"Leveller" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be secret meetings, although the empire rigidly suppressed all secret societies. He weakened the martial spirit of the soldier. He divided families—the basis of Roman society—against themselves. He was a socialist leveller. He threatened with ruin all the trades connected with either the established worship—as amongst the silversmiths at Ephesus—or with the luxuries and amusements of life. Those amusements in circus or amphitheatre he hated, and therefore appeared misanthropic. He not ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... What a leveller is avarice! How does it pull down by attempting to raise? How miserable, as Seneca says, in the desire?—how miserable in attaining our ends?—The same great man alledges, that as long as we are solicitous for the increase ...
— Barford Abbey • Susannah Minific Gunning
... contradictions! "Genius is the great leveller of the world," cries M. de Lamartine; "then genius should be a proprietor. Literary property is the fortune of democracy." This unfortunate poet thinks himself profound when he is only puffed up. His eloquence consists solely in coupling ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of the cemetery, shone the white ancestral monuments of the Frisbies. Death, the leveller, had not, somehow, levelled them,—proud and pretentious even in their tombs. You felt, as you read the sculptured record of their names and virtues, that even their ashes were better than the ashes of common mortals. They rendered sacred not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... torch. Now, so strange and wayward is that capricious passion which men call love, that when beset with dangers, his life in jeopardy, and threatened with death on every hand, he seemed to cling even to this lowly one as though his soul were bound to hers. Love, that mighty leveller, for a season threw down every barrier—the pride of birth, and the rank and sphere which were his birthright—nor did a licentious thought find a resting-place in his bosom. Young and ardent, he had spoken to her beforetime, though not explicitly, on the subject; and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... to defend Charlotte Corday was equivalent to acquiescing in the death of Marat: Marat, the friend of the people; Marat, whom his funeral orators had compared to the Great, the Sacred Leveller of Mankind! ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... man's way, and that any argument which denied the premiss of his peculiar fancy was worse than thrown away upon him. I therefore ventured no farther than to say that I had heard death was a leveller. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... lifted, and a glimpse afforded which shall inform them that their property or the country's freedom are endangered, and they will be found a rampart behind which all true patriots, the lovers of order and country, may rally, and which they may hold impregnable against the furious assault of the leveller, or the insidious ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... wealth—you fret yourself lest you should lose it. It robs you of your health, your ease of mind, your freedom of thought and action. Riches will not bribe inexorable death to spare you. At any hour that great leveller may sweep you away into darkness and dust, and what will it then avail you, that you have wasted all your hours, and foregone all wholesome pleasure, in adding ingot to ingot, or acre to acre, for your heirs to squander? Set ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... his corps of informers, of the course that the coming movement would pursue. Two months before they began to reflect back to him an account of his own design, Cromwell's detection office in Whitehall contained a report from a supposed Leveller, who had passed from Essex to Cornwall, and then from Cornwall to Scotland, that a rumour was afloat, that the republicans in the army who were 'resolved to stand by their first principles, in opposition to the Government,' had banded together, under noted leaders, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... great mantle of beauty, and makes it possible to travel on snow-shoes or by dog-train through vast regions absolutely impassable in the summer months. Horses or other large animals, are absolutely worthless for travel in such regions. The snow is a great leveller. It fills up many a dangerous pitfall and puts such a cushion on the logs and rocks, that upsets or falls are only laughed at by the dog-travellers as they merrily dash along. The only drawbacks to a tumble down a steep declivity of some hundreds of feet, as once befell the writer, ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... with us of moderate means, that they will naturally form a specialized class, and in virtue of their palaces, their picture-galleries, their equipages, their yachts, their large hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion, which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your back ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... should have under one heading four distinct sets of averages, each of which, in the individual cases, might show important variations from the others, and therefore require some variation of explanation. And yet that great leveller, the general average, has obliterated these vital differences, and is recorded as indicating the 'most pleasing proportion.'[3] That such an average falls near the golden section is immaterial. Witmer himself, as we shall see,[4] does not set much store by this coincidence as a starting ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... treadmill of his daily occupation, he has turned from the finer thoughts of his leisure moments. Duty, while deepening Captain Butor and temporarily converting him into a useful, even an important personage, acts as a leveller on Stoss. Stoss merely seemed to partake in the life on the sea, while in actuality concerned with nothing but himself. And there's my colleague, the ship's surgeon. I was completely upset to find ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann |
