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Cabal   /kəbˈɑl/   Listen
Cabal

noun
1.
A clique (often secret) that seeks power usually through intrigue.  Synonyms: camarilla, faction, junto.
2.
A plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially a political plot).  Synonym: conspiracy.



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"Cabal" Quotes from Famous Books



... to think ill of others, particularly in difficult affairs, and they sometimes endeavor to justify them, through charitable feelings, which are praiseworthy in principle, but which may have evil consequences, when a doctrine is in question which has been widely spread, and which is supported by a cabal. Wading, seeing that the five propositions were censured by various constitutions of the Pope, made a report on the whole affair, with the following beautiful declaration, worthy of a truly Catholic Doctor: "If, before this decision, any one shall have been of a different ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... let events drift now. They had passed beyond her control. Perhaps a policy of masterly inactivity might rescue her from the tornado which had swept her off her feet. In any case, she must fight her own battles, irrespective of the cabal entered into in Paris. Captain James Devar was an impossible ally; the French Count was a negligible quantity when compared with an English viscount whose ancestry threw back to the Conquest and whose estates covered half of a midland shire; but there ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... Canning, and those of his opponents with whom he was agreed on the Roman Catholic question, concurred in representing this act of the seceding ministers as a cabal against Mr. Canning; and the Duke of Wellington, more especially, was made the subject of most unsparing abuse. The ground of this was that he had not contented himself with resigning the office he held ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... more. While they were deliberating, up rides Guy Johnson, his short, pursy figure waddling in the saddle, his arrogant, high-featured face redder than ever with rage. Back of him rode a whole company of the Hall cabal—Sir John Johnson, Philip Cross, the Butlers, and so on—all resolved upon breaking up the meeting, and supported by a host of servants and dependents, well armed. Many of these were drunk. Colonel Guy pushed his ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... memory, have had vast and violent runs, not one has been excellent; few have been tolerable; most have been scandalous. When a poet writes a tragedy, who knows he has judgment, and who feels he has genius, that poet presumes upon his own merit, and scorns to make a cabal. That people come coolly to the representation of such a tragedy, without any violent expectation, or delusive imagination, or invincible prepossession; that such an audience is liable to receive the impressions which the poem shall naturally ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... and the happy effects they had experienced from it, prompted them to choose from among their wisest and most virtuous men, him in whom they had observed the tenderest and most fatherly disposition. Neither ambition nor cabal had the least share in this choice; probity alone, and the reputation of virtue and equity, decided on these occasions, and gave the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... thus added himself to our cabal without rebuke, took a lively interest in what followed. The proud father continued: "My son-in-law, after some business preliminaries, wrote me a handsome letter demanding what he had already effectively possessed himself of. I wrote to Francine, already returned to her duties, to be a good girl ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... position at the expense of their rivals. These jealousies were inflamed by the youthful caprice of Tewfik. At first he extended great favour to Ali Fehmi, an officer of fellah descent, only to withdraw it owing to the intrigues of a Circassian rival. Ali Fehmi sought for revenge by forming a cabal with other fellah colonels, among whom a popular leader soon came to the front. This was ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... Basil Lowe, I am not come here to listen to commonplace excuses. I have been ill used, and know it; and the world shall know it. I am not ignorant of the designs of my enemies; but no cabal shall succeed against me. Thaumaturgos shall not be suppressed! Thaumaturgos shall see the light! Thaumaturgos shall have justice, in spite of all the machinations of malice. Sir, I ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... I bless God for, my safe mediocrity: I know, that, if I possessed all the talents of the gentlemen on the side of the House I sit, and on the other, I cannot, by royal favor, or by popular delusion, or by oligarchical cabal, elevate myself above a certain very limited point, so as to endanger my own fall, or the ruin of my country. I know there is an order that keeps things fast in their place: it is made to us, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... in order to depose him. He obeyed the summons with pleasure, and landed at Constantinople in June, 403, with several Egyptian bishops his creatures, refused to see or lodge with John, and got together a packed cabal of thirty-six bishops, the saint's enemies, in a church at Chalcedon, calling themselves the synod at the Oak, from a great tree which gave name to that quarter of the town. The heads of the impeachment drawn up against the holy bishop were: that he had deposed a deacon for beating a servant; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... step at first. The mistake probably resulted from his besetting sin—excess of confidence. On 26th January he expressed to Cornwallis his deep disappointment and grief at the action of the Dublin Parliament, which he ascribed to prejudice and cabal. Clearly he had underrated the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... disposes to a cynical abasement of our fellow-men—counted for something. Something must be set down to habitual converse with the classics—a converse which tends to impart to character, as Platner said of Godfrey Hermann, "a certain grandeur and generosity, removed from the spirit of cabal and mean cunning which prevail among men of the world." His blindness threw him out of the competition of life, and back upon himself, in a way which was sure to foster egotism. These were constitutional elements of that aloofness from men which characterised ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... had won, bearing at last the tri-color we all love and honor, as the symbol of our homes and the hope of the world, and thought how more grandly, even in her ruin, Richmond stood in the light of its crowding stars, rather than the den of a desperate cabal, whose banner was known in no city nor sea, but as the ensign of corsairs, and hailed only by fustian peers, now rent in the grip of our eagle, and without a fane or an abiding-place. Let us go on, not conquerors, but Republicans, battering down ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... may hear these men denouncing government this week, and see them strutting about the Castle, its pampered instruments, and insolent with its patronage, the next. If there be a strike, conspiracy, or cabal of any kind, these "patriots" are at the bottom of it; and wherever ribbonism and other secret societies do not exist, there they are certain ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... it is notorious and indisputable that all machinery for the execution of the law and the maintenance of order, the judges, prosecuting attorneys, sheriff and drawers of jurors, and every other of court of law are in the hands of a despotic cabal who excessively tax, and whose courts convict all those who oppose them, and exonerate by trial the most farcical, the vilest criminal, rob and murder in broad day light, often at the bidding of their protectors. Such a status for a people claiming to be civilized seems difficult ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... has been a cabal against James from the first to make him lay aside his principles, and I cannot regret his refusal to submit to improper dictation, at ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lord and master; how he must reward those that present him with a crown, who deals so ungraciously with him who gave him life, and who set him up an happier object than a monarch: no, no, Philander; he that can cabal, and contrive to dethrone a father, will find it easy to discard the wicked and hated instruments, that assisted him to mount it; decline him then, oh fond and deluded Philander, decline him early; for you of all the rest ought to do so, and not to ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... and cabal on behalf of Harold, which has led to the determination of the principal chiefs, and which now ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... children." Charles refused to let him return, for Clarendon had committed the unpardonable offense of daring to look "sourly" at the vices of the King and his shameless companions flushed "with insolence and wine." Charles now formed a new ministry or "Cabal,"[1] consisting of five of his most intimate friends. Several of its members were notorious for their depravity, and Macaulay calls it the "most profligate administration ever known."[2] The chief object of its leaders ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... a faction which had long monopolised the spoils of office, and that this faction found compensation in the establishment of a new government, it is not easy to resist the suspicion that the secession movement was neither more nor less than a conspiracy, hatched by a clever and unscrupulous cabal. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... Grace, you may call it vengeance—vengeance on the cabal of councillors, who have ever countermined you, in spite of your wit and your interest with the King.—Vengeance ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... aims were raised by his success against Sir George Booth in the August following, and jealousies soon arose between his party in the army and the Rump. The Parliament would have dismissed him, and the chief officers in the cabal with him, but Lambert with the army in October hindered their free meeting, and took the management of the government into the hands of a council of officers, whom they called the Committee of Safety. ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... would put the loose ends of civilization together now and do more toward the restoration of normal conditions in six months' time than can the powers of the earth, acting independently, in ten years' time. The Republican senatorial cabal insists that the treaty be Americanized. Suppose that Italy asked that it be Italianized— France that it be Frenchized—Britain that it be Britainized, and so on down the line. The whole thing would result in a ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... always useful, while its alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no advantage. It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe. The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or nugatory ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... pleasure and be satisfied. So Puritanism suddenly gained all that it had struggled for, and gained it even in the hour when all seemed lost, when Milton in his sorrow unconsciously portrayed the government of Charles and his Cabal in that tremendous scene of the council of the infernal peers in Pandemonium, plotting the ruin ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... 17th.—The hon. Member who described the present Parliamentary situation as "a cabal every afternoon and a crisis every second day" is justified of his epigram. The lobbies this afternoon were full of agitated whisperers, with much talk of a divided Cabinet and this and that Minister on the brink of resignation, because they cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various

... church or state He very zealous is, and able, Devout at pray'rs, and sits up late At the cabal and council-table. His very dog, at council-board, Sits grave ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... In his charges of cabal and intrigue, Frontenac had chiefly in view the clergy, whom he profoundly distrusted, excepting always the Recollet friars, whom he befriended because the bishop and the Jesuits opposed them. The priests on their part declare that he persecuted them, compelled them to take passports ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... Madame du Barri. But this part of the scheme failed. The dauphin was strangely insensible to the personal charms of Marie Antoinette herself, and was wholly inaccessible to any inferior temptations; and, as far as the arrangements of the court were concerned, the success of the mistress's cabal was limited to procuring the dismissal of the mistress of the robes, the Countess de Grammont, for refusing to cede to Madame du Barri and some of her friends the place which belonged to her office at some private theatricals which were held in ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... the absence of a good tenor part. Still a third comic opera, the "Carnaval de Venise" saw the light the same season, which was written in large measure to show the marvelous flexibility of Mme. Cabal's voice. Very few singers have been able to sing the role of Sylvia, who warbles a violin concerto from beginning to end, under the title of an "Ariette ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... into the snare. That Waverley was at a distance in the Highlands, was received as a sufficient excuse for transmitting his letters through the medium of the pedlar; and the sight of his well-known seal seemed to authenticate the negotiations in his name, where writing might have been dangerous. The cabal, however, began to take air, from the premature mutinous language of those concerned. Wily Will justified his appellative; for, after suspicion arose, he was seen no more. When the Gazette appeared, in which Waverley was superseded, great part of his troop broke out into ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... I wonder not they were weary of you; last night was one of their cabal-nights: they have 'em three times a week and meet by turns at one another's apartments, where they come together like the coroner's inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputations of the week. You and I are excluded, and it was once proposed that all the male ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve

... there was nothing to be done for this. I owned it to Perrin, and told him that he was quite right. He took advantage of my mood to lecture me and advise me not to put in an appearance at the opening ceremony that was soon to take place at the Comedie. He feared a cabal against me. Some people were rather excited, rightly or wrongly—a little of both, he added, in that shrewd and courteous way which was peculiar to him. I listened to him without interrupting, which slightly embarrassed him, for Perrin was an arguer but not ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... but quite disconcerted me in paying my respects, by their whispering each other, and appearing to stifle a laugh. When I was seated, the ladies grouped themselves up in a corner, and entered into a private cabal, seemingly to discourse upon points of great secrecy and importance, but of equal ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... Almoner went to see him, with that other priest who had come with us. The Bishop of Marseilles again testified to them his sorrow for the insults given me without any cause; and told them, that it was usual with those persons to insult all such as were not of their cabal, that they had even insulted himself. They were not content with that. They wrote to me the most offensive letters possible, though at the same time they did not know me. I apprehended that our Lord was beginning in earnest to take ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... not be forgotten: if the project of a dictatorship, in the execrable sense affirmed by Jefferson, was, during that session, advocated by any man or by any cabal in the Assembly, history must absolve Patrick Henry of all knowledge of it, and of all responsibility for it. Not only has no tittle of evidence been produced, involving his connivance at such a scheme, but the Assembly itself, a few months later, unwittingly furnished ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... to have no lack of provocation. Since the removal of Reeder, all the Federal officials of the Territory were affiliated with the pro-slavery Missouri cabal. Both to secure the permanent establishment of slavery in Kansas, and to gratify the personal pride of their triumph, they were determined to make these recusant free- State voters "bow down to the ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... lack of 'Boulangism' in France forty years ago had M. Thiers and his legislative cabal got the better of the Prince President in the 'struggle for life' which then went on between the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... second son. He moreover observed, that, in consequence of this information, he no sooner heard of Mr. Pickle's death, which happened at the club, than he went directly with a lawyer to his house, before any cabal or conspiracy could be formed against the rightful heir; and, in presence of witnesses provided for the purpose, sealed up all the papers of the deceased, after the widow had, in the first transports of her sorrow and vexation, fairly owned, that ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... government had no military success to its credit. An impetuous people that lacked experience of war, that had been accustomed in unusual measure to have its wishes speedily gratified, must somehow be marshalled behind the government, unless the alternative was the capture of power by the Congressional Cabal that was forming against ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... Painters, to monopolize to themselves all valuable commissions, and particularly the honor of decorating the chapel of St. Januarius, is one of the most curious passages in the history of art. The following is Lanzi's account of this disgraceful cabal: ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that England has ever seen. In 1671 the Cabal was in power. Charles II had concluded the treaty by which he bound himself to set up the Roman Catholic religion in England. The first step which he took toward that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative, all the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... my last about the four Princes, I now know not to be true with respect to the Duke of Gloucester, who has held aloof from all cabal with them, and even declared in the House of Lords that he had ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham



Words linked to "Cabal" :   clique, coconspire, camarilla, political science, coterie, government, plot, politics, inner circle, Gunpowder Plot, secret plan, camp, faction, pack, ingroup, game



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