"Crass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one is tempted to go further, and show the crass idiocy and impertinence of those whose dicta ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... much the same work to-morrow; combating the irritating misrepresentations, exposing suppressors, discovering the truth under a mountain of crass stupidity and wilful deceit. Next day he will be again at work; and the same process will go on the following week. In the month there are perhaps about five days—exclusive of Sundays—upon which he does not sit. But those days are not holidays. They are spent in patiently reading ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Christianity with the political and social tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science, criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence, sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of traditional belief and crass superstition. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Raffles was right. Then I saw two things in one glance. Raffles had stepped a few inches backward, and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a light in his eyes. And another kind of light was breaking over the crass features of our friend ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... Errors, by James Freeman Clarke, p. 114.] Is this because the man is infallible, because he has never been detected in holding an erroneous opinion? Doubtless any of these intelligent passengers could find out, by half an hour's conversation with him, that his mind was full of crass ignorance and misconception. And nobody supposes that he is infallible, even as a pilot. He may make a mistake. What then? Will these passengers gather around the captain, and demand that he be ordered down from the bridge and thrown overboard if he disobeys? Will they ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... deserted her and her children, and was living with a concubine all that time! Why should a person attempt to write biography when the simplest facts have no meaning to him? This book is littered with as crass stupidities as that one—deductions by the page which bear no discoverable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on the amazing dullness of man, his prejudices, the astonishing manner in which he seized upon and clung savagely or pathetically to the most ridiculous interpretations of life. He was also forever noting that crass chance which wrecks so many of our dreams and lives,—its fierce brutalities, its seemingly inane indifference to wondrous things,—but never in a depressed or morbid spirit; merely as a matter of the curious, as it were. But ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... even its crass ignorance of conditions in the great centers of industry and population, added a charm to life as it was lived in Polktown. Yet it was wide-awake regarding local affairs, and this pretty and well-dressed girl walking so blithely toward High Street had had an actual ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... identity, between Spinoza's psychological doctrines and those of contemporaries, serves to give conclusive lie to the crass contemporary contention that Truth instinctively shuns the philosophical study, and that she only favors the laboratory or clinic where she freely comes and frankly discloses herself to the cold, impersonal embrace of ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... precipitately from the chasm; but whether that be its original pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls, is a secret hidden in her own heart. Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds the customs of this country too crass to harmonize with her supersensitive soul, and spends much time dangling about the titled slobs "on the other side." Some time ago she purchased the epicene young Earl of Craven as husband for her daughter, in the humble hope ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... frumps, the old women of each sex; Better raise their ready wrath than the prudent public vex With crass rules. Muzzles now and collars then, partial orders soon relaxed; Men rebel when with caprice they are tied, or teased, or taxed, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... I to myzell, 'poor Tom wun't coom here to-day: arl up with her, if 'a doeth: and who be there to suckzade 'un?' Mark me now, all these charps was good to shutt 'un, as her coom crass the watter; the watter be waide enow there and stony, but ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... estimate the loss to civilization and the world that has been caused by the destruction of accumulated stores of books, through the crass ignorance or stupid bigotry of benighted rulers? The chronicles record a number of such vandal acts. Hwangti, one of China's greatest monarchs, he who built the Great Wall of China, attempted the complete extinction of literature in that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... intelligence Noll can be infernally crass at times," muttered Mr. Langton to himself as he walked back ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that which was tacitly regarded as obsolete and exploded "superstition." Such words could answer only to ideas which a cultured man was scarcely supposed to harbor in his mind. "Magic," a synonym for jugglery; "Sorcery," an equivalent for crass ignorance; and "Occultism," the sorry relic of crack-brained, medieval Fire-philosophers, of the Jacob Boehmes and the St. Martins, are expressions believed more than amply sufficient to cover the whole field ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... people who live like that. We are all tempted to build our nests where we may lay our young, or dispose of ourselves or our treasures in the very sanctuary of God, with blind, crass indifference to the Presence in which we move. The Father's house has many mansions, and wherever we go we are in God's Temple. Alas! some of us have no more sense of the sanctities around us, and no more consciousness of the divine Eye that looks down upon us, than ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... goes the supper-bell! And yet your duffing Uncle Bob Has never told you what befell When all his team got out for blob. So much for bad poetic gas That gets my ancient dander up! Well, to the banquet! What is crass Shall deeply drown in radiant Bass While we as Vikings ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... to make money. The thought of going back to a pittance a year sickened him. That pittance had once been a fortune to him. But his appetite had not been gorged, satiated; rather, it had the resilience of crass youth; jumping the higher with every indulgence. It increased in ratio with his income. He had no one to guide him; no one to compel advice with a whip, if necessary. He knew it all. So he kept his curse secret. He would pile up one more fortune, retain it ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... the shadowy course wherewith she was guiding the boat toward the distant dock—forgetful of everything—she dropped her hand from the steering wheel and turned about, in crass astonishment, ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... sentiments before others man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.—The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was easy for him ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the determination of the Imperial to make itself known. She had been brought up to believe that, gas being dear, no opportunity should be lost of turning a jet down, and that electricity was so dear as to be inconceivable in any house not inhabited by crass spendthrift folly. She now saw electricity scattered about as though it were as cheap as salt. She saw written in electric fire across the inner entrance the beautiful sentiment, "Our aim is to please YOU." The "you" had two lines ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... underground is a rebuke to the Papal Rome above it; and, from the worldly pomp, the tedious forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... permanent home in Kilcolman, a fortified tower and estate in the southern part of the island, where the romantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from the crass realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short, but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, brought to London and published in 1590. The dedication ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars, and ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons. "The ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... provided for everything in his future, he was to discover a little later, except for the affable condescension of Mrs. Peachey toward the profession of letters. Cyrus's antagonism he had attributed to the crass stupidity of the commercial mind; but it was a blow to him to encounter the same misconception, more discreetly veiled, in a woman of the charm and the character of Mrs. Peachey. Bland, plump, and pretty, she received the modest avowal of his ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... intended to capture, fired their cannon in rejoicing at a victory that forever killed the prestige of British arms in the New World. For hitherto the British soldier had been thought invincible, and this exhibition of crass stupidity and bungling gave the colonials a different opinion of British arms. The British were brave it is true, but they could not adjust themselves to meet the enemy on their own ground,—and ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... dense, coagulated, crass, gross, inspissate, inspissated, grumous, incrassated; compact, turbid, roily, feculent, muddy; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... any time that every female incubates each year. The young birds are easily distinguished by their size when feeding, and high up in air by the worn primaries of the older birds. It is when the young go out of the nest on their first foraging that the parents, full of a crass and simple pride, make their indescribable chucklings of gobbling, gluttonous delight. The little ones would be amusing as they tug and tussle, if one could forget what it is they ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... which I remember reading there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from each other. There was associative apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. It is needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of the word. He had nothing, save the outside, in common with those undesirable coxcombs, who have not been bred by the High Church movement, but have taken refuge in its cracks, as they would have done forty years ago in those of the Evangelical,—youths who hide their crass ignorance and dulness under the cloak of Church infallibility, and having neither wit, manners, learning, humanity, or any other dignity whereon to stand, talk loud, pour pis aller, about the dignity of the priesthood. Such men Frank had met at neighbouring clerical meetings, overbearing and out-talking ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... very starn, bekase he knewn it was only an axcuse she was afther makin,' an' she was lookin' that he'd be sayin' somethin' about the young Kings an' was afther dodgin' as long as she cud. So whin he shpoke so crass, she riz up aff the sate, for it was a fib she was tellin', an' she didn't shwape the kitchen at all, an' that was done be wan av the maids, an' gev a sigh, an' wint in the ould ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... sorrow, the messages of God which these immortal and yet unmeasured compositions embody,"* then will America give to music the place it deserves. Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from crass commercialism. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... and ask him why such is the case, we shall stimulate his powers of observation along with his thinking. If the teacher asks a boy when and by whom America was discovered, he resents the implication of crass ignorance; but if she asks how Columbus came to discover America in 1492, he feels that it is conceded that there are some ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... with a slight half-embarrassed smile. The vicar of Nottingham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents. At a certain ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mr. Philander, that you should have evinced such a paucity of manly courage in the presence of one of the lower orders, and by your crass timidity have caused me to exert myself to such an unaccustomed degree in order that I might resume my discourse. As I was saying, Mr. Philander, when you ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this pleasant sport was one Comber, a large, pale-faced boy, some years older than his place in the school justified, but of a crass stupidity, a greedy stomach and a vicious cruelty. Peter had already met him in football and had annoyed him by collaring him violently on one occasion, it being the boy's habit, owing to his size and reputation, to run down the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... (with lofty disdain). Crass folly!—a woman utterly unknown, who came heralded by the roar of wind and the rush of rain—a creature born of the tempest, with flame in her eyes and hair, and fire in the scarlet of her mouth; ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... system to which they have been subjected has given them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper development ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... fertile field for crass, popular propaganda. On the one hand the Allies urging China to join with them. On the other hand America, their friend. This great country sways back and forth between them, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the air as being “crass, and full of rotten harrs”; and Drayton, in his “Polyolbion” {28a} speaks of the “unwholesome ayre, and more unwholesome soyle”; but that condition of things has long ago passed away. Another charming ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... overture, in which the pompous disorder and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread about their works like a heavy mist.—No matter, there was in the works, even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had never before felt.—What was it? He dared not analyze ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... mission? For the time it had failed. Saxe, as Stephen had said, had proved too much. He must make Saxe the scapegoat. The obvious lie damned him. It was crass stupidity to put into Hugues' mouth a lie which carried its own disproof with it. To force an accusation based upon the remainder of the story would be unpolitic. His best course would be to relieve the King of all his ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the open window. Finger on trigger, Banneker held up his flashlight in his left hand and irradiated the spot. He saw the hand, groping, and on one of its fingers something which returned a more brilliant gleam than the electric ray. In his crass amazement, the agent straightened up, a full mark for murder, staring at a diamond-and-ruby ring set upon ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... vastly larger proportion of the population—brings us face to face with a root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts of every class of man who is to be found in England—men as refined, men no less crass and brutal—some as vulgar and some as full of the pride of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American, democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the Wars of the ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the egregious Deeford, was quite charming to watch and hear. Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND should, I am sure, mitigate the asinine priggishness of the young viscount's bearing in the First Act. His conversion from this to the merely crass stupidity of the second was too much for us to bear. Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD as Mr. Hugh Meyers looked quite as if he might have been able to put his hand on two million; Mr. HARBEN as Sir Michael Probert just as if he would sign any document which was put before him under threat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... the part of the public, and then ignominious flight. He shuddered as he thought of the dull, wet days on the Atlantic and his hideous week in America. He had been in a perpetual state of protest against everything from the hotel service to what he termed the "crass vulgarity ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with sonic pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seconds, when wonders are working, but the crass ignorance of humanity oft prevents the operation being seen. Be that as it may, Royson discovered that it was nearly eleven o'clock before he had cleaned his soiled clothes sufficiently to render ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... frequently be set at ease by some self-constructed theory which would not bear its own examination for a minute—as if a quack were to treat himself with his own bread-pills and feel better—Mark, having convinced himself that the reviewer was a crass fool whose praise and blame were to be read conversely, found the wound to his self-love begin to heal ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... came in through the spreading skylights, and Bennington stood in the center of the radiance. He was a man, every inch of him, and not a man among them could deny it. There are many things that are recognizable even to crass minds, and one of these is a man. Genius they look upon with contempt, but not strength and resolution; they can not comprehend what is not visible to ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising, or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps and wilting humanity; and ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... their schemes something more was needed than the wit of Brent and his ally, the widow Leigh; something more, even, than his skill in shooting pigeons in flight with an air-rifle. The vacuum was supplied by the crass stupidity of the EMPEROR'S minions. Even when full credit is given to Brent for letting his bath overflow so as to flood the public salon and render it untenable, it was surely unwise of Mrs. Sanderson to offer her private parlour for ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... English People, whom the crafty class Has huddled into graves from sight and sound Of what God hands you, and, with pence, or pound, Lids down your wild dead stare,—wake! why so crass? See in the Celts spring-burst from underground, The Human Resurrection ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... I was not responsible for the crass and purblind idiocy of railway officials, I ignored this expression of ingratitude and ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... the black humours of indigestion. He perceives that natural laws, however harsh they seem, are never so harsh as our amateurish attempts to circumvent them. Modern philanthropy is an attempt of this nature. It is crass emotionalism. Regarded from the point of view of the race, your philanthropy is a disguised form ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... characteristic of the majority of human beings. It is a fair guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of a novelist of genius. Its harsh reception by critics in England and America was referred to by the author privately as an example of the "crass Philistinism" of criticism in those lands: Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book understood, appreciated. I imagine, however, that whatever the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon view, it comes close to the ultimate decision to be ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... moment that these problems are peculiar to Germany, but merely that, owing to the rapid progress, they are aggravated, and that to point out Germany as a model of successful achievement, along these and other lines, in order to bolster up political cure-alls at home, is a betrayal of crass ignorance of the general internal situation of the country, and once such prejudiced pleaders are found out, the rebound will go too far the other way. That were a pity, too, for we have much to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... in the bush you’ll find yourself at home. I liked his proposal, and ’out hesitation Signed my name wid a X that spelt Paddy Malone. Oh, Paddy Malone, you’re no scholard, Ohone! Sure, I made a cris-crass that spelt Paddy Malone. ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... rail and with the other was continually handing up prisoners to be judged. All in the inclosed space stood and moved a mass of careless men, the lawyers, hangers-on, and all who fatten upon crime—careless, laughing, nudging, talking openly to the women of the street. A crass scene, a scene of bitter cynicism, of flashy froth, degrading and cheap. Not here to-night the majesty of the law; here only a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... performance. De Puysange liked that air; he liked the reticence of every glance and speech and gesture,—liked, above all, the thinnish oval of her face and the staid splendor of her hair. Here was no vulgar yellow, no crass and hackneyed gold ... and yet there was a clarified and gauzier shade of gold ... the color of the moon by daylight, say.... Then, as the pleasures of digestion lapsed gently into the initial amenities ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... aal zettin' crass-legged," said Simon, with a chuckle. "Thee medst cum and pick 'em all out if thee'st ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? - Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... of them becomes conscious of the stealthy movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures, but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors, either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed indignantly into the forest with his ribs aching from blows ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... which can place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... crushes her, earth holds her, mold grips her. Fiends, do you not know that she is dead?... "Let us dance the pavon!" she said; the waxlights glittered like swords on the polished floor. Twinkling on jewelled snuffboxes, beaming savagely from the crass gold of candelabra, From the white shoulders of girls and the white powdered wigs of men... All life was that dance. The mocking, resistless current, The beauty, the passion, the perilous madness — As ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... Cochrane gently, "you make a speech. It will be recorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details and emphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only. That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, but your presence is a sign of your interest but ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the dark recesses of the inner man they fell upon the grinning skeleton of hypocrisy. Carmen might be, doubtless was, incapable of reasoning. Of logical processes she knew nothing. But by what crass assumption might he, admittedly woefully defeated in his combat with Fate, oppose his feeble shafts of worldly logic to this child's instinct, an instinct of whose inerrancy her daily walk was a living demonstration? In quick penitence and humility he stretched out his arm ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he thought, remembering how these doctors had just examined him; "why, they have only lately been hearing lectures on mental pathology; they had passed an examination—what's the explanation of this crass ignorance? They have not a conception of ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast. The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... assists at Bob Sawyer's party, and who is described in the original work as "a dirty, slipshod girl, in black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected daughter of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances." No one had ever realised the crass stupidity of that remarkable young person—dense and impenetrable as a London fog—until her first introduction in these Readings, with "Please, Mister Sawyer, Missis Raddle wants to speak to you!"—the dull, dead-level of her ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... been called upon to disavow at the hustings the conclusion to which Mr. Daubeny hinted in East Barsetshire that he had arrived. The East Barsetshire men themselves,—so said the Liberals,—had been too crass to catch the meaning hidden under his ambiguous words; but those words, when read by the light of astute criticism, were found to contain an opinion that Church and State should be dissevered. "By G——! he's going to take the bread ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... again bowed. I was amazed to witness the crass ignorance and astounding superstition displayed by the Emperor of Russia, whom all Europe believed to be a progressive, wideawake monarch. That he possessed a spiritualistic kink, as did also his German wife, was quite apparent. Any bogus medium or charlatan could easily impose ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... a great mistake. Such crass and breathless promptness takes away a great deal of ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon,—negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency. The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... unchallenged. I do believe most firmly that President Wilson gave the criminal such chances of reform as no court of law in the world would grant. But, at last, his patience was exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... said the master, looking ludicrously piebald after his ink bath, 'before resuming duties I wish to draw your attention to the crass foolishness of which our young friends Haddon and McKnight are guilty. You perceive that their action is not ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... in her wicker chair. If I had been a woman, I would have fled from Melora Meigs even into the arms of a bearded farmer; I would have listened to the most nasal male the hills had bred. I would have milked cows, to get away from Melora. But I am a crass creature. Besides, what son of the soil would want her: unexuberant, delicate, pleasant in strange ways, and foreign to all familiar things? She wouldn't even fall in love with Arnold Withrow, who was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... her bedroom and shut the door almost with a bang; for the little woman was furious with him for what she deemed his crass stupidity. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... too bad," said Linda reflectively; "because Eileen is sensitive and constant contact with crass vulgarity certainly would ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... elected, an abstract of whose statement is to be laid before Parliament. The Corporation are therefore deemed unworthy or incompetent to manage their own finances. Men of business are told that their ignorance is so crass, or their honesty so doubtful, that the Legislature is compelled to keep a watchful eye on their expenditure. The proposition is as absurd as it is insulting and uncalled for. The Corporation are further to ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... character. Beliani likened him to Bayard, it is true, and Marulitch had scoffingly adopted the simile; but that was because each thought Bayard not admirable, but a fool. The somber history of the Kosnovian monarchy, a record of crass stupidity made lurid at times by a lightning gleam of passion, justified the belief that Alexis would follow the path that led Theodore, and Ferdinand, and Ivan, and Milosch to their ruin. Each of these rulers began to reign under favorable auspices, yet each succumbed ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... possessed only of that thin-blooded quality of imagination which is ever associated with the prosaic-minded man. Yet, if taunted with this obvious lack, his wrath is deeply stirred. His psychology is that of the crass materialist—always a rather funny article. It will afford me genuine relief, none the less, to hear the cold judgment his mind will have to pass upon the story of this house as I shall ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... all who signed it was but a scrap of paper, of no more binding force than others that had gone their way to dusty death in the diplomatic waste baskets. To observe the obligation it imposed was hypocrisy. To fight in order to compel Germany to observe it was crass militarism. Plainly, Mr. Shaw is a little difficult. The Government under which he lives is either too bellicose or not bellicose enough; too ready to help France if France is attacked or not ready enough to ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... out there to the Swami," I said, "if you're still with us on this crass, materialistic plane, will you ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... boys," he said, "who wrecked my studio. Two stupid little boys; two little boys who have been taught their Catechism, and will one day aspire to the priesthood." And that it should be two stupid little boys who had broken his statue seemed significant. "Oh, the ignorance, the crass, the patent ignorance! I am going. This is no place for a sculptor to live in. It is no country for an educated man. It won't be fit for a man to live in for another hundred years. It is an unwashed country, that is what ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference. Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic, Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so crass as a wink or a nod. I almost doubted that I had intercepted it, and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his fellows. More a shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of sudden light—or whatever it was, it carried ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... mother, tipped by his father, hail-fellow-well-met with Pate Wylie—Lord, but young Gourlay was the fine fellow! Symptoms of swell-head set in with alarming rapidity. He had a wild tendency to splurge. And, that he might show in a single afternoon all the crass stupidity of which he was capable, he immediately allowed himself a veiled insult towards the daughters of the ex-Provost. They were really nice girls, in spite of their parentage, and as they came down the street they glanced with shy kindness at the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... occultism usually is quite familiar with the crass individual who assumes the cheap skeptical attitude toward occult matters, which attitude he expresses in his would-be "smart" remark that he "believes only in what his senses perceive." He seems to think that his cheap wit has ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... was right—the creed of his church, as of all others, in a lesser degree perhaps, is too crass, too mechanical, too childish to tally the ideals of a generation which is each day awakening to some new potency of matter, some ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... common knowledge. That such a subject is not considered a necessary part of education is indeed lamentable, for the crass ignorance that everywhere abounds upon the subject of nutrition and diet is largely the cause of the frightful disease and debility so widespread throughout the land, and, as a secondary evil of an enormous waste of labour in the production and distribution of unneeded food. Were everyone to live ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... blazed. No exaggeration those words. A veritable fire burned there, a fire, it might be, of mere physical irritation and savage exasperation at the too-rapid crumbling of the wilfully disobedient body, a glory, perhaps, of obstinate pride and conceit, a fire of superstition and crass ignorance, but a fire to be doubted of no ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... a power.] Therefore this word was revealed and spoken to me: 'This is space and place where the love realm is to arise and become verdant with its natural inhabitants, who have laid aside their crass self-love [selfishness] and left it behind them, as it might not come here; even as it is the one which makes the entrance so narrow and crowded....' Hereupon I saw in my spirit unexpectedly different persons, modified out of measure in their bodies, and they were so highly ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... seem to impress some as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, decadent writer. Then Azorin has said of me that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... prayin', nae doot, that James Moore—curse him!—will win ma Cup awa' from me, yer ain dad. I wonder ye're no 'shamed to crass ma door! Ye live on me; ye suck ma blood, ye foul-mouthed leech. Wullie and me brak' oorsel's to keep ye in hoose and hame—and what's yer gratitude? Ye plot to rob us ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... strewn with wave-worn masses of chalk: and never did I feel so paltry and short a thing as there, with far-outstretched bays of crags about me, their bluffs encrusted at the base with stale old leprosies of shells and barnacles, and crass algae-beards, and, higher up, the white cliff all stained and weather-spoiled, the rock in some parts looking quite chalky, and elsewhere gleaming hard and dull like dirty marbles, while in the huge withdrawals of the coast yawn darksome gullies ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... be false to myself, my simple self that was, And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, Who yet has something in common ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... dear, I fear that you are a crass materialist. I am beginning to despair of ever inculcating in you any respect for the finer and subtler things of life. I must try Bolton. Bolton, have you ever seen a finer moon? Remember that I won't move a step until you have carefully considered the matter and fully ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... gone to America with that horrid Miss Campion; yes, and she is horrid to take our dear Criss-crass away. Fern cried so this morning, and Crystal cried too, but she had to go, she said, so it was no use making a fuss about it; and she does not mean to come back for a long time. What is the matter?" peering curiously in his face, "does your head ache?"—for Raby had uttered a low ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... out of the top of his head, and cannot swallow a herring. Indeed, so lately as last year a popular M.P., writing to one of the religious papers, allowed himself to say that "science will not hear of a whale with a gullet capable of admitting anything larger than a man's fist"—a piece of crass ignorance, which is also perpetrated in the appendix to a very widely-distributed edition of the Authorized Version of the Bible. This opinion, strangely enough, is almost universally held, although I trust that the admirable models now being shown in our splendid Natural History Museum ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... recently established in London. No contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was assuredly no excess of emotional life—whether good or bad—in the body of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was simply good-fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... train; the covert secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and disastrous ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... minutes of waiting nearly finished him. As the absurdly formal clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with his ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... latter indeed, that the courtiers' anger and M. de Maurepas' growing jealousy were directed. "Once upon a time there was in France," said a ,pamphlet, entitled Le Songe de M. de Maurepas, attributed to Monsieur, the king's brother,—"there was in France a certain man, clumsy, crass, heavy, born with more of rudeness than of character, more of obstinacy than of firmness, of impetuosity than of tact, a charlatan in administration as well as in virtue, made to bring the one into disrepute and the other into disgust, in other respects shy from self-conceit, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... point with a good deal of fullness his theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—in Venus and Adonis, a certain crass naturalism; in Lucrece a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116—in praise of friendship—with 129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery of sensual ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... many times was reading incessantly, with the speed of a Frenchman, from printed strips of cheap colored paper which she offered for sale at a cent each. They were political in nature, often in verse, insulting in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity at which the dismal multitude laughed bestially. Three musicians, one with a rude harp, a boy striking a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar to those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both music and reading motionless, with expressionless ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... on their addled pates, and howling on their gods for mercy,—all forsooth! because for once in their unobserving lives they behold the river red instead of green! Ay me! 'tis a thing to laugh at, this crass, and brutish ignorance of the multitude,—no teaching will ever cleanse their minds from the cobwebs of vulgar superstition,—and I, in common with every wise and worthy sage of sound repute and knowledge, must needs waste all my scientific labors ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... tender thing is gone away at last. He will take this half of a broken sixpence back: it was given in happier times. If ever he should marry, he will know that one far away prays for his happiness. And if—if these unwomanly tears—And suddenly the crass idiot discovers that she is laughing at him, and that she has secured him and bound him as completely as a fly fifty times wound round by a spider. The crash of applause that accompanied the lowering of the curtain stunned Macleod, ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... sarcastically accounts by admitting that he must be considerably more stupid than the common run of mankind, in fact, that he is wholly devoid of human understanding—a confession which he evidently expects every reasonable man to repeat after him to those who assert that crass ignorance of fundamental facts is an aid to the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... crass matter of profits, I found the small town richer in easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. A few years later I spent a week in London, but I picked up less there to write about than I found in Sabetha, Kansas, in a ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... out in the morning, remained out all day, and sat down to dinner at nine o'clock in the evening with the face of a somnambulist. Her husband thought it absurd; however, he might perhaps have never known the reason for this; a profound ignorance of women, a crass confidence in his own merit, and in his own fortune, might perhaps have always hidden the truth from him, if the two lovers had not, so to speak, compelled him to ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... stolid dunce is bad, but the conceit of the brisk and lively dunce is worse. The stolid dunce is comparatively quiet; his crass mind works slowly; his vacant face wears an aspect of repose; his talk is merely dull and twaddling. But the talk of the brisk dunce is ambitiously absurd: he lays down broad principles: he announces ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... "Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... as may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of. For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader. Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed uncritically, though it was no more permitted to interfere ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... have strong, meat-fed instincts, and what with the county Members, the Bishops, the Peers, all the hereditary force of the country, they still rule the roast. And there's a certain disease—to make a very poor joke, call it 'Pendycitis' with which most of these people are infected. They're 'crass.' They do things, but they do them the wrong way! They muddle through with the greatest possible amount of unnecessary labour and suffering! It's part of the hereditary principle. I haven't had to do with them ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... plenary, deep, high; signal, at its height, in the zenith. world-wide, widespread, far-famed, extensive; wholesale; many &c 102. goodly, noble, precious, mighty; sad, grave, heavy, serious; far gone, arrant, downright; utter, uttermost; crass, gross, arch, profound, intense, consummate; rank, uninitiated, red-hot, desperate; glaring, flagrant, stark staring; thorough-paced, thoroughgoing; roaring, thumping; extraordinary.; important &c 642; unsurpassed &c (supreme) 33; complete &c 52. august, grand, dignified, sublime, majestic ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... thousand francs, the brother and sister possessed between them at least ten thousand francs a year. This they considered wealth, and with it they endeavored to impress society, which immediately took the measure of their vulgarity, crass ignorance, and foolish envy. On the evening when they were presented to the beautiful Madame Tiphaine, who had already eyed them at Madame Garceland's and at Madame Julliard the elder's, the queen of the town remarked to Julliard junior, who stayed a few moments after the rest of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... which the wonderful lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things; the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought, depraved ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the interior of the islands has been almost abandoned the said Spanish laborers can neither give any help to the ordinary administration, nor prevent the transference of whole provinces to the hands of secular Indians and Sangley mestizos (as is happening)—who by their crass ignorance, disgraceful morals, and utter lack of decency, incur universally the contempt of their parishioners, making them, because of the tyrannies of these, sigh for the gentle yoke ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... knowing better than to insist. "Look at this," and took him into the kitchen and showed him a superb leg of mutton hanging beside the window. "I hung it up in a draft so as to get some of the crass freshness out of it. We'll eat it when we have the astrologer Gevingey to dine with us at Carhaix's. As I am the only person alive who knows how to boil a gigot a l'Anglaise, I am going to be the cook, so I shan't come by for ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... sure enough,' says Nell; 'I know his speech; it's his wandherin' sowl that can't get rest, the crass o' Christ ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... annually; and dolt he would be, did he not learn at least all the superficialities of statecraft. He may make grievous errors. He may be misled by mob prejudice or mob enthusiasm; but he is not likely to persist in a policy of crass blundering very long. King Demos may indeed rule a fallible human monarchy, but it is thanks to him, and to his high court held at the Pnyx, that Athens owes at least half of that sharpness of wit and intelligence ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares—so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness—that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... in the last resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few. There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this Memoir we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Watts-Dunton, who tells us he has been 'brought into personal relations with many men of genius,' and so on ad nauseam, and of a sort of novel by Mr. Burrow, in a palpable imitation of the style of De Foe without a spark of De Foe's ability. The only thing for which this Mr. Burrow is distinguished is his crass anti-Catholic bigotry; and the terms in which, in one part of the book at least, he refers to the Blessed Virgin are an outrage not merely on the religious feelings of Catholics, but also on ordinary propriety. Catholics, unless they deserve to be treated scornfully, will take note of the fact that ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the line was thirty-five miles long (Sallust, Hist, iv, 19, Dietsch; Plutarch, Crass. 10), it probably passed not from Squillace to Pizzo, but more to the north, somewhere near Castrovillari and Cassano, over the peninsula which is here in a straight line about twenty-seven ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen |
