"Mendacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I assented, with just the shade of irony necessary to rob the assertion of its mendacity. "But go on, go on. You have not begun to satisfy me yet. You did not stop with finding a motive for the crime I ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... let it be understood that it wishes a particular man to be ruined; and, in twenty-four hours, it will be furnished with grave charges, supported by depositions so full and circumstantial that any person unaccustomed to Asiatic mendacity would regard them as decisive. It is well if the signature of the destined victim is not counterfeited at the foot of some illegal compact, and if some treasonable paper is not slipped into a hiding-place in his house. Hastings was now regarded as helpless. The power to make or mar the fortune ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is neither here nor there. I am not speaking of men who lie with an object. There is some excuse for that: indeed, it is sometimes to their credit, when they deceive their country's enemies, for instance, or when mendacity is but the medicine to heal their sickness. Odysseus, seeking to preserve his life and bring his companions safe home, was a liar of that kind. The men I mean are innocent of any ulterior motive: they prefer a lie to truth, simply ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... now. Why did He ever allow a nation to be Without a bible? Why didn't He give a few leaves to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Take from the bible the miracles, and I admit that the good passages are true. If they are true they don't need to be inspired. Miracles are the children of mendacity. Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, sublime, and eternal march of cause and effect. Reason must be the final arbiter. An inspired book cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. Is a man ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... has won the king's ill-favor in many ways, for which he can offer no defence." Against such a pressure of public opinion the archbishop of Trondhem dared no longer stand, and on the 22d of September despatched Sunnanvaeder to the king, adding, with the mendacity of a child, that he had detained him in Norway only in order that he might not flee. Gustavus, with grim humor, thanked him for his solicitude, and begged him now to return all other refugees. Sunnanvaeder was kept in jail till the ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you) be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin against Heaven): him you declare Sent-of-God, supreme Captain of your England; and having done so,—tie him up (according to Pitt) with Constitutional straps, so that he cannot stir hand or foot, for fear of accidents: in which state he is fully cooked; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... be delighted," I answered, with strenuous mendacity. "Did you say Stephano's, or what do you think of one of these places closer at hand? I was told of a little restaurant in Soho the other day, where the cooking ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... interested him enormously. He represented a type which was new to him, and which it delighted him to study. The major's heartiness, his magnificent disregard for meum and tuum, his unique and picturesque mendacity, his grandiloquent manners at times, studied, as he knew, from some example of the old regime, whom he either consciously or unconsciously imitated, his peculiar devotion to the memory of his late wife,—all ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the three had honestly and openly withdrawn from the position that Henry would be able to go to the prize-giving. They seemed to have silently agreed to bury the futile mendacity of the earlier afternoon in ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... not, then, the discovery that a man has the power to lie that shakes my confidence in him; it is loss of confidence in his mendacity that I find it impossible to get over. I forgive him for telling me lies, but I cannot forgive him for not telling me the same lies, or nearly so, about the same things. This shows he has a slipshod memory, which is unpardonable, or else that he ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... for mendacity is proverbial. One instance of this national weakness was attended with considerable inconvenience to us. By some mischance we had run by the village where we intended to stop for the night, which was situated some distance off the road. Meeting a Persian lad, we inquired ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... pointing out the moral improbability of the current accounts. He might have dwelt on the unsupported testimony of the only witness, the unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself convicts on another subject of flagrant mendacity. But he would have been especially slow to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy he has described, would, in consequence of "some vision either of sleep or fancy," in which future exaltation was ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... parties have had any part in the matter. He does not seem to know that the attitude of British Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity. ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... for the Protection of the Young had put up a Howl because the Game diverted the Attention of Urchins from their Work in the Public Schools and tended to encourage Mendacity among Office Boys. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... the daily issue of libellous pamphlets and placards, of which he had not less than twenty-two on his table directed against himself, which he carefully preserved as his best eulogium and claim to immortality. He advocated the severe repression of the seditious; yet, with a stretch of hypocrisy and mendacity uncommon even with a Guise, he expressed himself as for his own part very sorry that such "grievous executions" had been inflicted upon those who went "without arms and from fear of being damned to hear preaching, or who ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... resentment. Deerslayer looked upon these impotent attempts to arouse him as indifferently as a gentleman in our own state of society regards the vituperative terms of a blackguard: the one party feeling that the tongue of an old woman could never injure a warrior, and the other knowing that mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect those who resort to their use; but he was spared any further attack at present, by the interposition of Rivenoak, who shoved aside the hag, bidding her quit the spot, and prepared to take his seat at the side ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the sixties of our century. I know very well that these ideas are obsolete. I am not preaching to the world, nor hoping to convert society, but to you, and purely in your own private, spiritual interest. If you enter on this path of tattle, mendacity, and malice, and if, with your cleverness and light hand, you are successful, society will not turn its back on you. You will be feared in many quarters, and welcomed in others. Of your paragraphs people will say that "it is a shame, of course, but it is very amusing." There ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... up in a comfortless, poverty-stricken home, without any religious teaching or influences, what wonder that they became addicted to most of the petty vices,—that they acquired an unenviable reputation for mischief, mendacity, and thieving in ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... little struck at Eugene's way of confessing to his sweetheart, she does not betray any suspicion of mendacity. She can truly say she likes Pauline, and that she is glad of the engagement, that she and Polly are certain to be the best of friends. The warms arms around her are so fond, the kisses so delicately sweet, the exaggerations of feeling are so utterly ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Governor, Baron Carondelet, both with his subordinates and with his superiors, it is almost amusing to note the frankness with which he avows his treachery. It evidently did not occur to him that there was such a thing as national good faith, or that there was the slightest impropriety in any form of mendacity when exercised in dealing with the ministers or inhabitants of a foreign State. In this he was a faithful reflex of his superiors at the Spanish Court. At the same time that they were solemnly covenanting for a definite treaty of peace with the United States they were secretly intriguing to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... no genius for mendacity and he was already beginning to repent of his daring fiction. But Mrs. Bornholm, suddenly possessed with some luminous idea, proceeded mercilessly in her cross-examination, feeling that her position, as the wronged party, gave her a right to trample ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... SPECIAL CASE under consideration, the guilty man, I will assume, lies hard and fast, but, when he fancies that all that is left him will be to reap the reward of his mendacity, behold, he will succumb in the very place where such an accident is likely to be most closely analyzed. Assuming even that he may be in a position to account for his syncope by illness or the stifling atmosphere ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures—quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal law—can only be purchased ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... humorous extravagance of expression,—the consul spent a somewhat uneasy evening under the fire of questions that assailed him in reference to the fair deserter. But he kept loyal faith with her, adhering even to the letter of her instructions, and only once was goaded into more active mendacity. The conversation had turned upon "Debs," and the consul had remarked on the singularity of the name. A guest from the north observed, however, that the name was undoubtedly a contraction. "Possibly it might have ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... all whom they represent. You refer to my having to encounter misrepresentation and antagonism. I do not wish to make too much of that. I have no doubt been exposed to much criticism and some abuse. There has, I sometimes think, been an exceptional display of mendacity at my expense. But this is the fate of every public man who is forced by circumstances into a somewhat prominent position in a great crisis. And, after all, praise and blame have a wonderful way of balancing one another if ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... port as if the devil were after him whenever a capful of wind threatens a storm of exposure; but a bold, sea-going liar, who spurns a continent, striking straight out for blue water, with his eyes fixed upon the horizon of boundless mendacity. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Novelist, and Chronicler are all obliged to paint upon their data with colors the imagination alone can supply, and all do it—alive or dead. You will find that Fiction, as distinguished from neat mendacity, has not one form upon earth, but a dozen. You will find the most habitually, willfully, and inexcusably inaccurate, with the means of accuracy under its nose, that form of fiction called "anonymous criticism," political and literary; the most equivocating, perhaps, is the "imaginavit," ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... out a light. No, she was something, she was a retailer of gross humours, a vile sinner; it might be kindling more than a light, an eternal flame. "Child of Mary," indeed! She deserved to be strangled with her white ribbon. And she exaggerated everything with that morbid mendacity of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... any more in the bunks would mean a struggle for life an' death. Thar's plenty of bunkless gents, however, besides him, an' as he sinks into them sound an' dreamless slumbers which is the her'tage of folks whose consciences run trop, he hears 'em drinkin' an' talkin' an' barterin' mendacity, an' argyfyin' pol'tics ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... marvel that this hag of hatred works[sf] Eternal evil latent as she lurks, To make a Pandemonium where she dwells, And reign the Hecate of domestic hells? Skilled by a touch to deepen Scandal's tints With all the kind mendacity of hints, While mingling truth with falsehood—sneers with smiles— A thread of candour with a web of wiles;[sg] A plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming, To hide her bloodless heart's soul-hardened scheming; 60 A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal, And, without ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... ride to Porlock myself, directly after dinner, and make sure whether he were dead, or not. For it was not by any means hard to suppose that Sam Fry, being John's first cousin, might have inherited either from grandfather or grandmother some of those gifts which had made our John so famous for mendacity. At Porlock I found that it was too true; and the women of the town were in great distress, for the King had always been popular with them: the men, on the other hand, were forecasting what ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... and one day, after he had been kept out with the loud, stolid "Not at home" of practiced mendacity, he watched, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the Democratic campaign fund. This return of evil for good appears to have been a new experience for Hawthorne, but those who are much concerned in the affairs of the world soon become accustomed to it, and pay little attention to either the malice or the mendacity ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Every town within two thousand miles of the Klondike River advertised itself as "the point of departure for the gold fields," and set forth the special advantages of its entrance way, crying out meanwhile against the cruel mendacity of those who dared to suggest other and "more dangerous ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... I should like to know myself," I confessed candidly. Then I added with pardonable mendacity: "I think I must have been taken for somebody else, if it was anything more than a desperate ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... are naturally disposed to be very confident about matters of recollection, reflective persons are pretty sure to find out, sooner or later, that they occasionally fall into errors of memory. It is not the philosopher who first hints at the mendacity of memory, but the "plain man" who takes careful note of what really happens in the world of his personal experience. Thus, we hear persons, quite innocent of speculative doubt, qualifying an assertion made on personal recollection by the proviso, "unless my memory ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... responded, with prompt mendacity. "I was in the neighborhood and heard the shot fired, so I ran in to have a look around and see if anyone was hurt, and I came across this poor little chap yowling on the doorstep. I won't want any supper to-night, Mrs. Quinlan. I'm ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him—he will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... connected with Falstaff that give him his perennial attraction. It is the personality that owes nothing to history with which Shakespeare's imaginative power clothed him. The knight's unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way of life supplies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... That was the tenour of his letter to his aunt; but even that letter sufficed to make it almost certain that he could never marry the girl. He acknowledged that he had bound himself not to do so. And then, in spite of all that he said about the mendacity of Castle Quin, he did believe the little history. And it was quite out of the question that he should marry the daughter of a returned galley-slave. He did not think that any jury in England would hold him to be bound by such a promise. Of course ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... is notorious. It is exceeded only by their mendacity. But Angels have up to this time stood in good repute. Your conduct, sir, is scandalous. I ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... Radcliffe the device of introducing apparently supernatural occurrences which are ultimately traced to natural causes. Like Mrs. Radcliffe he is at the mercy of a conscience which forbids him to thrust upon his readers spectres in which he himself does not believe. He lacks Lewis's reckless mendacity. In Wieland mysterious voices are heard at intervals by various members of the family. To the hero, who has inherited a tendency to religious fanaticism, they seem to be of divine origin, and when a voice bids him sacrifice those who are dearest ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... ship-shape as you can. Watch the papers, or they may do us more harm in a single fool story than can be remedied by wise counter-mendacity in a year. Especially watch the Times, although there's mighty little choice between them. You and Alice ought to spend as much time at the Trescotts' as you can spare. You'll hear from me almost daily. Wire anything of importance fully. Keep the L. & G. W. extension story ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... most heinous crime. And we suspect, we know, and for the welfare of the community we hope to be able soon to point out openly, who and where this vile one is. Yes, only an atheist and anarchist is capable of such villainous mendacity, such unutterable wickedness and treachery. Now, we would especially call upon our readers in Baalbek to be watchful and vigilant, for among them is one, recently come back from America, who harbours under his bushy hair the atheism and anarchy ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... with flaming eyes and cheeks and loudly throbbing heart. She was furious at him for daring to speak of such things, daring to couple Forrest's name with hers, with—anybody's. She was ready to cry out against the man for such malignity—mendacity; and then her cooler judgment and common sense began to reassert themselves. Why shouldn't it be true? Why shouldn't he seek the hand of one so—so lovely and wealthy as Miss Allison? What more natural than that Miss ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... Spaniards, who wasted or pocketed them, they kept their own army unsupplied with money, transport, or clothes. Unsupported by the home authorities, the British commanders had yet to struggle with the faithlessness, mendacity, and inertness of the Portuguese and Spanish authorities, and were hampered with obstacles such as never beset a British commander before. Still, in spite of this, British genius and valour triumphed over all difficulties, ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... real major-general—albeit he was dead—was a famous windfall, for the widow had social ambitions which hitherto she had never been able to gratify. Hence she smiled sweetly at the veteran in a way which stimulated him to further flights of mendacity. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dollars and his goods actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to, much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they availed naught, when Levine, with an expression of horror at such deliberate mendacity on the part of the clerk, ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... went hobbling down the row. There were the ladies and they accosted him to know if anything were wrong,—if they had not better go to Mrs. Truscott? et caetera, et caetera; but he answered with unaccustomed brilliancy and mendacity that he had a scare for nothing because he could not read her fine Italian hand. She was only getting some things ready to send to Captain Truscott by the stage to Fetterman. All the same he slipped into his room, got his revolver, gave a quiet twirl ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... moment be understood as expressing a wish for OSCAR's once again dropping into poetry—that OSCAR should once again take to the other sort of Lyre; far from it. No; let him remain the head professor of the gay science of mendacity in the Cretan College. Now, when a Professor and double M.A., i.e., Master of the Mendacious Art in the Cretan College, says or writes one thing, he must be taken as meaning exactly the opposite. Otherwise he is no Cretan, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... head and fixing her round blue eyes with calm mendacity on the boy, "don't you tell me. I ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So that, if Westward Ho! does not present us with the weaknesses and the dilemmas of Hypatia, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so rich with interest. But it has ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... were, as he felt even in making them, not only gratuitous, but utterly unconvincing, but he had arrived at that condition in which a man discovers with terror the unsuspected amount of mendacity latent ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... boat" of happiness at least once during a love affair—usually by trying to leap out of it before it lands in the port of Matrimony. All a man needs in order to win any woman is a little audacity, a little mendacity and plenty of pertinacity. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... one final effort of mendacity, 'he's fine to look at, but he has no grit in him. Any mongrel from a kraal can make him turn tail. Besides, he is a born fool and can't find his way home. I'm thinking ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... Bartlett," said Yates, "that I am the innocent cause of Miss Kitty's mirth. You see, madam—it's a pathetic thing to say, but really I have had no home life. Although I attend church regularly, of course," he added with jaunty mendacity, "I must confess that I haven't heard grace at meals for years and years, and—well, I wasn't just prepared for it. I have no doubt I made an exhibition of myself, which your daughter ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... began to see the cruelty to animals which English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do not know how the Americans are reputed good and just ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... that men may rather pray for than hope for Matters little by what name a government is called Meet around a green table except as fencers in the field Men who meant what they said and said what they meant Men fought as if war was the normal condition of humanity Mendacity may always obtain over innocence and credulity Military virtue in the support of an infamous cause Mistakes might occur from occasional deviations into sincerity Mondragon was now ninety-two years old Moral nature, undergoes less change ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... neighbours, yielded at length to the inordinate craving for drink; the man who had held himself so high above his honest and industrious fellow-settlers, could now unblushingly enter their cabins and beg for a drop of whiskey. The feeling of shame once subdued, there was no end to his audacious mendacity. His whole time was spent in wandering about the country, calling upon every new settler, in the hope of being asked to partake of the coveted poison. He was even known to enter by the window of an emigrant's cabin, during the absence of the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... my folly, Mr. Lee," said Kate, with swift mendacity; "he was all the time looking after something for you, when I begged him to shoot a bird to get a feather for my hat. And ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... other anecdotes, however; not of a parrot character, but chiefly of funny sayings of the little ones at home. Mrs. Judge Robinson, with the artistic mendacity of your true raconteur, accredited to her own four-year-old a speech about the stars being holes in the floor of heaven, although it was said of this gem in "Harper's Drawer," where she had read it, that "the following good ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... select for consideration one group of these vices,—the important group which fall under the general head of untruthfulness. Insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,—their name is Legion. That externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is almost too obvious to need demonstration. In school the child lives in an atmosphere of unreality ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity! ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... days that followed, the double pursuit continued with the same tortures, or worse, and with the same odious mendacity. By a phenomenon which is of frequent occurrence in the moral degradation of men of keen intellect, he now had a terrible lucidity of conscience, a lucidity without interruptions, without a moment of dimness ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... in the dank gutters decay had taken the form of a mild deliquescence; and the pillars were spotted as if Nature had dropped over the too early ruin a few unclean tears. The house itself was lifted upon a broad wooden foundation painted to imitate marble with such hopeless mendacity that the architect at the last moment had added a green border, and the owner permitted a fallen board to remain off so as to allow a few privileged fowls to openly explore the interior. When Miss Sally Dows played the piano in the ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... enemies of the government he was, without doubt, the most deeply criminal. He was the original author of the plot for assassinating the royal brothers. He had written that Declaration which, for insolence, malignity, and mendacity, stands unrivalled even among the libels of those stormy times. He had instigated Monmouth first to invade the kingdom, and then to usurp the crown. It was reasonable to expect that a strict search would be made for the archtraitor, as he was often called; and such a search a man of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... serve as a memorable example of the cant and mendacity of an editor! and that total absence of critical judgment that could assert such matured reflection, in so exquisite a style, could ever have been "first conceptions, just as they came into the mind of Lady Gethin, as she ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... for them except in supreme power, and no other means for maintaining this but in the excesses of despotism, dishonesty, mendacity and violence. In the Constitution they manufacture, they desire to remain the sovereigns of France and they decree[5112] at once that, willingly or not, France must select two-thirds of its new representatives from amongst them, and, that she may make a good ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... quo. To natives and foreigners alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... her assistance rendered or proffered to Austria in 1798-9 which gave Napoleon his pretext for crushing her. Her recent struggle for independence, though fruitless, was respectable, and protracted beyond the verge of Hope; and not even Royalist mendacity has yet pretended that her revolt from Austria, or her prolonged defence under bombardment and severe privation was the work of foreigners. But the Croat again lords it in her halls; Trieste is stealing away her remnant of trade; ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... article on the food question, "has still at hand a very large supply of pigs"—even after the enormous number she has exported to Belgium. Germany, however, does not only export pigs; her trade in "canards" with neutrals grows and grows, chiefly with the United States, thanks to the untiring mendacity of Bernstorff and Wolff. Compared with these efforts, the revelations of English governesses at German courts, which are now finding their way into print, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... every evidence of the grossest mendacity, was lightly passed over, and the men walked on ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the bean-humbug ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas |
