"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Legislature acted politically—that is to say, when it dealt with foreign complications, or electoral reforms—he followed his leader. When the Legislature acted socially—that is to say, for the good of the people—he followed his conscience. On the last occasion when the great Russian bugbear provoked a division, he voted submissively with his Conservative allies. But, when the question of opening museums and picture galleries on Sundays arrayed the two parties in hostile camps, he broke into open mutiny, and went ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... the most important) victory of the war in the Battle of Tannenberg. He won it because the ground was exceedingly difficult, and because he knew the ground far better than any other man on earth. He was entitled to very high credit. He got it. He became the idol of the German populace, and the bugbear of the Allied countries. But he has done nothing since. Soon after Tannenberg he made a fool of himself on the Russian frontier, and showed that success had got into his head. He subsequently initiated several terrific attempts, all of which were excessively costly and none ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... artificial methods of living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her organism a ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... ecstasy is ofttimes cut short by the reflection that he has yet to face that awful bugbear—the old folk. There is something terrible about age, it would seem, not only to its possessor, but even to those who must encounter it second hand, and Steve was not without his qualms. Although in his wooing he ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... which I have seen, been almost inclined to think that the courage as well as cowardice of fools proceeds from not knowing what is or what is not the proper object of fear; indeed, we may account for the extreme hardiness of some men in the same manner as for the terrors of children at a bugbear. The child knows not but that the bugbear is the proper object of fear, the blockhead knows not that a ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... and startling contrasts, both of hues and material. Her hands are always cold and seldom clean; and she has sundry uncomfortable notions about damping the spirits of youth and checking the exuberance of its gaiety which render her a perfect terror and bugbear to the rising generation. When I was a little thing, laughing, prattling, and giggling, as children will, an admonishing look from my aunt, with a gaunt finger held aloft, and a cold "Kate, don't be silly, my dear," was always sufficient to make me dull and gloomy for ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... said, "Yes, yes. Guerchard is a good assistant in a business like this. A little visionary, a little fanciful—wrong-headed, in fact; but, after all, he IS Guerchard. Only, since Lupin is his bugbear, he's bound to find some means of muddling us up with that wretched animal. You're going to see Lupin mixed up with all this to a ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... in the room. She fidgetted at the sink. The music was a bugbear to her, because it prevented her from saying what was on her own mind. At length it ended, her father was turning over the various books and sheets. She looked at him ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... faith experienced in my brother's case was due almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... the Bible to stand sponsor for the condensation of the "records" of his ancestors which Smith unearthed. It was discovered very soon after the organization of the Mormon church was announced that the word was of Greek derivation, uopuw or uopuwv meaning bugbear, hobgoblin. In the form of "mormo" it is Anglicized with the same meaning, and is used by Jeremy Collier and Warburton.* The word "Mormon" in zoology is the generic name of certain animals, including the mandril baboon. The discovery of the Greek origin ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... 'What a bugbear that woman is!' I observed, rather irritably, as we retraced our steps in the direction of the Man and Plough, the little inn that stood at the junction of the four roads. Everything looked dark and eerie in the faint starlight. Our footsteps seemed to strike sharply against the hard, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fond of Needless, or Too much Retirement. Where was it, that the Devil fell upon our Lord? it was when he was Alone in the Wilderness. We should all have our Times to be Alone every Day; and if the Devil go to scare us out of our Chambers, with such a Bugbear, as that he'll appear to us, yet stay in spite of his teeth, stay to finish your Devotions; he Lyes, he dare not shew his head. But on the other-side by being too solitary, we may lay our selves too much open to the Devil; You know who says, Wo to ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... curious in his inquiries concerning me: the astute Senior had heard of our leaving the End of Time with the Gerad Adan, and his mind fell into the fancy that we were transacting some business for the Hajj Sharmarkay, the popular bugbear of Harar. Our fate was probably decided by the arrival of a youth of the Ayyal Gedid clan, who reported that three brothers had landed in the Somali country, that two of them were anxiously awaiting at Berberah the return of the third ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per tael on all sales, said to have been voluntarily imposed on themselves by ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... Baptists. Like other Nonconformists, these were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his brethren in the faith. 'They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, he returned ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Price of Party Government" in the Fortnightly Review for June, 1900. Mr. Lilly complains bitterly that the infallible oracle in politics to-day is "the man in the street." He asserts that all issues are settled "by counting heads, in entire disregard of what the heads contain." His bugbear is the extension of the franchise. "Representative institutions, for example," he asks, "what do they represent? The true theory unquestionably is that they should represent all the features of national life, all the living forces of society, all that makes the country what it is; and ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... was poor, and she knew that everybody knew it; yet so long as she was not in absolute want, and the poor-house, that bugbear of honest poverty, was yet far distant, she managed to keep a cheerful heart, and visited her neighbors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... magnitude of the country, the conflict of interests in its different sections, the State organizations and semi-sovereignty, and the consequent lack of that strong centralization of administrative powers and functions which, however much of a bugbear to many people's imaginations, is indispensable to a complete nationality—has threatened us in the past and may be expected to threaten us in the future. The latter evil ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... and a battered helmet with the vizor up, disclosing a weather- beaten bronzed face, with somewhat wild dark eyes, and a huge grizzled moustache forming a straight line over his lips. Altogether he was a complete model of the lawless Reiter or Lanzknecht, the terror of Swabia, and the bugbear of Christina's imagination. The poor child's heart died within her as she perceived the mutual recognition between her uncle and the new comer; and, while Master Gottfried held out his hands with a cordial greeting of "Welcome, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the small proprieties, and lesser virtues that lie on the surface of things and give life its polish, Audrey was for ever riding full-tilt against prejudices or raising a crusade against what she chose to term 'the bugbear ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Some other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, Shall take this idle breath, If I a poem leave, that poem ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... water is a worry! And doubtless, if the iron glove Should meet us here in Kent or Surrey, Its clasp might soften into love; We might despatch him with a grey grin, And all the German Scribes would vow "Our bugbear is the Montenegrin; We do not hate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Man. "When you shall have learned that 'what people say' is the most senseless bugbear in all this wide world of senseless bugbears, you will be far on the road to true greatness. You will have broken the heaviest, most galling, most idiotically useless fetter that weights down ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... officer approached the "Human Dog" would immediately roll over on his back, with his legs in the air, and yelp piteously; in fact, he combined the "lay" of insanity with that of starvation in a most ingenious and skilful manner. He was a familiar sight and a bugbear to the police, who were constantly arresting him; but, as he never asked for money, they had great difficulty in doing anything with him. Usually the magistrate sent him to the "Island," for thirty days and then Gottlieb would get him out on a writ of habeas ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... evil. I shall be firm; do not doubt me. I will cling with tenacity to that juste milieu under which we have hitherto so eminently prospered. Neither the Parcae and the Eumenides, nor Ixion and his friends, shall advance a point. I will keep each faction in awe by the bugbear of the other's supremacy. Trust me, I am a ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... go, my friend! punishment or no punishment! Why, I can scarcely make my own fellows go! Bosh! I know boys; school is their bugbear." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... bad," sighed Zellerndorf; "though it may not be without its advantages after all, for now we still have this second bugbear to frighten Leopold with. So long, of course, as the American lives there is always the chance that he may return and seek to gain the throne. The fact that his mother was a Rubinroth princess might make it easy for Von der Tann to place him upon the throne ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... so candidly, and with such an air of treating the whole business as the bugbear of a timid monarch, that ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but still more through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide, which is ticklish." Every ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... enemy; if maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... organs pretend. We do not want to rob our neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of others; they seem to think that anyone who differs from them must be a knave or ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... would be mutually beneficial, that it would induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of Negro ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... short in horror. Her especial bugbear in mathematics was eight-times-seven; she was coming toward it fast—could she remember it, with old Squire Bean looking ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... "Our darling shall be free as air; his duties shall be made to seem like pleasures, or, better still, he shall have no duty but his pleasure. He shall do only what he wills, that his will may grow strong, and he can but choose the right, for he knows no evil. We will hold up before him no bugbear of future punishment, for doubtless there is no such thing; and if there be, it will not be meted out to such a child. He will love and obey his parents because they have devoted themselves to his happiness, and because ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... great bugbear of certain economists, is indeed a grievous affair at Sydney, as page ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... situation somewhere else," said Anne cheerfully, "abroad if possible; but I have become a bugbear to Daisy, and it is best ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United States ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... to you to know at once that there will not be any statistics in this series of talks. We want instead just now to get broad and general, but distinct, impressions. Statistics are burdensome to most people. They are a good deal of a bugbear to the common crowd of us every-day folks. They are absolutely essential. They are of immense, that is, immeasurable, value. You need to have them at hand where you can easily turn for exact information, ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... Matteis's secretary; and 4th and 5th, two spies. These men united in a conspiracy to destroy various persons who were obnoxious to them in the province, some of them actuated by political motives, and others in order to get possession of the property of their victims. The bugbear of the Court is Carbonarism, and Matteis pretended that there was a Carbonari plot on foot, in which several persons were implicated. He employed the spies to seduce the victims into some imprudence of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... dame began to exercise her judgment. A few minutes sufficed for forming a resolution; nor was it sooner formed than that it was begun to be put into action, yet not before the excited girl was away, no doubt to tell some of her companions of her relief from the bugbear of the man with the terrible eyes. The formation of a purpose might have been observed in her puckered lips and the speculation in her grey eyes. The spirit of romance had visited the small house in Toddrick's Wynd, where for fifteen years ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The angry ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... imagining what would be the consequences if this or that misfortune were to befall him—of which he himself sought and secured the shadow beforehand, to darken and hinder the labour which might prevent its arrival. But he was a good man nevertheless, for his greatest bugbear was debt. If he could only pay off every penny he owed in the world, and if only his wife were so far better as to enjoy life a little, he would, he thought, be perfectly happy. His wife, however, was tolerably ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... nor so happy as one in ten thousand. Cui bono, then I ask—where is this moral machinery which I sometimes dreaded? I cannot perceive its operations. It has no existence; it is a mere chimera; like many another bugbear, the foul offspring of credulity and fear on the one side—of superstition and hypocrisy on the other. No; life is merely a thing of chances, and its incidents the mere combinations that result from its ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 'black man,' but who nevertheless do not like to be left alone in the dark. We would beg you to let your light shine into a few dark corners out of which we cannot clearly see our way. Do not despise us if we still secretly believe a little in the black man. We will not forget that he is merely a bugbear; but it will pacify us to hear from your own mouths what the true and natural facts of the case are. In the first place, what are, in your opinion, the means employed by nature, in the struggle for the existence of species, to keep the growth of numbers from reaching the limit of the food-supply? ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... papa be a bugbear to frighten me. What can he do? I don't suppose he'll beat me. And I'd rather he would than shut me up here. As for you, mamma, I don't think you care for me a bit. Because Sophy is going to be married to that oaf, you are become so proud ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... attention was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word among ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... board worthy a special chronicle during the day. The men were drilled in various exercises, and gave excellent satisfaction to their officers. The next morning the St. Regis was off Cape Hatteras, and though it is a greater bugbear than it generally deserves, it gave the ship a taste of its quality. The wind had hauled around to the south-west, and was blowing a lively gale. The sails had been furled in the morning watch, and off the cape the course had been changed ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... pained by its manifestation of his failing powers. In fact, his was an unfinished fame—a brilliant beginning, but no continuance. Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, "Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts. He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him." Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; but Byron was ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... causeways. A poor woman in a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern England, is surrounded now by the same ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... make a bugbear of aunt Shaw' said Margaret, laughing. 'Edith picked up all sorts of military slang from Captain Lennox, and aunt Shaw never took ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... What, hath this dreamer, with his father's ark, The bugbear he hath built to scare the world, Shaken my sister? Are we not the loved Of Seraphs? and if we were not, must we Cling to a son of Noah for our lives? Rather than thus——But the enthusiast dreams The worst of dreams, the fantasies engendered ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... resort. Its hillsides had never been barred by the intrusive and peremptory notice-board, a bugbear to ladies strolling book in hand, a cock-shy to the children passing on their way to school. The Conquhar was a swift, clear-running river coursing over its bed of gneiss, well tucked-in on either side by green hayfields, where the grasshopper for ever "burred," ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... this girl who presumed to call him horrid and hard-hearted, and to hold up as an example his bugbear and opponent, Bill Howroyd. Horatia returned his look with a perfectly fearless one. 'So you prefer Bill Howroyd's way? Perhaps you prefer his home to mine? He'll never build himself a Balmoral,' said ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... his like in the whole world. When he travels he flings himself forward on a staff of fifty ells' length, with a pace as swift as a bird's flight. Once when my father was out hunting he was charmed by an ogress who lived in a cave under a waterfall, and with her he begat this bugbear. The island is one-third of my father's realm, but his son finds it too small for him. My father had a ring the greatest gem, which each of us would have, sister and brother, but I got it, wherefore he has been my enemy ever since. Now I will write him a letter and send him the ring ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they grossly lie That say there's hope of immortality. Let them but tell us what a soul is: then We shall adhere to ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... detrimental to the interests of her husband's niece, as the probate judge had told her she might if she listened to the seduction of immediate cash. And fortunately the bank officer did not ask for money to pay taxes and interest on the mortgages, which had been the bugbear of her married life. This was the next point touched upon ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... young she had been at the time of Maddox's treason, the Colonel began to doubt if her imagination had not raised a bugbear, and he questioned her, "My dear, why are you so much afraid, of this person? What ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge |
