"Reactionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was bound at once to dignify it and create a popular stir that might lead to a triumph. Whence the suggestion came is not known, but its execution, so far as the libretto was concerned, was left to Gieseke. Under the Emperor Leopold II the Austrian government had adopted a reactionary policy toward the order of Freemasons, which was suspected of making propaganda for liberal ideas in politics and religion. Both Schikaneder and Mozart belonged to the order, Mozart, indeed, being so enthusiastic a devotee that he once confessed to his father ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... world has learned since the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... George F. Russell, is a hired Manager for the Washington Employers' Association, whose membership employs between 75,000 and 80,000 workers in the state. Russell is known to be a reactionary of the most pronounced type. He is an avowed union smasher and a staunch upholder of the open shop principle, which is widely advertised as the "American plan" in Washington. Incidentally he is an advocate of the scheme to import Chinese and Japanese cooley labor as a solution ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... last week of October, when Hungary abandoned the empire, released its civil and military officials from their oath of allegiance to the imperial crown, and formed arrangements for an independent government of its own. Count Tisza, formerly premier of Hungary, and the most reactionary of Hungarian statesmen, was assassinated toward the close of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... constantly opposed by the moderates, and decried and despised by the ultras. This has been the common fate of all successive governments since the beginning of the dynasty. Neither liberal ministers, nor reactionary ministers have found favor ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... deep and acrid, of everything German and especially of German-Americans. The ingenuity of some German papers in supporting this thesis was wonderful. On one occasion a petty squabble in a Roman Catholic theological school in the United States between the more liberal element and a reactionary German priest, in which the latter came to grief, was displayed as an evidence that the American people were determined to drive out all German professors and to abjure German science. The doings of every scapegrace in an American university, of every silly woman in Chicago, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... has to learn that Rockefeller, just as much as he himself, is a product of economic conditions. After he once thoroughly learns this there will be no danger of his being a Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can be a fruitful ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... admired, that it was a mere brawl, but the people were ignorant and romantic. There were signs of treating this alleged Highlander and his alleged opponent as heroes. We tried all other means of arresting this reactionary hero worship. Working men who betted on the duel were imprisoned for gambling. Working men who drank the health of a duellist were imprisoned for drunkenness. But the popular excitement about the alleged duel continued, and we had to fall back on our old historical method. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... respects, a reactionary one; and race hatred is one of its most manifest results. It is not merely a rising of the East against the West; it is also a conflict between Mohammedans and Hindus. In Eastern Bengal, where the Mussulmans are in a large majority, ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... and fair that they should strain every effort to put a stop to such atrocities as have been witnessed by the civilized world within a few years. But it must be borne in mind that it is the Russian government, the Russian reactionary party, including the Russian Church, and not the Russian people, that are responsible for the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... Paris had been strewn with torpedoes, bombs, and inflammable materials, connected with electric wires. "The reactionary quarters shall be blown up," was the announced intention of the Commune. Mercifully, these arrangements had not been completed when the Versailles troops obtained the mastery. Almost the first thing done was to send sappers ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... swerved from the fundamental convictions of 1789, and he would have become a republican if Lewis had gone over to the reactionary emigres. But he wished him to retire to some provincial town, that he might not be in the power of the Assembly, and might be able to disperse it, backed by the growing anger of the country. Meantime, opinion was to be worked and roused ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... this fact there can be no question—the divisions among the revolutionary forces in Spain, which Engels deplored, resulted, after many months of fighting, in returning to power the most reactionary elements in Spain. And this was foreseen, as even before the end of the summer Bakounin had despaired of success. In his opinion, the Spanish revolution miscarried miserably, "for want," as he afterward wrote, "of energy and revolutionary spirit in the leaders as well as in the masses. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... for anything but agreement or reactionary argument from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... what a lot of reactionary warlords tell her," said Aubrey. "This man I was talking with at the Crillon—I wish I could tell you his name—heard it directly from...Well, you know who." He turned to Henslowe, who smiled knowingly. "There's a mission in Russia at this minute ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... of the corn laws the tariff legislation of Great Britain was guided by a new policy, that of free trade, and it has been followed ever since. The reactionary tendencies of Continental Europe after the fall of Napoleon reached also to England, where they controlled the conduct of political affairs until Canning, in 1822, became Secretary for Foreign Affairs. His policy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... meanwhile had placed himself at the head of the reactionary party, pensioned the tycoon, and made rapid advancement in European manners and customs. In 1868, Satsuma and his party broke out into open rebellion against the mikado. But the prince's levies were no match for the imperial ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... reactionary outbreaks influenced Congress to pass the so-called Ku-Klux Act of April 20, 1871, designed to suppress these outrages. This measure, although not dissimilar to others which protected the negro in his right of suffrage, met with stout Republican opposition, the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... bomb-fire, in hearts stricken by personal tragedy or world-agony, will prevail over the old order which dominated the nations of Europe, and the old philosophy of political and social governance will be challenged and perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are thwarted by reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to its old-fashioned discipline under their authority, there will be anarchy reaching to the heights of terror in more countries than those where anarchy now prevails. If by fear or by wisdom the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which to combat the rising tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and functions. This was especially true after the accession to the throne of Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... worst fears. She still smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled, and the old laugh came when she spoke ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lest "they should have to accept not merely, variation according to definite laws, but likewise a principle of finality and other causes lying beyond the range of scientific investigation." The rejection of the theory of selection often promotes, as Goette rightly observes, a reactionary tendency towards a priori explanations of phenomena with which we are but slightly acquainted. "There are naturalists who do not discard the theory of selection simply because it seems to furnish ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... ready to live for God experimentally. They must be prepared to face the crises of life as they occur individually and socially with courage and a desire to lead the way for their fellow men. Instead of this, we find that church people have the reputation of being ultra-conservative, reactionary, and lovers of the status quo. The children of light, as it were, are being dragged along by the children of darkness, and are being compelled by them to face up to responsibilities which they ought to have assumed in the name of God years before anyone else. Of course, ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... duty? To think alike as to men and measures? Impossible! Even for our great party! There is not a reactionary among us. All Democrats are Progressives. But it is inevitably human that we shall not all agree that in a single highway is found the only road to progress, or each make the same man of all our worthy candidates ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... contradictory laws are met with. According to the bill for the new civil laws of Germany, the administration of the wife's property falls to the husband, unless the wife has secured her property to herself by special contract. This is a reactionary attitude, long since discarded by many other countries. On the other hand, the wife is allowed to retain what she has earned by her own personal labor, and without assistance of her husband, or by the independent ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... treated as usual than England, was to be fined an additional twenty-five minutes, and was to lose the proud privilege of Irish time, Mr. Courtney was more pleased than ever. He made merry over what he called the arguments of reactionary patriotism. ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... pertinent question. What is it after all but "sentiment," he inquires, that prevents a man from killing his grandmother in time of hunger? Sentiment is the most respectable thing in human psychology. No one believes in it more thoroughly than your reactionary Tory. But he wears his heart on his sleeve with a difference. He is so greedily patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism in the world to himself. That he should love his country is natural and noble, a theme so high as to be worthy ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... doubt that the powers, engrossed in the diplomatic conflicts of which Peking was the centre, had entirely underrated the reactionary forces gradually mustering for a struggle against the aggressive spirit of Western civilization. The lamentable consequences of administrative corruption and incompetence, and the superiority of foreign methods which had been amply illustrated by the Japanese War, had at first produced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... cooeperate with the Senate in the formulation of American policy and in the appointment of the Peace Commission, and which had opposed his departure in person to Paris—all those elements now had their chance. Having won a difficult victory over reactionary forces in Europe, Wilson was now compelled to begin the struggle over again at home. And whereas at Paris he had displayed some skill in negotiation and an attitude of conciliation even when firm in his principles, ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... of the liberty of conscience, inquisitions, violence of every sort; and during the prevalence of enlightment and humanity, the Jews were acted upon by the intellectual and cultural stimulus proceeding from the peoples with whom they entered into close relations. Momentary aberrations and reactionary incidents are not taken into account here. On its side, Jewry made its personality felt among the nations by its independent, intellectual activity, its theory of life, its literature, by the very fact, indeed, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... constitutionalism, or, as Guizot was pleased to designate it, his revolutionary opinions. The intrigue of the French government was successful, so far that the Queen of Spain was married to a Spanish Bourbon, brother to Don Enrique, a man whom the queen personally hated, a bigoted devotee and reactionary, whose fanaticism against liberty was morbid, and who was an avowed Carlist, openly denying the right of the Queen of Spain to the throne. Whatever could be supposed as likely to influence the fortunes ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Cortes denounce the vices of the clergy, and defend liberty of conscience; they propose means which, a few years ago, would have been visited with the most cruel persecution, and with the brutum fulmen of anathema. The government expatriate reactionary bishops without so much as a murmur from the people against these strokes of severity; many priests, enlisted under the banner of Carlism, have been taken by the troops, and shot as common culprits, without a single voice having been raised in their defence. The ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... mantle, and plied us with numerous questions regarding the Queen, her family, and her government. She lives on the hill among her dependents, exerts great influence, and has done good service in resisting the reactionary tendencies of her brother-in-law Masupha, a dogged and turbulent ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets. Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all thinking as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... evening costume, you see, Jeeves is hidebound and reactionary. I had had trouble with him before about soft-bosomed shirts. And while these mess-jackets had, as I say, been all the rage—tout ce qu'il y a de chic—on the Cote d'Azur, I had never concealed it from myself, even when treading the measure at the Palm Beach Casino in the ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... predictions with regard to the French Revolution were realized. During all the years that have intervened since reconstruction days, the conservative has had as a resource for leadership his harking back to those days. The demagogue and the reactionary — enemies of the children of light — have always been able to inflame the populace with appeals to the memories and issues of the past. Such men have ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... understand that they're to swing to Henderson after two ballots. You've got to keep your hand on the throttle in the convention, you understand. And I don't need to impress upon you how grave are the consequences if this man Crewe gets in, with public sentiment behind him and a reactionary Lower House. You've got to keep your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him. The occasion was to be the opening of the new post-office, when Hong Yung-sik would give an official banquet to which all must come. During the dinner, the detached palace was to be set on fire, a call was to be raised that the King was in danger, and the reactionary Ministers were to be killed as they rushed to his help. Two of the students were appointed sentries, two were to set fire to the palace, one group was to wait at the Golden Gate for other members of the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. It is strange that the reactionary members of the "upper classes" should be too short-sighted to discern this obvious truth. But perhaps they have a secret conviction that by so educating the "lower orders" as to make them slow and stupid, helpless and lifeless, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... place determines the status of the race as a whole. It would, however, be to small purpose if we did not ask what can be done to develop the innate good and correct the bad in a race so puissant and numerous? This mass is not inert; it has great reactionary force, modifying and influencing all about it. The Negro's excellences have entered into American character and life already; so have his weaknesses. He has brought cheer, love, emotion and religion in saving measure to the ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... strong contrast with this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, is the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... with neither his old associates nor with the times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple trees. Monroe came to laugh at "old Monroe's" pigheadedness. He ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... enlightened and perfected methods. Among the leading statesmen of Russia were men, such as the Minister of Public Instruction, Sergius Uvarov, who were well acquainted with Western European ways and fully aware of the fact that the reactionary governments of Austria and Prussia had invented several contrivances for handling the Jewish problem which might be usefully applied in their own country. Though anxious to avoid all contact with the "rotten West," and being in constant fear of European political movements, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... too much of the blood of the count flowing through the veins of the tribune of the people. Danton answered him with a smile: 'In that case we must draw off the count's blood from the tribune of the people, that he may either be cured of his reactionary disease or die ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... descriptions. This military and political co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary—there seems hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in the way of rapid and effective co-operation in the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the "classes". We all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, i.e., thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. The Radical calls his opponent Tory and reactionary. The wicked Tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the House of Lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against every attempt at a juster distribution; selfishness is his one motive; ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... his trunk and puts money in his purse to visit lands old in story he becomes a hopeless reactionary. He is sallying forth to see things not as they are, but as they were "once upon a time." He is attracted to certain localities by something which happened long ago. A great many things may have happened since, but ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... alleged that he has at least served the reactionary party. I much doubt it. What internal factions has he suppressed? Secret societies have swarmed in Rome during his reign. What remonstrances from without has he silenced? Europe continues to complain unanimously, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... The powerful reactionary role which princedom assumed only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has evolved, which feels the political husk—the appropriate covering of the old society—to be an unnatural fetter which it must burst. The more immature these new elements are, the more conservative appears ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... A reactionary sentiment of our day is to make an idol of the great figure-head of Puritanism. We had lately (April 25, 1899) a celebration of the Tercentenary of Cromwell; in the place of his birth he has been made use of (by a strange stroke of irony) ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... men's minds, and prejudice them against me. It was just at the time when the German-Catholic agitation, set in motion by Czersky and Ronge as a highly meritorious and liberal movement, was causing a great commotion. It was now made out that by Tannhauser I had provoked a reactionary tendency, and that precisely as Meyerbeer with his Huguenots had glorified Protestantism, so I with my latest ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... man who had ever known how to govern Ireland, and he, unfortunately, was now in hell; where, the Major would add, he was probably better off, his contribution to constructive politics had ended. He and his generation, reactionary almost to a man, instead of attempting to ride the waves of the rising tide, subscribed their guineas to construct breakwaters that were pathetic in their futility. Gallant in resistance, barren in expedient, history may condemn ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... up an army of feeble imitators, also produced in the ranks of poetry a vindication of what was good in the old; new theories, and a very different estimate of poetical subjects and expression. The first poet who may be looked upon as leading the reactionary party is Alfred Tennyson. He endeavored out of all the schools to synthesize a new one. In many of his descriptive pieces he followed Wordsworth: in his idyls, he adheres to the romantic school; in his treatment and diction, he ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... despite her own performances, a fold to which the worldly wolf was no stranger; and her trouble had turned a light-hearted little lady into an eager, intellectual, speculative being, with a sort of shame for her former estate, and an undoubted reactionary dislike of dominion and of petty pomp. Of her own high folk one neither saw nor heard a thing; her friends were the powerful preachers of most denominations, and one or two only painted or wrote; for she had been greatly exercised about religion, and somewhat ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... rebellion which, in many features, exhibited a remarkable similarity to the one with which our own Government is contending. We refer to the secession of the seven Swiss cantons forming the Sonderbund, which, like the insurrection of the Southern States, was a revolt of reactionary against liberal principles of government; it was likewise the fruit of a well-organized and long-matured conspiracy, which only delayed an open outbreak until all its preparations were adequately perfected ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... treating of the Irish Character, and the true relation between Employer and Employed, can hardly fail to be of interest. They contain, too, some considerations which Woman as well as Man is too much in danger of overlooking, and which seem, even more than when first urged, to be timely in this reactionary to-day.—ED.] ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... knees touched the floor, and then winding one arm slowly about his neck, she hid her face in his breast, and, bursting into tears, sobbed aloud. It was not merely the reactionary breaking down of a nervous system strung to the highest point of undue excitement. It was the half consciousness of a terrible fear lest the day might come in which, goaded by injustice and neglect, she might learn no longer to love the man before ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... tendency, while the sympathies of the latter are rather with progressive ideas; at the same time, there will be found among the Lords a certain sprinkling of Radicals, and among the Commons not a few whose views are of an antiquated, not to say reactionary, type. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... possession of land obtained by force, being ever called in question by any human mind. It is, nevertheless, the nearest task of our day to discover how far original theft may be justly encountered by reactionary theft, or whether reactionary theft be indeed theft at all; and farther, what, excluding either original or corrective theft, are the just conditions ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... best type of the non-resistant quasi-ascetic, is the exception that proves the rule; he may be persecuted, but he persecutes not again. He is the best authenticated type living of primitive Christian. That the religion of Jesus was a purely reactionary movement, suggested by the smug complacency and voluptuous condition of the times, most thinking men agree. Where rich Pharisees adopt a standard of life that can only be maintained by devouring widows' houses and oppressing the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Burgomaster hoped that the resourceful English lady might have something new and tasteful to suggest in the way of loyal greeting. The Prince was known to the outside world, if at all, as an old-fashioned reactionary, combating modern progress, as it were, with a wooden sword; to his own people he was known as a kindly old gentleman with a certain endearing stateliness which had nothing of standoffishness about it. Knobaltheim was anxious to ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Brunswick; and on her account he wrote "God Save the Queen," in imitation of the British national anthem, and the satirical piece entitled "Swellfoot, the Tyrant." In the following words he attacked the prime minister, Lord Castleragh, whose reactionary counsels were transforming England into a state analogous to that of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... in What's Wrong with the World, in which he affirms: "Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout." And if, on learning some of the inferences he makes from this, you protest that he is reactionary, and is trying to put back the hands of the clock, he is quite unashamed, and replies that the moderns "are always saying 'you can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is, 'You can.' A ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... dealing with data, and indeed forms a constitutive element of such subjective criterion. It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian worthy of the name and know his own business. There exist liberal and reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist, and spiritualist historians. Absolutely ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Court of the United States soon fell under reactionary influence and gave its judicial sanction to all repression necessary to establish permanently the reactionaries in the South and to deprive the Negroes of their political and civil rights. It will be interesting, therefore, to show exactly how far the United States ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... in the days of Canning was certainly not translated into action in its full sense. 'Promises made to the ear were broken to the hope,' was said by a reactionary Viceroy. Military expenditure has grown enormously ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... them under the arms; that meant some service to be rendered, and this again brought marks of honor and perhaps a decoration. Everything was humbug. Workingmen should help themselves and throw out all that reactionary mob, army, clergy and aristocracy; otherwise there could be ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... had returned to England, and as he was not allowed to resume his seat in the Lords, he could make his power felt only through his pen. As he was thoroughly cured of his Jacobite sympathies, the doctrine he proclaimed was a Toryism stripped of the reactionary element. He proposed to make the State dominate over all the interests—land, Church, trade, and the like. That this might be done, and the government by a class for a class abolished, he appealed to the crown. The elevation of the State over the dominant classes had been the part ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... right. It was an inevitable consequence that first one side and then the other—and sometimes both at once—should attack him as a champion of the other. It became a commonplace of his experience to be inveighed against by reformers as a reactionary and to be assailed by conservatives as a radical. But this paradoxical experience did not disturb him at all. He was concerned only to have the testimony of his own mind and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... intellectual development, and consequent capacity of the people for self-government, not only offers no encouragement to effort, but actually discourages all striving, and blunts the appetites of the searchers for truth. It fossilizes the people, retards the march of intellect by its reactionary force, and rolls backward the wheels of all progress, till the nation becomes a community of dull, contented plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in inaction. Such we find to be the case with those nations of the Old ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the crime in No. 17 Innesmore Mansions as the sequel to some political disturbance in far-off Shanghai. It had not occurred to her that a hapless woman had been done to death merely as a warning to her father of the fate in store for him and his if he did not yield to the demand of the reactionary party in China, and deliver over to their vengeance some hundreds of the leading men ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... all," I said. "You're going to bring out of bed with you that hard reactionary bureaucratic spirit which all but ruined Russia and is in process of ruining Germany. It will be just as if the TSARITSA got loose and began to have her own way again. By the way, Francesca, what does one do when the butcher says there won't be any haunch of mutton till Tuesday, or when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... Immemor's suggestion clears the air, and should persuade Mr. Dexter and his reactionary friends to think twice before again inaugurating a crusade which can only recoil upon their own heads. I enclose 5 shillings, if only as a protest against this un-English 'hitting below the belt,' ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nation; but "the authorities" forbade this and every other movement. None the less, there has been a good deal of clandestine recruiting, and bitter recriminations against this turcophile attitude on the part of Italy—this "reactionary rigorism against every manifestation of sympathy for the Albanian cause." Patriotic pamphleteers ask, rightly enough, why difficulties should be placed in the way of recruiting for Albania, when, in the recent cases of Cuba and Greece, the despatch ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... drilled as the Bishops. Some of them bowed too often, and too hurriedly, and before they need, beginning with the Lord Functionary whom they mistook for royalty; and they walked out sideways instead of backwards, reactionary methods of progress not being in their blood. Still, taking them for all in all, they were a very learned-looking body, and their presence in such uncongenial surroundings showed ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... he cheerfully acknowledged intellectual talent in others, he took a pride in having remained a learner all his life, but he hated arrogant amateurishness. He was not a church-goer; he declined to be drawn into the circle of religious schemers and reactionary fanatics; he would occasionally speak in contemptuous terms of "the creed of court chaplains"; but, writing to his wife of that historic meeting with Napoleon in the lonely cottage near the battlefield of Sedan, he said: "A powerful contrast with our last meeting in the Tuileries in '67. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... closely tied up with the Ku Klux Klan. Through Robinson and through other politicians reached with the cry "Save America," he got a long list of prominent sponsors and gradually increased it until now it reads like a Who's Who of reactionary industrialists and innocent politicians. With letters of introduction from Senator Robinson, Steele's high pressure gang set out to collect ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... eager outlook on the future of our social order. Liberalism and Mr. Churchill have both had good reason to congratulate themselves on that choice, and the party which failed to draw him into a disastrous and reactionary change of view has no reason to resent it. Before he became a Liberal Mr. Churchill had taken the broad views of the South African problem that his father's later opinions commended to him, and he was properly chosen to expound to the House of ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... experienced its effect with unparalleled keenness. "Let me tell you something,'' he writes (Conversations with Eckermann. Vol. 1). "All periods considered regressive or transitional are subjective. Conversely all progressive periods look outward. The whole of contemporary civilization is reactionary, because subjective.... The thing of importance is everywhere the individual who is trying to show off his lordliness. Nowhere is any mentionable effort to be found that subordinates itself through love ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... had been the measures taken by the king to secure the peace of his good city of Nimes, they had nevertheless been reactionary; consequently the Catholics, feeling the authorities were now on their side, returned in crowds: the householders reclaimed their houses, the priests their churches; while, rendered ravenous by the bitter bread ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he thought of the terrifying oath of compact, sealed by a kiss upon the stones of a Pagan temple. But he had kept his word, rather as a promise than as a formal vow, with much worldly advantage to himself, though not much happiness; till increase of years had bred reactionary feelings which led him to receive the news of to-night with emotions ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... coolie* laws and we have passed all the Kafir laws. The 'Free' State has been safeguarded and all her colour laws have been adopted by Parliament. What more can the Government do for you?" And so the Union ship in this reactionary sea sailed on and on and on, until she struck an iceberg — the sudden dismissal ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... words, faced with the fact that while Ireland has been waiting for Home Rule we have taken the first great step in granting Home Rule to India. Surely this is a fact that presents a new challenge to the reactionary Unionist of the United Kingdom. Does he really contend that Ireland is incapable of receiving the same liberties as we are granting to India? Or will he make the wicked and dangerous suggestion that we are only conceding these ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... time the Republic was founded with at least temporary security, and although a coalition of all the reactionary parties rallied against it in 1877, when M. Jules Simon's ministry was dismissed, and when the Duc de Broglie was induced to try to destroy the new form of government by Caesarist methods, yet there was never any ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... The idea was mistaken, as the recall of these leaders, or at least of one of them, was due to the fact that the British Government was of opinion that the war was practically over. Again, they were relieved of the inconvenient and harassing presence of Kruger, the dour, reactionary old farmer, who had brought on the war and had now left his country to its fate; who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since he had set out on the Great Trek of 1836; and whose mind ran in a channel so shallow that it could almost be heard rippling over the stones. Also, ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... to know, then, that the renderings of the New York Rendering Company are likely to be reactionary as well as suicidal, (perhaps suetcidal might be a better word here,) in their results. Their "offence is rank," and has reached the nose of authority, for we find it stated that "Mayor HALL has already made complaint against the New York Rendering Company, and that they ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... immigration of free Negroes into that State. Later there followed an attempt to open the State to slavery by the Legislature of 1822-1823, but the slave party was defeated by the election of Governor Coles, who would not permit the reactionary element to reduce that commonwealth to a mediaeval basis.[1] Such slavery as existed in Illinois, however, differed widely from that in the South where it had become economic rather than patriarchal as it then existed in certain ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... his poetic fame in England decreased so much from the estimate of his contemporaries, by whom he seemed worthy of a place beside Goethe? The answer is to be sought in the fact that Byron reflected so powerfully the mood of that special time. That reactionary period in history has passed and with it much of Byron's influence and fame. He was, unlike Shakespeare, specially fitted to minister to a certain age. Again, much of Byron's verse is rhetorical, and that kind of poetry does not ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... ever-increasing pressure from above and the never-ceasing fermentation from below; to the feverish restlessness that had come over the body politic, changing its form, its ideals, and its convictions; and to the more scrupulous and sometimes reactionary stand that was being taken on all ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... one of its reactionary moods. It did not wish to quarrel with the Pope; it dallied with the King, and the matter was adjourned. From that moment the rising became a revolt, and the Pope was free to do with Avignon what the court might have done with Paris, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Standard Oil side of the story, after having abused Standard Oil for years in the pseudo-muck-raking magazines. He made them come up to his price, that was all. He's the star writer on Cartwright's, now, since that magazine changed its policy and became subsidizedly reactionary. I know him—a thoroughly dishonest man. Truly am I Ali Baba, and truly I wonder why I ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... her best when seated, having rather short legs. Her face was well-coloured, her mouth, firm and rather wide, her nose well-shaped, her hair dark. She spoke in a decided voice, and did not mince her words. It was to her that her husband, Sir James, owed his reactionary principles ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... returning in thousands to their old party, the Fabians, alone amongst progressives (except of course the Irish, who were keen to save the Roman Catholic schools), supported the Government in what was popularly regarded as a reactionary policy. Time has vindicated our judgment. The theological squabbles which occupied so much of the energies of the School Boards are now forgotten because the rival sects are no longer represented on the Education Authorities, that is, the town and county councils. Education ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... lawyer and judge, and were passed in an alliance with the wing of the Republican party that was most impervious to the new reforms, and were hence open to the attack that they were in spirit and intent reactionary. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... Palmerstonians, accepting with their chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure of his basenesses. Lucas in "The Times" pronounced the work perverse and mischievous; the "Westminster Review" branded it as reactionary. "The Quarterly," in an article ascribed to A. H. Layard, condemned its style as laboured and artificial; as palling from the sustained pomp and glitter of the language; as wearisome from the constant ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... a Confederation of Eastern and Central Europe under the direction of a Bolshevik Germany or the enslavery of those countries to a Germany become reactionary again, thanks to the general anarchy. In either case the Allies will ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Janet Jagan helped to organize the Peoples Progressive Party of British Guyana. Twice Jagan won a popular electoral majority and was established as Prime Minister of the British Colony. His two periods of administrative responsibility were badgered and hectored by every reactionary force that could be mobilized inside and outside British Guyana, from the British appointed governor to the domestic and foreign business interests and the urban trade unions. Before a third election British and American governments, business ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... this reactionary wave, the North had become wholly Protestant. It has been estimated that nine-tenths of the people of Germany were of the new faith; half the population of France had adopted it; even in Italy protest and disbelief were widespread and active. Only in Spain did the Inquisition with firmest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... sure that San Pedro and the other natives had deserted—fled in the night, for fear of the giants—there was a reactionary feeling of despondency and gloom among Tom and his three friends. But the boldness and energy of the young inventor, his vigorous words, his determination to proceed at any cost to the unknown land that lay before them—these served as a tonic, and after a few moments, Ned, ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... the terms of peace, so as to avoid all causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress, he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Already a reactionary policy is being enacted in several countries where for years the State-School was the only one to share in the public treasury. In Holland, the Parliament of June, 1920, by a vote of 72 against 3, passed a new school-law ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... didn't think she ought to marry me, and so on. I couldn't get her to say why for a long time, but at last it came out. Some one, that idiotic Englishwoman, I suppose, had put it into the dear girl's head that it was her duty not to ally herself with 'a reactionary' (I think that was the word) and in this case that meant poor harmless me. I argued till I must have been blue in the face, but I couldn't get her to give in: she says now that she thought she would make me give in. And so it had to stay, but my consolation was that I knew she really ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... nor from the necessity of preserving their purity of style by a mortified negative asceticism. They wrote pure polyphony because they understood it and loved it, and hence their work lives, as neither the progressive work of their own day nor the reactionary work of their imitators could live. The 12-part Stabat Mater in the seventh volume of Palestrina's complete works has been by some ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... with calm decision. And she believed it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a sense ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... however, that a certain number of Slavophiles are addicted to the military mania, and this form of their belief is more dangerously reactionary than its ordinary phase. Many of these belong to the bureaucratic caste. Official Russia holds aloft the eagle; human Russia the dove. Official Russia leads the anti-Jewish massacres; human Russia is very little responsible for pogroms. Ignatieff, "Father of Lies," a bureaucrat ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... occupation of Rome, the brilliant essays of liberalism of Pius IX., the Republic, the siege of Rome, the reactionary government of late years, have alike supplied matter for Master Pasquin, which he has shaped according to the fashion of the times. He still pursues his ancient avocation. Res acu tetigit. But the point of the needle is not the means by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... roared out their hate chorus, "Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down, you dirty Hun." Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the expression of its ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me that his personal experience with the President had been very much like mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... father was Count Monaldo Leopardi, who had written little books of a religious and political character; the religion very bigoted, the politics very reactionary. His library was the largest anywhere in that region, but he seems not to have learned wisdom in it; and, though otherwise a blameless man, he used his son, who grew to manhood differing from him in all his opinions, with a rigor that ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... as they do, then, it seems to me that the talk we frequently hear about reviving "the art of the one-act play" by restoring the curtain raisers or afterpieces to the programs of our theatres is reactionary and futile. All recent attempts to pad out a slim play with an additional short one have failed to meet with approval, even when the short piece was so masterly a work as Barrie's "The Will," splendidly ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... the days of Stein. There were marked tendencies towards Liberalism and towards unification in different parts of Germany; and, if the Liberal party could have produced one man of firmness and decision, these forces might have triumphed over the reactionary Prussian clique. In this conflict Morier was bound to be a passionate sympathiser with the parties which included so many of his personal friends and which advocated principles so dear to his heart. With the triumph ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... saw an outbreak of religious and anti-foreign fanaticism in China which rapidly assumed alarming proportions. A sect or society known as the Boxers, founded in 1899 originally as a patriotic and ultra-conservative body, rapidly developed into a reactionary and anti-foreign, and especially anti-Christian organisation. Outrages were committed all over the country, and the perpetrators shielded by the authorities, who, while professing peace, encouraged the movement. Thousands ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... CHAPLIN has been correctly reported he is even more of a reactionary than most of his opponents imagined. In the course of the debate on the Sunday Closing Bill he is said to have delivered himself as follows:—"Drunkenness is diminishing, and I say Thank God; long may it continue." The pious ejaculation would seem to be an expression ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... long before the revolution. But a conviction of the necessity of immediate change gradually came to all. The Czar himself brought matters to an issue. His vacillation, his appointment of ministers who were not only reactionary, but were suspected of being German tools, were too much for even honest supporters of the Imperial regime. Some of these reactionaries, it is true, were easily driven from power. In 1915 Sukhomlinov and Maklakov were overthrown ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Anarchism is not that some Anarchists believe in violence, and that from time to time there are cowardly assassinations which are as futile as they are cowardly. The real danger lies first in the reactionary principle that the interests of society must be subordinated to the interests of the individual, and, second, in holding out a hope to the working class that its freedom from oppression and exploitation may be brought about ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary moment, everything that he should have remembered—saw nothing, thought of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting lips: the eyes and lips of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... his eyes, and the will departed from the hand that still clutches the sceptre. All through Paul's life he was dogged and tormented by this controversy. There was a deep gulf between the churches he planted and this reactionary section of the Christian community. Its emissaries were continually following in his footsteps. As he bitterly reproaches them, they entered upon another man's line of things made ready to their hand, not caring to plant churches of circumcised Gentiles themselves, but starting up behind him ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reactionary tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... that, as a whole, this restrictive code was successful. From a modern point of view it may appear less arbitrary than the suspension of the habeas corpus act for a whole year (1817-18), but it was assuredly tainted with a reactionary spirit, and was capable of being worked in a way inconsistent with civil liberty. That it was not so worked, on the whole, and caused less hardship than had been anticipated, was not so much the result of changes ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... with respect to the internal dissensions of France; and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispensable as an act of self-defence." So far indeed was he from sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading around him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what was libellous in any publication from the judge to the jury, completed ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... human intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... people began to grow weary. "So much for your vaunted Revolution! You are more wretched than ever before," whispered the reactionary in the ears of the worker. And little by little the rich took courage, emerged from their hiding-places, and flaunted their luxury in the face of the starving multitude. They dressed up like scented fops and said to the workers: "Come, enough of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Hence this popular demand for immediate legislation by the People,—this twentieth-century appeal to the Agora and Forum methods which antedate the era of Christ. It is true the world outgrew them two thousand years ago, and they were discarded; but, living in a progressive and not a reactionary period, all that, we are assured, is changed! The heart is no longer on the right-hand side of the body. To secure desired results it is only necessary to start quite fresh, as a mere preliminary discarding all ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... de Peyronnet was the Garde des Sceaux in the Polignac Cabinet: he was considered one of the most reactionary members 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
... Republic. Having received the King's thanks, he retired to his estate in the department of Orne, which had long been burdened with mortgages; and, in 1807, he married Henriette Le Chantre de la Chanterie, with the concurrence of the Royalists, whose "pet" he was. He pretended to take part in the reactionary revolutionary movement of the West in 1809, implicated his wife in the matter, compromised her, ruined her, and then disappeared. Returning in secrecy to his country, under the assumed name of Lemarchand, he ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... their Jewish heritage; of genuine interest in religion, however, they had little. This secular priestly party was called the Sadducees, probably from Zadok, the high-priest in Solomon's time. What theology the Sadducees had was for the most part reactionary and negative. They were opposed to the more earnest spirit and new thought of the scribes, and naturally produced some champions who argued for their theological position; but the mass of them ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... Commercial side has been the chief topic of conversation among boys and masters. The latter are, I fear, reactionary—realising, no doubt, their incompetence to deal with business subjects. The boys are enthusiastic. I am constantly approached in the corridors by lads who say it has always been their ambition to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... noble Maori's enlightened efforts for the civilisation of his countrymen, his mind seems to have been not wholly without misgiving as to the possible consequences of his policy. He could not altogether throw off the suggestions of the reactionary party, that the coming of the white man would eventually lead to the slavery and dispossession of the Maori. Could he look down from his lofty eminence now that a century has passed, what would be his thoughts? He would ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize about this reactionary scepticism is that as it is bound to be unlimited in theory, so it is bound to be unlimited in practice. In other words, the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable it to advance, not only towards Eugenic legislation, but towards any conceivable or inconceivable extravagances ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... in continued disturbance. Factions with differing creeds raised revolts in various sections of the country until, in February, 1913, Madero was overthrown by one of these groups, led by Felix Diaz and General Victoriano Huerta, and representing a reactionary tendency. Madero and his vice president Pino Suarez were killed, it was believed by order of Huerta, and on the 27th of February, in the City of Mexico, Huerta was proclaimed President. Don Venustiano Carranza, Governor of the State of ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... remarkable group of prophets proclaimed so many new principles that a fundamental revision and expansion of Israel's primitive codes became necessary in order to adapt the latter to the new needs of the age. The reactionary reign of Manasseh had also brought out plainly the contrast between the older heathen cults, still cherished by the people, and the exalted ideals of the true prophets. If the prophetic teachings were to become ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... and it was Putney's delight to witness its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro' Kilburn, the daughter of a shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force of her reasons, should be content ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... China is sincerity but an actor is a pretender. He appears to be what he is not. Now our ancient wise men felt that pretense of any sort must have a dangerous reactionary influence on the character. If a man learns how to be a clever actor on the stage he may be a skilled deceiver in other walks of life. Moreover, no one to whom sincerity is as the gums are to the teeth, would wish to acquire the art of acting as though he were some one else. Hence actors in China ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the originals; they are not even paraphrases—to turn again from painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... reaction in favor of the natural. Men had never lived so utterly in defiance of the laws of nature before; but they could not do this without feeling a strange charm in that which they defied; and, accordingly, we find this reactionary sentiment expressing itself in a base school of what was called pastoral poetry; that is to say, poetry written in praise of the country, by men who lived in coffee-houses and on the Mall. The essence of pastoral ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... as has anybody else, certainly as much as certain people from Birmingham. They can't turn us out, and we, the Tory Free Traders, have as much right to dictate the policy of the Conservative Party as have any reactionary Fair Traders." In 1904 the Conservative Party already recognized Churchill as one working outside the breastworks. Just before the Easter vacation of that year, when he rose to speak a remarkable demonstration was made against ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Commons, under George III., was a corrupt and discredited body; and the Treaty of Paris was affirmed by 319 votes to 65. It had fallen to the lot of Governor Palliser—a fine reactionary in the view he took of his charge—to frame local orders for carrying out the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. His orders were clear and unambiguous. The French right of fishing within the permitted area ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... doubtless many law-abiding people who became Tories in spite of themselves. Later on, the methods of the inquisitorial communities possibly made Tories out of some who were the victims of their attentions. The outbreak of armed rebellion must have shocked many into a reactionary attitude. It was of these that a Whig satirist ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... were ready to think that the Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary sentiment of La Vendee, the absolute unworkableness of the new constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best coffee-house in the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... manufactured mountain! It is a big business building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me," he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a man who has been ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... country—loyal to the interests which he believes a section of his own nation properly represents. The German students have fought for their Fatherland; they have also fought for the liberal sentiments of their own land against reactionary movements, as in 1848. In the American Civil War no brighter record is to be found than is embodied in the tablets in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, or in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. But the collegian ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... character of a drama. The six distinct literary groups that I intend to present to you are entirely like the six acts of a great play. In the first group, the French emigrant-literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction has already begun, but the reactionary currents are everywhere blended with the revolutionary. In the second group, the half-Catholic romantic school of Germany, the reaction is growing; it goes further, and holds itself more aloof from the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... been wasted on a quite worthless Education Bill. But during his term of office he had two signal opportunities of showing the faith that was in him. One was the occasion when, in defiance of all reactionary forces, he exclaimed, "La Duma est morte! Vive la Duma!" The other was the day when he gave self-government to South Africa, and won the tribute thus nobly rendered by General Smuts: "The Boer War was supplemented, and compensated for, by one of the wisest political ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... transformation. Gregory's gladness had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,—the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was I? Oh, yes—one must conform. Especially if one belongs to, or has married into, the Claiborne family. Of all the men in England the Earl of Claiborne is the most conservative, the most reactionary, the most deeply encrusted with prejudice. He would stop at little where the question concerned the prestige of the aristocracy in general; he would stop at nothing where ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis |
