"Pettifogging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great difference between a country attorney and an attorney in Paris; tall Cointet was too clever not to know this, and to turn the meaner passions that move a pettifogging lawyer to good account. An eminent attorney in Paris, and there are many who may be so qualified, is bound to possess to some extent the diplomate's qualities; he had so much business to transact, business ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... litigation, (with sometimes a third for a judge,) do not confine themselves to the matter in hand, but expatiate in a wide field, accusing their adversaries or defending themselves with all the adroitness of practised advocates, and not unfrequently with all the windings and subterfuges of pettifogging sycophants. In this way the poet endeavoured to make his poetry entertaining to the Athenians, by its resemblance to their favourite daily occupation of conducting, deciding, or at least listening to lawsuits. On this account Quinctilian expressly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the /Reichshofrath/ (Imperial Councillor) von Senkenberg, afterwards so celebrated. The second was admitted into the magistracy, and displayed eminent abilities, which, however, he subsequently abused in a pettifogging and even infamous way, if not to the injury of his native city, certainty to that of his colleagues. The third brother, a physician and man of great integrity, but who practised little, and that only in high families, preserved even in his old age a somewhat whimsical ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... romance, a conception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, but when I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House of Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itself as a club—when I turn from that to this race of brave and smiling people, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... peace of the world shattered upon so slight a pretext? A little time, a few days, even a few hours, might have sufficed to preserve the world from present horrors, but no time could be granted. A colossal snap judgment was to be taken by these pettifogging diplomats. A timely word from the German Chancellor would have saved the flower of the youth of Germany and Austria from perishing. It would be difficult to find in recorded history a greater discourtesy to a friendly power, for Austria was not at ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... or more noble conduct in a pleader than in Otis; that he always defended his causes solely on their broad and substantial foundations." Among other stories and items of fact put forth in evidence of his contempt of the pettifogging and professional lying so common in these degenerate days, is the following: Being engaged on one occasion to recover the amount of a bill which was alleged by the defendant to have been paid, he discovered, quite accidentally, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... reside at the Trecothick estate and the Polwellan Wheal, where I found, instead of profit, every kind of pettifogging chicanery; I passed over in state to our territories in Ireland, where I entertained the gentry in a style the Lord Lieutenant himself could not equal; gave the fashion to Dublin (to be sure it was a beggarly savage city in those days; and, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... persuading the Belgian Socialists that honour and patriotism were ideologies bourgeoises and that the "economic interests" of Belgium would be best promoted by a submission. These pedantic barbarians got the answer which they deserved; but on their pettifogging thesis Raemaekers' cartoon is perhaps ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Bolshoff decides to defraud his creditors, with the aid of a pettifogging lawyer, and he makes over all his property to his clerk, Podkhaliuzin. The latter has long sighed for Lipotchka, but his personal repulsiveness, added to his merchant rank, has prevented his ever daring to hint at such a thing. Now, however, he sees his chance. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 'Perfectly natural. She hates them! So should I if I'd been bothered and worried out of my life by them in the way she has. I hate them myself—that kind: or, rather, it's wrong to say that of them, poor creatures, for they mean well, they really mean well at bottom, in their blundering, formal, pettifogging way. They think they can take the kingdom of Heaven, not by storm, but by petty compliances, like servile servants who have to deal with a capricious, exacting master. Poor souls, they know no better. They measure the universe by the reflection ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had been beguiled into finding for the defendant on a bare literal construction of words which to anybody acquainted with local circumstances bore another and much blacker meaning. This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated as ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... sympathy with their innocent victims, such as Queen Marie Antoinette, is quite uncalled for. "The Revolution was in its conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris—a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... said to himself, "what chateau? Ah, I understand! Athos is not a man to be thwarted; he, like Porthos, has obliged his peasantry to call him 'my lord,' and to dignify his pettifogging place by the name of chateau. He had a heavy hand—dear old ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... repeated the senseless pit-digging and refilling programme for the priests, his invention was by no means exhausted. Direct incentive to rebellion proving completely abortive he now resorted to indirect pettifogging and pin-pricking tactics, harassing the unfortunate priests at every turn, depriving them of food or something else, reducing their rations, giving them the most repulsive work he could discover, and so forth. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... out, Thady: kick him out, will ye?—Have ye none of the owld blood left round your heart, that you'll not kick him out of the house, for a pettifogging schaming blackguard!" and Larry got up as though he meant to have a kick ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... to do what you are attempting; it does, by Heaven—sheer, brazen gall! It's been done, though, by little, pettifogging shysters, by piking real-estate crooks—thousands of parcels of property scattered all over the United States have been filched in that manner. But a hundred-thousand acres! It's the biggest steal that ever has been attempted, to my knowledge, short of a Government ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... means displeased with his morning's work he started off in the direction of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was pleased to find that the firm of George Fleming & Co. occupied good offices, and that the clerks looked as if they had been there a long time. It was just as well not to have a pettifogging lawyer to deal with. Mr. Fleming was in, but he was engaged for a little time. Perhaps the gentleman would state his business; but on the ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... his companion—"in those circumstances you are right; and, as they say in that beggarly assemblage of pettifogging rogues and traitors called the House of Commons, I must shape my motion in another way. The manner in which I will beg you to deal with the Duke, is this. Find an opportunity, before this night be over, of entreating ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... of the Law," wrote the patroon, "be it known by these presents, thou art summoned to appear before me! I have work for you—not to serve any one with a writ; assign; bring an action, or any of your rascally, pettifogging tricks! Send me no demurrer, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... for the sake of noting the disagreements between the Evangelists in some of the details. But now he was in no mood for small criticism. Which is the shallower, indeed, the criticism that harps on disagreements in such narratives, or the pettifogging that strives to reconcile them, one can hardly tell. In Charlton's mood, in any deeply earnest mood, one sees the smallness of all disputes about sixth and ninth hours. Albert saw the profound essential unity of the narratives, he felt the ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... fortifications, Trim.—O! very poor work, answered Trim, to what your Honour and I make of it.—The character of this last man, said Dr. Slop, interrupting Trim, is more detestable than all the rest; and seems to have been taken from some pettifogging Lawyer amongst you:—Amongst us, a man's conscience could not possibly continue so long blinded,—three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession. Will that restore it to sight? quoth my ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Sessions, and taught him to know his place. But De Blacquaire's an officer and a gentleman'—he made a burly bow towards the General—' and I don't suppose for a minute that he'd be guilty even of dreaming of such a piece of rascality as this. It's much more likely to be some pettifogging lawyer's game—some sneaking rogue that's got these fellow-rascals round him, with an idea of doing a little bit of blackmail. Stubbs is a decent fellow—for a lawyer. I don't think Stubbs would have a finger in that sort of pie, any ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... a blow struck by her, and concerned themselves not with several previous abortive blows. The prisoner, knowing himself proved actually guilty, and the numerous chances existing against him on the record, if he chose to make pettifogging experiments upon its technical sufficiency, submitted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... all tales that relate dealings with the Evil One: all Devil's Bridges, Devil's Dykes, and the Faust legends show that Satan may be trusted to keep his word, while the saints invariably kept the letter and broke the spirit. To so primitive a tale as that of "The Countess Cathleen" the pettifogging quibbles of later saints are utterly unknown: God saves her soul because it is His will to reward such abnegation of self, and even the Evil One dare ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... which is only as much as to say that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency. The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... a pettifogging colonial policy, commerce was turned into the merest peculation by a class of persons who made it their object to restrict the agriculturist, and hold his interests at their mercy. The more the farmer raised, the more he found himself subject to the shopkeeper's narrow restrictions; ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... distortion of phrases, the shameless 'explaining away,' are of a character that would again justify the remark of Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) in another matter many years before, that they were 'tactics worthy of a pettifogging attorney,' and even the subsequent apology—to the attorney. But what answer could be made to a protest which reminded the right honourable gentlemen of the following deliberate and official ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... and the world believed, and the Canadians themselves knew, that they intended to filibuster and postpone as long as possible, he took the common-sense way to a settlement. If he had resolved, as he had, to draw the boundary line "on his own hook," in case there was further pettifogging he committed no impropriety in warning the British statesmen of his purpose. In judging these Rooseveltian short cuts, the reader must decide whether they were justified by the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... there was his distinct pledge to the people during his campaign, that if they elected him governor he would make himself the leader of the party, would broadly and not with pettifogging legalism interpret his constitutional relationship to the Legislature, would undertake to assist in legislative action, and not wait supinely for the Legislature to do something, and then sign or veto the thing done. Moreover, he had insisted on the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... voice like a guinea-fowl's broke peevishly in. "Now, now, now, where is the hand? that is what I want to see." The speaker was a little pettifogging clerk. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... be done, at least there has been, but the cases are of no great value—we do not make much out of them, we get them up very easy, but they don't bring much profit." What a beast, thought I, is this! and what a curse to a country, to have such an unfeeling pettifogging rascal practising in it—a horse jockey, too—what a finished character! I'll try him on ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... eyes of the public. Suppose a woman had been nominated at the right time, and in the right way, according to your understanding of punctilios, wouldn't the same resistance have been made and the same row got up? You know right well that there would. Then what is all your pettifogging about technicalities worth? The only question that anybody cares a button about is this, Shall woman be allowed to participate in your World's Temperance Convention on a footing of perfect equality with man? If yea, the whole dispute turns on nothing, and isn't worth six lines in The Tribune. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and he should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... force. Upon the Jeffersonian and Madisonian attempts at peaceful coercion they looked with mingled annoyance and contempt, believing, as they did, that the whole American policy was that of a weak and cowardly nation trying by pettifogging means to secure favourable trade conditions. The situation had reached a point where the United States had nothing to hope from either ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... nobleman," said the Marquis; "for my part, I have that regard for you, that I should be sorry the thing went on. This Sir William Ashton was a pretty enough pettifogging kind of a lawyer twenty years ago, and betwixt battling at the bar and leading in committees of Parliament he has got well on; the Darien matter lent him a lift, for he had good intelligence and sound views, and sold out in time; but the best work is had out of him. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... He'd think it silly to be pettifogging and dishonest about money, or to go in for mad speculations run by shady companies; but he wouldn't think it extraordinary ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... ships, mishandled and in many cases disabled, now swell the numerical tonnage of other countries without adding so very much to their shipping power. The Hamburg-America line and Nord-deutscher Lloyd and others, shorn of their real glory, still continue a pettifogging existence booking tickets for passengers on the ships of foreign lines. What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British and American journalists defended then, that she should ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... saved you and brought you hither. I did everything, as you have guessed. I ruined you, and why? That I might have you all to myself. To speak frankly, I was tired of your husband. You took to haggling and pettifogging: far otherwise do I go to work; I want all or none. This is why I have moulded and drilled you, polished and ripened you, for my own behoof. Such, you see, is my delicacy of taste. I don't take, as people imagine, those foolish souls who would give ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... all the world," he snarled, "as an unworthy Pontiff and a contemptible caitiff. You attempt to entrap me into the meanest unfairness! You pose as a public-spirited citizen solicitous about the sanctity of the worship of Vesta and I find you a pettifogging wretch actuated by spite and malice. You desire not a fair test, but the ruin of a woman you are low-minded enough to hate. Eugh!" With one of his excesses of unconventional energy he flung the sieve far out over the river. It sailed whirling through the air, splashed in the water ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... assaults, he could not withstand the momentum of the blow, which in an instant laid him flat on the floor, deprived of all sense and motion; and Trunnion hopped upstairs to dinner, applauding himself in ejaculations all the way for the vengeance he had taken on such an impudent pettifogging miscreant. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... do not form a leit-motif. I have dwelt at length upon this, for misguided people have blinded both themselves and others as to Wagner's true aims and methods and the splendour of the accomplished thing by trying to read into his music a host of trifling and pettifogging allusions which he never intended. There is enough to break our minds ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... reported to her confederates. "For calm self-complacency I've never seen anybody to equal her. The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school! Oh, it's too precious! She'd patronize the Queen herself! The Poplars must be executing a war-dance for joy to have got rid of her. Probably they'd have subscribed for more than a bracelet ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... tell him even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism, totally foreign to Mr. Dosson's domestic habits and to which he would even have imputed a certain pettifogging provinciality—treatable however with dry humour. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... reluctant, determined to have her rights. But Mr. Pickwick acting on this assumption addressed the firm, from the first to the last in the most scurrilous language. He called them "robbers, swindlers,—a brace of pettifogging scoundrels!" Shocking and ungentlemanly terms, and what is worse, actionable. Yet the pair received this abuse with infinite good temper and restraint, merely securing a witness who should listen, and threatening the ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... Talboys in that way? Thoughtless girl, you don't know what you are doing. His family is all but noble. What am I saying? noble? why, half the House of Peers is sprung from the dregs of the people, and got there either by pettifogging in the courts of law, or selling consciences in the Lower House; and of the other half, that are gentlemen of descent, not two in twenty can show a pedigree like Talboys. And with that name a princely mansion—antiquity stamped ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. But it was on condition that she should give up ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... older, the "ladylike," Suffrage women did, but we came at last to see that all that was possible to accomplish that way had been done. The Cause hadn't moved an inch for years. It was even doing the other thing. Yes, it was going backward. Even the miserable little pettifogging share women had had in Urban and Borough Councils—even that they were deprived of. And they were tamely submitting! Women who had been splendid workers ten years ago, women with the best capacities for public service, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... of dancing. Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look what a pull Cromwell had over Pym—the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree. Who would expect eloquence from Pym—who would read poems by Pym—who would bow to the opinion of Pym? He might have been a dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only wonder that he succeeded as he did. Pym and Habakkuk ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there no healing sacrament which, when a man partook of it, gave him life and more life! Was there not an honourable rivalry among nations, each to be better than the other, to replace this brawling about boundaries, this pettifogging with frontiers? Was there to be no end to this killing and preparing for killing? Would men, from now on, set themselves to the devisal of murderous and more murderous weapons of war until at last ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... he said, with a harsh laugh. "You must remember there are two sides to the question. I should say that the interests of a husband and wife were identical, but that is not the view taken by those wretched little pettifogging ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... that any Governor of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves. That is another thing that Society can do for art: it can kill the middle-class ideal. Was ever ideal so vulnerable? The industrious apprentice who by slow pettifogging hardness works his way to the dignity of material prosperity, Dick Whittington, what a hero for a high-spirited nation! What dreams our old men dream, what visions float into the minds of our seers! Eight hours of intelligent production, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the morality of public bodies. They grow more and more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence. They get weak and obstinate at the same time. Those who belong to them have all the upstart pride and pettifogging spirit of their present character ingrafted on the venerableness and superstitious sanctity of ancient institutions. They are naturally at issue, first with their neighbours, and next with their contemporaries, on all matters of common propriety and judgment. They become more attached to forms, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... distressing use of the red herring. He brought the happiness of childhood into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people, Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent example of the creative results that come from centering a political problem on ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Glenvarloch estate!" said Dalgarno. "Dare not say it is, or I will, upon the spot, divorce your pettifogging soul from your carrion carcass!" So saying, he seized the scrivener by the collar, and shook him so vehemently, that he tore ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... than sound: they are imposing, but not solid. The question really is, what is best for the people at large,—what will be most likely to secure them a high-minded, honorable Bar? It is all-important that the profession should have and deserve that character. A horde of pettifogging, barratrous, custom-seeking, money-making lawyers, is one of the greatest curses with which any state or community can be visited. What more likely to bring about such a result than a decision, which strips the Bar of its character as a learned profession, on the ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829). They probably missed in him "a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory" which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in Monkbarns. Scott, in brief, was not as Dry-as-dust; all the dead bones that he touches come to life. He ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... London. And don't you think our Wenna would fascinate everybody with her mouselike ways and her nice small steps? And if they did have any trouble, wouldn't she be better to have somebody with her not timid and anxious and pettifogging, but somebody who wouldn't be cast down, but make her as brave ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to have represented before you?—not human nature in its height and vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in these my ripe years, eat with a highwayman who takes his life in his hands than with the civilian who robs his king and the king's poor, and has no better trick than false accounts, nor better friend than the pettifogging knave. Doltaire had no burning love for France, and little faith in anything; for he was of those Versailles water-flies who recked not if the world blackened to cinders when their lights went out. As will be seen by-and-bye, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Against whom? Against a parcel of imbeciles who are pettifogging from morning till night in ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... said to the disadvantage of the devil, that he has very much improved in his management of worldly affairs; so much so, that, instead of an administration of witches, wizzards, magicians, diviners, astrologers, quack doctors, pettifogging lawyers, and boroughmongers, he has selected some of the wisest men as well as greatest fools of the day to carry his plans into effect. His satanic majesty seems also to have considerably improved in his taste; owing, no doubt, to the present improving state of society, and the universal ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... exquisitely engraved (used to illustrate "A Shillingsworth of Nonsense"), and a couple of "Punch's Valentines." In one of these—the Lawyer—the original of Mr. Squeers may be seen in the character of an orthodox pettifogging attorney perched upon a stool. But Punch could not support such twin stars as Leech and "Phiz," and the latter left in 1844 for "The Great Gun," whose leading draughtsman he became. In the pages of "The Great Gun" ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... such a pettifogging fellow as thy clerk to persecute this lady; pr'ythee think on't: Tis a grievance of the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... born at Vannes, started as a soldier for the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to yield. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... the difference between a mere drudge and an intelligent workman; between the mere salesman or clerk and the enterprising merchant; between the obscure and pettifogging lawyer and the sagacious, influential counselor. It is the difference between one who deserves to be, and will be, stationary in the world, and one who, having determined to make the best of himself, will continually rise in influence and true respectability. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... and allowed themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... this, the hitherto independent farmer has to contend with high rents, want of sympathy in his landlord, who probably is ignorant of his very existence, and has never seen him perhaps in his life; and when it is considered that he is left to the sharp practice and pettifogging, but plausible rapacity of a dishonest agent, who feels that he is irresponsible, and may act the petty tryant and vindictive oppressor if he wishes, having no restraint over his principles but his interest, which, so far from restraining, only guides and stimulates ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... doubt, regarded as typical of the noble qualities of its wearer. These being so hateful to the ugly, sly, intriguing, slandering, malevolent, ill-conditioned, pettifogging, pitiful arch-enemy, it might well be supposed that the mere apparition of that type would scare him away. To this supposition is ascribable the adoption of the horse-shoe, as an infallible charm against ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... had got a bad case in hand and acted accordingly. Looking at D'Alton he shook his head, which Mrs. Brookes perceiving, she shook her head in turn, and, taking out her handkerchief, wept copiously. Dr. Tuffnell tried to soothe the patient with gentle words, but she (mistaking him for a pettifogging lawyer, whom D'Alton had engaged to bind her over to keep the peace) ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... Pitt, the greatest of all civilian ministers of War, was dismissed from office and not reinstated till the British Empire had been without a cabinet for eleven weeks. The French overran the whole of Hanover and rounded up the Duke of Cumberland at Kloster-Seven. Mordaunt and his pettifogging councils of war turned the joint expedition against Rochefort into a complete fiasco; while Montcalm again defeated the British in America by ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... Lord at the altar of that parish! The parson would scarcely—in these days—have been therefore made bonfire of, and had a pretty martyr's memorial by Mr. Scott's pupils; but he would have lighted a goodly light, nevertheless, in this England of ours, whose pettifogging piety has now neither the courage to deny a duke's grace in its church, nor to declare Christ's in ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... popularly responsible for the acquittal of men whom the public has prejudged to be guilty. This unreasoning, impulsive, and irresponsible public never stops to inform itself; never discriminates between legal acumen and pettifogging trickery, between doing one's full duty to his client and interposing or misrepresenting his own personal opinions; and never remembers that the functions of law and the practice of law are to prevent and to punish crime, to ascertain the truth, and to determine and enforce justice,—that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... want to correct your faults. I don't mean to say that you can learn nothing from them, because they are not all fools by any means, and they will often pick out your weak points with a malignant sagacity, as a pettifogging lawyer will frequently find a real flaw in trying to get at everything he can quibble about. But is there nobody who will praise you generously when you do well,—nobody that will lend you a hand now while you want it,—or must they all wait until ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tradesmen, such as under-working, touting for employment, sneaking, cringing, lying, and the like. These are the persons who, in such shabby or fraudulent cases as may succeed, share the fees with low attorneys, and who sign habitually, for the same pettifogging practitioners, half-guinea motions in the batch, for half-a-crown or eighteenpence apiece; and, in short, do any thing and every thing that is mean and infamous. Alas for the dignity of the bar! The common mechanic, who earns his regular thirty shillings ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... off to London to get married, are you, miss?" he said ferociously. "Well, we'll see. You don't go out of my sight until we sail, and if I catch that pettifogging lawyer round at my gate again, I'll break every bone in his ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... to the Colony. Up to the beginning of the 18th century the offices of solicitors and notaries were filled from Mexico, where the licences to practise in Manila were publicly sold. After that period the colleges and the university issued licences to natives, thus creating a class of native pettifogging advocates who stirred up strife to make cases, for this purpose availing themselves of the intricacies of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... dissimilarity in the mode of election, as fatal to this argument in the mouth of an English High Churchman, I was told that "the Crown now represents the Laity!" Such a fiction may be satisfactory to a pettifogging lawyer, but as the basis of a spiritual ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world—perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation—but ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of his Church, did not wish to incur the accusation of grasping and avarice, he dreaded nothing so much as a law-case. To accept lightly the gifts and legacies offered was to lay himself open to expensive pettifogging. Far better to refuse than to lose both his money and reputation. So were reconciled, in this man of prayer and meditation, practical good sense with the high disinterestedness of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... chose Barras to command their armed force, but save a few police they had no force. The night was wearing away and Fleuriot had not been able to persuade Robespierre to take any decisive step. Robespierre was, indeed, only a pettifogging attorney. At length he consented to sign an appeal to arms. He had written two letters of his name—"Ro"—when a section of police under Barras reached the City Hall. They were but a handful, but the door was unguarded. They ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... By the time you've gone through the mill yourself you'll want to grind everybody else. There's an attraction about the St. Chad's code; you'll like it better when you're more used to it, and when you've forgotten any pettifogging notions you may have ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum[Lat], evasive; irrelevant &c. 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c. (absurd) 497. foolish &c. (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; finespun[obs3], overrefined[obs3]. at the end of one's tether, au bout de son latin. Adv. intuitively &c. adj.; by intuition; illogically &c. adj. Phr. non constat[Lat]; that ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... to Schuetz requesting him to journey to Schaffhausen on important business. The attorney arrived, and Wilhelmine observed how shabby was his coat, how rusty his general appearance. He was again the pettifogging lawyer in poor circumstances, and Wilhelmine reflected that he would be all the more anxious to serve her in order to return to his ill-gotten ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... were, worse remained behind. A local politician, who had been sent to the legislature from the district where the "People's College'' had lived its short life, prepared, with pettifogging ability, a long speech to show that the foundation of Cornell University, Mr. Cornell's endowment of it, and his contract to locate the lands for it were parts of a great cheat and swindle. This thesis, developed in all the moods and tenses of abuse before the legislature, was next ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Now, this Layton was a perfect ruffian; a man whom no one liked, and whom all feared. He was a deep drinker, a great swearer, in short, a perfect reprobate; who never cultivated his land, but went jobbing about from farm to farm, trading horses and cattle, and cheating in a pettifogging way. Uncle Joe had employed him to sell Moodie a young heifer, and he had brought her over for him to look at. When he came in to be paid, I described the stranger of the morning; and as I knew that he was familiar ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... lose nearly a whole day, and at the end of it I may find that I have got nothing for my pains. These justices always try to find some excuse for the peasant, and when they do condemn, by way of exception, the affair does not end there. There is pretty sure to be a pettifogging practitioner prowling about—some rascally scribe who has been dismissed from the public offices for pilfering and extorting too openly—and he is always ready to whisper to the peasant that he should appeal. The peasant knows that the decision is just, but he is easily persuaded ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... patrolled the coasts, incessantly active. A storm of genuine if not informed indignation broke out in the United States. The action of the Canadian authorities was denounced as unneighbourly and their insistence on the letter of ancient treaties as pettifogging; and, with more justice, it was declared that the Canadian Government used the fishing privileges as a lever, or rather a club, to force the opening of the United States ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... scoundrel!" he cried. "You pettifogging lawyer—tricky to the last! How gladly you would throw over your friend to prolong your own wretched existence! Do you think you are now talking to a biased judge and a susceptible, brainless jury? Revenged on Heaton? I am revenged on him already. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... in the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist, who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the "Helena," again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... his very being as his own house, his business, his projects. He buried his hands in his pockets and snorted. His cowardly dread of the consequences of fraud forced him into a half confession of fraud, but in his words lay the feverish pettifogging of the frenzied financier who fights for Mammon even ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... as one so glaringly righteous that it had only to be pleaded before any just judge to be at once established. But now ... the horror was, that it was no longer her cause at all. This was not Joanna Godden coming boldly to the Law of England to obtain redress from her grievous oppression by pettifogging clerks—it was just a miserable dispute between the Commissioners of Inland Revenue and the Lessor of Property under the Act. It was full of incomprehensible jargon about Increment Value, Original Site Value, Assessable ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... policy which he thinks will aid the Union cause. But the country was never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe—and their name is legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has been obliged to call them in, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 1559, as an apologetic contemporary tract), conceals the actual facts of the case, and, while perpetually accusing the Regent of falsehood and perfidy, displays an extreme "economy of truth," and cannot hide the pettifogging prevarications of his party. His wiser plan would have been to cancel this Book, or much of it, when he set forth later to write a history of the Reformation. His party being then triumphant, he could have afforded to tell most of the truth, as in great part he does in his Book III. But he ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... neighbour's half-starved negroes, provided, always, they were hunted with honourable hound-dogs. He held such animals in high esteem, while curs he looked upon with utter contempt; he likened the one to the chivalrous old rice-planter, the other to a pettifogging schoolmaster fit for nothing but to be despised and shot. With these feelings he (Romescos) declared his intention to kill the very first negro he caught in his swamp with cur-dogs; and he kept his word. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... in their stained and dirty upper windows, and clung insecurely to their closed shutters. And on the sign-boards of these establishments were names that Sophia did not know. The character of most of the shops seemed to have worsened; they had become pettifogging little holes, unkempt, shabby, poor; they had no brightness, no feeling of vitality. And the floor of the Square was littered with nondescript refuse. The whole scene, paltry, confined, and dull, reached for her the extreme of provinciality. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... pity that some good man has not set Hadley up in a better business than pettifogging. Apply to your patron, Judge Innes. Lick his foot. There's an immaculate judge for you! Talk of corruption! I've been present at every session of the court whenever the case of Burr came up. Away back as early as the beginning of November Daviess ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... sources. Elizabeth never spent a penny of public money without good reason; sometimes—as in Ireland habitually, and to some degree at the time of the Armada though not so seriously as is commonly reputed—her parsimony amounted to false economy; often it took on a pettifogging character in her dealings with the Dutch, with the Huguenots, and with the Scots, though in the last case at least it must be admitted that either party was equally ready to overreach the other if the chance offered. But for very many years a very close ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... believe the weather to be calm, because they have drawn a nightcap over their ears, and, burying their heads in pillows of domestic comfort, do not hear Satan sweeping in a hurricane over the earth; let envy, ambition, blindness, and the pettifogging wisdom of small times,—let all these artistically investigate the question of my official capacity, or the nature of my public authority; let them scrupulously discuss the immense problem whether I still possess, or possess no longer, the title of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... was a pettifogging attorney, who derived a tolerable income from a rather disreputable legal practice picked up among the courts that held their sessions in the various halls of the State-house. He was known in the profession as Slippery George, from the easy manner in which ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... The Marquis de Vandenesse wore mourning for his father, and succeeded to his estates. One evening, therefore, after dinner it happened that a notary was present in his house. This was no pettifogging lawyer after Sterne's pattern, but a very solid, substantial notary of Paris, one of your estimable men who do a stupid thing pompously, set down a foot heavily upon your private corn, and then ask what in the world ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... review of the probable future. How far is this thing going to be done finely; how far is it going to be done cunningly and basely? How far will greatness of mind, how far will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jealous and pettifogging spirit that lurks in every human being? Are French and British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other? Is the Russian seeking only a necessary ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... point when it would be far more convenient to bring it out at that—miles away. You get boundary walls of coal between the estates, abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each coal owner sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get it into the silly coal scuttles beside the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... 'and I have no wish to reflect on her memory, though her mistrust has done so much injury, I will not say to me, but to the cause of my unhappy country. Her scheme was, I think, to have made you that wretched pettifogging being, which they still continue to call in derision by the once respectable name of a Scottish Advocate; one of those mongrel things that must creep to learn the ultimate decision of his causes to the bar of a foreign court, instead of pleading before the independent and august Parliament ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... humiliating confession of impotence to maintain order within the national borders, or it justified Canning's contention that it was in retaliation for the "Leopard's" action. His further plea, that it must therefore be taken into the account in determining the reparation due, was pettifogging, reducing a question of insult and amends to one of debit and credit bookkeeping; but the American claim that the step was necessary to internal quiet was puerile, and its precipitancy carried ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... look wonderingly at the grotesque figure lying in the grass, "with his feet up a tree," or sitting on a fence, as, absorbed in a book, he learned to construct correct sentences and made himself a jurist. At once he gained a little practice, pettifogging before a justice of the peace for friends, without expecting a fee. Judicial functions, too, were thrust upon him, but only at horse-races or wrestling matches, where his acknowledged honesty and fairness gave his verdicts undisputed authority. His popularity grew apace, and soon he could ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... unreasonable, violent, and disagreeable; and that, under such circumstances, her custom was not wanted by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. The disappointed female would generally leave the shop with some loud remarks as to swindling, dishonesty, and pettifogging, to which Mr. Jones could turn a deaf ear. But sometimes worse than this would ensue; ladies would insist on their rights; scrambles would occur in order that possession of the article might be obtained; the assistants in the shop would not always take part with Mr. Jones; ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... bonds; either by his personal initiative alone, and vigilant supervision, as did Hawke and Rodney, or by adding to this the broad view of discretion in subordinates which Nelson took. Before leaving this subject, note may be taken of a pettifogging argument advanced by Lestock and adopted by the Court, that orders to these three ships to press ahead would have resulted in nothing, because of the lightness of the wind then and afterwards. True, doubtless, and known after the fact; but who before the event could predict the uncertain ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... all such pettifogging bounds, And forged a party's Will for (say) Five Hundred Thousand Pounds, With such an irresistible temptation to a haul, Of course the sin must be ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert |
