"Innovator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Socrates for the Lodge had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally. The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a disturber and innovator. And the democracy was still smarting from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides, understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the treacheries of Alcibiades, another. And there were vicious youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had ruined themselves, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... exterminate the rough forces and passions of nature in the young people and to put in place of them quiet moderation and ideals recognized by the state. Many a one who at present is a contented citizen or an ambitious official, would have become without these endeavors of the school an unmanageable innovator or a hopeless dreamer. There was something in him, something wild, lawless, which first had to be broken, a flame which had to be extinguished. The school must break and forcibly restrict the natural being; it is its duty to ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... for three years, under the pretext of visiting some of the places rendered celebrated during the late wars; but that if he preferred a diplomatic mission I would make a suitable provision for his expenses; and the great innovator, Time, might effect great changes during the period of his absence. But my foolish Council affirmed to me that his guilt, as a principal, being evident, it was absolutely necessary to bring him to trial; and now his sentence is only that of a pickpocket. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... he was indefatigable in his services in the temple, and that all his spare time was devoted to works of benevolence and general utility; and as they bent devoutly as he passed through the streets they little dreamed that the high priest of Osiris was regarded by his chief brethren as a dangerous innovator. ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Young, at least, are of the distinctly modern school; but note how individually each has utilized his inheritance of vibrating color and light. On wall A are two fine figure studies by Robert Reid, an innovator and a really great painter, though he did not show it when he painted the panels for the ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... increase power. In the arcana of temples or in the chambers of court physicians knowledge may still be sought; but it will be hidden as a secret thing, or if it dares come out to elevate common thought or brighten common life, it will be trodden down as a dangerous innovator. For as it tends to lessen the mental power devoted to improvement, so does inequality tend to render men adverse to improvement. How strong is the disposition to adhere to old methods among the classes who are kept in ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age. The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too, says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Harvey, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern political thought, and his application of the historical method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time when current political thought, led by Rousseau, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... physician, who accused him before the Inquisition of heresy and magic; and something of the same kind may have happened in the case of his Paduan contemporary, Giovannino Sanguinacci, who was known as an innovator in medical practice. He escaped, however, with banishment. Nor must it be forgotten that the inquisitorial power of the Dominicans was exercised less uniformly in Italy than in the North. Tyrants and free ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... social man, he leaves a still stronger impression of the futile or mischievous efforts of those—himself amongst the number—who are thrusting themselves forward as the peculiar and exclusive advocates of progress and improvement. He exhibits himself in the attitude of an innovator, as powerless in effect as he is daring to design; whilst, at the same time, he deals a crashing blow (as upon rival machinators) on that malignant party in European politics, whether it call itself liberal or of the movement, whose most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... than to art, and it must be granted that this is true of Macpherson's work; nevertheless, the fact that Ossian aroused the interest of major men of letters for fifty years is suggestive of his importance as an innovator. In a curious way, Macpherson's achievement has been overshadowed by the fact that many greater writers followed him and developed the artistic direction that he was among ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... sorrow to a mother's heart,' said Portia, 'to know that her two sons, and her only sons, are, one the open enemy of his country, the other—what shall I term you, Lucius?—an innovator upon her ancient institutions; and while he believes and calls himself—sincerely, I doubt not—the friend of his country, is in truth, as every good Roman would say—not an enemy, my son, I cannot use that word, but ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... church in matters of doctrine was identified in most men's minds with rejection of the authority of the civil magistrate;[250] and every one who dared to dispute the jurisdiction of Rome was regarded as a dangerous (p. 326) innovator, and an ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... and the Lyceum, with rare and brave exceptions, met the formidable array of Facts with which the work bristled, by sciolistic criticisms, bigoted denunciations, or timid, faint praise. Conservatives in Politics and Religion exhibited him as a dangerous innovator, a social iconoclast, the would-be destroyer of all that was sacred in Institutions and in Religion. Theologians branded him as immoral and atheistic, and poured upon him a torrent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... innovator, the patriarch and his bishops rose up in wrath, and Asaad was threatened with ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of the Holy Office could drag a man's thoughts from his bosom and search his midnight dreams. The Church party, in the interest of their order, fostered the Duke's fears of sedition and branded every innovator as an atheist; the Holy Office having even cast grave doubts on the orthodoxy of a nobleman who had tried to introduce the English system of ploughing on his estates. It was evident to Odo that the secret hopes of the reformers centred in him, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false asceticism of so-called "religious" art, in the characteristic comments and confessions of an innovator in the traditions of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... domain of poesy, and an innovation of such a sort that against it the master-poet, Milton, lifted up his voice in solemn protest, and the solitary epic in English literature is a perpetual protestation against the custom. Shakespeare was an innovator of the laws of the drama when he violated unities of time and place; and in a sense the drama was an innovation on narrative poetry, and the novel an iconoclast in its ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... is unrestraint ("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who shovels undistinguished ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the Cardinal of Capua The Breaking Point Lonely Burial Dinner in a Quick Lunch Room The Hemp Poor Devil! Ghosts of a Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills Elegy for ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... advanced to open hostility, as what I was not actually or personally engaged in: He in a while arrived to that height of folly and wickedness that he wrote and published a large book, in five parts, to which he maliciously gave for a title, "The Christian Quaker distinguished from the Apostate and Innovator," thereby arrogating to himself and those who were of his party the topping style of Christian Quaker, and no less impiously than uncharitably branding and rejecting all others, even the main body of Friends, for ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... the first innovator in education, and, glaring as his faults were, he succeeded in effecting radical changes in the entire circle of youthful training. Sprung from a degraded class, addicted to vulgar habits, and dissipated beyond the countenance of good ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... over the management of all internal affairs to others. That he would now take upon himself a whole new department of public duties, that he would after his prolonged absence appear again as leader and innovator in ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the memory of Constantine also as an innovator and a disturber of established laws and of customs received from ancient times, accusing him of having been the first to promote barbarians to the fasces and robe of the consul. But in this respect he spoke with folly and levity, since, in the face of what he so bitterly reproved, he a ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists; but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them; because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... his first public appearance eleven years before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels, tales, and memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a contemporary—a correspondent, even—of Franklin; but if our author shared many of poor Richard's interests, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... imitation. For ill, to man's nature, as it stands perverted, hath a natural motion, strongest in continuance; but good, as a forced motion, strongest at first. Surely every medicine is an innovation; and he that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things which ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... of theology and psychology—where the human consciousness perceives nothing tangible, and whence it derives only vague aspirations—implies no knowledge, of anything like a law, a science or a method, such as our artist-innovator of the nineteenth century ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of a cut and dry vocabulary. But you - may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown - it has ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an education. At the age of thirty-three he took his seat on the school-bench at Barcelona. In 1526 he entered the University at Alcala. He was here looked upon as a dangerous innovator, and was imprisoned six weeks, by order of the Inquisition, for preaching without authority, since he was not in holy orders. After his release he attended the University of Salamanca, but ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... innovator—he simply expressed what the many wished to hear—he was caught in the current of the time: he was part and parcel of the Renaissance. And he was a loyal Churchman. None of his diatribes were against the Church itself—he wished to benefit the Church by freeing it from the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... I hear some of my fair readers exclaim, "Is this the early rising this new correspondent of the MIRROR means to enforce? Drag us from our beds at peep of day! The visionary barbarian! Why, ferocious as our Innovator is, he would just as soon drag a tigress from her's! We will not obey this self-appointed Dictator!" Stay, gentle ladies; in the first place I am not going to enforce this or any other hour; in the second place, I am not going to enforce early rising at all.—Convinced you ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... liberals, and, as was natural at this stage, democrats; contemplating root-and-branch innovation by aid of the hustings and ballot-box. Hustings and ballot-box had speedily to vanish out of Sterling's thoughts: but the character of root-and-branch innovator, essentially of "Radical Reformer," was indelible with him, and under all forms could be traced ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly and made great wars." The new Protector was a weak and worthless man; but the bulk of the nation were content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and worldly in his conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his Council. Their first act was to throw aside ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire. The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too desires only truth—first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in worldly fortune; and as the whirligig ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Cumberland—called in 'A Northern Circuit,' Sir Frigid Gripus Knapper—directed his under-sheriff not to give white gloves on the occasion of a maiden assize at Carlisle, and also through the mouth of his subordinate, declined to pay the officers of the circuit certain customary fees. To put the innovator to shame, Sir William Gascoigne, the judge before whom the case was laid, observed in open court, "Though I can compel an immediate payment, it being a demand of right, and not a mere gift, yet I will set him ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... praise let us not dispute his right. His vivacity, indeed, actually went so far as to make him something of an innovator. He introduced new and imposing spectacular effects; he ventured to write tragedies in which no persons of royal blood made their appearance; he was so bold as to rhyme 'pere' with 'terre.' The wild diversity of his incidents ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... no sceptic, no innovator in matters of opinion or observance, but a quiet student, a scholar, a man of books, a calm, bright-minded, whole-souled thinker, believing, hopeful, social, sunny, but absorbed in philosophical pursuits. Well does the writer of these lines recall the vision of a slender figure ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on Phedre. The Duchesse de Bouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... time in the full glare of passion and action, unsoftened by the veil that hides and in some measure transforms when they have passed into history; and it included in this reality the little, the commonplace, the trivial. This innovator in fiction aimed, as Crabbe and Wordsworth had aimed in poetry, at interesting the reader in themes which were ordinarily deemed to be void of interest. The thing deserved trying. His predecessors, and even his contemporaries, had neglected ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... betray them, to his due punishment; and it was Jesus, the son of Sapphias, who principally set them on. He was ruler in Tiberias, a wicked man, and naturally disposed to make disturbances in matters of consequence; a seditious person he was indeed, and an innovator beyond every body else. He then took the laws of Moses into his hands, and came into the midst of the people, and said, "O my fellow citizens! if you are not disposed to hate Josephus on your own account, have regard, however, to these laws ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... for assuming that the Church at Rome probably had Adoptionist proclivities is the undeniable fact that early in the second century Hermas held this view, and there is no evidence that he was an innovator. ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... first passage for the left hand in a very rational manner; Klindworth differs by beginning with the third instead of the second finger, while Riemann—dear innovator— takes the group: second, first, third, and then, the fifth finger on D, if you please! Kullak is more normal, beginning with the third. Here is Riemann's phrasing and grouping for the first few bars. Notice the half note with peculiar ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... etc. He seems to have no intermission, but penetrates where others would not have ventured, or have faltered from utter weariness. In the field of philology he has few peers, while in early Sanskrit learning he has virtually taken the part of an innovator. While reverently following after Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, Windischmann, Bopp, and others of equal distinction, he sets aside the received views in regard to chronology and historical occurrences. ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabeus and his brethren arise to assert the honour of the ancient law, and to defend the temple of their forefathers, with as ardent a spirit as can inspire any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of ancient ages? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that when once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the ordinary ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... in a large barn about fifteen miles from Moscow. The Superior being unwilling to publish the true facts of the broken jaw-bone, a certain fame, the fame of an earnest but misunderstood religious innovator, had preceded him. Adherents, barely twenty at first, gathered to his side. These disciples, humble analphabetics like himself, have left us no word of what passed at those long discussions. Certain it is that he now began to formulate the rules of his Revised Church. They ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... mistake sadly at variance with our democratic professions. Democracy needs to reclaim its all-claiming principles of right and justice for the down-trodden. And yet, while the negro generously submits to serve us, we look upon him as an auspicious innovator, who never could have been born to enjoy manhood, and was subjected to bear a black face because God had marked him for servitude. Did God found an aristocracy of colour, or make men to be governed by their distinctive qualifications of colour relationship?" says Franconia, her face ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... if you hadn't carried Simon Crood's niece away from under his very nose," said Tansley. "But now that you've brought personal matters into the quarrel, the old chap'll move every piece he has on the board to checkmate you. It won't do to have you on the Council, Brent, you're too much of an innovator. Now this town—the real town!—doesn't want innovation. Innovation in an ancient borough like this is—unsettling and ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... personage came upon the scene when it was agreed that Luther should appear before the Legate at Augsburg. Cardinal Cajetan was the weightiest divine of the Court of Rome, and a man of original mind, who was denounced in his order as a dangerous innovator, and whose writings could not be reprinted without large omissions. He is commemorated, in political literature, among the advocates of tyrannicide. He was more dexterous than Prierias, although he also refused a revision of current practices. By putting forward ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... lest it should supply the Socinians with inconvenient texts. Nelson hints that the great Jesuit may have been a secret Arian, and Bull stamped upon his theory amid the grateful applause of Bossuet and his friends. Petavius was not an innovator, for the idea had long found a home among the Franciscan masters: "Proficit fides secundum statum communem, quia secundum profectum temporum efficiebantur homines magis idonei ad percipienda et intelligenda sacramenta fidei.—Sunt multae conclusiones necessario inclusae in articulis creditis, sed ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... change and the grounds of it, though it may not always be appropriate, can never be premature, and for these reasons. The fact of a new idea having come to one man is a sign that it is in the air. The innovator is as much the son of his generation as the conservative. Heretics have as direct a relation to antecedent conditions as the orthodox. Truth, said Bacon, has been rightly named the daughter of Time. The new idea does not spring up uncaused and by ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... English ancestors, but that characteristic product of the New World who looks more with eagerness to the future than with satisfaction on the past, and whose pre-eminent optimism is inspired by his ardent appreciation of the living present. Walt Whitman stood forth as an innovator into such realms, where the rigor of conditions demanded an abstract compliance with rules which were based on absolute truths, and where a swerving from them was evidence of impotence. His unconventional ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various |
