"Sophistry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Philosophy in Greece"[905] without feeling that his vindication of Plato is complete and unanswerable: "Plato never represents the Sophists as teaching a lax morality to their disciples. He does not make sophistry to consist in holding wicked opinions; he represents them as only too orthodox in general,[906] but capable of giving utterance to immoral paradoxes for the sake of vanity. Sophistry rather tampers and trifles with the moral convictions ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... have enjoyed property not rightfully their own, is an aggravation of the injury which they have committed, and is so far from being a reason for letting them enjoy that property for ever, that it is rather a reason for compelling them to make prompt restitution. With this childish sophistry the petitions on our table are filled. Is it possible that any man can be so dull as not to perceive that, if this be a reason, it is a reason against all our statutes of limitation? I do a greater wrong to my tailor if I withhold payment ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... what does he mean by poetical? "The essence of poetry," he says, "is invention—such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights." Here, again, there is confusion and sophistry. There is much high and noble poetry of which invention, such invention as is here spoken of, is not the essence. Devotional poetry is of that character. Who would require something unexpected and surprising in a strain of thanksgiving, repentance, or supplication? Such feelings as these, if ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... advancing to the examination of the problems of life, with an eye single only to the glory of truth. Like the Spartan of old she has thrown her spear into the thickest of the fray, and will fight gloriously in the midst thereof till she regains her own. No specious sophistry or vain delusion—no time-honored tradition or untenable doctrine can evade her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Montfort did not know how to answer so ridiculous a sophistry; and, truth to tell, she was more than pleased to hear from the lips of Roger de Conde what bored her on the ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Church contradicts the other on any single point of doctrine, then one or the other must be false, that is, it must be either asserting what Christ denied; or else denying what Christ asserted. They cannot, under any circumstances, be described as true Churches. This is not sophistry or subtilty. It is common-sense. Christ promised unity in promising truth; since truth is one. Is Christ divided? asks St. Paul. No! Then neither ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their sophistry and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Proposal, and make my Father happy in my Marriage! It must not be (return'd Don Henrique) my Honour, my Friendship forbids it. No (she return'd) your Honour requires it; and if your Friendship opposes your Honour, it can have no sure and solid Foundation. Female Sophistry! (cry'd Henrique;) but you need no Art nor Artifice, Ardelia, to make me love you: Love you! (pursu'd he:) By that bright Sun, the Light and Heat of all the World, you are my only Light and Heat—Oh, Friendship! Sacred Friendship, now assist me!—[Here for a Time ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... the last analysis, what you yourselves are. Let no sophistry blind you to the truth of that. There are rhythms in the world of space which we find only in the architecture of the past, and enamoured of their beauty we repeat them over and over (off the key for ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... a time when the minds of the rest of Europe were tolerably pacified in a religious respect, became the scene of theological controversies full of sophistry and bitterness, the natural consequence of the incipient oppression of the dissidents. The literature was overwhelmed with pamphlets, stuffed with a shallow scholastic erudition, and written in a style ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... hate, Anselmo—'tis a bitter word; Say rather fear—of what belongs to Heav'n. Was there no crime, Anselmo, when thou stol'st, Like a disguised thief, this trusting heart? What sophistry can'st thou put forth to show Thou should'st retain ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... any subtlety of doctrine? Is my character so little known to her that she can think me capable of craft or duplicity? Had I even the desire, I have neither the address nor the patience to practice them; no, loveliest Miss Beverley, though sometimes by vehemence I may incautiously offend, by sophistry, believe me, I never shall injure: my ambition, as I have told you, is to convince, not beguile, and my arguments shall be simple as ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... with that strong display of fervour for which I was remarkable at my years, and expected old Barnet to be utterly confounded; but he only shook his head, and, with the most provoking grin, said: "There he goes! Sickan sublime and ridiculous sophistry I never heard come out of another mouth but ane. There needs nae aiths to be sworn afore the session wha is your father, young goodman. I ne'er, for my part, saw a son sac like a dad, sin' my een first opened." With that he went away, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... equally consulted with my own. Indeed, if not principle, interest would make me act faithfully towards him, for my fortunes are bound up in his. But am I entitled, I, who can lose nothing, am I entitled to play with other men's fortunes? Am I all this time deceiving myself with some wretched sophistry? Am I, then, an intellectual Don Juan, reckless of human minds, as he was of human bodies; a spiritual libertine? But why this wild declamation? Whatever I have done, it is too late to recede; even this very moment delay is destruction, for now it is not a question as to the ultimate ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... descent, and maintain that on account of it he could not be admitted into the congregation of Israel. Samuel and other prominent men had to bring to bear all the weight of their authority to shield David against the consequences of Doeg's sophistry. (103) ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Editor," grapples with an equally modern and timely subject, viz., the license of the press. With terrible vividness he shows the misery, ruin, and degradation which result from the present journalistic practice of misrepresentation, sophistry, and defamation. It is a very dark picture he draws, with scarcely a gleam of light. The satire is savage; and the quiver of wrath is perceptible in many a sledge-hammer phrase. You feel that Bjoernson himself ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... giant who used to spoil young pilgrims with sophistry. He attacked Mr. Greatheart with a club; but Greatheart pierced him under the fifth rib, and then cut off his head.—Bunyan, Pilgrim's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... that even this sophistry has been able, with the help of a strong desire to repose in quiet upon the understanding of another, to mislead honest intentions, and an understanding not contemptible, it may not be superfluous to remark, that those things which are common among friends are only ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... such sophistry in my life," said Ralph in disgust. "You'll be telling us next," he added sarcastically, "that we hadn't ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Where others only see sand and reefs, not worth the trouble of cultivation, the Englishman discovers some productive germ that with his indefatigable energy brings forth a thousand fold. Nor is Colonial work, industrial activity and commercial thrift disturbed by bureaucratic sophistry or immoderate fiscal pretentions, that so frequently suffocate the most promising and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... other circumstances, Romola would have been sensitive to the appeal at the beginning of Savonarola's speech; but at this moment she was so utterly in antagonism with him, that what he called perplexity seemed to her sophistry and doubleness; and as he went on, his words only fed that flame of indignation, which now again, more fully than ever before, lit up the memory of all his mistakes, and made her trust in him seem to have been a purblind delusion. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... each other's presence, their natural and invincible antipathy to each other would have broken out into open and exterminating warfare. But why should we delay longer upon an argument which is based on gross and monstrous sophistry? It can mislead only such as wish to be misled. The lovers of sunlight are in little danger of rushing into the professor's dungeon. Those who, having something to conceal, covet darkness, can find it there, to their hearts' content. The hour can not be far ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... preparing our lesson, was it wrong? Yes. In spite of the old sophistry I knew it to be so. But what attitude should one adopt? To refuse publicly to have any part in the system would seem like mock-heroics. The only course open was to learn the work and earn the marks. Inevitably I had arrived ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... be considerably more valuable; and one would think it apparent, that such occasional premiums have no more to do with justice, than a levy of black mail, paid by its victim, because he would fare no worse. The New York Express exposes the sophistry of its contemporary, by simply asking what is paid to authors of less reputation, who may possess even superior merit; and The Literary World—a periodical of The Spectator class,—though it growls a little at Punch, and now ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... her conversation, and seemed to be the governing motive of all her actions. And when she had once discovered the truth and the right, at which she appeared to arrive with intuitive quickness, no wheedling or sophistry could blind her to their force; and no inducements could be offered sufficient to cause her to waver in their support. And yet this peculiar trait, as deeply seated as it was, and as firmly as it ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... crafty words shall mar, Nor sophistry distract; No parrying counsel jar With the eternal fact;— Keep watch, my soul, in fear, The Judge of men ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... to, and duty towards her changed and took on a greater freedom. To pour forth worship and offers of service at the feet of a happy woman is at once an impertinence to her and a shame to yourself. But to pour forth such worship, such offers of service, at the feet of an unhappy woman—age-old sophistry, so often ruling the speech and actions of men to their fatal undoing!—this is praiseworthy and legitimate, a matter not of privilege merely, but of obligation to whoso would ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... intelligible language, that every word, every sentence, carried conviction with it. He conversed of rational liberty, of freedom as the natural rights of man, and as the law of God and nature. He put the matter clearly and distinctly, undisguised by sophistry; and, as far as I could discover by his discourse, I had already an inherent love of that liberty of which he spoke: I was naturally an enthusiastic admirer of freedom, and an implacable foe to tyranny and oppression; and this I admitted to him, at the same ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is what we are so ready to say,' she answered, her breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it belongs to them, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... if he attempts to remove the contradiction by any artificial, hasty, or forced process. If his object is merely to find proof-texts in support of the doctrines he already believes, such paradoxes will afford him nothing but barren difficulties, and a sphere for the exercise of sophistry and misplaced ingenuity. But if he can bear to admit his ignorance, and is willing to examine these difficulties in order to correct his own errors, enlarge his own views, and learn something really new, he will often find here ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... between freedom and slavery. It was the futile attempt of legislative diplomacy to escape the fatal logic of antecedent facts. The war with Mexico, like the annexation of Texas which paved the way for it, was inspired by the lust for slave territory. No sophistry could disguise this fact, nor could its significance be overstated. The prophets of slavery saw clearly that restriction meant destruction. They girded themselves for battle on this issue, and were not at all placated by Northern disclaimers of "abolitionism," ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis—to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry—to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes Future effects dreaded from its past enormities God is only the invention of fear Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration Invention of new tortures and improved racks Labour as much as possible in the dark Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage My means were the boundaries ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... dealing with Kant's dictum, that the intuition of duty implies a God of necessity, is foolish enough to say "that this feeling of obligation rather excludes than compels the belief in a divine legislator;" which is a very discreditable piece of sophistry. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... once ensued placed the Papal Government in a position of great embarrassment. Its traditions and policy forbade it to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures. Concealment of the facts was impossible, sophistry was unavailing. Commercial prosperity now left Venice as well as Genoa. The front of Europe was changed. Maritime power had departed from the Mediterranean countries, and passed to ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... eternally for a coward had he held back; that he took up his weapon in self-defence precisely as a man levels his gun at the house-breaker or the midnight assassin;—the expounder of the law has still been proof against sophistry which, once accepted, must tend inevitably to social disorganization. The deliberate resolution to kill a fellow-creature has nothing to do with self-defence. To destroy another in cold blood is murder in the sight of the law, and can assume no other aspect. But what availed it that ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... bound meekly to submit, and to be torn in pieces or roasted alive without a struggle. The arguments in favour of this proposition were futile indeed: but the place of sound argument was amply supplied by the omnipotent sophistry of interest and of passion. Many writers have expressed wonder that the high spirited Cavaliers of England should have been zealous for the most slavish theory that has ever been known among men. The truth is that this theory at first presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... while to think, not pausing that she might answer her aunt's sophistry, which she hardly noticed, but that she might consider, if it were possible, what it was that she was about to do;—that there might be left a moment to her before she had surrendered herself for ever to her doom. And then she spoke. "Aunt ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... scoffs at contemporary religious beliefs. Lastly, he is impatient of hearing from the half-converted Cratylus the doctrine that falsehood can neither be spoken, nor uttered, nor addressed; a piece of sophistry attributed to Gorgias, which reappears in the Sophist. And he proceeds to demolish, with no less delight than he had set up, ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... which Cicero and his friends discuss is, the endurance of pain. Is it an unmixed evil? Can anything console the sufferer? Cicero at once condemns the sophistry of Epicurus. The wise man cannot pretend indifference to pain; it is enough that he endure it with courage, since, beyond all question, it is sharp, bitter, and hard to bear. And what is this courage? Partly ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... carried Cornelia a considerable distance beyond her position on the evening of her return from New York, when she had excused her beautiful appearance, to herself, by suggesting that it would not do for the husband of her sister to detest her! That was sophistry, and it was sophistry that served her now; but the subjects upon which she exercised it were becoming hourly more and more ticklish. The woman of two weeks back would have started and turned pale before the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Dogmatism was its absolute reliance on the wisdom of Hippocrates, and Methodism was marred by its insufficiency and sophistry. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... chair.[174] And hence the frequent alterations which took place in its philosophical tenets; which, depending rather on the arbitrary determinations of its present head, than on the tradition of settled maxims, were accommodated to the views of each successive master, according as he hoped by sophistry or concession to overcome the repugnance which the mind ever will feel to the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... might be kept a little in check, till he could resume the subject more at large from the beginning, under his second signature, Camillus.... I gave a copy or two, by way of experiment, to honest-hearted men of common understanding, and they were not able to parry the sophistry of Curtius. I have ceased, therefore, to give them. Hamilton is really a colossus to the anti-republican party.... For God's sake, take up your pen, and give a fundamental reply to Curtius and Camillus." But Madison did not yield to Jefferson's entreaty. In these papers Webster reviewed the treaty ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... personal temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most moderate, of the ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... shew how the historical representation in Isaiah liii. is of some suffering prophet or remnant, yet the truth and patience, the grief and triumph, have their highest fulfilment in Him who said, 'FATHER, not My will but Thine.'" (p. 74.) I have transcribed this passage to illustrate the miserable sophistry of the author. It is foretold by Malachi that before the great and terrible day of the LORD, Elijah is to come back to Earth[56]. John Baptist came in his "spirit and power[57]," but was not Elijah himself. How does it follow from this that Isaiah may have prophesied merely ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... The heartless sophistry of this reasoning—heartless because of its pitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women—is exposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions of the men. He does not ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... from the worm in his path,—so I have allowed to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowledge, and not generally inhumane; allowing that the crime came ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart—and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... However unphilosophical it is held to be to multiply causes, the advocates of contagion are not likely to reduce the number, as this would at once cramp them in their pleadings before a court where sophistry is not always quickly detected. Those who see irresistible motives for dismissing all idea of contagion, look, on the contrary, for the production of cholera, to sources, admitted from remote times to have a powerful ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... there is one supreme there cannot be a concurrent authority; and further, that where the laws of the Union are supreme, those of the States must be subordinate; because there cannot be two supremes. This is curious sophistry. That two supreme powers cannot act together is false. They are inconsistent only when they are aimed at each other or at one indivisible object. The laws of the United States are supreme, as to all their proper, constitutional objects; ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... doubt, but oh, it's beguiling sophistry! It's so perfectly disguised that I seldom recognize it except at night when I lie awake, and it sits on my bed, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would not only greatly mar his mother's happiness, but in all probability lead to a renewal of the intimacy between his father and Gurley; an event which he himself felt was to be deprecated. But the Demon of Sophistry, who first taught self-deceiving man how to make "the wish father to the thought," here interposing, whispered to the incipient lover that his father had reformed, and why not then Gaut Gurley? This reasoning, however, could not be made to satisfy his judgment; and again ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... society made fruitless attempts to break the force of the blow dealt it by Garrison in the United States. But wherever its emissaries traveled "The Thoughts" confronted and confounded them. So that Mr. Garrison was warranted in saying that "all that sophistry or misrepresentation could effect to overthrow its integrity has been attempted in vain. The work, as a whole, stands irrefutable." The attempts made to maintain its hold upon the British public were characterized by duplicity and misrepresentation beyond anything ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... undeniable Gospel. Its teachings cannot be passed by and discarded. All must admit that it would be happiness to follow and perfection to imitate Him. None ever felt for Him a sincere emotion of contempt, nor in anger accused Him of sophistry, nor saw immorality lurking in His doctrines; however they may judge of those who succeeded Him, and claimed to be His apostles. Divine or human, inspired or only a reforming Essene, it must be agreed that His teachings are far nobler, far purer, far less alloyed with error and imperfection, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... neither admire nor love? Why wear out life in a course of action which leads neither to wealth nor honors? Why turn away from pleasures which lie near us to follow after ideal things? These are questions which force themselves upon us; and it requires faith and courage not to be shaken by this sophistry. Visions of ideal life float before young eyes, and if to be attracted by what is high and fair were enough, it were not difficult to be saint, sage, or hero; but when we perceive that the way to the best is the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,—not of the individual only, but of all ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... he not, indeed, be considered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses? I can see clearly enough where the contributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also understand how one accustomed to value realities only as they resembled fables should be won with such pensive sophistry; and I can certainly sympathize with his feeling that the mariner's failure to reappear according to appointment added its final and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and completed the mystery from which the man emerged and ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... diminish the demand; and a reduced demand will send the price down again. It is not certain, therefore, after all, that the tax will really raise the price." A glance at the diagram will keep us out of such a bog of sophistry and muddle. For if we suppose the amount of the tax per unit of the commodity to be represented by Ss, the curve ss' (drawn, as it is, roughly parallel to SS') will represent the new conditions of supply ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... for a moment whether it were not wrong to distrust the power of truth and virtue, and not to let Mr. Clifton see I could demolish the audacious sophistry by which he had endeavoured to confound and overwhelm me. But my ideas were deranged, and I could not collect sufficient fortitude. Oh how dangerous is this confusion of the judgment, and how desirable that heavenly presence of mind which is equal to these great these trying occasions! I therefore ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... degradation of morals, for they dissected and represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, What is there in it?—and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast. Charmides was unmarried, and it is not ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence the business of being a citizen almost ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... throughout the most characteristic element. The fragments cohere by external cement, not by an internal unity of thought; and Pope too often descends to the level of mere satire, or indulges in a quaint conceit or palpable sophistry. Yet it would be very unjust to ignore the high qualities which are to be found in this incongruous whole. The style is often admirable. When Pope is at his best every word tells. His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... serious conversation; in short, what he said, and what I felt, was like a refreshing shower falling upon earth that had been dried for ages. It has not made me unhappy; I have felt ever since humble. I have longed for virtue: I hope to be truly virtuous; to let sophistry fly from my mind; not to be enthusiastic and foolish but only to be so far religious as will lead to virtue. There seems nothing so little understood ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Broechner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... "I shall still find you sincere, Harrington; scorning to take any unfair advantage in argument, and impatient of all sophistry, as I have ever found you. You will be fully aware of the moral significance of the conclusion at which you have arrived, —even that there is no conclusion to be arrived at; and you will be miserable,—as all must be who have your power to ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... played out the game. That one night in the open had shaken his nerves. Until then there had been left to him at least a few grounds upon which he could base his unblushing demands upon his neighbours' stores. Now he must beg instead of borrowing. The most brazen sophistry could not dignify by the name of "loan" the coin contemptuously flung to a beachcomber who slept on the bare ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... manner; which is not by holding up its hand, but by falling on its face. But there is no more curious quality in its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of hurry and fatigue, with which it flings down its argument—or rather its refusal to argue. It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything. It does not so much poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one. For instance, one of these papers printed an article on Sir Stuart Samuel, who, having broken the great Liberal statute against corruption, ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... have applied for relief whenever he felt harassed and discouraged in public business. But here this great man was interested by the subject he discusses, and by the whole course of his experience and conduct, to refute the dogmas of that pusillanimous sophistry and selfish indulgence by bringing forward the most glorious examples and achievements of patriotism. In this strain he had doubtless commenced his exordium, and in this strain we find him continuing it at the point in which the palimpsest becomes legible. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... diffuse peritonitis, said young man is not in line for saving life; on the contrary, he is liable to mismanage and meet with as great a failure, and be the cause of as unnecessary a death as was the good doctor from whom we are quoting and of whose medical sophistry I am trying to give the true ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... sophistry of Satan's citation of scripture was unworthy a categorical reply; his doctrine deserved neither logic nor argument; his misapplication of the written word was nullified by scripture that was germane; the lines of the psalmist were met by the binding ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... light of investigation on the things of religion? There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy. It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by sophistry. How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no pole ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... two illustrious debaters. Douglas, says Mr. Blaine, "was everywhere known as a debater of singular skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was a master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... of some strength to resist them; this adds no more strength to us, but diminisheth and taketh from our vigilance and so exposeth us, as it were, naked and secure, to the cruelty of our adversary. I would wish every Christian to be thoroughly acquainted, and often conversant in two books of sophistry, I may so term them—the deceitfulness of his own heart, and the deceivableness of sin, Jer. xvii. and Heb. iii. 13. These are the volumes he would daily turn over to learn to discern the sophistications, self ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the native which throws the gauntlet into the tyrant's face. Our very misfortune ensures our success—because then we had some something to lose, now we have nothing. We can only gain—for I defy the sophistry of despotism to invent anything of public or private oppression which is ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... these fine intellectual feats are performed afterwards causes a reaction from my sense of satisfaction, and sometimes makes that appear comparatively worthless, the power, skill, and dexterity of which concealed the sophistry and seduced me while ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... tone of slate, deep when one chanced to find oneself peering deep into them. And they were old. Any spontaneity of youth which might have flashed from them at one time had faded entirely and left a sort of wistful sophistry behind, an almost plaintive hunger which made the pity of his shoulder-stoop—still mercifully only a prophecy of what the next twenty years of toil might leave it—an even more pitiful thing. His sheer bigness should ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... and animated enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination, while it delights and improves the wise and the good, will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, under the false name of Philosophy, and with a malignant industry has been employed against the peace, good order, and happiness of society, in our free and prosperous country; but thanks be to GOD, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... logic, immaterial dissertations on materiality, and abstruse investigations of useless subjects, they are mere literary legerdemain. Their disputations being usually built on an undefinable chimera, are solved by a paradox. Instead of exercising their power of reason they exert their powers of sophistry, and divide and subdivide every subject with such casuistical minuteness, that those who are not convinced, are almost invariably confounded. This custom, it must be granted, is not quite so prevalent as it once was: a general spirit of reform is rapidly diffusing itself; ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain, The creature's at his foolish work again, Throned in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes with sophistry. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... men,—lovers of the word of democracy, and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in deceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democratic voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate slavery in all its forms; and that, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... living, and instruct men to be content with what they have, and to be laborious in their calling; they forbid men to make war from a desire of getting more, but make men courageous in defending the laws; they are inexorable in punishing malefactors; they admit no sophistry of words, but are always established by actions themselves, which actions we ever propose as surer demonstrations than what is contained in writing only: on which account I am so bold as to say that we are become ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... However I thought proper to make this Experiment with very slender hopes of success indeed, since Recourse to the Law is at best a desperate effort. I have now laid open my affairs to you without Disguise and Stated the Facts as they appear, declining all Comments, or the use of any Sophistry to palliate my application, or urge my request. All I desire is a speedy ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... appropriate all possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the oaths by which he had bound himself to murder Duncan, another art of sophistry by which men have sometimes deluded their consciences, and persuaded themselves that what would be criminal in others is virtuous in them; this argument Shakespeare, whose plan obliged him to make Macbeth yield, has ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... that researches into {255} scientific truth are perverted by some in our own times into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures." In words of ambiguous sophistry, they proceeded to request, in effect, that people would be pleased to adopt the views of churches as to the complete inspiration of all the canonical books. The great question whether the Word ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... or more power than he; and as to that pretence which is usually made use of, that Life is meant as a blessing, and that therefore when it becomes an evil, we may if we think fit resign it, it is indeed but a mere sophistry. We acknowledge God to be infinite in all perfections, and consequently in wisdom and power; from the latter we receive our existence in this Life, and as to the measure it depends wholly on the former; so that if ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... You will never be happy as Sir Ronald Keith's wife; he will never be happy as your husband. I know how you are trying to delude yourself; I know you are trying to believe you will love him and be happy by-and-by. Don't indulge such sophistry any longer; don't be led away by your ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... unanswerable appeal that he had ever heard or read, was made for nearly an hour by the old gentleman. So perfect was his recollection, that every argument urged against the Christian religion was met in the order in which it was advanced. Hume's sophistry on the subject of miracles, was, if possible, more perfectly answered than it had already been done by Campbell. And in the whole lecture there was so much simplicity and energy, pathos and sublimity, that not another ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... against the appointment of a Federal officer to choose a Federal President, was not a barrier at all—the moral sense of the whole American people was shocked. No form of words can cover up the falsehood; no sophistry can hide it; no lapse of time wash it out. It will follow its contrivers wherever they go, confront them whenever they turn, and as often as one of them asks the suffrages of his countrymen, he may expect to hear them reply, "Why do you reason with us, why seek ...
— The Vote That Made the President • David Dudley Field
... Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... General McDowell and his corps, while it illustrated the great anxiety of the President and Secretary of War for the safety of Washington, caused the failure of the campaign on the Peninsula. All the sophistry in the world, my son, cannot change ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... heart is, after all, the best reply to the sophistry just noticed. No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question. It is not more incomprehensible than distinctive. There lives no man who at some period ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it now attacks God, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... evils I was made,— Tyranny, Sophistry, Hypocrisy; Whence I perceive with what wise harmony Themis on me Love, Power, and Wisdom laid. These are the basements firm whereon is stayed, Supreme and strong, our new philosophy; The antidotes against that trinal lie Wherewith the burdened world groaning is weighed. Famine, war, pestilence, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, a soaking which has somewhat the same effect on the moral and mental fibre that seven years in a tanner's vat used to have upon sole leather. How often I have known Adin, on some great political occasion or crisis, to crush some sophistry or compromise, or attempt to get things on a lower plane, by indignantly flashing out with some old text, such as, "Righteousness exalteth a nation," or "Sin is a reproach to any people," or answer, as he did once, to a gentleman who wanted him to sacrifice ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... to receive it. The address was afterward changed to "George Washington, &c., &c." The messenger endeavored to show that this bore any meaning which might be desired. But Washington understood the sophistry and refused any communication which did not distinctly recognize his position as ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... feeling and the judgment are not necessarily in accord. The feeling may lag behind an enlightened judgment. On the other hand, the feeling of repugnance to acting in certain ways may be a justifiable protest against a bit of intellectual sophistry. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull. Dulness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... things; others like young puppies, as Plato[265] says, rejoicing in tearing and biting, betake themselves to strifes and questions and sophisms; but most plunging themselves into dialectics immediately store themselves for sophistry; and some collect sentences[266] and histories and go about (as Anacharsis said he saw the Greeks used money for no other purpose but to count it up), merely piling up and comparing them, but making no practical use of them. Applicable here is that ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... he appeared to listen with attention, and offered nothing against the reasoning of OMAR, yet secretly despised it as sophistry; which cunning only had rendered specious; and which he was unable to confute, merely because it was subtil, and not because it was true: he had been led, by his passions, first to love, and then to adopt different opinions; and as every man is inclined to judge of others by himself, he doubted, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... satellite, saturnine, schism, scurrilous, sectarian, secular, sedative, sedentary, seditious, sedulous, segregate, seismograph, senescent, sententious, septuagenarian, sequester, sibilant, similitude, sinecure, sinuous, solicitous, solstice, somnolent, sophisticated, sophistry, sorcery, spasmodic, specious, spirituelle, splenetic, spontaneity, sporadic, spurious, stipend, stipulate, stoical, stricture, stringency, stultify, stupendous, sublimity, suborn, subpoena, subsidiary, subsidy, substratum, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... do something that's worth while, and to leave behind us at the last something that hasn't got the American eagle stamped on it with the motto 'In God We Trust.' Ugh! How the good Lord must hate us for that copyrighted chunk of sophistry I It's a wonder He doesn't send His angels down to make ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... backbiting, reveling, and professing to be traveling the narrow way that leads to eternal rest the same as if there was no Bible. Such have no examination of their lives, and should they have they use some satanic sophistry to gloss their sin. "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge?" It is he that shows out of a godly life that he is a Christian. It is he that carefully examines every act and thought and word and by Heaven's grace tolerates nothing in his life ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... severe punishment at my father's hands, and that his hands were stayed by Mr. Blight's intercession was but another evidence of his power. When my father reasoned with me kindly, instead of whipping me, I yielded, not to his sophistry but to that masterful influence before which even he seemed to bend. I realized the hopelessness of my cause, and found myself facing Mr. Blight again, an humble suppliant for his pardon. Humbly I asked him if I might not soon see Penelope again, and she joined ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... pondered his opinion as he gave it, and his words came irregularly by twos and threes. "It may be hard—for some while—to make her see the—the necessity. Women fight for their own by instinct—right or wrong, they do not ask themselves. If you reason, they will seize upon any sophistry to confute you—to persuade themselves. Doubtless the instinct comes from God; but to men, sometimes, it ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the cry of horror that had risen to her lips. The man's cold-blooded sophistry was threatening to make a breach in ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... concerned in supporting an impious thing in the world. The way that some may take to prove it impious, is, because it will tend highly to the interest of swearing.—But this I take to be plain downright sophistry, and playing upon words: If this be called the Swearing project, or the Oath-act, the increase of swearing will be very much for the benefit and interest of swearing, (i.e.) to the subscribers in the fund to be raised by this fruitful Swearing-act, if it should be so called; but not to the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... will hear of no other than a Greek criterion for Indian chronology, Prof. Weber (op. cit.) finds Greek influence—his universal solvent—in the development of India's religion, philosophy, literature, astronomy, medicine, architecture, &c. To support this fallacy the most tortuous sophistry, the most absurd etymological deductions are resorted to. If one fact more than another has been set at rest by comparative mythology, it is that their fundamental religious ideas, and most of their gods, were derived ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... reader. The strain of their position in all these respects made Newman and his allies no exemplary school. Their example has been, perhaps rightly, held to account for something that was often under the evil name of sophistry suspected and disliked in Mr. Gladstone himself, in his speeches, his writings, and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... are in quest of information on a subject the most momentous which can engage the attention of a free people; that the field through which you have to travel is in itself spacious, and that the difficulties of the journey have been unnecessarily increased by the mazes with which sophistry has beset the way. It will be my aim to remove the obstacles to your progress in as compendious a manner as it can be done without ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Sophistry suggested that it might be the missing girl, Esmay, and certainly she who had walked here was the veiled woman of the temple worshippers; there were the footprints, broader and heavier in appearance, of her companion, and the halting progress of the black-chapped ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... clustering about individuals, the deadly results of autopsies, the inoculation by fluids from the living patient, the murderous poison of hospitals,—does there not result a conclusion that laughs all sophistry to scorn, and renders all argument ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... modern human philosophy are inadequate to grasp the Principle of Christian Science, or to demonstrate it. Revelation shows this Principle, and will rescue reason from the thrall of error. Revelation must subdue the sophistry of intellect, and spiritualize consciousness with the dictum and the demonstration of Truth and Love. Christian Science Mind-healing can only be gained by working from a purely Christian standpoint. Then it heals the ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... which Hotspur might have spoken, we have the sophistry of the thinker poetically expressed, and not one word from the hot, high-couraged soldier. Indeed, in the last four lines from the bookish "we read" to the end, we have the gentle poet in love with desperate extremities. The passage must be compared ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of these homilies. Let the reader, however, draw some idea of their nature from the one written for Easter Sunday, which has been deemed sufficient proof that the Saxon Church ever denied the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation; for he there expressly states, in terms so plain that all the sophistry of the Roman Catholic writers cannot pervert its obvious meaning, that the bread and wine is only typical of the body ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of words, striking and vivid in his language, his harangues were perfect treatises on the subjects he discussed. The only rival of Mirabeau, he needed but a cause more natural and more sterling to have become his equal: but sophistry could not deck abuses in colours more specious than those with which Maury invested the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... vex'd— Which smile one day, and droop the next, The gallant tulip and the rose, Emblems which some use to disclose Bodied ideas—their weak grace Is mere imposture to thy face. For Nature in all things, but thee, Did practise only sophistry; Or else she made them to express How she could vary in her dress: But thou wert form'd, that we might see Perfection, not variety. Have you observ'd how the day-star Sparkles and smiles and shines from far; Then to the gazer ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... "Deduction," endeavoring to prove, from old authors, that it was not till 1686 that the Polish limits were extended beyond the mouth of the Dwina and the little town of Stoika on the Dnieper, five miles below Kiow. The following is a specimen of the lawyer-like sophistry which the Empress employs to establish her claim to the Russian territory, which remained in the hands of the Poles after the treaty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Dissertation on Debt and Debtors', where the subject was, I imagine, treated in the orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... or definitions of cheating and gambling. Public shows, dances, punishments, and executions affect, in time, standards of decency, taste in amusement, sentiments of humanity, views as to what is interesting and attractive. Methods of argument which are fashionable may train people to flippancy, sophistry, levity of mind, and may destroy the power to think and reason correctly. Scherr[409] says that fashion served as a means to transfer to Germany the depravation of morals which had corrupted the Latin nations in the sixteenth century. Fashions now spread through ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... jay, with all its sophistry, did not apparently know that French sportsmen only kill what they can eat, and therefore its fears would in any case ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... week, in the cynic-philosopher's study, and of there disputing on every imaginable subject—Mr. Vanstone flourishing the stout cudgels of assertion, and Mr. Clare meeting him with the keen edged-tools of sophistry. They generally quarreled at night, and met on the neutral ground of the shrubbery to be reconciled together the next morning. The bond of intercourse thus curiously established between them was strengthened ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... this sophistry, which had done duty so often and had been successful so often in their case as in others, by calling upon their Deputies to resign. Laferre neglected to do so. He was too greatly occupied with his opportunity. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... furnished with contents, etc., that nothing but searching through three thick volumes would decide. In these volumes I find, augmenting as we go on, declarations about the character and power of "the Church" which have a suspicious appearance. The suspicion is increased by that curious piece of sophistry, No. 87, on religious reserve. The queer paradoxes of that tract leave us in doubt as to everything but this, that the church(man) is not bound to give his whole counsel in all things, and not bound to say what the things are in which ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... work before us. In the conscious pride of mental might and in the easier moments of conversations, that illuminated the minds of Reynolds[10] and of Burke, Johnson delighted to indulge in a lively sophistry which might sometimes deceive himself, when at first he merely wished to sport in elegant raillery or ludicrous paradox. When these sallies were recorded and brought to bear against him on future occasions, irritated at their misconstruction and conscious ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... grace with the air of a John Roberts, and retired triumphant; while the Charchester representatives pointed out that as their score was at seventy-four, they had really won a moral victory by four points. To which specious and unsportsmanlike piece of sophistry Pringle ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... no sophistry can sew up. Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men. They carry it so far that the theory of Slave ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... enabled my mother to live luxuriously. Half the sum would afford every wished-for comfort to my Anna, and much less would enable us at once to marry. Here was the rock on which I went to pieces—here was the giddy light that blinded me to all considerations—here was the sophistry that made all other reasoning dull and valueless. I did not stop to enquire what movement of feeling could operate so generously upon my uncle. If an unfavourable suggestion forced itself upon me, it was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... contract did really underlie American, as all human society, nothing can be more certain than that the Negro had neither part nor lot in it. When Douglas pretended that the black race was not included in the expression "all men" he was talking sophistry, but when he said that the American Republic had been made "by white men for white men" he was stating, as Lincoln readily acknowledged, an indisputable historical fact. The Negro was a man and had the natural rights ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... "comrades" have refused to meet them. The Leipziger Volkszeitung for July 16th, 1915, contains more than a column about "We and the French," in which the German party spreads the usual Teutonic lime of sophistry and empty phrases. ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... of our correspondents, and find that, when they have occasion to refer to them, they also confirm the great facts already ascertained, then our belief becomes conviction which can not be overturned by any sophistry, that these things did occur. If Whig and Tory agree in relating the facts of James' flight, and William's accession, if the letters of his Jacobite friends and those of the French ambassador confirm the statements of the English historian, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... observation, how many persons there are who continue the hateful practice of enslaving their fellow men, and who acquiesce in the sophistry of the advocates of that practice, merely from want of reflection, and from an habitual attention to their own immediate interest. If to such were often applied the force of reason, and the persuasion ...
— Minutes of the Proceedings of the Second Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies Established in Different Parts of the United States • Zachariah Poulson
... something far deeper than any social prejudice or political theory on the part of slaveholders, or any general apprehension of danger to their peculiar property. That cause is a moral one, and is to be found in the recklessness, the conceit, the sophistry, the selfishness, which are necessarily engendered by Slavery itself. A generation of men educated to justify a crime against the Law of Nature because it is profitable, will hardly be restrained long by any merely political obligation, when they have been persuaded to see their advantage ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... informs may be crushed; the spirit in passing breathes on other souls, and other hearts are fired to action, and the fight goes on to victory. To the man whose mind is true and resolute ultimate victory is assured. No sophistry can sap his resistance; no weakness can tempt him to savage reprisals. He will neither abandon his heritage nor poison his nature. And in every crisis he is steadfast, in every issue justified. Rejoice, then good comrades; our souls are still our own. Through the coldness and depression ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Sophistry.—The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... were reason infallible, the separation of the churches would be an incalculable blessing, by securing to all minds a free investigation upon religious subjects. But infidelity desires no more powerful coadjutor than human reason in its freest exercise, because it is so liable to be led away by sophistry, and its invariable tendency is to reject as myths and fables all things which it cannot comprehend or for which it cannot see a material cause. Perfect reason is the twin brother and strongest supporter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in regard to the souls of the people——Oh! it was the merest sophistry to assume that such responsibility on the part of a clergyman is susceptible of being particularized. It should, he felt, be touched upon, if at all, in a very general way. Did that young woman expect ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... felt. In the Examiner, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift, an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St. John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... the refinements of an over-fastidious morality, reviewing the professional rules that are recognised in England, asks 'whether it be right that not merely believing, but knowing a statement to be true, he should do all that can be done by sophistry, by rhetoric, by solemn asseveration, by indignant exclamation, by gesture, by play of features, by terrifying one honest witness, by perplexing another, to cause a jury to think that statement false.' Bentham ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... or accomplished, but he had a strong, well-balanced mind, and he would go through forests of sophistry and masses of legal opinions straight to the point. Governor Wise, who admired him greatly, used to tell a story illustrative of the rough bark of Old Hickory's character. During the Administration of President Monroe, General Jackson, in command ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... that men of such acute understandings as Abelard and Lombard, who might have done much to reform the errors of the church, and to restore science in Europe, should have depraved both, by applying their admirable parts to weave those cobwebs of sophistry, and to confound the clear simplicity of evangelical truths, by a false philosophy ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... doubt had entered my mind I should have been miserable indeed; but no such thought fretted me. I was only hurt that he could have brought himself to believe anything against me, that he should have listened to her false sophistry and not have asked for my explanation; but, as I remembered that love was prone to jealousy and not above suspicion, I soon forgave ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... itself on the open theatre of the world in a fair and manly manner. Whatever are its excellences or defects, they are visible to all. It exists not by fraud and mystery; it deals not in cant and sophistry; but inspires a language that, passing from heart to heart, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck Pemberton somehow as expressive. After a moment the child repeated: "You are a hero!" Then he added: "They leave me with you altogether. You've all the responsibility. They put me off on you from morning till night. ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... conceive how Dona Leonor de Cisneros had been induced apparently to abandon the faith to which she had so long adhered. Falsehoods and devices of all sorts had been employed to induce her to make her peace with Rome. Every argument which sophistry could invent had been brought forward to shake her belief. There was a rack, with other fearful tortures, and the stake, on the one hand, and forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church on the other—ay, and a happy life with her Antonio. When at last the inquisitors found her stubborn, ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... not failed! And yet—and yet—what shall we say? And what shall we say of God's fatherhood? Shall we say as some do that as Judge He must do cruel things which as Father He would shrink from? God forbid! The Judge and the Father are one. Men would never use such sophistry about the character of God if it were put into plain words. "Ye must ken," said a godly old Scotchman, "that the Almighty may often have to do in His offeeshial capacity what He would scorn to do as a private individual!" I quote this not with flippancy but with stern ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... ears against the arguments of the heresiarch, when circumstances permit you not to withdraw the foot from his company. Anchor your thoughts upon the service of Our Lady, while he is expending in vain his heretical sophistry. Are you unable to maintain your attention on heavenly objects—think rather on thine own earthly pleasures, than tempt Providence and the Saints by giving an attentive ear to the erring doctrine—think of thy hawk, thy hound, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Caesars have most liberally construed! I am a poor casuist, Sir; nor do I think the loyal commander of the Coquette would wish to uphold all that sophistry can invent on such a subject. If we begin with potentates, for instance, we shall find the Most Christian King bent on appropriating as many of his neighbors' goods to his own use, as ambition, under the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... attire proclaimed him to be from the country; but his sophistry, his knowledge of the world and his wonderful insight into human nature contradicted his looks immeasureably. A conflict or two convinced his fellow students that he was more than a match for them in stealth and cunning, if not in dress ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... with your sophistry, Julian," replied Alice Bridgenorth, "any more than you can overpower me with your passion. Had the patriarch destined his son to death upon any less ground than faith and humble obedience to a divine commandment, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott |
