"Sophistry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... infallibility of human testimony discredits the miracles of the past. The impossibility that human knowledge, that science, can ever exhaust the possibilities of Nature, precludes the immediate reference to the Supernatural for all time. It is pure sophistry to argue, as do Canon Row and other defenders of miracles, that 'the laws of Nature are no more violated by the performance of a miracle than they are by the activities of a man.' If these arguments of the special pleaders had any force at all, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... an aggravation of the injury which they have committed, and is so far from being a reason for letting them enjoy that property for ever, that it is rather a reason for compelling them to make prompt restitution. With this childish sophistry the petitions on our table are filled. Is it possible that any man can be so dull as not to perceive that, if this be a reason, it is a reason against all our statutes of limitation? I do a greater wrong to my tailor if I withhold payment of his bill during six years ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the darkness upon me. Hunched up in the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine my mental balance with his sophistry. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... By what sophistry can rulers convince themselves that, while petit larceny is criminal, grand larceny is patriotic; that, while it is reprehensible for one man to kill another for his money, it is glorious for one nation to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... constrained to shake our heads at the transparent sophistry of the plea, which requires no exposure. For Chaucer knew very well how to give life and colour to his page without recklessly disregarding bounds the neglect of which was even in his day offensive to many besides the "PRECIOUS folk" of whom he half derisively ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... improper to add that all this talk about expenditure of vitality is full of sophistry. Lecturers and writers speak of our stock of vitality as if it were a vault of gold, upon which you cannot draw without lessening the quantity. Whereas, it is rather like the mind or heart, enlarging by action, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... appeared to listen with attention, and offered nothing against the reasoning of OMAR, yet secretly despised it as sophistry; which cunning only had rendered specious; and which he was unable to confute, merely because it was subtil, and not because it was true: he had been led, by his passions, first to love, and then to adopt different opinions; ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... was a charming profession. Meanwhile, by going to the very opposite extreme from sophistry, I mean by a more than Quixotic veneration for an abstract dogma you hold to be true, and by your determination to make people die for it, you are causing fearful misery of body, untold agony of soul, to a woman and a man whom you should have every reason to like. Go to, Ram Lal, adept, magician, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... vex'd— Which smile one day, and droop the next, The gallant tulip and the rose, Emblems which some use to disclose Bodied ideas—their weak grace Is mere imposture to thy face. For Nature in all things, but thee, Did practise only sophistry; Or else she made them to express How she could vary in her dress: But thou wert form'd, that we might see Perfection, not variety. Have you observ'd how the day-star Sparkles and smiles and shines from far; Then to the gazer doth convey A silent but a piercing ray? So wounds my love, but that ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... nothing to row about, is there?" And Soldier Joe was not on the instant clever enough to answer her sophistry; but when she left him and he had thought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... inconceivable Being; and what you cannot conceive, that you must not believe: and therefore prayer is not merely an impertinence, it is a mistake; for it is speaking to a Being who only exists in your own imagination. I need not say, my friends, that all this, to my mind, is only a train of sophistry and false reasoning, which—so I at least hold—has been answered and refuted again and again. And I trust in God and in Christ sufficiently to believe that He will raise up sound divines and true philosophers in His Church, who will ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... once, she fancied, set all to rights. The moment the idea came into her head, upon the spur of the occasion, she resolved to execute it directly. It was settled between the drawing-room door and her dressing-room. And when thus executed successfully, with happy sophistry she justified it to herself. "After all," said she to herself, "though it was not absolutely true, it was ben trovato, it was as near the truth, perhaps, as possible. Beauclerc's best friends really feared that he was falling in love with the lady ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... associates had made him impatient of the feebler sensual indulgences of the later companions of his luxury, and exposed their hollow fascinations; his sensitive fastidiousness kept him clean among vulgar temptations; his clear perceptions were never blinded by selfish sophistry. Meantime his feeling for Susy remained unchanged. Pride had kept him from seeking the Peytons. His present visit was as unpremeditated as Peyton's invitation had been unlooked for by him. Yet he had not allowed himself to be deceived. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... abstruse investigations of useless subjects, they are mere literary legerdemain. Their disputations being usually built on an undefinable chimera, are solved by a paradox. Instead of exercising their power of reason they exert their powers of sophistry, and divide and subdivide every subject with such casuistical minuteness, that those who are not convinced, are almost invariably confounded. This custom, it must be granted, is not quite so prevalent as it once was: a general ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... situation of a girl giving herself to a man whom she despises, for the sake of his money. The records of the Divorce Court teem with such cases. For the battered honour of my father I am going to lose my own. Be silent—no sophistry of yours can hide the brutal truth. I hate that man from the bottom of my soul, and he knows it. And yet his one desire is to marry ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... as a debater of singular skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate, which, in its intensity, resembles a physical ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... philosophers sometimes don't know how to answer the simplest questions. I'm a plain tanner who never in my life studied sophistry, yet I know why I must honour ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... case did his work with admirable skill, blowing aside the froth of Mr. Furnival's eloquence, and upsetting the sophistry and false deductions of Mr. Chaffanbrass. The case for the jury, as he said, hung altogether upon the evidence of Kenneby and the woman Bolster. As far as he could see, the evidence of Dockwrath had little to do with it; and alleged malice and greed on the part of Dockwrath could have nothing to ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... two noble men, who would have done anything for my happiness, actually overweighted my conscience and turned the sweetest dream of my life into a tragedy. How little strong men, with their logic, sophistry, and hypothetical examples, appreciate the violence they inflict on the tender sensibilities of a woman's heart, in trying to subjugate her to their will! The love of protecting too often degenerates into ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... convicted in the eyes of the world of a great crime. No elaborate vindications, by their sophistry, or by barefaced misstatements of facts, could clear him, in the judgment of impartial men of either creed, from the guilt of such a butchery of his subjects as scarcely another monarch on record had ever perpetrated. Medals were early struck in honor of the event, upon ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Railroad sophistry for many years succeeded in preventing the masses from realizing that an increased supply of transportation does not necessarily lower its price, or, in other words, that railroad abuses do not necessarily correct themselves ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... his shoulders before this sophistry. In the doorway, the captain gave some orders to a soldier who soon returned with a bit of chalk which had been used to number the lodging places. Von Hartrott wished to protect his uncle and began tracing on the wall near the door:—"Bitte, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a single important law fathered by him? What book contains one of his maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him, and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and fury, so much intrigue and sophistry, and self-seeking, and now the silence ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... he stood at the polling place with two tickets in his hand— one, license; the other, "No License." Sophistry, policy, avarice said: "Vote License." Conscience echoed: "No License." After a moment's hesitation, he threw from him the No License ticket and put the License in ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... executions affect, in time, standards of decency, taste in amusement, sentiments of humanity, views as to what is interesting and attractive. Methods of argument which are fashionable may train people to flippancy, sophistry, levity of mind, and may destroy the power to think and reason correctly. Scherr[409] says that fashion served as a means to transfer to Germany the depravation of morals which had corrupted the Latin nations in the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... unpleasant. Suppose he never came back. Suppose he never finished his investigation of the lamp? Suppose—there was a number of possibilities to suppose. Why, then the field would be open to him and he could go ahead with a clear conscience. But could he? In spite of all sophistry and special pleading with himself Walter knew he had caught the idea of the electrodes from Bauer's drawing, which suggested the secret. How did he know but that Bauer had discovered it as indicated in his own diagram ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... sir," said the old man, speaking English with a singularly pure accent for a foreigner. "That absurd book plunged me so deep down in the quagmires of sophistry and error, Mr. Kerby, that I really could not get to the surface at once when you came into the room. So you are willing to draw my likeness for such a small sum as five pounds?" he continued, rising, and showing me that he wore a long ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... brother adhered to his purpose of establishing himself in his business in the same country, that would make a difference—a difference that it was hard, perhaps, for a thoughtful man to put into words, but which was still harder to wipe away by any sophistry of words. Robert Trenholme may have been wise, or he may have been foolish, but he estimated this difference as great. Should Alec persist in this thing, it would, in the first place, endanger the success of his school, or alter his relation ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Thirty-first Congress purposed also to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction in all the other unorganized Territories. This contention was one of those non-sequiturs of which Douglas, in the heat of argument, was too often guilty. Still more regrettable, because it seemed to convict him of sophistry, was the mode by which he sought to evade the charge of the Appeal, that the act organizing New Mexico and settling the boundary of Texas had reaffirmed the Missouri Compromise. To establish his point he had to assume that all the land cut off from Texas north ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... confer that power upon the President of the United States, but proves that this supposition, destitute as it is even of the merit of plausibility, must have originated in an intention to deceive the people, too palpable to be obscured by sophistry, too atrocious ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Satan's chain in this most formidable outrage, I much more incline to side with the opinion of those that have grounds to hope better of them. (7.) As to all that have unduly suffered in these matters (either in their persons or relations), through the clouds of human weakness, and Satan's wiles and sophistry, I do truly sympathize with them; taking it for granted that such as drew themselves clear of this great transgression, or that have sufficient grounds so to look upon their dear friends, have hereby been under those sore trials and temptations, that not an ordinary measure of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... debate. All litigated questions, and especially this species of private legislation, have two sides, and it is the business of an advocate to present in the most favourable light the cause which he is retained to defend. Deliberate sophistry is as culpable as false relations of fact; but completeness or judicial impartiality belongs to the tribunal, and not to the representative of the litigant. When all moral scruples have been allowed their full weight, the qualifications of a great advocate are almost ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue;[15] we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour,[16] someone ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cicero and his friends discuss is, the endurance of pain. Is it an unmixed evil? Can anything console the sufferer? Cicero at once condemns the sophistry of Epicurus. The wise man cannot pretend indifference to pain; it is enough that he endure it with courage, since, beyond all question, it is sharp, bitter, and hard to bear. And what is this courage? Partly excitement, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... and the judgment are not necessarily in accord. The feeling may lag behind an enlightened judgment. On the other hand, the feeling of repugnance to acting in certain ways may be a justifiable protest against a bit of intellectual sophistry. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... it! what sophistry. Count Horn murdered a banker, like a common thief, for his gold, and this unhappy lord hath done the deed for which he must suffer in a mistaken sense of honor, and with all tenderness compatible with such a deed. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phaedo, but, who, himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared to me that he was expecting to prove that Socialism must be sound philosophy because it was contradictory ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... benefit of any doubt, are virtues which are not oldfashioned, and for which, as time goes on, the world is likely to have as much need as ever. [Sir James Stephen writes thus of his friend Macaulay: "That his understanding was proof against sophistry, and his nerves against fear, were, indeed, conclusions to which a stranger arrived at the first interview with him. But what might be suggesting that expression of countenance, at once so earnest and so monotonous—by what manner of feeling those gestures, so uniformly firm and deliberate ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... irritable humours are set afloat: you have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy—you are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There is 'no juggling here,' no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the evidence, no attempt to make black white, or white black: but you resign yourself into the hands of a greater power, that of Nature, with the simplicity of a child, and the devotion of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Callias, Thrasimachus, Polus, Aristophanes, or some of his adversaries and emulators might object; but neither they nor [4425]Anytus and Melitus his bitter enemies, that condemned him for teaching Critias to tyrannise, his impiety for swearing by dogs and plain trees, for his juggling sophistry, &c., never so much as upbraided him with impure love, writing or speaking of that subject; and therefore without question, as he concludes, both Socrates and Plato in this are justly to be excused. But suppose they had been a little overseen, should divine Plato be defamed? ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shall we say? And what shall we say of God's fatherhood? Shall we say as some do that as Judge He must do cruel things which as Father He would shrink from? God forbid! The Judge and the Father are one. Men would never use such sophistry about the character of God if it were put into plain words. "Ye must ken," said a godly old Scotchman, "that the Almighty may often have to do in His offeeshial capacity what He would scorn to do as a private individual!" I quote this not with flippancy but ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... woman has been a mystery to another woman. Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sifts her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and fingers before letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago Eve's son rang the door-bell of the family residence in Paradise Park, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... time lost in mere ornament. Perhaps no book extant containing so few pages, can said to convey so many genuine historical facts. There is here no attempt to glaze over recorded truth, or win the reader by sophistry to opinions merely those of the author. The pure, simple history of Queen Mary is placed before the reader, and each one is left to form an unbiased opinion from events impartially recorded there. One great and most valuable feature ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... she punctuated the conversation recklessly, and then another crowd swept about them and more elegant little cabs with more Gorgeous Girls and their cavaliers whirled by. Mary hated her stupid sophistry about commercial nuns, novitiates and all, her plain gray-eyed spinster self doomed to a Persian cat and a ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... interval, that night! if Marian had but stood there with the grave, earnest, heartfelt voice that repelled all sophistry with the wonted "I don't know," if the dark eyes had been there to look with contempt on all but the "right," and to fill with tears, the more touching because so rare, as her tenderness, her deep feeling would have been called out by the sensation of seeing ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... went at once to call on her. She found Basil with his wife, and his efforts to make Ethel see how much he expected from her influence, and yet at the same time not even hint a disapproval of Dora, were almost pathetic, for he was so void of sophistry that his innuendoes were flagrantly open to detection. Dora felt a contempt for them, and he had hardly left ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... are a victim of sophistry—sophistry of the most dangerous kind. I can't argue with you, but I pity you, and ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi (formerly Mrs. Thrale), and on the latter’s publication of Johnson’s letters, she writes:—“Greatly as I admired Johnson’s talents and revered his knowledge, and formidable as I felt the powers to be of his witty sophistry, yet did a certain quickness of spirit, and zeal for the reputation of my favourite authors, irresistibly urge me to defend them against his spleenful injustice—a temerity, which I was well aware made him dislike me, notwithstanding ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination, while it delights and improves the wise and the good, will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, under the false name of Philosophy, and with a malignant industry has been employed against the peace, good order, and happiness of society, in our free and prosperous country; but thanks be to GOD, without producing the pernicious effects ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but that does not afford me confidence to begin that, or the like of that, again." Still, he was nearing the end of his doubts and self-torturing sophistry. A last glimpse of his imperious curiosity, kept alive by saucy hopes and fears, is seen in his letter to Speed of the 5th of October. He ventures, with a genuine timidity, to ask a question which we may believe has not often been asked ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... could be magnificently inconsistent. Let him set his mind and heart upon a given pursuit, pleasure, or line of conduct not altogether advisable at the moment, and the ingenuity of the excuses by which he justified himself were monuments of elaborate sophistry. Yet, if later he lost interest, he reversed his arguments with supreme disregard for his ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... man fails except by his own choice. You might have been master of the vineyard, but you have preferred to have the vineyard master you. Confronted with an uncongenial task, you slunk away from it and shielded yourself behind the sophistry that the work was unworthy of you. As if any work ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... reference to it are of importance, yet it were less vital to doubt the miraculous inspiration of a genealogy than the authoritative teaching of an epistle; or to doubt the date of a book than its contents. No doubt is unimportant; but it were merely repeating the sophistry of the Stoics, in making all sins equal, to deny gradations of importance in doubts; gradations which however are not here put forward to defend eclecticism, but to enforce the lesson, that, in dealing ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... personal preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he would declare in favor of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... facts existing relative to the island of St. Brandan: Its reality was for a long time a matter of firm belief. It was in vain that repeated voyages and investigations proved its nonexistence; the public, after trying all kinds of sophistry, took refuge in the supernatural, to defend their favorite chimera. They maintained that it was rendered inaccessible to mortals by Divine Providence, or by diabolical magic. Most inclined to the former. All kinds of extravagant fancies were indulged concerning it; [361] some confounded ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... thirsty for a word from her, thirsty with the pitiable thirst of the shipwrecked sailor who knows a swallow of salt water will but increase his torture, and who craves it, none the less. Long since, he had forfeited his right to her friendship—no sophistry could blind him to that. Moreover the ocean of degradation not only lay behind him; it lay in front as well. It was as he had told Barclay. He stood upon an island, not the mainland, of redemption, and ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... we are so ready to say,' she answered, her breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be forgotten ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said young man is not in line for saving life; on the contrary, he is liable to mismanage and meet with as great a failure, and be the cause of as unnecessary a death as was the good doctor from whom we are quoting and of whose medical sophistry I am trying to give the ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... manifest. The society made fruitless attempts to break the force of the blow dealt it by Garrison in the United States. But wherever its emissaries traveled "The Thoughts" confronted and confounded them. So that Mr. Garrison was warranted in saying that "all that sophistry or misrepresentation could effect to overthrow its integrity has been attempted in vain. The work, as a whole, stands irrefutable." The attempts made to maintain its hold upon the British public were characterized by duplicity ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching or misrepresentation or sophistry, the ugliness of his youth ceases to be his own and becomes only the presentation of a curious social condition. In his youth he expressed a low condition, in later life a noble one; at each period he expressed correctly what he found. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... with her "Deduction," endeavoring to prove, from old authors, that it was not till 1686 that the Polish limits were extended beyond the mouth of the Dwina and the little town of Stoika on the Dnieper, five miles below Kiow. The following is a specimen of the lawyer-like sophistry which the Empress employs to establish her claim to the Russian territory, which remained in the hands of the Poles ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... literature, she is advancing to the examination of the problems of life, with an eye single only to the glory of truth. Like the Spartan of old she has thrown her spear into the thickest of the fray, and will fight gloriously in the midst thereof till she regains her own. No specious sophistry or vain delusion—no time-honored tradition or untenable doctrine can evade her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Vol. i, p. 433. "Let a deaf worshipper of antiquity and an English prosodist settle this."—Rush, on the Voice, p. 140. "This phillipic gave rise to my satirical reply in self-defence."— Merchant's Criticisms. "We here saw no inuendoes, no new sophistry, no falsehoods."—Ib. "A witty and humourous vein has often produced enemies."—Murray's Key, p. 173. "Cry holla! to thy tongue, I pr'ythee: it curvetts unseasonably."—Shak. "I said, in my slyest manner, 'Your ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... sensible, though I dare say it is full of sophistry; but I have made up my mind to go into the country and paint while Salemina and Francesca are on the Continent. One cannot think in this whirl. A winter season in Washington followed by a summer season in London,—one wants a breath of fresh ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... are sometimes out of place. The invincible Socrates is withdrawn from view; and new foes begin to appear under old names. Plato is now chiefly concerned, not with the original Sophist, but with the sophistry of the schools of philosophy, which are making reasoning impossible; and is driven by them out of the regions of transcendental speculation back into the path of common sense. A logical or psychological phase takes the place of the doctrine of Ideas in his mind. ...
— Statesman • Plato
... uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects, though not of disorderly minds. But thou who feedest on dreams dost prefer the sophistry and subterfuges in matters of importance and uncertainty to what is certain and natural, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... now? Was there any other thing to expect? Was he, of all men, going to her with platitudes about courage and faith? And even so, would sophistry avail anything? Did he not know Ernestine ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... He can lie like a courtier, and think it no scorn, When gold's to be got, to forswear and suborn. He can rap his own raps[1] and has the true sapience, To turn a good penny to twenty bad halfpence. Then in spite of your sophistry, honest Will Wood Is a man of this world, all true flesh and blood; So you are but in jest, and you will not, I hope, Unman the poor knave for the sake of a trope. 'Tis a metaphor known to every plain thinker, Just as when we say, the devil's a tinker, Which cannot, in literal sense be made good, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain, The creature's at his foolish work again, Throned in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... darkness which these and other Christian doctrines cast upon the Mystery of Man. If, however, Warburton, with all his scholastic subtlety, failed to make Pope a Christian, he made him a warm friend; Allen, Pope's acquaintance, a rich father-in-law; and himself, by and by, the Bishop of Gloucester. Sophistry has seldom, although sometimes, been thus ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... the youth, or his disposition in general, but only to the act which, as result, is a manifestation of the disposition. It acts mediately on the disposition, but leaves the inner being untouched directly; and this is not only demanded by justice, but on account of the sophistry that is inherent in human nature, which desires to assign to a deed many motives, it ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... genius of sophistry may fly to the rescue of Know-Nothingism, by pretending that it is not on account of his religion that the Catholic is to be excluded from office, but because he is subjected, not merely to the spiritual but the temporal ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... fascinated us, but Pierre Leroux, with his tone of profound conviction and his thorough appreciation of the great problems awaiting solution, exercised a still more potent influence, and we did not see the shortcomings of his studies and the sophistry of his mind. My customary course of reading was Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Reid, and Dugald Stewart. In the way of religious books, my preferences were for Bossuet's Sermons and the Elevations sur les Mysttres. I was very familiar, too, with Francois ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... guise, cousin, you must hold on boldly still. For I purpose to give up my part in this matter, unless I make you yourself perceive both that every man universally is a very prisoner in very prison—plainly, without any sophistry at all—and also that there is no prince living upon earth who is not in a worse case prisoner by this general imprisonment that I speak of, than is many a simple ignorant wretch by that special imprisonment ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... further added that his action had not intended any insult to her, that he was merely expressing his natural admiration for a spirit so good and true, and that his soul was innocent of any intention of evil. With sophistry in the use of which he was an adept, he closed his epistle, fully clearing himself, and assuring her that he could have made her understand it that day if she had not left so suddenly, and he had not been almost ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... passion could dictate, Sir Edward endeavoured to persuade Louisa to consent to marry him, but all proved unavailing. She sometimes thought what he said was just, but aware of her partiality, she could not believe herself an unprejudiced judge, and feared that she might mistake the sophistry of love for the voice of reason. She was sure while honour, truth and gratitude pleaded against inclination they must be in the right, though their remonstrances were hushed into a whisper by the louder solicitations of passion. Convinced that she ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... that it is the chiefest of cruelty and unkindness, the chiefest of madness, to incite these poor and ignorant people—ever ready to follow the voice of sophistry or selfishness—to believe that their burglary of the house of success is right and reasonable; because it is certain that such burglary will be met in the South by the law, by the White Justice, and that, if need be, until either white or black man shall exist no more in ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Broechner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on the increase, building new chapels and so forth, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... properly constituted mind. The "Charity" that does not begin at home is the worst species of unjustifiable prodigality, and the first step to the absolute ruin of the "nearest and dearest" for the sake of the profligate and abandoned. And no sophistry can justify the apparent liberality that deprives others of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... his ideas were more just, and his arguments better, than those of his companions, yet he could not at first bring out his ideas to advantage, or manage his arguments so as to stand his ground against the mixed raillery and sophistry of his school fellows. He had not yet the tone of his new society, and he was as much at a loss as a traveller in a foreign country, before he understands the language of a people who are vociferating ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... little one," but could find no mark of any wound upon it. When at length she learned how the case was, she tried to comfort him, insisting he was not to blame, for he did not mean to kill the little one. He would not hearken to her loving sophistry. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... together in one great and irresistible stream. On this very account the privilege of influencing an assembled crowd is exposed to most dangerous abuses. As one may disinterestedly animate them, for the noblest and best of purposes, so another may entangle them in the deceitful meshes of sophistry, and dazzle them by the glare of a false magnanimity, whose vainglorious crimes may be painted as virtues and even as sacrifices. Beneath the delightful charms of oratory and poetry, the poison steals imperceptibly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can almost certainly be prophesied—that in this saturnalia of sophistry there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?" the ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... supreme there cannot be a concurrent authority; and further, that where the laws of the Union are supreme, those of the States must be subordinate; because there cannot be two supremes. This is curious sophistry. That two supreme powers cannot act together is false. They are inconsistent only when they are aimed at each other or at one indivisible object. The laws of the United States are supreme, as to all their proper, constitutional objects; ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart—and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... evidence, the multiplied groups of cases clustering about individuals, the deadly results of autopsies, the inoculation by fluids from the living patient, the murderous poison of hospitals,—does there not result a conclusion that laughs all sophistry to scorn, and renders ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... my short encounter with the Socinian that satisfied me respecting the Athanasian creed. I felt that had I taken up its bold assertions and established every one of them, as now I did, by scripture, no sophistry could have staggered my faith, though it had been but a reasoning, not a saving faith, in that high doctrine of the coexistent, coequal Trinity. I did not then know—for of all church history I was ignorant—that its original ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... almost inclined to infer from this passage that the author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry; for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply implicated in the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... passion, Vera, with all its sophistry and its deviations. You are practising the arts of a Jesuit. Remember that you yourself bade me, only yesterday, not to leave you. Will you curse me for not yielding to you? On whom does the responsibility rest? Tell me ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... run after an active man, who has the start of you: to jump out of a carriage; to take your pistols; and THEN, your hammer. THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE." By heavens! does it not make a man's blood boil, to read such blundering, blood-seeking sophistry? This man, when it suits him, shows that Rey would be slow in his motions; and when it suits him, declares that Rey ought to be quick; declares ex cathedra, what pace Rey should go, and what direction he should take; shows, in a breath, that he must have run faster ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the girl, to his utter astonishment. "Mr. Adams said he had no time for maudlin sentimentalism or petticoat sophistry. He was in the business of collecting and disseminating news, and he wanted that news to go shrieking out of his office! Here is one of his afternoon extras. You can see how the report of an Italian wife-murder ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and wishing did her no good. There she was, still isolate. And still there was that in her which would preserve her intact, sophistry and deliberate intention notwithstanding. Her time was up. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... ceremonial observances and devout contemplation. The Indian systems do not disdain logical discussions, or a search after the principles of which the universe is composed; and hence we find great refinements in sophistry, and a wonderful subtilty of logical discussion, though these are directed to unattainable ends,—to the connection of good with evil, and the union of the Supreme with Nature. Nothing seemed to come out of these speculations but an occasional ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the same material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one to say, "It may repel you, but it does not repel me." But this is very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that "One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a vulture. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... according to personal temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most moderate, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... to improve that of Mrs. Jobson, that admirable woman made no complaint. Hitherto the brightness of her attire and the size of her hats had been held to atone for her lack of figure and the roomy comfort of her boots, but Mr. Jobson, infected with new ideas, refused to listen to such sophistry. He went shopping with Dorothy; and the Sunday after, when Mrs. Jobson went for an airing with him, she walked in boots with heels two inches high and toes that ended in a point. A waist that had disappeared some years before was recaptured ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... extract how well doth the great Doctor meet the sophistry of those who, in our times, say that it is ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... shrug. Had George been less absorbed in his own mental discomforts, he would have discovered there and then that the matter of his speech, not the manner of his delivery, was what held his wife's attention. No longer could rounded periods and eloquent sophistry hide from her his thoughts ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... It is fortunate for mankind that the empire of talents has its limitations, and that it is not in the power of ingenuity to subvert the distinctions of right and wrong. Take my word for it, that the true merits of the case against you will be too strong for sophistry to overturn; that justice will prevail, and impotent ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... for the attack on Hazlitt was given by the Quarterly in connection with a review of The Round Table, Hazlitt's first book. The contents of this volume were characterized as "vulgar descriptions, silly paradox, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour and rancorous abuse."[25] A little later, when the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays seemed to be finding such favor with the public that one edition was quickly exhausted, the Quarterly extinguished its sale by "proving that Mr. Hazlitt's knowledge of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... weeks,—morning, noon, and night; but soon he threw himself heartily into the subject, and of all the thousands of political speeches I have heard it was the most effective. It was eloquent, but it was far more than that; it was HONESTLY argumentative; there was no sophistry of any sort; every subject was taken up fairly and every point dealt with thoroughly. One could see the supports of the Greenback party vanishing as he went on. His manner was the very opposite of Mr. Conkling's: it was kindly, hearty, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great "Bible of the working class," down to the martyred Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... ought, by no means, according to the opinion of a Christian statesman, to be concerned in supporting an impious thing in the world. The way that some may take to prove it impious, is, because it will tend highly to the interest of swearing.—But this I take to be plain downright sophistry, and playing upon words: If this be called the Swearing project, or the Oath-act, the increase of swearing will be very much for the benefit and interest of swearing, (i.e.) to the subscribers in the fund to be raised by this fruitful Swearing-act, if it should be ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... the sophistry, nor ask him whether it would be more proper for her to ramble about the city with him for an equal period; she only said, "Is it something that I shall care to hear, or that will ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... assurance of training, of the man well rehearsed and fully prepared. And he knew that if he should be pinned into a corner by logic and asked for his proofs, that he could squirm out easily and take the offensive again by appealing to faith, the last word in sophistry, and a greater and more powerful weapon than intelligence. This was his game, and it was fixed; he could not lose if he could arouse enough interest in a man to hold him to the end of the argument. He continued to drive, ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... finds its excuse in itself. This is the sophistry in which we are richest. The struggle of good and evil is serious, and really painful, only in the case of a man who has been brought up in a position where actions, deeds and thoughts have had ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... turned aside from the worm in his path,—so I have allowed to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowledge, and not generally inhumane; allowing that the crime came upon him in the partial insanity ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all was silent and nothing interfered with his thoughts, his anxious mind ran over all that had passed, and turn it which way he would, it still seemed wrong. What with this feeling, and the fear of making his grandfather angry, Louis felt very uncomfortable; and then came Reginald's sophistry, and Louis almost argued himself into the belief that his brother was right and he too scrupulous: and when he tried to pray for direction he did not feel sincere, for he was conscious of a wish to go to the church, and a great dread of offending his grandfather. After some hours' ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... liberty to use all means against society, the enemy; but honour or scruples of any sort among themselves were tabooed. A naturally honourable man like Giannoli was, of course, free from the danger of falling victim to such perverted sophistry. But the manner in which these doctrines succeeded in perverting the minds of fairly intelligent and well-meaning men is illustrated by ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... missed the best thing of the whole circus by leaving before Colonel Bouteille made his speech in favor of the prohibition amendment." And he gave a resume of the colonel's laughable sophistry for George's benefit,—and for mine as well, for I had paid no attention to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... reflect for a moment on such a crisis, without dropping a tear for the self-created infirmities of man: but there are considerations at which he shudders, and which he would rather varnish over with the sophistry of his refinement, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... sophistry, which had done duty so often and had been successful so often in their case as in others, by calling upon their Deputies to resign. Laferre neglected to do so. He was too greatly occupied with his opportunity. He went down to "address his constituents." They chased ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Gerald from his high estate of honor, it was not without a deep sense of the atrocity of the act he was about to commit that he prepared for its accomplishment. It is true that, yielding to the sophistry of Matilda's arguments, he was sometimes led to imagine the avenging of her injuries an imperative duty; but such was his view of the subject only when the spell of her presence was upon him. When restored to his calmer and more unbiassed judgment, in the solitude of his own ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... behavior of the tiger and the cat is simple and easily comprehensible, whereas that of the dog with his conscience, his humor, his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master, or that of the bee with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. If, then, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with myself. I almost got myself convinced sometimes. But I knew in my heart it was only sophistry. You see, it isn't as if she would let me do anything for her, even if she wanted anything done, which I've no particular reason to suppose she does. She's English, and a stranger over here, but she told me—when we were friends—that ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... her elfish gaiety. Some girls would have understood at once, but Patty was different. She was happy one moment, and troubled the next, not knowing the reason. She was not analytical; there was no sophistry in her young heart. She did not dream that this man loved her; she was not ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... harassed condition, the sophistry illuded her; she was sensible only of the menace his words distilled. She saw herself tricked and trapped, meshed in a web of damning circumstance; everything was against her—appearances, the hands of all men, the cruel ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... religion among all classes of people, not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life, in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, profligacy, and corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments, if a love of equal laws, of justice and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... sure to be put upon that expression by the hearer and the reader. The strain of their position in all these respects made Newman and his allies no exemplary school. Their example has been, perhaps rightly, held to account for something that was often under the evil name of sophistry suspected and disliked in Mr. Gladstone himself, in his speeches, his writings, and even ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... phenomena; on the other hand, also the discovery of the law, the essential being, the hidden force, that causes those phenomena—thus reducing the data supplied by observation to their simple principles. Intellectual consciousness was first extricated by Descartes from that sophistry of thought which unsettles everything. As it was the purely German nations among whom the principle of spirit first manifested itself, so it was by the Romanic nations that the abstract idea ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various |
