"Secret society" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a matter of time in British countries. The registration of voters is not yet conducted in the same rigid manner as in America, nor is the farce of holding a primary election gone through; but whether the control be exercised by a political organization, a newspaper, a local committee, or a secret society, the principle is the same. Mr. Bryce has noticed the rapid change in the practice of England on this point:—"As late as the general elections of 1868 and 1874 nearly all candidates offered themselves to the constituency, though some professed to do so in pursuance of requisitions emanating ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... is a secret society working against us here. Sect, I'd call it. Undermined the whole inhabited portion of Lakos—which isn't a ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... story is not only entertaining but instructive; and you have told it with infinite vivacity. I was much affected towards the end, as I held at one time very liberal opinions, and should certainly have joined a secret society if I had been able to find one. But the whole tale came home to me; and I was the better able to feel for you in your various perplexities, as I am myself of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... and assembly of the Dionysian Artificers, who inhabit Ionia to the Hellespont; there they had annually their solemn meetings and festivities in honor of Bacchus," wrote Strabo (lib. xiv, 921). They were a secret society having signs and words to distinguish their members (Robertson's Greece), and used emblems taken from the art of building (Eusebius, de Prep. Evang. iii, c. 12). They entered Asia Minor and Phoenicia fifty years before the temple of Solomon was built, and Strabo traces them ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the Greek nation from the Ottoman Empire as to make it the ruling element in the empire itself by ejecting the Moslem Turks from their privileged position and assimilating all populations of Orthodox faith. These dreams took shape in the foundation of a secret society—the 'Philiki Hetairia' or 'League of Friends'—which established itself at Odessa in 1814 with the connivence of the Russian police, and opened a campaign of propaganda in anticipation ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... Almendralejo (Badajoz). At the Colegio de San Mateo Espronceda was considered a precocious but wayward pupil. His poetic gifts won for him the lasting friendship of his teacher, Alberto Lista. At an early age he became a member of a radical secret society, Los Numantinos. Sent into exile to a monastery in Guadalajara, he there composed the fragmentary heroic poem Pelayo. After his release he went to Lisbon and then to London. Enamored of Teresa, though another's wife, he fled with her to Paris, where he took an active part in the revolution of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... also talk of a widespread secret society, known as the Club. A club in the Near East means something revolutionary. The people of Andrijevitza, who told me later on in hushed whispers about the "Clubashi," were amazed to hear that in London the police permitted ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... upon which any secret society holds a caveat. Wisdom can not be corraled with gibberish and fettered in jargon. Knowledge is one thing—palaver another. The Greek-letter societies of our callow days still survive in bird's-eye, and next to these come the Elks, who ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... perfection, it was taken up by the celebrated Dr. Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law in the University of Ingolstadt, and by him perfected as a system of light or illuminism. On the 1st of May, 1776, he founded, among the students of the above-named University, a secret society under the name of the Illuminati, whose avowed object was to diffuse the light of science, these secret societies being so many radiating centers of light. But the science taught was the most atrocious infidelity, and its object the overturning of all government ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... to recall his name and where she had seen him. It was not at any of the meetings of the secret society—of that she was sure. He seemed to read her thoughts, for he laughed—a deep, thunderous laugh which filled the underground ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... the wretched found expression in violence. In 1761 a secret society called the Whiteboys was organised in Munster and parts of Leinster to resist, or exact vengeance for, the enclosure of commons, and unjust rents or tithe. The movement was agrarian, not religious, though the Whiteboys were catholics, nor political. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Cardinal del Medici, and that when he ascended the throne, mainly through their labors, he was called upon to cooperate in the fulfilment of the great idea. An individual who, in his youth, has been the member of a secret society, and subsequently ascends a throne, may find himself in an embarrassing position. This, however, according to the tradition, which there is some documentary ground to accredit, was not the perplexing lot of his holiness Pope Leo X. His tastes and convictions were in entire ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Genoa, June 22, 1805. His faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited from his parents; and while still a student in the University of Genoa he gathered round him a circle of youths who shared his dreams. At the age of twenty-two he joined the secret society of the Carbonari, and was sent on a mission to Tuscany, where he was entrapped and arrested. On his release, he set about the formation, among the Italian exiles in Marseilles, of the Society of Young Italy, which had for its aim the establishment ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... I confess frankly, has always bored me, even though the volume contains La Fille aux Yeux d'Or. The idea of a secret society in Society itself was not new; it was much more worthy of Sue or Soulie than of Balzac, and it does not seem to me to have been interestingly worked out. But perhaps this is due to my perverse and elsewhere confessed objection to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... revelation," he said, "that here in this quiet place we were nursing revolution, and had some secret society in full swing amongst us. But then, as the little bit of history brought up the past, I felt the tide of feeling sweeping through me, and all the dread enthusiasm of the race woke ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on earth, for he has the brains of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean, common-sense butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and scientific secret society of assassins. He doesn't know I know it, nor, for the matter of that, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... parallels in older Hellenistic or Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which it rested. For my own part, when I try to understand Christianity as a mass of doctrines, Gnostic, Trinitarian, Monophysite, Arian and the rest, I get no further. When I try to realize it as a sort of semi-secret society for mutual help with a mystical religious basis, resting first on the proletariates of Antioch and the great commercial and manufacturing towns of the Levant, then spreading by instinctive sympathy to similar classes in Rome and the West, and rising in influence, like certain other mystical ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... programme. Genet was delighted by this demonstration—a demonstration (arranged chiefly by the labors of Peter S. Duponceau, who came to America originally as the secretary of Baron Steuben, and who was now secretary of a secret society of Frenchmen, which met at Barney M'Shane's, sign of the bunch of grapes, number twenty-three North Third street) that should strike with terror the "cowardly, conservative, Anglo-men, and monarchists," led by ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... look upon him as a traitor to the diggers' cause but although he had been a member of the party of Young Irelanders, he was the most innocent traitor and the poorest conspirator I ever heard of. He could keep nothing from me. If he had been a member of some secret society, he would have burst up the secret, or the secret would have ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... come again," Mr. Hannaway Wells foretold grimly. "The working man has tasted blood. He has begun to understand his power. Our Ministers have been asleep for a generation. The first of these modern trades unions should have been treated like a secret society in Italy. Look at them now, and what they represent! Fancy what it will mean when they have all learnt to combine!—when ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had been Bonaparte's faithful confidant from the outset of his career, and could furnish a queen who boasted an ancestry no less distinguished than that of the Greek emperors of the Comnenian family. The people were most friendly, deputations from the powerful secret society of Freemasons presented addresses, the regency made no resistance, the commander-in-chief and his army gave in their submission. But the French general showed no sign of organizing the liberal government which they so earnestly desired and fully expected. On ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... achieve that end, their silence being due to a lack of proper records and to the difficulty of establishing the simple truth in a country where rumour reigns supreme. But there is little doubt that the famous Ko-lao-hui, a Secret Society with its headquarters in the remote province of Szechuan, owed its origin to the last of the Ming adherents, who after waging a desperate guerilla warfare from the date of their expulsion from Peking, finally fell to the low level of inciting ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... upon my honour, that I accept most thankfully the pardon offered me by Prince Louis-Napoleon, and I engage never to become a member of any secret society, to respect the law, and be faithful to the Government that the country has chosen by the votes of the 20th and 21st ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... committed by some Russian or Roumanian secret society, and the Governments of both countries showed surprisingly little interest in investigating the matter and delivering the culprits ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... would estrange a considerable number of the Protestant Republican citizens of Massachusetts. I don't think you will convince them that I am indifferent to the good will of so large a portion of the American people as are said to be enlisted in the ranks of the secret society to which you refer. If you know as little of your Catholic fellow citizens as you know of me, you have a good deal as yet to learn of the subject ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... had come from a trip to the outstations, "it hurts my heart to see how cruel these people are. And those awful, ugly, cruel gods they pray to. The chiefs are so cruel and mean and have no mercy. And then that terrible secret society, the Egbo. I saw some of their runners dressed in fearful costumes scaring the people and whipping them with long whips. I saw a poor man whom they had beaten almost to death. Then there is that horrible drinking. They are worse than wild animals when they become drunk. ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... evolutionary stages of culture in which all peoples, primitive, ancient, and modern alike, might be classified. New light has been thrown upon the actual accommodations in the small family, in the larger family group, the clan, gens or sib, in the secret society, and in the tribe which determined the patterns of life of primitive peoples under different geographical and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... how tremendous and far-reaching an association the Boy Scouts are. It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised secret society in the world. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse |
