What the child could not pronounce the parents do not practise. O how lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close of this petition: As ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... fragments of idols. The neglected gardens no longer check the advancing sands, which in some places were drifting over the ramparts. Through its abandoned gateway we almost staggered with weakness, and directed our course to the miserable bazaar. The only meat we could find was pork, that shibboleth between Mohammedanism and Confucianism. The Dungan restaurant-keeper would not cook it, and only after much persuasion consented to have it prepared outside and brought back to be eaten beneath his roof. With better water and more substantial food we began, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... afraid this bout? A little, said I. To tell you the truth of it, quoth he, never were the Ephraimites in a greater fear and quandary when the Gileadites killed and drowned them for saying sibboleth instead of shibboleth; and among friends, let me tell you that perhaps there is not a man in the whole country of Beauce but might easily have stopped my bunghole ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Africa is only possible under Boer supremacy," is the Bond shibboleth. The end justifies the means, even to sedition, to a war of conquest and the wholesale ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... SHIBBOLETH, a word by which the Gileadites distinguished an Ephraimite from his inability to sound the sh in the word, and so discovered whether he was friend or foe; hence it has come to denote a party ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... about those red tabs? The expression "red tabs" is, however, employed rather as a shibboleth; staff-officers must be distinguished somehow when they are not wearing armlets, and were the tabs less conspicuous there would be no special harm in them. It is the red band round the cap that is so ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... tiger's voice: The lightning's touch is death; the thunder rends The very rocks whereon its anger lights, The paths are mined with gins; and giants wait To slay me should I speak with faltering tongue Their crafty shibboleth! Most dearest coz, This part you offer bids me play with death! I'll none of it. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... believed that he had a mission to bring labor into its own. The coming of the Democracy of Labor was a real democracy to him—no mere shibboleth. And as he rode through the rows of wooden tenements, where he knew men and women were being crushed by the great industrial machine, he thought of the tents in the fields; of the women and children and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... despising each other. To a Dutch or Russian Jew, the "Pullack," or Polish Jew, is a poor creature; and scarce anything can exceed the complacency with which the "Pullack" looks down upon the "Litvok" or Lithuanian, the degraded being whose Shibboleth is literally Sibboleth, and who says "ee" where rightly constituted persons say "oo." To mimic the mincing pronunciation of the "Litvok" affords the "Pullack" a sense of superiority almost equalling that possessed by the English Jew, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... well known to deal in such commodities, and to whom he was instructed to address himself in a particular phrase and with a certain sign, which, it seems, passed at that time current among the initiated Jacobites. The moment Mr. Pembroke had uttered the Shibboleth, with the appropriate gesture, the bibliopolist greeted him, notwithstanding every disclamation, by the title of Doctor, and conveying him into his back shop, after inspecting every possible and impossible place of concealment, he commenced: 'Eh, Doctor!—Well—all under the rose—snug—I keep no ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... creed—"Ali is the noblest of [God's] delegates, the wazir of the best of apostles"; "the Imam Maadd calls men to profess the unity of the Eternal"—in addition to the usual dogmas of the Mahometan faith. For two centuries the mosques and the mint proclaimed the shibboleth of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various |
