"Sycophancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very high rank; and the praises with which the Princess had loaded him, had not entirely fallen to the ground. He was no longer in the humour in which the morning had found him, disposed to outrage the feelings of the Emperor, and to insult his dignity; but, flattered by the adroit sycophancy which the old philosopher had learned from the schools, and the beautiful Princess had been gifted with by nature, he assented to the Empress's proposal; the more readily, perhaps, that the darkness did not permit him to see that there was distinctly ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Having a firm and just reliance on his own judgment, he was not partial to counsellors who dealt much in suggestions and objections. At the same time he had too much discernment, and too much elevation of mind, to be gratified by sycophancy. The confidant of such a prince ought to be a man, not of inventive genius or commanding spirit, but brave and faithful, capable of executing orders punctually, of keeping secrets inviolably, of observing facts vigilantly, and of reporting ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the May-flower are older than the white man, older perchance than the red man; they alone are the true Native Americans. Of the later wild plants, many of the most common are foreign importations. In our sycophancy we attach grandeur to the name exotic: we call aristocratic garden-flowers by that epithet; yet they are no more exotic than the humbler companions they brought with them, which have become naturalized. The dandelion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Tiberius that he laid no claim to imperial honours was met by the grave pretence that the needs of the state forbade his refusal of them, however reluctant he might be. His mother, Livia Augusta, was the object of a like sycophancy. But the world was not deceived by ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... circular telegram dispatched to the provinces three days later, the analysis of Japan's relationship to the Entente Powers being particularly revealing. The obsequious note which pervades this document is also particularly noticeable and shows how deeply the canker of sycophancy had ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... terrible admission. Again, baronets were almost invariably depicted in lurid colours by the best novelists. In short their presence at our public schools could not be safely tolerated, as even the children of good Radicals were not immune to the danger of snobbery and sycophancy. The Bill also provided for compulsory vegetarian diet and the abolition of all cadet corps, rifle-shooting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... Nile, and with Speke navigated Lake Tanganyika. He knew that he had not discovered the source, and he wanted to try again, but he and Speke quarreled, and pamphleteered against each other in the press. Burton, deficient in money, and in sycophancy, was discredited for a time, although now his name is immortal in geography as a pioneer of African travel. We have seen how he left his betrothed to study the Mormons, and he studied them more closely than his wife's book intimates, for she ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the epic tirade for the epigram as the vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpassed brilliance and verve. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and ...
— English Satires • Various
... laudation, acclamation, approval, encomium, panegyric, adulation, cheering, eulogy, plaudit, applause, cheers, flattery, sycophancy. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... and scorn marked this noble class. Of course there were exceptions, but the historians and satirists give the saddest pictures of their cold-hearted depravity. The sole result of friendship with a great man was a meal, at which flattery and sycophancy were expected; but the best wine was drunk by the host, instead of by the guest. Provinces were ransacked for fish and fowl and game for the tables of the great, and sensualism was thought to be no reproach. They violated the laws of chastity and decorum. They scourged to ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... a healthful moral influence, we have just as little reason to doubt. There is a sprinkling of verse in an appendix, which BURNS was good enough to praise. It is of that kind 'which neither gods nor men permit;' and is conclusive, not of BURNS'S judgment, but of his 'tender' sycophancy. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... people was universally lofty and honorable. A fawning sycophancy or little meannesses were unknown; social intercourse was unrestrained because all were honorable, and that reserve which so plainly speaks suspicion of your company was never seen. There was no habit ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Sage" of China (372-289 B.C.), is far more outspoken than Confucius in his denunciation of bad rulers. There was no sycophancy in the words which he uttered during an interview with King Hsuan of the State of Ch'i. "When the prince treats his ministers with respect, as though they were his own hands and feet, they in their turn look ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of their egotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by a universal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made a lie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity, but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases—as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... a murmur: 'It should suit so good a walker,' and burned to compliment—her spirited easy stepping, and scorned himself for the sycophancy it would be before they were on the common ground of a restored understanding. But an approval of any of her acts threatened him with enthusiasm for the whole of them, her person included; and a dam in his breast had to keep ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... openly assert that he is in the pay of the reactionary whites, whose purpose is to keep the Negro down; and the incumbent himself will tell his board of regents how much he is opposed by the Negroes because he labors for the interests of the white race. Out of such sycophancy it is easily explained why our State schools have been so ineffective as to necessitate the sending of the Negro youth to private institutions maintained by northern philanthropy. Yet if an outspoken Negro happens to be an instructor in a private school conducted by educators from the North, ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... meeting of the municipal body, and speech by Bierlyn, Prairial 25, year II.) " How can the insipid arrogance of these (Strasbourg) people be represented to you, their senseless attachment to the patrician families in their midst, the absurd feuil1antism of some and the vile sycophancy of others? How is it, they say, that moneyless interlopers, scarcely ever heard of before, dare assume to have credit in a town of sensible inhabitants and honest families, from father to son, accustomed to governing and renowned for centuries?"—Ibid., 113. (Speech of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... alarming to many; and to conservative habits of political thinking, the dread of innovation and of theory. The returned Tories had indeed all become Federalists, which fact, with many others, lent to this attitude the appearance of deficient patriotism, of sycophancy toward our ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... appetite, and he rose to return to the shop, involuntarily clutching his fist as he brushed close past the tyrant Tag-rag on the stairs, whom he would have been delighted to pitch down head-foremost. If he had done so, none of his fellow-slaves below, in spite of their present sycophancy towards Tag-rag, would have shown any particular alacrity in picking up their common oppressor. Poor Tittlebat resumed his old situation behind the counter; but how different his present, from his former air and manner! With his pen occasionally peeping pertly out of his ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... here, but the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and, paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram |
