"Special pleading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attic and there each morning I hammered away, eager to get my material "roughed out" while it was hot in my memory. I often wrote four thousand words between breakfast and luncheon. One story took shape as a brief prose epic of the Sioux, a special pleading from the standpoint of a young educated red man, to whom Sitting Bull was a kind of Themistocles. Though based on accurate information, I intended it to be not so much a history as an interpretation. It interested me at the time ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... he was not, I can't trust a page of his special pleading, let it look as clever as the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... bad breeding, but of want of knowledge. When they were wrong, they have readily admitted their mistakes; when they were right, they have never sneered at their European adversaries. There has been, with few exceptions, no quibbling, no special pleading, no untruthfulness on their part, and certainly none of that low cunning of the scholar who writes down and publishes what he knows perfectly well to be false, and snaps his fingers at those who still value truth and self-respect more highly than victory or ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... these delightful pages have not been marred by discussion of the causes or conduct of the great struggle between the States. There is no theorizing or special pleading to distract our attention from the unvarnished story of the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... Basilike' was no more written by Charles than by Cromwell. It was a doctored composition—a churchman's spurious history, trumped up by Charles's friends and partisans, possibly with the approval of the King himself. It is a fine piece of special pleading in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... bit of special pleading deserves notice. In the instructions of the king to the Archbishop of Lyons, to be read at the council in that city, Francis thus expressed himself: "Et combien que pour ung tel et si bon oeuvre que celluy qui se offre de present, le dict sire fut conseille, que juridiquement ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... premonition; rule of thumb; superstition; astrology[obs3]; faith (supposition) 514. sophistry, paralogy[obs3], perversion, casuistry, jesuitry, equivocation, evasion; chicane, chicanery; quiddet[obs3], quiddity; mystification; special pleading; speciousness &c. adj.; nonsense &c. 497; word sense, tongue sense. false reasoning, vicious reasoning, circular reasoning; petitio principii[Lat], ignoratio elenchi[Lat]; post hoc ergo propter hoc[Lat]; non sequitur, ignotum per ignotius[Lat]. misjudgment &c. 481; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... justice might be even more thoroughly served than if the antagonist agents were to set themselves to be as impartial and equal-handed as the magistrate himself. But I could not extend the same tolerance to the special pleading of the newspaper editor. I saw that, to many of the readers of his paper, the editor did not hold the place of a law-agent, but of a judge: it was his part to submit to them, therefore, not ingenious ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... he could believe them as fully as any one else; be that as it may, there was no serious objection taken to him on the ground of his examination, but the affair of the trial sermon was not so soon got over, and a good deal of special pleading had to be done for him by his friends, which is no unusual thing when the merits of a candidate are under discussion. That "swapping of texts" no less than three times was a very extraordinary feature in the case, and called forth some severe ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... only one plausible or possible, the only one possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the Church. Every shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of Churchmen, and the gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived. No keener and subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and possibly in lawyers' prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... is not on such beggarly special pleading as this that the claim shall be founded. It must rest on the unceasing, or practically unceasing, impetus of story-interest which carries the reader through. A remarkably useful contrast-parallel in this respect, may be found in that strange book, the Moyen de Parvenir. I am of those who ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... designs. He has all the old monachal contempt of woman. He is cerebrally chaste. Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de reellement obscenes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of these public trials at all, having abundant other ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one is to be had. If it was proper that Virginia should do it before the adoption of our present Constitution, it is eminently proper that she should do it now. There are occasions, sir, in the history of nations, when men should rise far above the rules of special pleading. This is one of them. Let the gentleman look into the history of the old articles of Confederation; let him read the debates which arose upon their adoption. Virginia originated measures then, far more important than any before us now; and there were gentlemen then, who took the same ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... more severely tried than Franklin was tried by the colleagues whom Congress sent him, from time to time, as clogs upon the great wheel which he was turning so skilfully. And this, too, Mr. Parton has set in full light, not by the special pleading of the apologist, but by the documentary researches of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... lent to Trochu. He read them, kept them two days to show some of his colleagues, and then returned them. One single extract was published by the Journal Officiel—a German report upon the defences of Paris. No man in the House of Commons is more fond of special pleading than Sir Roundell Palmer. When anyone complains of it, the reply is, that he teaches some children their catechism on Sundays. So, when anyone ventures to question the veracity of Trochu, one is told that he has adopted his ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the blunders and folly of her solicitors and counsellors, especially upon the absurdity of the opinions which she had not followed. Her cause depended upon the replication she was to put in to a plea in special pleading: she thought she saw the way straight before her, and exclaimed vehemently against that love of the crooked path by which her ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... evening in Brookfield had come to hang heavily on his hands. Now when the Reverend Dolman received Philip Crane's check for fifty dollars the next day, to be applied to the church encumbrance, he sought to allay his surprise by attributing the gift to his own special pleading that evening, of course backed up by Providence. If anybody had stated that the mainspring of the gift had been the wicked horse-racing poem of their denunciation he would have been scandalized and full of righteous disbelief. It is quite likely that even ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... your father's questionings as I answer every one, truly, in word and spirit, or told him, when he asked what I must not reveal, that I could not tell. I never equivocated in my whole life; equivocation is a subterfuge, mean as well as sinful—the special pleading of a lie." ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... because you were the first?" said Nora, going over to her and laying a friendly hand upon her arm. Mrs. Sharp was, of course, too preoccupied with her own troubles to realize, even if she had known that the question of Nora's return to England had come up, that her friend was doing some special pleading for herself, against herself. But to her brother, who years before had in a lesser degree gone through the same searching experience, the cause of her warmth was clear. He ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... March 17th, 1862: "Huxley is rather disposed to think you have overlooked saltus, but I am not sure that he is right—saltus quoad individuals is not saltus quoad species—as I pointed out in the Begonia case, though perhaps that was rather special pleading in the present state of science." For the Begonia case, see "Life and Letters," II., page 275, also letter 110, page 166.), I did not write without going pretty carefully into all the cases of normal structure in animals resembling ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... warned that what we gain in a thousand cases through time-clock and card-catalogue methods, might be lost ten times over through the shackling of the initiative of a single man of unrecognized genius. And all this would be very much to the purpose; but it is not upon any such special pleading that the case ought to be made to rest. The loss that would be suffered transcends all these concrete and definable instances of it. It would be pervasive, fundamental, immeasurable. Grievous as ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... self,' said Clara, 'I do not profess to know, without the rule, what is right and what is not. We are always trying to transcend the rule by some special pleading, and often in virtue of some fancied superiority. Generally speaking, the ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... dependent product, or as the producing principle of the organism, it ends at death: for, in the former case, it can no longer be produced when the organism perishes; in the latter case, that it ceases to sustain the organism is a proof that it has itself decayed."22 In this specious bit of special pleading, unwarranted postulates are assumed and much confusion of thought is displayed. It is covertly taken for granted that every thing seen in a given phenomenon is either product or producer; but something may be an accompanying part, involved in the conditions of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... centuries before the Reformation; but it is generally agreed that in the earlier half of the Middle Ages the example and influence of the Church were a bright light shining in a dark world. This notion has been recently challenged by Mr. Coulton, who, angered by the special pleading of Cardinal Gasquet and other professional apologists, hotly denounces the exaltation of the Ages of Faith. The Middle Ages, he complains, are the one domain of history into which, in England at any rate, the scientific spirit has not yet ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Britain" (which supplies both the material and the opinions of almost every subsequent English or Canadian historian) can be found the British view of the case. It is an invaluable work, written with fulness and care; on the other hand it is also a piece of special pleading by a bitter and not over-scrupulous partisan. This, in the second place, can be partially supplemented by Fenimore Cooper's "Naval History of the United States." The latter gives the American view of the cruises and battles; but it ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... fist, but knuckle-dusters, bludgeons, and daggers? In the war of ideas, any party which imposes restraints on others to which it does not subject itself, is guilty of persecution; and the finest phrases, and the most dexterous special pleading, cannot ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote |
