"Vacillation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still enough of vacillation among the bishops, and of dissatisfaction among the Patriarch's brothers, to raise a question which the mission submitted to the judgment of the Prudential Committee, as to how far it was proper to employ the higher ecclesiastics on ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... should be understood. In any executive work which involves the cooperation of two different men or parties, where both parties have anything like equal power or voice in its direction, there is almost sure to be a certain amount of bickering, quarreling, and vacillation, and the success of the enterprise suffers accordingly. If, however, either one of the parties has the entire direction, the enterprise will progress consistently and probably harmoniously, even although the wrong one of the two parties may ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... merely relieved Amherstburgh, the key of Upper Canada, from all immediate danger, but at a single blow annihilated the American power throughout that extensive frontier. That this bold measure, powerfully contrasted as it was with his own previous vacillation of purpose, had greatly tended to intimidate the American General, and to render him distrustful of his own resources, there can be little doubt. The destructive fire from the well served breaching batteries, was moreover instanced ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... felt it to be most important that they should not err this time. As they hung in admiration over the sleeping babes, one of them remarked a circumstance that at once decided their preference and put an end to their vacillation: one of the little heroes held his hand tightly closed; the tiny, mottled palm of the other was wide open as it lay upon his snowy breast. 'He will be a liberal and bold knight,' said one of the Bearnais, 'and will best suit us as a head.' ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... ignores Buddhism in his romance called Vasavadatta. But Bhartrihari, the still popular gnomic poet, was a Buddhist. It is true that he oscillated between the court and the cloister no less than seven times, but this vacillation seems to have been due to the weakness of the flesh, not to any change of convictions. For our purpose the gist of this literature is that Hinduism in many forms, some of them very unorthodox, was becoming the normal religion of India but that there were still many eminent Buddhists and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... say that there is a higher good than that of action, and that this higher good belongs to the whole world as it is in reality. In this way the twofold attitude and the apparent vacillation of mysticism are explained ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... this editor was immediately arrested by the military power; but his bold words were already in the hands of the public, and produced a great effect: so great an effect that the Government, after some vacillation, withdrew the state of siege; though at the same time it strengthened the military organisation and made it more stringent. Three of the Committee of Public Safety had been slain in Trafalgar Square: of the rest the greater part went back to their old place of meeting, and ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... tried to fortify herself with the thought that what she had to tell was not bad in itself—only a revelation of a lost past.... Well—why not let it go? Dust and ashes, dead and done with!... But this vacillation was short-lived. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... does nothing but reflect. Hamlet seems meant to show how vain it is to be merely a philosopher in this world. Hamlet is always pondering, thinking of the abstract rights and wrongs of the case. In the result, though he does eventually avenge his father's murder, his introspection and vacillation have led to the death of himself and no fewer than three other innocent persons—Ophelia, Polonius and Laertes. Yet Hamlet was at least twice as brainy as the rest of them, and he was also a good sportsman; for instance, he refuses to kill Claudius when ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the fair budding moustache scarcely hid the weak, irresolute mouth. Here the resemblance stopped, for Miss Hamilton's firm lips and finely-curved chin showed no lack of power; but in her brother's face—attractive as it was—there were clearly signs of vacillation. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... remnant of an ignoble life. When visibly approaching his end, he is said, at the suggestion of an Italian physician, to have confessed himself to a priest, and to have received the last sacraments of the Romish Church. Yet, with characteristic vacillation he listened, but a few hours later, with attention and apparent devoutness, to the reading of God's Word, and answered the remonstrances of his faithful Huguenot physician by the assurance that, if he recovered his health, he would openly espouse the Augsburg ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in the immense blue pane of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... reckoning was due. It was not in his nature to face a crisis, and with him a trouble seemed less formidable if it could only be put off a little. Edmonds, who knew with what kind of man he had to deal, said nothing further, and quietly reached out for another cigar. He saw vacillation in his victim's manner. ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... mean, to a generous nature like your own, to which every sort of nobleness comes easily. Mine has been more difficult—and I have sunk under it again and again: and the sinking and the effort to recover the duty of a lost position, may have given me an appearance of vacillation and lightness, unworthy at least of you, and perhaps of both of us. Notwithstanding which appearance, it was right and just (only just) of you, to believe in me—in my truth—because I have never failed to you in it, nor been ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... to others seemed to himself sanctioned by his own insensibility to fear, and contempt for bodily pain, smiled with bitter scorn at the apparent vacillation and weakness of the prisoner: but, as he delighted not in torture merely for torture's sake, he motioned to the guards to release the Israelite; and replied in a voice unnaturally mild and kindly, considering the circumstances ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... steady advance from one stage to another, in accordance with a plan of intellectually organic development, as marked as that detected by the geologist in the gradual preparation of the earth for the abode of our species. The slowness and seeming vacillation of man's upward movement could not stagger his faith; for if it had taken thousands of ages to make earth habitable, why should it not take thousands more to bring man to his completeness? Equally free was he from misgiving on account of the remaining presence of so much misery and wretchedness; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... sometimes that great attribute of the divine nature is proposed as holding forth a pattern for us to follow, and the faith in it as tending to make us in a measure steadfast like Himself, as when Paul indignantly rebuts his enemies' charge of levity of purpose and vacillation, and avers that 'as God is faithful, our word toward you is not yea and nay' (2 Cor. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know not, but I presume that there was. The opinion that was confidently expressed on Saturday gave way to a new opinion, and the noble Lord announced that legislation would be proceeded with immediately. All this indicates that there was a good deal of vacillation on the part of the Government. At last, however, has come the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control. There were some good things in it, no doubt. I do not suppose that any man could stand ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... "some sense," as he phrased it, from this adamantine pioneer. Such a man naturally arrogated and obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of vacillation furthered this preeminence. He was a good man in the main as well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the demagogue. And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions and fostered ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... precautions and making provision against that, I by no means swerved from my well-known loyalist policy, but my object was to make him more of a loyalist and induce him to drop somewhat of his time-serving vacillation: and he, let me assure you, now speaks in much higher terms of my achievements (against which many had tried to incite him) than of his own. He testifies that while he served the state well, I preserved it. What ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... coming to him in English money he then found them valued at forty to the pound sterling. This difference between eighty and one hundred and twenty-five he thought (naturally enough to his unsophisticated mind) was due to the vacillation in policy of enforcement of the pegged rate ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... mean time, Charles's preparations went forward with the languor and vacillation resulting from divided councils and multiplied embarrassments. "Nothing essential to the conduct of a war was at hand," says Comines. The king was very young, weak in person, headstrong in will, surrounded by few discreet counsellors, and wholly destitute of the requisite funds. [23] ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... cablegrams to the United States I wrote: "People are everywhere murmuring and whispering that beneath the surface of things powerful undercurrents are flowing which invisibly sway the policy of the secret council, and the public believes that this accounts for the sinister vacillation and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... motion to and fro.] Oscillation. — N. oscillation; vibration, libration; motion of a pendulum; nutation; undulation; pulsation; pulse. alternation; coming and going &c. v.; ebb and flow, flux and reflux, ups and down. fluctuation; vacillation &c. (irresolution) 605. wave, vibratiuncle[obs3], swing, beat, shake, wag, seesaw, dance, lurch, dodge; logan[obs3], loggan[obs3], rocking-stone, vibroscope[obs3]. V. oscillate; vibrate, librate[obs3]; alternate, undulate, wave; rock, swing; pulsate, beat; wag, waggle; nod, bob, courtesy, curtsy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... changing emotions of joy and regret which occasionally beset her, as her active mind dwelt on the decided step she had just taken, with the contending doubts and hopes, and possibly with some of the mental vacillation, that was natural to ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the whole course pursued by the Imperial Government, with respect to the quarrel of the two races, as having been rounded on an utter ignorance of, or disregard to the real question at issue, as having fostered the mischievous pretensions of French nationality, and as having, by the vacillation and inconsistency which marked it, discouraged loyalty and fomented rebellion. Every measure of clemency, or even justice, towards their opponents, they regard with jealousy, as indicating a disposition towards that conciliatory policy which is the subject of their ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... forfeited the appreciation gained from the Liberal party in Europe. Mr. Burgers' reserve is much to be regretted, as a few sidelights thrown on the Boer character at that period might have helped to educate the Liberal party of whom he spoke, and thereby saved much of the vacillation of policy for which the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... inconstancy, instability, vacillation, convertibility, transmutability, mobility, impermanence; volatility, irresolution, fickleness, capriciousness; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... who selected the site—would seem to have contemplated the possibility of an attack. Indeed the whole situation was regarded as purely temporary. The vacillation, caused by the change of parties and policies in England, led to the Malakand garrison remaining for two years in a position which could not be well defended either on paper or in reality. At first, after the Chitral campaign of 1895, it was thought that the retention of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... full benefit of his explanations, must be the rule in every corporation that respects justice. In the Church of England, a man cannot be deprived unless he contradict the articles clearly and consistently; the smallest incoherence on his part, the slightest vacillation in the rigour of his denial, is enough to save him. We may easily imagine, therefore, how widely a clergyman may stray from the fair, ordinary, current rendering of the doctrines of the Church, without danger. The whole essence of Christianity may be perverted under a few cunning precautions ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... irresistible she had leaned too far out from the cliff, and would have leaned farther had he not taken matters into his own keeping without apology. Another thing; the pressure of his hand over hers remained a sensation still—a strong, steady, masterful imprint lacking hesitation or vacillation. She was as conscious of it as though her hand still tightened under his—and she was conscious, too, that nothing of his touch had offended; that there had arisen in her no tremor of instinctive ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... yet of those who, in life's morning, I saw touched by the light of a high hope, many have seceded. Some have become voluptuaries; some mere family men, who think it is quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people, and treat them decently; others are lost through indolence and vacillation. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... despises and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives—trouble, uncertainty, doubt, curiosity—which hang about and impede duty; which is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity, of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change, with great craving for enjoyment—nay, with great lapses from its ideal, with great ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... 1852, saw in the motion of the stars a protest against their earthly drafts. They had become regular astrologers The National Assembly had cut off Bonaparte's hope of a constitutional prolongation of his term; the candidature of the Prince of Joinville tolerated no further vacillation. ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... interpreted as "the legitimate king of the city," the question has recently been raised whether we ought not to read "Sharru-kenu-shar-ri" and interpret as "the legitimate king rules"—an illustration of the vacillation still prevailing in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the eternal vacillation of such a contest? Then you will know that desire fighting against reason now drove my will back step by step until it was tottering on the brink of chaos, and again, in a triumph of resistance, my determination swept everything before it ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... of vacillation between the conviction of insanity and the commencing conviction of something worse can scarcely ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... attempting to hit him on the head. The earl, seeing this, advanced a step also, and got his spud almost up to the animal's eye. But these indignities the beast could not stand. He made a charge, bending his head first towards John Eames, and then, with that weak vacillation which is as disgraceful in a bull as in a general, he changed his purpose, and turned his horns upon his other enemy. The consequence was that his steps carried him in between the two, and that the earl and Eames found themselves for a ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... also delighted to see the Irish party openly exert its power—not quite realizing that such exhibitions were against the interest of the democratic alliance, which had to undergo a grave test. The Government's vacillation had rendered another general election necessary if the Veto question ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... or rather de Lauzon, was succeeded by the Baron D'Avaugour, the last of the Fur Governors, a weak, stupid man, who had almost by his imbecility and vacillation suffered the business of his employers to be extinguished. The Iroquois most vigorously waged war during his time upon every other tribe of Indians. They altogether exterminated the Eries, and in their very wickedness, did good in rendering ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... and wine. Old seamen, who had met the Turks again and again from their youth up, prepared grimly for revenge; sanguine boys, who held arms in set fight for the first time that day, looked forward eagerly to the moment of action. Even to the last the incurable vacillation of the allied admirals was felt: they suggested a council of war. Don John's reply was worthy of him: "The time for councils is past," he said; "do not trouble yourselves about aught but fighting." Then he entered his gig, and ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... she wait for him (for it is a man to a certainty)?' resumed the elder of the smokers, at the end of several minutes of silence, when, full of vacillation and doubt, she became lost to view behind some bushes. 'Will she reappear?' The smoking went on, and up she came into open ground as before, and ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... wishes to be the father of the orphans of Alexandre de Beauharnais and the husband of his widow. 'Do you love him?' you will ask. Well, no!—"Do you feel any repugnance toward him?' No, but I feel in a state of vacillation and doubt, a state very disagreeable to me, and which the devout in religious matters consider to be the most scandalizing. As love is a kind of worship, one ought in its presence to feel animated by other feelings than those I now experience, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... men, and must act as such. It has refused to encumber itself with expensive and useless dormitories, and the faculty has in the main left the students to themselves. But whenever interference became necessary, it has acted promptly, without undue haste or severity, and also without vacillation. Here, at least, we do not find the ruinous practice of suspending a student one week, only to take him back the next. The mere existence, then, of the Sheffield Scientific—to say nothing of its success—by the side of the powerful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... decision had emerged in the full splendor of its dignity from the mess of vacillation in his weak, irresolute character, Rafael heard voices down the road. He jumped to his feet. Leonora was approaching, followed by the two peasant women, who were bent low under their heavily ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... In December Prussia had definitely given her protection to the Russian troops in Hanover and offered it to the Hanoverians. Pitt computed that at the beginning of the next campaign nearly 300,000 men would be available in North Germany. But the vacillation of Prussia ruined all. On December 15 Haugwitz signed the treaty of Schoenbrunn, by which Prussia was to enter into an offensive and defensive alliance with France and was to receive Hanover in return for Ansbach, Cleves, and Neuchatel. Frederick William could not yet stoop to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... explained that Alma y vida symbolizes the decline of Spain, the dying away of its heraldic glories, and the melancholy which pervades the soul of Spain; the common people, though possessing reservoirs of strength, are plunged in vacillation and doubt. The sad ending is the most appropriate to the national psychology of the time. Warned by Electra, he says, he deliberately avoided popular applause, and sought to gain the approval ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... alone 'twas natural to please; His motions all accompanied with grace, And Paradise was open'd in his face." Yet to a strict observer, the manly beauty of Monmouth's face was occasionally rendered less striking by an air of vacillation and uncertainty, which seemed to imply hesitation and doubt at moments when decisive ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... he had been compelled by ill-treatment to abuse his master and worship the idols. "But how dost thou find thy heart?" said the prophet. "Steadfast in the faith," said he. "Then," answered Mohammed, "if they repeat their cruelty, thou mayest repeat thy words." He also had himself an hour of vacillation. Tired of the severe and seemingly hopeless struggle with the Koreish, and seeing no way of overcoming their bitter hostility, he bethought himself of the method of compromise, more than seven centuries before America was discovered. He had been preaching Islam ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... gather round the siege of Jerusalem, eighteen years later, and the events that followed it. They describe the cruel and successive imprisonments of the prophet for his fearless and seemingly unpatriotic proclamation of the Babylonian triumph, the pitiful vacillation of the king, the final capture of the city, the appointment of Gedaliah as governor of Judah, his assassination and the attempt to avenge it, the consequent departure of many Jews to Egypt against the advice of Jeremiah, who was forced to accompany them, the prophet's denunciation of the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... deduces from the name the solemn thought that those who truly feel its significance will shape their words accordingly, and act and speak so that they shall not fear to call His pure eyes to witness that there are neither, hypocrisy, nor insincerity, nor vacillation, nor the 'hidden things of dishonesty' nor any of the skulking meannesses of craft and self-seeking in them. 'I swear by the God of the Amen, and call Thy faithfulness to witness that I am trying to be like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... have given him? It is lamentable that he had no familiar friend and companion from that period capable of apprehending and remembering his conversations. In his lucid intervals he must have said many wise, many learned, and many brilliant things; perhaps his very disease, in its vacillation between light and darkness, may have struck out many unexpected and surprising beauties, which common attendants were utterly incapable of appreciating. The flushes of the mind under the unnatural impulses of malady are sometimes ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... in check by an enemy not by half as strong. 4th. Every initiative which our diplomacy tried abroad was wholly unsuccessful, and we are obliged to submit to new international principles inaugurated at our cost; and, summing up, instead of a broad, decided, general policy, we have vacillation, inaction, tricks, and expedients. The people fret, and so will the Congress. Nations are as individuals; any partial disturbance in a part of the body occasions a general chill. Nature makes efforts ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... and swore, accusing the chief of pusillanimous homesickness, "of reducing his explorations to a six hours' anchorage on an island shore," "of coming from Asia to carry home American water." The commander had had enough of {28} vacillation, delay, interference. One-third of the crew was ailing. Provisions for only three months were in the hold. The ship was off any known course more than two thousand miles from any known port; and contrary winds might cause delay or drive the vessel on ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... to send for him. Gregory discovered on reaching home that Jemima's letter was still in his pocket. And, therefore, much as he disliked the appearance of vacillation and weakness, he was obliged to be at the farmhouse ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... faithful service, was so successfully exerted, as to contribute greatly to the depression of that loyal and ill-rewarded family. But Buckingham was incapable, even for his own interest, of pursuing the steady course which Christian suggested to him; and his vacillation probably saved the remnant of the large estates of the Earl ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... a bow, then he spoke energetically and rapidly, pressing his advantage before the other's weakness should lead him into fresh vacillation. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... track the villains west," he answered with the promptitude of one who decides quickly and without vacillation. "O Lord! If I were only young! But to think of a man too stout and old to buckle on his own snow-shoes hankering for that life again!" And my uncle heaved a ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... decision. Such a result was of course out of the question. Moreover, the Cortes of Tarragon, which happened then to be in session, and which required the royal attention, supplied the monarch with a fresh excuse for indulging in his habitual vacillation. Meantime, by way of obtaining additional counsel in so grave an emergency, he transmitted the letters of the nobles, together with the other papers, to the Duke of Alva, and requested his opinion on the subject. Alva replied with the roar of a wild beast, "Every time," he wrote, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... doubt but that the great evil of natural blindness must have been the punishment of some sin; and merely wished to know whether it were his own sin, committed in some former state of existence, or the sin of his parents. Their minds seem to have hung in a state of vacillation between the theory of Plato and that of imputation. But our Saviour replied: "Neither did this man sin, nor his parents," that he was born blind; but "that the work of God might be made manifest in him." ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... my spirit from being completely at rest is the longing, that becomes every day more ardent within me, to embrace that life to which, without a moment's vacillation, I have been for years inclined. It seems to me that, in those moments when I feel myself so near to the realization of the constant dream of my life, it is something like a profanation to allow my mind ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... relations as well as it does its domestic, and made a proper exhibition of maritime preparation and of maritime force, this people would hold the balance in many of the grave questions that are now only in abeyance in European politics. Hitherto we have been influenced by every vacillation in English interests, and it is quite time to think of turning the tables, and of placing, as far as practicable, American interests above the vicissitudes of those of other people. The thing is more easily done than is commonly imagined, but a party politician is rarely a statesman, the subordinate ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... expect much from the Emperor's clemency. Distrust of his intentions induced the Holy League to carry on desultory war with the imperial troops; but mutual jealousies, the absence of effective aid from England or France, and vacillation caused by the feeling that after all it might be safer to accept the best terms they could obtain, prevented the war from being waged with any effect. In September, 1526, Hugo de Moncada, the imperial commander, concerted with Clement's bitter foes, the Colonnas, a means of overawing ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the United States sends one war-ship to Cuba, a thing it is no longer likely to do, Spain would act with energy and without vacillation."—El Heraldo, ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... inheritance, though since belief in the inheritance of acquired characters fell into disrepute, the fact has been a good deal overlooked. The "Origin" without "use and disuse" would be a materially different book. A certain vacillation is discernible in Darwin's utterances on this question, and the fact gave to the astute Butler an opportunity for his most telling attack. The discussion which best illustrates the genetic views of the period arose in regard to the production of the rudimentary ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... added to the group, of whom vacillation was the distinguishing characteristic. Giuseppe, in the innumerable discussions that arose between Rugiero and Eugenio, would acquiesce with first one and then the other in whatever exaggerated sentiments their enraged frame of mind might prompt them to utter, with the view of keeping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... permission to remain, but it was peremptorily refused. Hooker soon afterward changed his mind and countermanded his first order, but it was then too late; our troops had left the ridge and the enemy were in possession of it. There was too much vacillation at headquarters. Slocum, who was pressing the enemy back, was very much vexed when he received the order, but obeyed it, and retreated without being molested. It is true, Wright's brigade had formed on his right, but the advance of the Eleventh Corps would have taken that in flank, ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... multitude at least could not forget the greatness of his services to the cause of Reform. If the dissolution had come two or three years earlier, the Government might have gone to the country without fear; but in 1841, both at home and abroad, their blunders and their vacillation had alienated confidence, and it was not difficult to forecast the result. The General Election brought Lord John a personal triumph. He was presented with a requisition signed by several thousand persons, asking him to contest the City of London, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... were divided into two parties and fought bitterly with each other during their intervals of truce with the Christians. Ferdinand won in the game largely by a shrewd playing off of one of these factions against the other and by taking advantage of the weakness and vacillation of the young king, whose clandestine entrance to the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... part would have fortified their courage to attack; but they are so much awed by our superior arms, and I may safely add the superior courage of our men, that they never will, however much they may threaten, be the first to come to blows, provided there is no vacillation or unsteadiness on our parts. This the captain knew, ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... knows his own mind—Caiaphas, the high priest. He has no doubt as to what is the right thing to do. He has the advantage of a perfectly clear and single purpose, and no sort of restraint of conscience or delicacy keeps him from speaking it out. He is impatient at their vacillation, and he brushes it all aside with the brusque and contemptuous speech: 'Ye know nothing at all!' 'The one point of view for us to take is that of our own interests. Let us have that clearly understood; when we once ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... through the water. Her slight timbers creaked and groaned with the increased pressure put upon them by the heavy drag of the boats in tow, and Dyer laid his hand apprehensively upon the painter of the leading boat, strained as taut as a bar; but it was no time for vacillation, the obscurity and the increased strength of the wind were almost worth men's lives at such a moment, and George, who was tending the boat's mainsheet, hung on to every inch of it, like grim death. Once, as they went foaming ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... could exceed the vacillation and confusion that reigned in the English cabinet at that time. The forces of England were frittered away in small and objectless expeditions, the plans of action were changed with every report sent either ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... day. He had suffered himself to be persuaded into joining in a species of amusement for which he cared nothing, by a mere word from a woman for whom he cared less, but whom he had half determined to marry, and who had wholly determined to marry him. He, who hated vacillation, had been dangling for four-and-twenty hours like a pendulum, or, as he said to himself, like an ass between two bundles of hay. At one moment he meant to marry Donna Tullia, and at another he loathed the thought; now ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... abandonment of the contest, in which success was nevertheless assured to perseverance and vigor. Grant's memoirs bear continual testimony to the statesmanlike regard he had, in planning his greater military operations, to this important factor in the war, the vacillation under uncertainty of that popular support upon which success depended. The temperament of Farragut reflected readily the ups and downs of the struggle, and was saddened by the weaknesses and inconsistencies of his own side, which he keenly appreciated. ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... elemental cravings and necessities, the soul of man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting impulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, the desire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants to stand out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Journalist's table. Milde was there, also the Attorney and Coldevin, the grey tutor from the country. They were waiting for Paulsberg. They had been discussing the situation again; it commenced to look a little dubious now when several of the leading parliamentarians had shown symptoms of vacillation. "Just as I have told you," said Milde, "it is beginning to ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... political conduct seldom repaid him: he writes to Atticus,[116] "I believe I do not please Caesar, but I am pleased with myself, which has not happened to me for a long while." However, this effort at independence was but transient. At no period of his public life did he display such miserable vacillation as at the opening of the civil war.[117] We find him first accepting a commission from the Republic; then courting Caesar; next, on Pompey's sailing for Greece, resolving to follow him thither; presently determining to stand ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Kuyper draws a conventional picture of British policy with regard to the Boers, making it out to be ever greedy of power. The contrary is the truth. A vacillating and timid policy has been England's great mistake in South Africa; it is this very vacillation that has ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... watched the scene with moist eyes. He was generally a man of prompt decision, and he well knew that he would incur by this act the charge of vacillation. It was a noble self-denial in him to be willing to do so, but it would have required an iron heart to resist such earnest supplications, and he was more than repaid when he saw how much anguish he had removed ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... March commissioners from the Parliament, under the Earl of Northumberland, came to Oxford with propositions to treat. It is questionable whether the offers of the Commons were sincere. But Charles, by his vacillation and hesitation, by yielding one day and retracting the next, gave them the opportunity of asserting, with some show of reason, that he was wholly insincere, and could not be trusted; and so the commission was recalled, and the war ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... terror which the name of that celebrated reformer inspired in the hearts of Roman Catholics, in order to intimidate the court of Rome and humiliate its pride. It is not therefore to be wondered at, that, with this vacillation of principles and declared antipathy to Rome, Charles should have regarded, in his dominions, if not with manifest favour, at least with cold indifference, the propagation of what were then called, by Spaniards, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... dying day. What was to be done with the enemy? They already outnumbered the English; and some fifteen hundred of Desmond's wild Irish hovered in the forests round, ready to side with the winning party, or even to attack the English at the least sign of vacillation or fear. They could not carry the Spaniards away with them, for they had neither shipping nor food, not even handcuffs enough for them; and as Mackworth told Winter when he proposed it, the only plan was for him to make ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Indian's. He was not straight as an arrow, for that suggests something too fragile and short, but more like a column—not only straight, but tall and majestic, and capable of holding any weight, and without fatigue or exertion. When he put his foot down, either literally of figuratively, it was down. Vacillation, or fear, or incertitude, or indecision, were strangers to whom he would never be introduced. When he entered a room you were, to use a New Testament phrase, "exceedingly filled with ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... light and purity and warmth, while Malbone was shut out into the darkness and the chill. The only two things to which he clung on earth, the two women between whom his unsteady heart had vibrated, and both whose lives had been tortured by its vacillation, went away from his sight together, the one victim bearing the other victim in her arms. Never any more while he lived would either of them be his again; and had Dante known it for his last glimpse of things immortal ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Months of vacillation followed the failure of Monroe's mission. The President could not shake off his obsession, and yet he lacked the resolution to employ force to take either Texas, which he did not want but was entitled to, or West Florida which he ardently ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... being characteristic of the British authorities. The Germans never do things by halves. What they authorise to be done is carried out to the letter. What they say they mean and there is no delay in executing an order once it is issued. The Teuton system may have shortcomings but hesitation and vacillation cannot be numbered among them. Directly the order concerning the re-arrest of the British was issued, extreme activity was displayed in carrying it out. Possibly it was a mere temporary measure, as K—— ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... experiment in integration to Forrestal on 2 December. He was not oblivious to the impression his vacillation on the subject had produced and went to some lengths to explain why he had opposed such experiments in the past. Although he had been thinking about such an experiment for some time, he told Forrestal, he had publicly rejected the idea at the National Defense Conference and during the Senate ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... my second blunder in Weimar. I was afraid to be alone with Goethe for an entire evening, and after considerable vacillation decided not to go. Several elements combined to produce this fear. In the first place, it seemed to me that there was nothing within the whole range of my intellect worthy of being displayed before Goethe. Secondly, it was not until ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a cigar. "Bernstorff said, or is said to have said—I do not count him among my acquaintances—that on that night this supercanaille showed symptoms of what I think I have seen described as vacillation. That is quite on the cards. It bears out my theory. In any event the fellow had his ambitions. He wanted to descend into the red halls of history disguised. He might have succeeded. History is very careless and to-day barely recalls that at five o'clock on the morning succeeding his marriage ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... hesitation or vacillation in the decisive treatment of the guilty, this warning is especially intended to protect and save ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... administration. He had in critical periods evinced a want both of firmness and of sagacity. When the Southern States were on the eve of secession and the temper of the country was on trial, he had, though with honest intentions, shown signs of irresolution and vacillation. When he was betrayed into the ill-advised and abortive peace negotiations with Southern commissioners at Niagara, he had displayed the lack of tact and penetration which made the people doubt the solidity and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to beware of assassins and prisoners, since, to his certain knowledge, the "new king has paid large sums of money to several Neapolitans of bad repute, who have been sent to Milan on some evil errand." After much vacillation on the Pope's part, and prolonged negotiations with both France and Naples, he was induced by the Orsini, who were staunch allies of the house of Aragon, to grant Alfonso the investiture of Naples, and to send his son, Cardinal Juan Borgia, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... thousands who are lying on the bloody battle-fields of Jena and Auerstadt, and accusing the duke of having murdered them! You had better pity Prussia's misfortunes and disgrace, which have been brought about by the duke! For, I tell you, the indecision, vacillation, and timidity of the duke were the sole causes of our terrible disaster. All of us felt and knew it. None of the younger officers and generals had any doubt about it; every one knew that those old gentlemen, who had outlived their own glory, and still believed ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... drew herself away and shivered. She knew she was wicked now—very, very wicked—but it was again characteristic of her that having made her decision there was no vacillation about her. The die was cast—for that night they were to be happy, and all the rest of her life ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... Irene, regarding him with mock sternness, "we don't allow that kind of thing. It is shameful vacillation—I love a long word—What's the other word I was trying for?—still longer—I mean, tergiversation! it comes from tergum and verso, and means turning the back. It is rude to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... it had been more than she had been willing to believe; and even now she could not absolutely cease to entertain some hopes of the results of Oliver's return, nor silence one lingering fancy that Louis might yet wait unbound; although she told herself of his vacillation between herself and Isabel, of his father's influence, and of the certainty that he would see many more worthy of his love than herself. Not any one who could love him so well—oh no! But when Mary found her thoughts taking this turn, she rose up as she lay, clasped her hands together, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of fondness in which he addresses her, and the tone of respect she invariably maintains towards him, even when most exasperated by his vacillation of mind and his brain-sick terrors, have, by the very force of contrast, a powerful effect on ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the surgeon thinks it was Tuesday. The child will never know its own birthday. It will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible. Every one in the ship says so. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... unending military expenditure. And they gave the colonists ground for complaints, sometimes just, sometimes unjust, against the home government, which was constantly accused of parsimony, of shortsightedness, of vacillation, of sentimental weakness, in sending out too few troops, in refusing to annex fresh territory, in patching up a hollow peace, in granting too easy ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Una, you echo my words! I observe, too, a vacillation in your step, a joyous inquietude in your eyes. You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word which of old was wont to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... her—one who, as a husband, would at first be abhorrent to her? As Madame Staubach thought of heaven then, a girl who loved and was allowed to indulge her love could hardly go to heaven. "Let it be so," she said to Peter Steinmarc after a few days of weak vacillation,—"let it be so. I think that it will be good for her." Then Peter Steinmarc swore that it would be good for Linda—that it should be good for Linda. His care should be so great that Linda might never doubt the ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... said, "I've come back again to my former opinion; you're not very shrewd. And you think you ought to have had Eugene's letters to read? Why, my poor fellow you would have spoilt everything, with your perpetual vacillation. You never can make up your mind. You are ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... nature until overmastered by two grim men who gradually hypnotized his will. The turning-point for Buchanan, and the last poor crisis in his inglorious career, came on Sunday, December 30th. Before that day arrived, his vacillation had moved his friends to pity and his enemies to scorn. One of his best friends wrote privately, "The President is pale with fear"; and the hostile point of view found expression in such comments as this, "Buchanan, it is said, divides his time ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Poverty, the struggle for daily bread, the consciousness of insignificance—ah, do not force me to recall it! I had to make my own way. You know the monstrous education at a boarding-school, foolish novel-reading, the errors of early youth, the first timid flutter of love. It was awful! The vacillation! And the agonies of losing faith in life, in oneself! Ah, you are an author. You know us women. You will understand. Unhappily I have an intense nature. I looked for happiness—and what happiness! I longed to set my soul free. Yes. In that I saw ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... take warning from the experiences of our contemporaries. We allude to the obvious necessity in a country like ours, and, indeed, in any country, of maintaining a national moneyed institution as a check upon the vacillation, expansions, and contractions which mark the policy of small banks of issue. This national institution, while free from individual profit, and without power to grant individual favors, should create and perform the functions of a national currency, and execute all the details required by or for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their own bravery, to their able leader, and finally to Persian vacillation and cowardice, this little army had now reached a place of safety. It was long, however, before they got back to their native country, and when they did, they were not to arrive at its shores asleep, on shipboard, as the much wandering ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... memory of the pretty self-willed dominant boy, who now grew larger and more masculine in stature under the instance of each successive light. Stephen knew the others fairly well through and through. The usual mixture of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of purpose and vacillation, was quite within the scope of her own feeling and of her observation. But this man was something of a problem to her; and, as such, had a prominence in her thoughts quite beyond his ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... bliss was no heroine. She was a lovely, loveable girl, nothing more. How would she greet him when they met presently on the tennis lawn? With tears and entreaties, and pretty little deprecating speeches, irresolution, timidity, vacillation, perhaps; hardly with heroic resolve to act ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... contesting the just demands of the men, had yielded to a dangerous point by removing officers at the dictation of mutineers. Their vacillation encouraged the idea that mutiny paid, and mutiny accordingly spread. On the 12th it broke out in the ships lying at the Little Nore with reinforcements for the North sea fleet. These ships contained a large number of London roughs ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... the mind, which arises from two contrary emotions, is called "vacillation"; it stands to the emotions in the same relation as doubt does to the imagination (II. xliv. note); vacillation and doubt do not differ one from the other, except as greater differs from less. But we must bear in mind ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... meanwhile, been in Vilna for more than a month, reviewing troops and holding maneuvers. Nothing was ready for the war that everyone expected and to prepare for which the Emperor had come from Petersburg. There was no general plan of action. The vacillation between the various plans that were proposed had even increased after the Emperor had been at headquarters for a month. Each of the three armies had its own commander in chief, but there was no supreme commander of all ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of "the general ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... a certain extent, upon the war; Elizabeth, after long vacillation, having at length agreed to send six thousand men to hold the towns of Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen, providing these three towns were handed over to her; thus evincing the same calculating greed that marked her subsequent dealings ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... weakness and vacillation has rarely appeared in more mocking guise than at the close of the year 1793. About the time when Toulon surrendered, the Austrian Government finally came to the determination to despatch thither the 5,000 men which it had formerly promised to send. Grenville received this news from Eden ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... vacillation of the only existing public authority, one of the most fatally celebrated actors of the worst times of the Revolution, Fouche, owed ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... vanity piqued, but before even the sentence which crowded back of her exclamation could frame itself, Giovanni's image flashed before her mind and pushed out every other impression. She seemed to see him racked with suffering, and all for her! She hated her own vacillation. She despised herself for a fickle flirt. What else was she? Here she was imagining all sorts of vague heartaches that were utterly unworthy of her loyalty either to Giovanni's love or to Jack's friendship. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... evidence against them so obviously called for conviction, that the Ministry was forced to appeal from this decision. The verdict was set aside; but such was the government's vacillation, that it hesitated to punish excesses that might on the morrow be regarded as virtues. The accused were cited before the tribunal of Ain, in the city of Bourg, where dwelt a majority of their friends, relatives, abettors and accomplices. The Ministry sought ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Brutus and Cassius had some difficulty in defending their houses and their lives and he gradually alarmed them so much, and worked so cunningly on their fears that they all quitted Rome. Cicero also left Rome, disapproving greatly of the vacillation and want of purpose in the conspirators. On the first of June Antonius assembled the senate to deliberate on the affairs of the republic, and in the interval visited all parts of Italy. In the meantime young Octavius ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... from his financial difficulties, without a radical change of government, disappeared forever. The controllers that succeeded Necker only plunged deeper and deeper into debt and deficit. It is needless to follow them in their flounderings. A long experience of the vacillation of the government both as to persons and as to systems had discouraged the hopes of conscientious patriotism, and strengthened the opposition to reform of all those who were interested in abuses. From the well-meaning king, if left ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... structures, and their appearance not driving the enemy away, they were at a loss what next to do, or how to proceed. On my arrival, I once more insisted on mounting the guns in our old forts, and assaulting Balidah under their fire. Macota's timidity and vacillation were too apparent; but in consequence of Budrudeen's overawing presence, he was obliged, from shame, to yield his assent. The order for the attack was fixed as follows:—Our party of ten (leaving six to serve the guns) were to ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... nose would have been well formed, but that it was a little snubbed at the end. Altogether his face gave you the idea of will, intellect, and a kindly nature; but there was in it a promise, too, of occasional anger, and a physiognomist might perhaps have expected from it that vacillation in conduct which had hitherto led him from better things ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... fully account for the intense and universal opposition to the plans of Earl Grey. The vacillation of his lordship in reference to the emigrant clause, produced feelings of exasperation and distrust, but the sad experience of Van Diemen's Land was accepted as a warning by other portions of the empire. A pamphlet, recording the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... opposition through the Sound, and the Swedish fleet of seven ships of the line and three frigates, could not, or did not, leave Carlscrona; as to the Russian fleet, it was frozen up; besides which, the demise of the Emperor Paul caused a vacillation in the councils of Russia. The result was, that little Denmark was left unaided to bear the brunt of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... he enjoined Bishop and Inquisitor to interpret in consultation any obscurities in the laws against heresy, and to administer the lighter penalties of deprivation of office and preferment. This recognition of episcopal jurisdiction was annulled by Alexander IV, who, after some vacillation, in 1257 rendered the Inquisition independent by releasing it from the necessity of consulting with the Bishops even in cases of obstinate and confessed heretics, and this he repeated in 1260. Then there ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... teaches that Man originally by the power of the Divine Image within him could control all Nature, but gradually lost this power through his own fault.]—power to command, and power to resist,—power that forbade all hesitation, vacillation or uncertainty—power which being connected by both physical and spiritual currents with this planet, the Earth, and the atmosphere by which it is surrounded, lifts all that it desires towards itself, as it rejects ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... broke in the room then, but perhaps it was only the clearing away of doubt and vacillation from his mind, with the respectable feeling that he had regained all the nobility which was slipping from him, and had come back to a firm understanding ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to acquiesce in the realisation of this scheme; and his Minister at Berlin continued to decline acceding to the Northern alliance. The Prince of Hesse-Cassel took a similar view of the case; but acted with a degree of vacillation worthy of the late conduct of Prussia herself, refusing on the one hand to embrace the confederation proposed by the Cabinet of Berlin, and yet declining, on the other, to form part of the Rhenish league, to which effect Buonaparte had frequently and urgently invited ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... vices of the Tudor monarch, who has been described as "the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king," may be found in "A History of Crime in England," by Luke Owen Pike. The distinguished author shows that in his brutality, his love of letters, his opposition to Luther, his vacillation in religious opinions, King Henry reflects with remarkable fidelity the age in which he lived, both in its contrasts and its inconsistencies. "It is only the previous history of England which can explain all the contradictions exhibited ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... provided only that, instead of another Louis the Sixteenth, a Leopold of Belgium, or a Frederick the Great were king.[28] With the last mentioned on the throne, there would assuredly be no repetition of that vacillation of purpose which rocked the cradle and fostered the growth of popular fury till it culminated in a Reign of Terror. Since, then, there cannot be either a repetition of the same circumstances to act upon men, or a reproduction of the same sort of men to be acted upon by circumstances, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... predicted moments of so-called "maximum peril." The threat we face is not sporadic or dated: It is continuous. Hence we must not be swayed in our calculations either by groundless fear or by complacency. We must avoid extremes, for vacillation between extremes is inefficient, costly, and destructive of morale. In these days of unceasing technological advance, we must plan our defense expenditures systematically and with care, fully recognizing that obsolescence compels the never-ending replacement ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... also that they had been inerrantly transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on The Constitution of Church and State appeared in 1830. It is the least satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also, though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... conduct I cannot separate from his subsequent conduct, and for this reason I ask you to do him ample justice on this occasion." A court of inquiry later decided that Commodore Schley's service up to June 1 was characterized by "vacillation, dilatoriness, and ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... had not meant to allow this, took umbrage, and entered into correspondence with Bussy in the Deccan. Clive had full knowledge of his various intrigues, which were carried on with the vacillation of a character as weak as it was treacherous; and seeing no hope of settled peace or trade under the rule of this man, entered into an extensive conspiracy for his dethronement, the details of which need not be given. The ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... heart, with what alacrity of eager soul, with what aptitude of mind to the deed, would I hang my friend, Undy Scott, the member of Parliament for the Tillietudlem burghs, if I could but get at his throat for such a purpose! Hang him! aye, as high as Haman! In this there would be no regret, no vacillation of purpose, no doubt as to the propriety of the sacrifice, no feeling that I was so treating him, not for his own desert, but for ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... to the same general northerly direction. When you are lost, nothing is more foolish than to make up your mind hastily and without due reflection; and nothing is more foolish than to change your mind once you have made it up. That way vacillation, confusion, and disaster lie. Should you decide, after due consideration of all the elements of the problem, that you should go east, then east you go, and nothing must turn you. You may get to the Atlantic Ocean if nothing else. And if you begin to modify your original plan, then you begin to ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... other than they revealed themselves at Batak in 1876. Sir Charles thought that, as Liberals had been precipitate in their desire to guarantee Ottoman integrity in 1870, so now they were precipitate in their Pan-Slavism. Moreover, the vacillation of the Liberal leaders had put a weapon into the hands of the Government. 'Fancy what a temptation to the present Government to publish the despatches,' notes Sir Charles, in comment on Sir William Harcourt's remark 'that the Tripartite Treaty discussion ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... and terrible words, Lady Macbeth, who had been waiting for a sign of weakness or vacillation on the part of her son-in-law, rose and, with a scared look, left the library. Lady Jane looked up to her husband as if she would fain follow and soothe her mamma, but Pitt ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... glance at the books. He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original sluggishness—still ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the exact counterpart of Luther. He appealed to the limited few, Luther to the masses; he to the educated and higher classes, Luther to the ignorant and lowly; he was a man of reflection, Luther a man of action. The apparent vacillation of Erasmus may have been due to ill health, to the influence of the Pope, to the ties of the Church in which he had been reared, to the satisfaction he found in his eminent literary position, and ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... point. When over our wine we always arrived at an understanding very quickly, but as soon as we sat at the piano, I had to listen to the most extraordinary objections concerning the trend of which I was for some time extremely puzzled. As the matter was much delayed by this vacillation, I put myself into closer communication with the stage manager of the opera, Hauser, who at that time was much appreciated as a singer and patron of art by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... finally at rest, being a valiant young creature, Damaris permitted herself no second thoughts, no vacillation or delay; but went straight downstairs and crossing the strip of terrace garden, bare-headed as she was, waited at the head of the steps leading up from the carriage drive to greet the idol of her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet |
