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Foist   Listen
noun
Foist  n.  A light and fast-sailing ship. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Foist" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Hero Siegfried!" Then he laughed like anything and sat down beside me and said: "You were enjoying yourself so much this morning that you had not even a glance to spare for me." "Contrariwise (I've got that from Dora), I never foist myself on anyone, and never hang around anyone's neck." Then he wanted to put his arm round my waist (and probably, most probably, he would have kissed me), but I sprang to my feet and called Dora or rather Thea, for before the gentlemen we pretend ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl

... months that followed were the most terrible in the history of Samoa. A handful of exasperated whites—treaty officials, missionaries, and consuls—were determined to foist Tanumafili on the unwilling natives of the group, and backed by three men-of-war, they declared Mataafa a rebel and plunged the country into a disastrous and sanguinary war. England and America, in the person of their ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... good-natured, harum-scarum fellow; and masterships of hounds, memberships of Parliament—all expensive unmoney-making offices,—being things that most men are anxious to foist upon their friends, Mr. Waffles' big talk and interference in the field procured him the honour of the first refusal. Not that he was the man to refuse, for he jumped at the offer, and, as he would be of age before the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... a third ticket in the field you would defeat free coinage; defeat a withdrawal of the issue power of national banks; defeat Government ownership of railroads, telephones and telegraphs; defeat an income tax and foist gold monometallism and high taxation upon the people for a generation to come, which would you do?... When I shall go back to the splendid commonwealth that has so signally honored me beyond my merits, I want to be able to say to the people that all the great ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... shows you much declined. Were you not dim and doted, you might see A pack of cheats that claim a pedigree, No more of kin to you, than you to me. Do you not know, that for a little coin, Heralds can foist a name into the line? They ask you blessing but for what you have; But once possess'd of what with care you save, The wanton boys would piss upon ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... part of the Scottish nation subscribed to by all ranks of the community, the first signature being appended to it in the Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, on February 28, 1638, to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to resist all attempts on the part of Charles I. to foist Episcopacy upon it; it was ratified by the Scottish Parliament in 1640, and subscribed by Charles ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the right services out of the tenants, and tell them what to do each week and see that they did it; he had to be careful that they brought the right number of eggs and pigs up to the house, and did not foist off warped or badly planed planks upon him. He had to look after the household serfs too, and set them to work. He had to see about storing, or selling, or sending off to the monastery the produce of the estate and of the tenants' rents; and every year he had to present a full and detailed account ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... to the varied complexion, to difference of race, to diversity of creed, to distinctions of caste, they would seek in vain through the laws and institutions of Massachusetts for any recognition of their prejudice. He deplored the fact that they had attempted to foist into the legal arrangements of the land a principle utterly repugnant to the State constitution, and that what the sovereignty of the constitution dared not attempt a school committee accomplished. To Phillips it seemed crassly inconsistent to say that ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... crimes they condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which "God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet, their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!—Yes! Gaston felt them, the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... For de love of Mike, d'yuh mean to tell me Lizzie is talking back? Whadda yuh know about dat! Whadda yuh know about dat! You'll get sick on us here, foist t'ing we know. Where was ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... we ask is, that they be given due knowledge and instruction. Furthermore, if Socialism be true, it should not fear open and complete examination. If the truth is the truth, it must prevail in the end. Therefore the surreptitious and secret attempt to foist Socialism upon an unsuspecting people savors much of the lack of sincerity and of belief in its real truth on the part of its own advocates. At least they should stop making their appeal mainly to the uninstructed foreign-born and to the apostles of half-baked learning, and ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers

... claim to have rediscovered this system of treatment, although it is a common practice in these days to revamp old theories and discoveries, and try to foist them upon the public as entirely new propositions. The credit for the resuscitation of this ancient remedial practice belongs, without doubt, to Dr. A. Wilford Hall, of New York, who practiced the treatment on himself for forty years before ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... that this organization of Sisters in Unity indorse the peace movement, and that it use its wide influence to check the tendency toward militarism which injudicious and misguided Americans hope to foist upon the American public." ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... again, I cannot say how he took the invectives and the "murder-subscription." Perhaps it was not quite right of me to foist on him, as examples of genuine Parisian opinion, two such papers as those I gave him; but, then, all is fair not merely in love but in war also, and in regard to the contentions of France and Germany, my sympathies were entirely on the side ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... sentiment. There were more things to go wrong than he had thought humanly possible in the management of a mine, and between ordering his machinery and taking on new men he had had scant leisure for affairs of the heart. He was young and inexperienced and the dealers took advantage of it to foist off old stock and odd parts, and then his engineers became fractious and disgruntled because he expected quick results. It was all very different from what he had expected when he had taken over the Paymaster lease, and yet it had to be endured and muddled through somehow until ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... best arguments that could then be urged in favour of Wood and the patent, and undoubtedly, also, it would have had the desired effect had it been allowed to do its work uncriticised. But Swift's opposition was fatal to Walpole's intentions. He took the report as but another attempt to foist on the people of Ireland a decree in which they had not been consulted, and no amount of yielding, short of complete abandonment of it, would palliate the thing that was hateful in itself. He resented the insult. After specific rebuttals ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... so numerous, that 'twould scarce tax their powers to sink me; and that your forces, great though they be, would not suffice to withstand them. However I am minded to answer none of them, until I have related in my behoof, not indeed an entire story, for I would not seem to foist my stories in among those of so honourable a company as that with which I have made you acquainted, but a part of one, that its very incompleteness may shew that it is not one of them: wherefore, addressing my assailants, I say:—That in our city there ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... last without any kind of alteration of his constancie, he recommending his soule vnto almightie God, gaue vp the ghost. When hee had thus ended his life (thanks be to God) his skin being taken and filled with strawe, was commanded foorthwith to be hanged vpon the bowsprit of a Foist, [Footnote: A Foist as it were a Brigandine, being somewhat larger then halfe a galley, much vsed of the Turkish Cursaros, or as we call them Pirates or Rouers.] and to be caried alongst the coast of Syria by the sea side, that all the port townes might see, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... interpreting and enforcing them, and a swarm of petty officials are kept busy attending to this intricate machine of popular government. In sober truth, it must be said that capitalism has created, and could not exist without, the very bureaucracy it charges Socialism with attempting to foist upon the nation."[301] ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... view of French married life is wickedly false.' The corruption of morals, she says, which so generally prevails in Paris, and which has been so systematically aggravated by the luxury and extravagance of the second Empire, has emboldened writers to foist these false pictures of ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... ever seen such a concentration of vice? See how baseness and wickedness can stand with head erect! Oh, hardened monsters! But the other eleven. How can they expect us to believe this transparent falsehood—this palpable device? How can they foist it upon ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... peoples may be molified and healed by indemnities, which also serve his purpose because they necessitate the incurring of a bonded debt, interest bearing. But the history of the world for centuries proves that a condition of war is Mammon's opportunity to foist a debt upon a free people and to increase the burden of those whose bonds ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... Knickerbocker, in his desire to vindicate, as he thought, the character of his race against the accusation of immorality, hath by his denial not only committed a grievous sin against "the truth of history," but hath greatly added thereto, by attempting to foist off the opprobrium of the same on to the shoulders of the Connecticut folks. But history will not remain forever falsified, and the day has at length arrived when every historical tub must "stand on its own bottom," and the world will henceforth know that the New Netherlanders did not take bundling ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles

... Jeremiah with its discovery and introduction to the Monarch, and even with its composition, may be ignored. Had there been a particle of evidence for this, it would have been seized and magnified by the legalists in Israel, not to speak of those apocryphal writers who foist so much else on Jeremiah and Baruch.(268) That they have not even attempted this is proof—if proof were needed—that Jeremiah, the youthful son of a rural family, and probably still unknown to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... didn't know why. He had always counted on Letty when the time should come to speak the word. He had shown his heart in everything but words; what more did a girl want? Of course, if any one preferred a purely fantastic duty to a man's love, and allowed a scapegrace brother to foist two red-faced, squalling babies on her, there was nothing to be said. So, in this frame of mind he had had one flaming, passionate, wrong-headed scene with his father, and strode out of Beulah with dramatic gestures of shaking ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... inside to the mask But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes. Whatever consciousness begins the task The task's accepted use to sleepness ties. Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces, Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing, Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces And get a whole world on their forgot causing; And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking, Itself goes not unmasked to ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa

... myself more or less of a fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of retaliating, and would foist upon me his favourite authors. He was never a worshipper of any one writer, but always had at least a dozen prophets in whose ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall

... that he had not come for any Seraphine! Mora might deny herself to him; but she would not foist another upon him. Only, alas! this grave and Reverend Prioress of whom the Bishop spoke, hardly seemed one with the woman of his desire; she who, but three evenings before, had yielded her lips to his, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... have been tracked by his trail of romances, as was Hop-o'-my-Thumb, in the fairy tale, by the white stones he dropped behind him. Poor Barbier, who ministered to a passion for novels that demanded twenty volumes a day, was at his wit's end. He tried to foist on the Emperor the romances of the year before last; but these Napoleon had generally read, and he refused, with imperial scorn, to look at them again. He ordered a travelling library of three thousand volumes to be made for him, but it was proved that the task ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... love-sick old fool—you gaudy tricked-out ass with the cap and bells dangling about your ears. Take care lest I snuff out the candle of your life, and so at length put an end to the infamous tricks which you try to foist upon the good, honest, modest ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... problem of governing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the enfranchisement of the women of these newly won island possessions. She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the world to foist upon them an exclusively masculine government, a "male oligarchy," as she called it. "I really believe I shall explode," she wrote Clara Colby, "if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your voice in protest.... I wonder if when ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... gross suggestion of immoral relation between Yorick, the clergyman and moralist, and the Paris maiden, seemed to Bode inconsistent with the then current acceptation of Yorick's character; and hence he preferred by artifice to foist the misdemeanor on to the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, in the Tyrol. His death was the signal for empirics and visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult philosophy, written in his name—of which you may see ten folios—not more than a quarter, I believe, genuine. And these foolish books, as much as anything, have ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... from you, Naomi. Carroll has placed himself beyond the pale by what he has done in having the impertinence to foist himself upon us as a social equal. Now, Carroll—are you ready with ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen



Words linked to "Foist" :   inclose, enclose, inflict, impose, put in, foist off, bring down



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