"Apologist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Thus Boileau, in the guise of invective, eulogizes Louis XIV. Russian ladies unite in their persons great acquirements, combined with amiability and strict morality; also a species of Oriental charm which so much captivated Madame de Stael." It will occur to most that the apologist of the Russian fair "doth protest too much." The poet in all probability wrote the offending stanza in a fit of Byronic "spleen," as he would most likely himself have called it. Indeed, since Byron, poets of his school seem ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... regard to the stage, declaring that he had essayed a dramatized story and not a stage-play. He would not advise that his work be put upon the boards; for the rabble of the theater would not understand him, would take him for an apologist of vice, and so forth. There seems no good reason to doubt the essential sincerity of these expressions, though their author quickly changed his tune when the staging of 'The Robbers' became a practical question. In ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... antecedent probability. No doubt the quotation may have been made from a lost Gospel, but here again [Greek: eis aphanes ton muthon anenenkas ouk echei elenchon]— there is no verifying that about which we know nothing. The critic may multiply Gospels as much as he pleases and an apologist at least will not quarrel with him, but it would be more to the point if he could prove the existence in these lost writings of matter conflicting with that contained in the extant Gospels. As it is, the only result of these unverifiable hypotheses ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him by the Monography of the Press to constitute himself the dead author's apologist. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... warmth and earnestness, used these arguments, he concluded, by plainly hinting to his wife that she had always been the apologist of the tailor, in all their disputes; and that she could not be so obstinately blind to the irrefragable reasoning he had urged, if she were not influenced by her old hankering after this fellow, and did not consult ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... property for all the people. There is a curious bit of evidence that the men of his own time did not realize his power as a poet. In Pierre Bayle's critical survey of the literature of the time, he calls Milton "the famous apologist for the execution of Charles I.," who "meddled in poetry and several of whose poems saw the light during his life or after his death!" For all that, Milton was only working on toward his real power, and his power was to be shown in his service to religion. His three ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... perhaps the greatest, of the writers for whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIERE. In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national—it is universal. Gathering ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... sorely lacked—a high notion of honour, a keen sense of right and wrong. He had the honest man's contempt for meanness of any description, and he had little patience with the lax so-called business morals of the day. For him a dishonourable or dishonest action could have no apologist, and he could see no difference between the crime of the hungry wretch who stole a loaf of bread and the coal baron who systematically robbed both his employes and the public. In fact, had he been on the bench he would probably ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... convinced how many faces history can wear, and how difficult it is to get at the true one, he has only to compare Dr. Lingard's account of this reign with Mr. Turner's. Much obliquity was to be expected, indeed, from the avowed apologist of a persecuted party, like the former writer. But it attaches, I fear, to the latter in more than one instance,—as in the reign of Richard III., for example. Does it proceed from the desire of saying something new on a beaten topic, where the new cannot ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... Not its most enthusiastic apologist would call Black Rock a religious community, but it possessed in a marked degree that eminent Christian virtue of tolerance. All creeds, all shades of religious opinion, were allowed, and it was generally ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... What I now desire is that every man who was enlisted as a soldier shall at once return to his command by the way of Fort Scott unless otherwise ordered by competent authority...." [Indian Office Land Files, Southern Superintendency, 1855-1870, C 1933]. Coffin, as usual, appeared as an apologist for the Indians and attempted to exonerate Opoeth-le-yo-ho-la from all blame [Letter to Dole, December 3, 1862, Ibid.]. He called the aged chief, "that noble old Roman of the Indians," and the chief himself ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Henry must have a male heir is so absolutely conclusive in the judgment of Henry's great apologist that he feels it necessary to offer excuses for the womanly weakness which blinded Katharine to her obvious duty. It may also have appealed with considerable force to a statesman who regarded all pledges and bonds as being in ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... was not sufficient to restrain the thoughtless impetuosity of the girl. She was, besides, an only daughter, and her father, of whom we shall give some account later, adored her. In addition to all this, her nurse, who acted as housekeeper in the house, was at the same time the accomplice and the apologist of her pranks, for the truth is she loved her like the apple of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... caricature of the theologians, their arguments and modes of expression, it was calculated to make them ridiculous especially in the eyes of the university students. Against an attack of this kind serious arguments were unavailing, and, unfortunately, there was no apologist of theology capable of producing a reply couched in a strain similar to that of the /Epistolae/. Gratius himself did undertake the task in his /Lamentationes obscurorum virorum/, but without success, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as fantastic in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early reputation as the apologist for free ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues, but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and bad: "The devils," says Sir Thomas Brown, "do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies; nor can the society of hell subsist ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Roman controversy it is sometimes hard to be just without appearing to mean more than is said; for the obligation of justice sometimes forces one who wishes to be a fair judge to be apparently an apologist or advocate. Yet the supreme duty in religious controversy is justice. But for the very reason that these controversialists wished to be just to Rome, they were bound to be just against her. They meant to be so; but ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... conqueror was cruel from policy alone, it is probable this was merely a precaution against signals; for it is quite apparent, if he desired, to torment his captives, France has places better adapted to the object than even the donjon of Vincennes. I am not his apologist, however; for, while I shall not go quite as far as the Englishman who maintained, in a laboured treatise, that Napoleon was the beast of the Revelations, I believe he was anything but ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to be otherwise, when Dana makes Vice so attractive in the Sun every morning, and Godkin makes Virtue so odious in the Post every afternoon?" Charles A. Dana, the editor of the Sun, the stanch supporter of Tammany Hall, and the apologist of almost every evil movement for nearly thirty years, was a writer of diabolical cleverness whose newspaper competed with Godkin's among the intellectual readers in search of amusement. At one time, when Godkin had been particularly caustic, and the Mugwumps at Harvard were unusually ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... woman realize the apologist claim of Lecky that "though she may be the supreme type of vice, she is also the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, happy homes would be polluted, unnatural ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a master of compression; he can put a conception more ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... (with Matthaei, [supra, p. 66,]) that Origen is the true author of all this confusion. He certainly relates of himself that among his voluminous exegetical writings was a treatise on S. Mark's Gospel.(438) To Origen's works, Eusebius, (his apologist and admirer,) is known to have habitually resorted; and, like many others, to have derived not a few of his notions from that fervid and acute, but most erratic intellect. Origen's writings in short, seem to have ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... enough then, though it has been forgotten till the last few years—was doing her utmost to shield Mary. Buchanan was deputed, it seems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly never people had an abler apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must be remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used—and it may be abused—all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he was fighting ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... torment himself like a convict in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing; and he would end by becoming a true monster, if he were to succeed!"[34] Many years afterwards he wrote in the same sense to Madame Voland. "I have ever been the apologist of strong passions; they alone move me. Whether they inspire me with admiration or horror, I feel vehemently. If atrocious deeds that dishonour our nature are due to them, it is by them also that we are borne ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... certain extent unreal; it is probable that the dialogue does in fact represent the matter of actual discussions between the two principal interlocutors, celebrated orators of the Flavian period, to which as a young student Tacitus had himself listened. One phrase dropped by Aper, the apologist of the modern school, is of special interest as coming from the future historian; among the faults of the Ciceronian oratory is mentioned a languor and heaviness in narration—tarda et iners structura in morem annalium. It is just this quality ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... express to you how strange it seems to me that I am obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of the people upon ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the abuse and injustice done to the Bible by those who make it the shelter and apologist for all the wrong, vileness, and sneaking meanness that the world bears up; and closed with a testimony against the cowardice of those time-serving ministers who allow their manhood to be suffocated by a white cravat, and who never publicly take sides ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unscrupulous combinations and corporations; and it is to be regretted more than wondered at if he struck out wildly in his indignation, and that his blows fell sometimes upon the wrong object. But I did not intend to act the part of his apologist. The twenty years of his senatorial life are crowded with memorials of his loyalty to truth and free dom and humanity, which will be enduring as our history. He is no party to this movement, in which my name has been more ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... all the same to you, sir apologist of the modern world, I should like to pause here and ask you frankly: Do you not feel yourself more contemporary with all the dead who slumber within these walls than with a radical elector or a free-mason deputy? Do you not feel that if these ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was on the wrong side. Also that it was not until after our own war that the heroine of fiction began to reverse the immemorial procedure and marry a man her inferior in years. In other words, anything she could get. This would almost argue that fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in attacking the principle of the Reformation, the passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent apologist of Barnevelt and ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the concomitants of barbarism. To deny this is to deny the superiority of RIGHT over wrong. He who denies this, becomes the advocate of barbarism; for, barbarism being below civilization, he asserts its equality with civilization, and thus becomes its apologist and advocate. ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... guests is pretty sure to take the part of devil's advocate, and to exercise his forensic skill in showing how easily interchangeable are the names of virtue and iniquity, crime and well-doing. September massacres then find, not their apologist, but their eulogist. Noyades of Carrier, fusilades of Collot d'Herbois, are cited as examples very suitable for imitation in adequate emergencies. Prussia's seizure, on behalf of Germany, of Schleswig ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... recollected and told, that in his old age he wrote a letter entreating his friend to discourage the reading of the Decameron, for the sake of modesty, and for the sake of the author, who would not have an apologist always at hand to state in his excuse that he wrote it when young, and at the command of his superiors.[613] It is neither the licentiousness of the writer, nor the evil propensities of the reader, which have given to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... is there civil war within the soul: Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier Makes humble compact, plays the supple part Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist For ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... said one apologist, "does not betoken a man of genius, but German candour shines on his brow." Strange candour, scarcely recognizable if you take the word in its common and proper sense. It must be taken, as was then the practice in Germany, through translations ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... ashamed to glory in their commercial success, and are always ready to cheer a politician who professes to have the interests of trade at heart. Amid the current eulogies of the working man and the apotheosis of the beings called 'Captains of Industry,' the bagman surely ought to find at least an apologist. Without him it seems likely that many articles would fail to find a place in the windows of the provincial shopkeepers. Without him large sections of the public would probably remain ignorant for years of new brands of cigarettes, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... well-being may be brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Milton. This Milton, from henceforth a European celebrity, was not the author of Paradise Lost which was not yet written, nor of his earlier poems which were little known in England and quite unknown elsewhere. He was the apologist of the Regicides, the Foreign ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Nor his comedies, which are deservedly forgotten; nor his improvements in the production of plays, serviceable as they were to the acting drama. But to his exertions Milton owed impunity from the vengeance otherwise destined for the apologist of regicide, and so owed the life and leisure requisite to the composition of "Paradise Lost." Davenant, grateful for the old kindness of the ex-secretary, used his influence successfully with Charles to let the offender escape.[18] This is certainly the greenest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Uitlanders; and he thought the time had come to realise his programme of February 17th, 1881, formulated by Dr. Reitz at the end of his official pamphlet,[4] "Africa for the Africanders from the Zambesi to Simon's Bay." We have seen what view, according to his apologist, "the man of war and politics" takes of his relations with the natives; we shall now see how he regards his relations ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Carbondale, so called because of the coal deposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautiful hamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, so dubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlier days; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because this village is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the original promoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend the Arkansas River makes at this place; Pawnee Rock, from a local rallying-point of the Pawnees ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Sankey are not unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the Anti-Jacobin. But the apologist is not really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it." Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How do you know that? On your own ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... insinuations of meanness, blurring the fair character of his best acts. The generous doings of the President were too notorious not to be admitted, but generally a sinister or selfish motive is insinuated. His courtesy was unpleasing, while extreme coarseness met with a ready apologist. In the several Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there does not appear the slightest ground upon which to found a charge of meanness of character: it is inconceivable how such should have ever been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires. We ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... not an apologist, least of all for myself, and as this is the true story of a life I believe to have been exceptionally varied I think that in it should be related the things I did which might be considered "bad" nowadays, ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... usually given in explanation of its use are for the most part merely paraphrases of the traditional meanings that in the course of history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist nor the priestly apologist will, as a rule, admit that he does not know why such ritual acts as pouring out water or burning incense are performed, and that they are wholly inexplicable and meaningless to him. Nor will they confess that the real inspiration to perform such rites is the fact ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of a biographer of Ralegh is to be strenuously on the guard against degenerating into an apologist. But, above all, he ought to be versed in the art of standing aside. While explanations of obscurities must necessarily be offered, readers should be put into a position to judge for themselves of their sufficiency, and to substitute, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... and the deep regret that all must feel that his promising career was prematurely cut short by the hand of death, should not blind us to the fact that, in spite of a manifest attempt to write judicially, he must be regarded as an apologist for Disraeli. In respect, indeed, to one point—which, however, is, in my opinion, one of great importance—he threw up the case for his client. The facts of this ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... that belief. There has not occurred, since that time, the least argument to prove that they were mistaken; can there be any reason at present to doubt the truth of their opinion? Camden, though a professed apologist for Mary, is constrained to tell the story in such a manner as evidently supposes her guilt. Such was the impossibility of finding any other consistent account, even by a man of parts, who ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... real nature seems to be often misunderstood: for though the foreign policy of the last two Kings of the House of Stuart has never, since the correspondence of Barillon was exposed to the public eye, found an apologist among us, there is still a party which labours to excuse their domestic policy. Yet it is certain that between their domestic policy and their foreign policy there was a necessary and indissoluble connection. If they had upheld, during a single year, the honour of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to set a very bad example to the warring Powers, and when protests are made in this country concerning the low proportion of the war's costs that is being met out of taxation it is easy for the official apologist to answer, "See how much more we are doing than Germany." It is easy, but it is not a good answer. Germany had no financial prestige to maintain; the money that Germany is raising for financing the war ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of modern culture. And, you know, the maiden follows mama. She is an apologist of sublime lewdness, of emancipated human caninity. Now I am no prude. I can stand a fairly strong touch of human nature. I can even put up with a good deal of the frankness of the cat and dog. But the frankness ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... one day of the week when Paradise needed no apologist. For on Thursdays the stage arrived from Tellurium, bringing the mail and, now and then, a passenger, and always a whiff of the outside world. No resident of Paradise Park would willingly have missed the arrival of the stage; and on this occasion fully two-thirds ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... contrasting the spread of Islam, "its rattling quiver and its glittering sword," with the silent progress of Christianity, our apologist, after dwelling on the teaching and the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... of current sophistries or the apologist might reply that all this money came from legitimate business transactions, the natural increase in the value of land, and thus on. But waiving these superficial explanations and defenses, which really mean nothing ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... conscience. Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there falls into the same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... injury to Mary Rafferty result from these experiments upon her brain? Bartholow himself admits some injury; he says that to repeat the experiments "would be in the highest degree criminal." The modern apologist, however will have it otherwise. At the beginning of the experiment, she smiled as if amused; and this, he tells us, "whows that she did not object, that the pain was not severe, AND THAT NO HARM WAS DONE HER." Is this a ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... what was considered exceptional the rule. It gathers up into one comprehensive statement the scattered occasions of misery, and reveals a system whereby the few thrive at the expense of the many. The apologist for Divine goodness has thus an aggravation of his load, and needs to be freed from all unnecessary trammels in the shaping ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... throughout temperate, hopeful, and charitable. The noblest side of womanhood comes out in this; and however her fiery youth might have counselled, in the pages now under consideration she appears as the apologist of humankind, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... that it was this difference in the two men that lay at the bottom of the unfortunate antagonism between Owen and Huxley. There is in Owen's writing, where he is not purely scientific, a touch of the apologist. He cannot quite make up his mind to follow evolution to its logical conclusions. Where he is forced to do so, it is to him like signing the death warrant of his dearest friend. It must not be forgotten that Owen was born more than twenty ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... spire, needs no apologist to justify its claim to be considered the most beautiful, not merely in England, but in Europe. From the time Leland naively wrote, "the tower of stone and the high pyramis of stone on it is a noble and memorable 'peace' of work," every critic of the cathedral praises ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... accordance with these. At first these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced by the Council of Arles in 314, and a modern Church apologist insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the sway of the Church—Justinian, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... natural domestic affections, must, for the most part, afford the greatest good of which they are capable. To the evils which sometimes attend their matrimonial connections, arising from their looser morality, slaves, for obvious reasons, are comparatively insensible. I am no apologist of vice, nor would I extenuate the conduct of the profligate and unfeeling, who would violate the sanctity of even these engagements, and occasion the pain which such violations no doubt do often inflict. Yet such ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to speak bitterly of this poor woman, and to pity More for his cruel fate in being united to a termagant. No one has any compassion for her. Sir Thomas is the victim; Mistress Alice the shrill virago. In those days, when every historic reprobate finds an apologist, is there no one to say a word in behalf of the Widow Middleton, whose lot in life and death seems to this writer very pitiable? She was quick in temper, slow in brain, domineering, awkward. To rouse sympathy for such a woman is no easy task; but if wretchedness is a title to compassion, Mistress ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the presumptuous intermeddler who has dared to libel the people of England is ten thousand times more real than Salmasius's official indignation at the execution of Charles. His contempt for Salmasius's pedantry is quite genuine; and he revels in ecstasies of savage glee when taunting the apologist of tyranny with his own notorious subjection to a tyrannical wife. But the reviler in Milton is too far ahead of the reasoner. He seems to set more store by his personalities than by his principles. On the question of the legality of Charles's execution he ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... unwholesome about it; and this is too often overlooked. Where does he tempt one to stray from duty? Where, even indirectly, does he give pernicious advice? Whom has he led to evil ways? Does he ever inspire feelings that breed misconduct and vice, or is he ever the apologist of these? Many poets and romance writers, under cover of a fastidious style, without one coarse expression, have been really and actively hurtful; and of that it is impossible to accuse Rabelais. Women in particular quickly revolt from him, and turn ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... I had fancied that Uncle Silas's gentle nature would have recoiled from such an outrage with horror and indignation; and instead, here he was, the apologist of that ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... an apologist of robbers and assassins, has neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself, he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... stood here instead of this, its poor apologist. It was to have filled these lines, this space, this very page. It is not here. You all know how, coming eagerly to a house to see someone dearly loved, you find in their place on entering a sister or a friend who makes excuses for them; you all know how the mind ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... prelude to a confession of error, which in part relieved the mind of Matilda: but she was still uneasy—she felt as if Charles would be her apologist with his family, for an error they were likely to blame in her; but the ardour of his manner made her feel much concerned for him—he was dear to her—she felt for him a sister's affection, but felt that ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism. While Italian prelates have found an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however extravagantly, that there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias and Machiavels, Stuarts and Fletchers, have surely a right to a fair trial. If they went too far ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the senseless remains of a dead man impertinent and superstitious. One of the first distinctions of the primitive Christians, was their neglect of bestowing garlands on the dead, in which they are very rationally defended by their apologist in Manutius Felix. "We lavish no flowers nor odours on the dead," says he, "because they have no sense of fragrance or of beauty." We profess to reverence the dead, not for their sake, but for our own. It is, therefore, always with indignation or contempt that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... rising to heaven on a bed of roses. After the celebrated quarrel between the subscribers and non-subscribers, a controversy took place about psalmody, which the Weigh-house ministers stoutly defended. Samuel Wilton, another minister of Weigh-house Chapel, was a pupil of Dr. Kippis, and an apologist for the War of Independence. John Clayton, chosen for this chapel in 1779, was the son of a Lancashire cotton-bleacher, and was converted by Romaine, and patronised by the excellent Countess of Huntingdon; he used to relate how ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... interest by the late Parliament, busy with speculations on the character of the new Electorate. But, if his parliamentary work had been slight, he had considerable literary reputation, and had taken an active part, in the press, in discussions on the Irish question. The apologist of Danton, the champion of the Jacobin Club, he was the one English political writer who believed himself able to find in the throes of the French Revolution valuable examples of public policy. The figures of that terrible convulsion did not attract him so much by their range of human passion, by ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... original study of American literature will not be a mere apologist for it. He will marvel at the greatness of the moral lesson, at the fidelity of the presentation of the thought which has molded this nation, and at the peculiar aptness which its great authors have ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Constitution, this pupil of the school of Filmer advanced the startling doctrine that the Lords and Commons of England derive their existence and authority from the King, and that the Kingly government could go on, in all its functions, without them. This pitiful paradox found an apologist in Mr. Windham, whose chivalry in the new cause he had espoused left Mr. Pitt himself at a wondering distance behind. His speeches in defence of Reeves, (which are among the proofs that remain of that want of equipoise observable in his fine, rather than solid, understanding,) have ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... part of these inferior writers:—'a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who, because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehensions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been long exposed to insult without a defender, and to censure without an apologist.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... interposition. Nor can the most favourable criticism exonerate them from the reproach at least of having witnessed without protestation the barbarous cruelties practised in the name of heaven; and the eminent names of Bishop Jewell, the great apologist of the English Church, and of the author of the 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' among others less eminent, may be claimed by the advocates of witchcraft as respectable authorities in the Established Church. The 'judicious' ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... The apologist may retort that he did not mean answer to the argument from coherency of conduct. In measuring utility you have to take into account not merely the service rendered to the objects of the present hour, but the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... nations. Even within the delegations of the Great Powers there were indignant murmurings against this indefensible and unheard-of treatment of allies. No man, whose mind was not warped by prejudice or dominated by political expediency, could give it his approval or become its apologist. Secrecy, and intrigues which were only possible through secrecy, stained nearly all the negotiations at Paris, but in this final act of withholding knowledge of the actual text of the Treaty from the delegates ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... the authority and prestige of the Jerusalem temple, and to prove that Jehovah "was not with Israel" (II Chron. 25:7), which was represented in his day by the hated Samaritans. The hatred engendered by the Samaritan feud explains many of the peculiarities of the Chronicler. He was, in fact, an apologist rather than a historian. Thus post-exilic institutions, as, for example, the temple song service with its guilds of singers, are projected backward even to the days of David, and the events of early Hebrew history are constantly glorified. ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... About Mr. Malabar! himself, his biographer writes: "If he could not accept the dogmas of Christianity, he had imbibed its true spirit," meaning the spirit of Christ Himself. "The cult of the Asiatic life" is the latest definition of Christianity given by a recent apologist of Hinduism, one of a small company of Europeans in India officering the Hindu revival. Crossing India again and going south, we find the late Dr. John Murdoch, of Madras, an eminent observer, adding his testimony regarding the homage paid to the Founder of Christianity. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... a natural apologist, pleads that the Irish gentry have the most beautiful gardens in the world and the greatest natural taste in gardening, and there must be some reason why the lower classes are so different in this respect. May it not ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the ancient Therapeutae, we have another important admission by the same historian, who, in quoting from an apology addressed to the Roman Emperor, Marcus Antoninus, in the year 171, by Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in Lydia, a province of Asia Minor, makes that apologist say, in reference to certain grievances to which the Christians were subjected, that "the philosophy which we profess truly flourished aforetime among the barbarous nations; but having blossomed again in the great reign of thy ancestor, Augustus, it ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... Catholics, who did not consider that the political claims referred to in the oath were the true principles of the Papacy, declared that the brief was spurious; but after some time it was confirmed in all due form, and an address appeared from the pen of the most eminent apologist of the See of Rome, Cardinal Bellarmin, in which he reminded the archpriest that the general apostolical authority of the Pope could not be impugned even in a single iota of the subtleties of dogma: how much less ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... that his trousers were reaching the point of danger, and now at length he had something that interested him. Charlie was sidling up unseen by the orator. There was a little nip followed by a sharp exclamation, and the thread of the discourse was broken! The relieved poet now had the floor as an apologist for his discourteous parrot. ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... this is an attack by a lower civilization upon a higher one. [Derisive cries.] As a matter of fact, the attack was begun by the civilization which calls itself the higher one. I am no apologist for Russia; she has perpetrated deeds of which I have no doubt her best sons are ashamed. What empire has not? But Germany is the last empire to point the finger of reproach at Russia. ["Hear, hear!"] Russia has made ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... The apologist little imagined he was at this moment infinitely more awkward and ill-bred than the person whom he affected to pity and to honour with his protection. Our hero continued to be upon the best terms possible with himself and ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... neighbourhood, but no less certainly he had, during the October of 1856, a smart exchange of cannon-shots with Yeh, which lasted for some days (three, at least, according to my remembrance), and ended in the capture of numerous Chinese forts. The American apologist says in effect, that the United States will not fight, because they have no quarrel. But that is not the sole question. Does the United States mean to take none of the benefits that may be won by our arms? He speaks of the French as more ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the "Curiosities of Literature," though hardly one of its "Amenities," that certain phrases carefully dissected from this paper (which was written by Mr. Bacon at the age of twenty-one) should be pertinaciously used, in the face of repeated exposures, to prove the author of it to be an apologist for slavery! ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in the world that they have been singled out for praise in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW. Poor places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—surely they have waited over-long for an apologist.... But first of all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these points of punctuation in the text ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... It is that which our poet gives of it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis—vanity! All the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. Like Francis ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... constrained and more serious was the beloved apologist of the Church, Ozanam, the inquisitor of the Christian language. Although he was very difficult to understand, Des Esseintes never failed to be astonished by the insouciance of this writer, who spoke confidently of God's impenetrable designs, although he felt obliged to ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... extenuation; palliation, palliative; softening, mitigation. reply, defense; recrimination &c 938. apology, gloss, varnish; plea &c. 617; salvo; excuse, extenuating circumstances; allowance, allowance to be made; locus paenitentiae[Lat]. apologist, vindicator, justifier; defendant &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his immediate antagonist. And the charge of intolerance and defective charity becomes thus very much stronger against the poor bishop, because it takes the shape of a confession extorted by mere force of truth from an else reluctant apologist, that would most gladly have denied everything that he could deny. The Life needs more than ever to be accurately written, since it has been thus chaotically mis-narrated by a prelate of so much undeniable talent. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... February gathering of a society over which for some time past I have had the honor of presiding, and which, therefore, commanded my first allegiance to-night. It is not often that I am accustomed to appear in the attitude of an apologist when called upon to respond to a sentiment such as you have assigned to me to-night, for it would be but the affectation of modesty to say that I have been unaccustomed to positions of this kind; yet I do feel something of reluctance in your presence to-night, at the first banquet ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... purity in the midst of such great temptations. I shall only add that this character of male chastity, though doubtless as desirable and becoming in one part of the human species as in the other, is almost the only virtue which the great apologist hath not given himself for the sake of giving the example to ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret loving. Jude the Obscure is perhaps the most unbiased consideration ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... freely given, of the comparatively few who, since that memorable day of its foundation, November 5, 1884, have maintained, written for, and contributed to the expenses of the Catholic Truth Society? It has provided the apologist with an armoury and the teacher with material; it has saved the scholarly many an hour of troublesome research; it has given the unlearned instruction suited to their needs; it has given the masses of our people the popular ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... other stain than that which comes from blood,—for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at the condition of this unhappy country when we see the Executive looking quietly on, when the public press has become the apologist of crime, and public sympathy is enlisted on the side ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... talked as though most blissfully ignorant of that rule. The passages given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes a supernatural Causer of what experience ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... government; that Cato himself, had he remained upon earth, could have done us no good, unless he would have yielded to become our prince. But I see you consider me as a deserter from the republic, and an apologist for a tyrant. I, therefore, leave you to the company of those ancient Romans, for whose society you were always much fitter than for that of your contemporaries. Cato should have lived with Fabricius and Curius, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... crimes, even as the bulletins of Napoleon were set forth to show his victories in the most favorable light. His fame rests on his victories and successes as a statesman rather than on his merits as an historian, even as Louis Napoleon will live in history for his deeds rather than as the apologist of Caesar. [Footnote: See History of Caesar, by Napoleon, a work more learned than popular, however greatly he may be indebted to the labors of others.] The "Commentaries" resemble the history of Herodotus more than any other Latin production, at least in style; ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... things" to which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might write books and yet ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... India by the British was in the same way very clearly done under compulsion, first lest the Dutch or French should exploit the vast resources of the peninsula against Britain, and then for fear of a Russian exploitation. I am no apologist for British rule in India; I think we have neglected vast opportunities there; it was our business from the outset to build up a free and friendly Indian confederation, and we have done not a tithe of what we might have done to that end. But then we ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... and the instinct-doctrines of Bergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologist for supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the method of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... gentlemanly and able representative of that colossal power which he has helped to build up and fortify. From being a child of that power he has now become, in a most theosophical manner, one of the fathers of it! As such he has made himself the apologist of a gigantic and rampant beast on whose horns of hazard the values produced by the labor of seventy millions of Americans are tossed about as if the wreckage were so much waste excelsior thrown on the horns of a bull! ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... Mortality: "He was the unscrupulous agent of the Scottish Privy Council in executing the merciless seventies of the Government in Scotland during the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second;" and his latest apologist candidly admits that "it is impossible altogether to acquit Claverhouse of the charges laid to his account." We are inclined to ask, with some surprise, Why should he wish to acquit him? But Claverhouse himself, as if in prophetic cynicism, writes his own condemnation ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... enthusiasm." Mr. Henson sees this clearly himself, and therefore he pretends that all the best ideas of the French Revolution were borrowed from Christianity. Shades of Voltaire and Diderot, of Mirabeau and Danton, listen to this apologist of the faith you despised! Voltaire's face is wreathed with ineffable irony, Diderot contemplates the speaker as a new species for a psychological monograph, Mirabeau flings back his leonine head with a swirl of the black ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... vague and not commonly avowed in so many words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner of his discourse—that these sports, as well as the general range of predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting character, do not altogether commend themselves to common ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... rebel who rests on the inherent or reserved right of each State to secede from the Union at her sovereign pleasure, is a bad logician, and unsound in his constitutional theories; but he is not necessarily a knave. But the rebel apologist who says to Europe, 'This revolt was not impelled by Slavery, but by hostility to the policy of Protection, Internal Improvements, etc., which the North had power in the Union to fasten upon us in defiance of our utmost opposition,' he shows himself a dissembler and a liar. There was no ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Scripture, of the councils, and of the theologians. This Catholicism I loved, and I still respect it; having found it inadmissible, I separated myself from it. This is a straightforward course, but what is not straightforward is to pretend ignorance of the engagement contracted, and to become the apologist of things concerning which one is ignorant. I have never lent myself to a falsehood of this description, and I have looked upon it as disrespectful to the faith to practise deceit with it. It is no fault of mine if my masters taught me logic, and by their ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... both. I quit now philosophers by profession to address myself to those literary journalists who deal out philosophy in crumbs for the use of feuilletons and reviews. There I find all possible notions in the most astounding of jumbles. "The villain has his apologist; the good man his calumniator.... Marriage is honorable, so is adultery. Order is preached up, so is riot, so is assassination, provided it be politic."[154] I contemplate with a calm satisfaction, with a very ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... de Courtoisie," Maupassant cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table: Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte de ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... not complaining of the owners of slaves—I do not doubt that the slaves are happier than they could be if set free in this country,' declares an apologist, even in Massachusetts! Stripes and servitude would doubtless soon alter his opinion. With him, to sell human beings at public auction, and to separate husbands and wives, and children and parents, is not a subject of complaint! and to be a slave, to be fed upon ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... its infidelity to justice, I did it to the glory of religion. I wanted to provoke a peremptory reply, and to pave the way for Christianity's triumph, in spite of the innumerable attacks of which it is at present the object. I hoped that an apologist would arise forthwith, and, taking his stand upon the Scriptures, the Fathers, the canons, and the councils and constitutions of the Popes, would demonstrate that the church always has maintained the doctrine of equality, and would attribute ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... we should say, at a rough guess, it may have 9000 or 10,000. It should be remembered, that from being an anti-sacerdotal journal it has become a priests' paper and the organ of priests; from being an opponent of the executive, it has become the organ and the apologist of the executive in the person of M. L. N. Buonaparte, and the useful instrument, it is said, of M. Achille Fould. Every body knows, says M. Texier, with abundant malice prepense, that Dr. Veron, the chief editor of the Constitutionnel, has declared that France may ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... are sensible of this power that hath oftentimes laid hold of our adversaries, and made them yield to us, and join with us, and confess to the Truth, before they had any distinct and discursive knowledge of our doctrines."—The Quakers, then, according to this eminent Apologist for them, had, from the first, definite doctrines, which might be distinctly and discursively known. What were they? They hardly amounted to any express revolution of existing Theology. In no essential respect did any of their recognised representatives ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson |
