"Balderdash" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lines are priggish, and the last three mere poetic balderdash. But it is in the fourth act, when Prince Henry is watching by the bedside of his dying father, that Shakespeare speaks through him ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... dine in Bounderby Hall, for ever lodge in Bounderby buildings, for ever attend a Bounderby chapel, for ever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, for ever be supported out of a Bounderby estate, and for ever nauseate all healthy stomachs, with a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster? Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the Coketown street, and this same precious will was to begin its long career of quibble, plunder, false pretences, vile example, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... of false thinking and borrowed expression which characterized contemporary American imitators of English imitators of Pope and Gray. Think of the future orator, lawyer, and senator writing, even at the age of twenty, such balderdash as this! ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... nephews. Not that they had openly separated themselves from him, or even ceased to be deferential to him and proud of the relationship, but that they had more and more gone into those courses of literary Bohemianism those habits of mere facetious hack-work and balderdash, which he must have noted of late as an increasing and very ominous form of protest among the clever young Londoners against Puritanism and its belongings. The Satyr against Hypocrites by his younger nephew in 1655 had been, in reality, an Anti-Puritan and Anti-Miltonic ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... example sake, as far as any thing can really be exprest by English Letters, without bodging patching, or bungling balderdash or barbarous gallimofry of our Romantic Letters, obscurer than the Egiptian Hieroglifix. I will subscribe an old saing in English, as easy as any thing, if custom and ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... instincts. Perhaps all tramps are poseurs. But there is this to be said for Whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an authentic creature. He did not sit in a study and throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not by his poses, that ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Old Testament writers, he had no patience with them. "Do oblige me," I find him writing to one friend, "by reading the prophet Zechariah, and giving me your candid opinion upon him. He is poor stuff, full of Yankee bounce; it is sickening to live in an age when such balderdash can be gravely admired whether as poetry or prophecy." This was because Pryer had set him against Zechariah. I do not know what Zechariah had done; I should think myself that Zechariah was a very good prophet; perhaps it was because he was a Bible writer, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... nearly finished yet. With his record of adventure, with the romantic reek of India (and camphor) in the tiger-skin of the rugs that strewed his hall and surged like a rising tide up the wall, with his haughty and gallant manner, with his loud pshawings and sniffs at "nonsense and balderdash," his thumpings on the table to emphasize an argument, with his wound and his prodigious swipes at golf, his intolerance of any who believed in ghosts, microbes or vegetarianism, there was something dashing and risky about him; you felt that you were in the presence of some hot coal straight from ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of the Seven Gables would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine, and Jane Eyre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance—the snap-shots at everyday ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... agent in the promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue.... Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... what you read. Oh, Mrs. Ellis! Oh, mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmothers of England, this is the sort of writing which is put in the newspapers for you! How can you help being the mothers, daughters, &c. of Snobs, so long as this balderdash is set before you? ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... if you put me to the question in the same fashion, I'd give you a very short answer. Remember one thing, however, old fellow—I've seen a precious deal more of life and the world than you have! From sixteen years of age, when you were hammering away at Greek verbs and some such balderdash at Oxford, I was up at Rangoon with the very fastest set of men—ay, of women too—I ever lived with in all my life. Half of our fellows were killed off by it. Of course people will say climate, climate! but if I were to give you the history of one day—just twenty-four ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... has thought fit for some time past to fill its columns with a story of the Peninsular war, announcing it as "by the author of Charles O'Malley." Heaven knows that injured individual has sins enough of his own to answer for, without fathering a whole foundling hospital of American balderdash; but this kidnapping spirit of brother Jonathan would seem to be the fashion of the day! Not content with capturing Macleod, who unhappily ventured within his frontier, he must come over to Ireland and lay hands on Harry Lorrequer. Thus difficulties are thickening every day. When they dispose of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... or indifferent. In the second place, it isn't sold to the gullible public, it's sold to equipment manufacturers who have their own test engineers and who have to keep their products up to legal safety standards. He didn't know this balderdash of his was going straight to the Times as fast as he spouted it; he thought I was taking it down in shorthand. I knew exactly what Dad would do with it. He'd put it on telecast in ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... What o' devil has he swallowed? His eyes roll in his loggerhead just for the world like a dying goat's. Will the addle-pated wight have the grace to sheer off? Will he rid us of his damned company, to go shite out his nasty rhyming balderdash in some bog-house? Will nobody be so kind as to cram some dog's-bur down the poor cur's gullet? or will he, monk-like, run his fist up to the elbow into his throat to his very maw, to scour and clear his flanks? Will he take a hair of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for, pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Bowker had thought all her life in terms of fashion and society. She was not in the least impressed. "Balderdash!" said she with a jab at the floor with the ebony staff. "Don't pose before me. You know very well you're marrying this man because you believe he will amount to ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... just follow me, instead of going off to Texas; sit here, and act in concert with us Union men, we will make him a very efficient agent in accomplishing that object."[927] But to the obdurate mind of Wigfall this Union talk was "the merest balderdash." Compromise on the basis of non-intervention, he pronounced "worse than 'Sewardism,' for it had hypocrisy and the other was bold and open." There was, unhappily, only too much truth in his pithy remark that "the apple of discord is offered to us as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... tell me that you believe, for one moment, in this balderdash?" demanded Ralph Mainwaring, at the same time rising and striding about the room in his wrath. "The utter absurdity of the thing, that such a will ever existed, in the first place, and then that it would be secreted all these years ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... Roger loudly and explosively. "Don't talk any more about that damned ghost. Nobody ever saw it. The whole story is balderdash." ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... passion seemed to Mrs. Cameron the senseless declamation of an inexperienced, hot-headed young man; and putting it aside, much as a great lawyer dismisses as balderdash the florid rhetoric of some junior counsel, rhetoric in which the great lawyer had once indulged, or as a woman for whom romance is over dismisses as idle verbiage some romantic sentiment that befools her young daughter, Mrs. Cameron simply replied, "All this is hollow talk, Mr. Chillingly; let ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... success, did not let the gaiety of the party flag for a moment during their return. They drank, sang, and talked balderdash and indecencies in a way to bring a look of disgust upon the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... delirium tremens that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."—A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling[A] as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer," rises to the lofty grandeur of the "Novum Organon,"—a sight that makes one who really respects the Bible hang ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... much balderdash in talk about unselfish motives as the origin of warfare. It is safe to say that 99 per cent of all the slaughter wrought by civilization under the cloak of a desire to better bad conditions really has been evil. It is impossible to conceive of general betterment through general ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... the hungry Balderdash; cheerful Sack has a generous Virtue in't, inspiring a successful Confidence, gives Eloquence to the Tongue, and Vigour to the Soul; and has in a few Hours compleated all my Hopes and Wishes. There's nothing left to raise a new Desire in me— Come let's be gay and wanton— and, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... objective point was the grave of Douglas, which became by the time he arrived the grave also of his own reputation and the hopes of his partisans. His speeches on the route were a volcanic outbreak of vulgarity, conceit, bombast, scurrility, ignorance, insolence, brutality, and balderdash. Screams of laughter, cries of disgust, flushings of shame, were the various responses of the nation he disgraced to the harangues of this leader of American "conservatism." Never before did the first office in the gift of the people appear so poor an object of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... asses. He may depend on it, what he is saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To myself there is a ring ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... add that considerable portions both of this play and the preceding are meant to be comical. But the result only proves that Marlowe was incapable of comedy. No sooner does he attempt the comic vein than his whole style collapses into mere balderdash. In fact, though plentifully gifted with wit, there was not a particle of real humour in him; none of that subtle and perfusive essence out of which the true comic is spun; for these choice powers can hardly live but in the society of certain moral ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... said. "Do you know what you're saying! Five years? We might all be dead and buried long before then. What age will I be in five years time. Oh, wheesht with you, Eleanor, and don't be talking such balderdash. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Hegelian philosophy occurred by means of a return to the materialistic standpoint, that is to say, a determination to comprehend the actual world—nature and history—as it presents itself to each one of us, without any preconceived idealistic balderdash interfering; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice any idealistic preconceived notion which could not be brought into harmony with facts actually discovered in their mutual relations, and without ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... liked to stoop to. I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called —- bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the City, one evening,—upon Universal Peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. In a word, I do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of idiotic criticism—incompetence, faint-heartedness, corruption. Where he got the stuff I can't imagine, for the most grousing Tommy, with his leave stopped, never put together such balderdash. Worst of all he asked me to ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... balderdash, such as this, Mr. Buckram beguiled the few minutes necessary for removing the bandages, hiding the bottles, and stirring up the cripples about to be examined, and the heavy flap of the coach-house door announcing ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... for half a lifetime, and at last return, bearded venerables, to be stared at by their kinsfolk as portents, heaven-sent, because they have freighted themselves with a cargo of fond maxims such as "The World is Illusion: all Flesh is Vanity," and similar gnomic balderdash, the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... happened. The marvellous peacemaker of Europe, the fire-engine who, as Hermann had said, was ready to put out all conflagrations, the fatuous mountebank who pretended to be a friend to England, who conducted his own balderdash which he called music, had changed his role and shown his black heart ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... use the word soul in the silly way they do! You have a soul, of course,—an immortal soul. But they don't mean that. By soul, they mean a puffball of hifalutin ideas, of nonsense about the occult and psychic, and all that balderdash. Oh, Patty, my little girl, don't let those idiot people carry away your common sense and your plain everyday sanity! Don't, I ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... talking about," observed Mr. Mayne, sharply, when Dick had hazarded a remark about the Premier's policy; "you are a Radical one day, and a Conservative another. That comes of your debating societies. You take contrary sides, and mix up a balderdash of ideas, until you don't know whether you are standing on your head or your heels;" and it was after this that Dick found his refuge ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... If we meet idiots in life, as will happen, it is a great mercy that they do not use such absurdly fine words. The Stranger's talk is sham, like the book he reads and the hair he wears, and the bank he sits on, and the diamond ring he makes play with—but, in the midst of the balderdash, there runs that reality of love, children, and forgiveness of wrong, which will be listened to wherever it is preached, and sets all ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... original article which I sent to Paris last week to have it translated for the feuilleton of the National. Whether you will be pleased with it I do not know, but I feel certain that your nature is at one with me. I hope you will find in it nothing of the political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, or personal animosities, against which you warned me; but that, in the deepest depth of things, I see what I see, is entirely owing to the circumstance that my own artistic nature and the sufferings it has to go through have opened my eyes in such a manner ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... something, he wanted to show her everything; but she was not sure now—after an hour's talk—that she particularly wanted to see anything more that he could show her. He had shown her a great deal while he sat there, especially what balderdash he thought it—the whole idea of women's being equal to men. He seemed to have come only for that, for he was all the while revolving round it; she couldn't speak of anything but what he brought it back to the question of some new truth like that. He didn't say so in ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... could hear the Major shouting. "Balderdash! There's more fuss than if I had asked for an interview with the Prime ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... it is more entertaining to come to a discussion charmingly mounted by Ricketts—discussion too, in which every one knows what he is going to say—than to flaccid plays in which the audience always knows what the actors are going to say better often than the actors. The sort of balderdash which Mr. —- serves up to us ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross |
