"Hotbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the very hotbed of ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... chisel and the pencil, no less than the more homely ones of the still and the crucible. San Marco, far from being that kind of sluggish lagoon often imagined in conventual life, was rather a sheltered hotbed of ideas,—fervid with intellectual and moral energy, and before the age in every radical movement. At this period, Savonarola, the poet and prophet of the Italian religious world of his day, was superior of this convent, pouring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... silken doublets, and by light-hearted dames like herself, and not by notorious plotters or sour priests. Still, as many Bordeaux merchants frequented the house, as well as traders from the Hanse towns, and other foreigners, it was looked upon by the suspicious as a hotbed of Romish heresy and treason. Moreover, these maligners affirmed that English recusants, as well as seminary priests from abroad, had been harboured there, and clandestinely spirited away from the pursuit of justice by the skipper; ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... fortunate to get through here so easily—the Jerseys are a hotbed of rebellion. Do you return with me ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... and again took the road leading to Puerto Lapice, whose outlines they sighted in the afternoon. Don Quixote thought this an opportune time for addressing his squire on the etiquette and laws of knighthood, as they were now approaching a very hotbed of adventure. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... more remarkable mixture of sagacity and instinct occurred to me one day as my people were pulling off the lining of an hotbed, in order to add some fresh dung. From out of the side of this bed leaped an animal with great agility that made a most grotesque figure; nor was it without great difficulty that it could be taken; when it proved to be a large ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... containing no sediment flows freely; but the melted grease which often passes into the pipes mixed with hot water, becomes cooled and solid as it descends, adhering to the pipes, and gradually accumulating until the drain is blocked, or the water passes through very slowly. A grease-lined pipe is a hotbed for ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... number of plants is desired, a hotbed may be called into requisition in early spring and the plants hardened off in cold frames as the season advances. Hardening off is essential with all plants grown under glass for outdoor planting, because unless ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... just the place for you, then. Perfect hotbed of golf. Fine links at the top of the hill, not half a mile from the farm. Bring your clubs. You'll be able to have a round or two in the afternoons. Get through serious work by ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... teacher to his class. I, in triumphant tone, did voice the truth That in our homeland stinking graft prevails, But, ah! I overlook the damning fact That ignorance among our foreign born Hath been the hotbed whence this thistle grew, And that our Governor did get his boost Into the forum through that rotten host Which proudly boasts a "Tammany" as its god. And do the people of our Empire State Evolve the doctrine which I loud proclaimed? No! in the dire extremity they laid Restraining hand upon the ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... prove, that the subject of his inquiry was of infinite consequence to the progress and increase of natural knowledge. But he found no quarter from the vengeful engineer, who now retorted his ironical compliments, with great emphasis, upon this hotbed for the generation of vermin, and advised him to lay the whole process before the Royal Society, which would, doubtless, present him with a medal, and give him a place among their memoirs, as a distinguished promoter of the useful arts. "If," said he, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... anti-revolutionaries had been weeded out of the city: some by death and imprisonment, others by flight. Boulogne became the hotbed of anarchism: the idlers and loafers, inseparable from any town where there is a garrison and a harbour, practically ruled the city now. Denunciations were the order of the day. Everyone who owned any money, or lived with any comfort was accused of being ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and the prophylactic pup Were playing in the garden when the bunny gambolled up; They looked upon the creature with a loathing undisguised, For he wasn't disinfected and he wasn't sterilized. They said he was a microbe and a hotbed of disease; They steamed him in a vapour of a thousand odd degrees, They froze him in a freezer that was cold as banished hope, They washed him with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... and the young man another, and the grown-up man another. Let us consider one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentleness of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings which are to be transferred afterwards in full cultivation to God, like plants nursed in a hotbed and then planted out, are to be cultivated first in youth. Afterwards, those habits which have been merely habits of obedience to an earthly parent, are to become religious submission to a heavenly parent. Our parents stand to us in ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the British habit of asylum should be abused. We have already in England the dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser's death—which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness, and the rumour gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter. "The higher liberalism" and the "higher liberal," that is, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and there was no avoiding the meeting. As he moved nearer he saw what a beautiful person she was, her rich primrose-coloured dress setting off her brunette complexion and her stately presence. She looked older than he had expected; but this was a hotbed where every one grew up early, and the expression and manner made him feel that an old intimacy was here renewed, and that they were ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... came into view as he drove over the brow of a long hill. He hated the place, knowing it well for what it was—a festering hotbed of gossip and malice, the habitat of all the slanderous rumours and innuendoes that permeated the social tissue of the community. The newest scandal, the worst-flavoured joke, the latest details of the most recent quarrel, were always to be had at ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... As Ireland is the hotbed of all crimes, do we not want a Lord Lieutenant who shall be able to assess the true value of every indiscretion, from simple murder to compound larceny? As every Irishman may in a few months be in prison, I want a Lord Lieutenant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... at Lawrence was the beginning of a plan, originating in that city, to organize insurrection throughout the Territory, and especially in all towns, cities, or counties where the Republican party have a majority. Lawrence is the hotbed of all the abolition movements in this Territory. It is the town established by the abolition societies of the East, and whilst there are respectable people there, it is filled by a considerable number of mercenaries who are paid by abolition societies ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... set up a new standard here, that men of such origins and such free choices of allegiance would ever turn in malign reaction against the Government and people who had welcomed and nurtured them and seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... submitted, he had been tossed, as a youthful student, into the freebooting Edinburgh of the forties. Edinburgh was alive in those days to her very paving-stones; town and university combined to form a hotbed of intellectual unrest, a breeding-ground for disturbing possibilities. The "development theory" was in the air; and a book that appeared anonymously had boldly voiced, in popular fashion, Maillet's dream and the Lamarckian ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... of Spanish stock that had been weakened by infusions of Indian and negro blood, but there were a number of Chinamen, and French Creoles. Besides these, Americans, Britons, and European adventurers had established themselves, and the town was a hotbed of commercial and political intrigue. The newcomers were frankly there for what they could get and fought cunningly for trading and agricultural concessions. The leading citizens of comparatively pure Spanish strain despised ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... Eastward Ho! That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for saeva indignatio, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy," mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of his personages (I should ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... less of London life and town-bred character than most of its predecessors; but what may thus be gained in variety is lost in raciness, breadth, and effect. The peculiar classes forced into existence by the hotbed of a great city, and owing a part of their gusto to town usage, may be narrow enough if compared with general nature, but they are broader than the singularities whom Mr. Dickens copies or invents as representatives of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... libertine pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense, maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every decent Englishman's sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell's iron ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... are the dissenters of Russia—this village was a hotbed of them, but they've gone the way of the ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... alley, and went to the gap where it opened on to the ditch. There was an admirably efficient hotbed for rearing diseases there. A solid bed of sewage of about two feet deep seemed to fill the hollow, and a thin sheet of filthy water covered this bed—with sickly breaks here and there. Ordure palpable and abominable was plentiful, and the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... vain for the Rabbi of the little western isle to contend by quip or reason against the popular frenzy. England, indeed, was a hotbed of Christian enthusiasts awaiting the Jewish Millennium, the downfall of the Pope and Anti-Christ, and Jews ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... ideology, the theory of the return to nature, the proclamations of the rights of man, all the temerities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal and Mandeville, the bold ideas of Hume, Hartley, James Mill and Bentham, all the revolutionary doctrines, were so many hotbed plants produced here and there, in the isolated studies of a few thinkers: out in the open, after blooming for a while, subject to a vigorous competition with the old vegetation to which the soil belonged, they ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... can't hear?" asked Bond, with his eye on her spreading fingers. "Well, then"—to Abner—"there is the great Human Problem, but it is not to be solved, nor was it designed that it should be. The world is only a big coral for us to cut our teeth upon, a proving-ground, a hotbed from which we shall presently be transplanted according to our several deserts. No power can solve the puzzle save the power that cut it up into pieces to start with. Try as we may, the blanket will always be just a little too small for the bedstead. Meanwhile, the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... ten hours a day did these children work in a space just wide enough for them to sit, with the two least under the slope of the stairs, permitted no distraction from their bobbins, but invaded by their mistress on the faintest sound of tongues. Into this hotbed of sprigs was admitted a child who had been a special favourite at school, an orphan niece of the head of the establishment. The two brothers had been lost together at sea; and while the one widow became noted for her lace, the other, a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of hundred villagers in the grip of his impassioned utterance he felt that the awakening of England had begun. It was a delicious moment. As a canvasser he performed prodigies of cajolery. Extensive paper mills, a hotbed of raging Socialism, according to Colonel Winwood, defaced (in the Colonel's eyes) the outskirts of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Pecksniff's estate, this request must be considered rather as a polite compliment that a substantial hospitality. It was the finishing ornament of the conversation; for when he had delivered it, Mr Pecksniff rose and led the way to that hotbed of architectural genius, the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... waiting for the match. I am taking Aruna into the Hills for a pilgrimage. It is possible Grandfather may come too; we are hoping to start soon after the fifteenth, if things keep quiet. Write to me, Roy, telling all you know. Lahore is a hotbed for trouble; Amritsar, worse; but I hope your authorities are keeping well on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... although small compared with that of Mindanao, is, nevertheless, in itself the most important, as well as the real hotbed of all the piracies committed. Its inhabitants, according to the unanimous reports of captives and various merchants, in skill and valor greatly exceed the other Mahometans who infest these seas. The sultan is absolute, and his subjects carry on trade with Borneo, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... hotbed of reaction and bigotry. True, she had a history differing vastly from that of the other Italian states, but the facts of the hour presented her in a most unattractive light. The Genoese felt the keenest heart-burnings in submitting to a decision in which they had ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... and all whose moral sense has been vigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadful suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed" of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the ruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating evil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too often fearfully miserable children. That is something ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells |
