"Diatribe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do stupid things and to be unable to know it. Probably no stupider thing was ever said or done than that by Wagner when he wrote a diatribe on the Jew in Art. He called it "Das Judenthum in der Musik" (Judaism in Music). He declared that the mightiest people in art and in several other things—the Jews—could not be artists for the reason that they were wanderers and ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... betrayed to the enemy, their daughters may be dishonoured or poisoned, their sons massacred; they may, in their old age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or broken by torture; and they will complain and be fierce in diatribe: the fiercest diatribe written against any Pope of the Renaissance being, perhaps, that of Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared with his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... with a bundle of letters, make up the first part of the Anatomy of Wit. From one of the letters we learn that Lucilla was as frail as she was beautiful, and that she died in evil report. The story, including the diatribe against love, is about as long as The Vicar of Wakefield. It begins as a romance and ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Nightingale. She was growing old, and she felt that she had closer and more imperative duties with her own family. Her niece could hardly forgive her. She poured out, in one of her enormous letters, a passionate diatribe upon the faithlessness, the lack of sympathy, the stupidity, the ineptitude of women. Her doctrines had taken no hold among them; she had never known one who had appris a apprendre; she could not even get a woman secretary; ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... we have seen, was at that time the object of assaults of zealous Christians and disloyal Jews, and hostile works against Judaism were the order of the day. Most of them, however, like the fabulous snake, vented their poison and died. It was different with McCaul's poignant diatribe against the cause of Judaism and the honor of the Talmud, which had been translated into many languages. Montefiore, while in Russia, urged Levinsohn to defend his people against their traducers, and the bed-ridden sage, almost ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... not giving a diatribe on American life, so will not pursue the matter farther. All that I am trying to do is simply this: to call attention to the fact that we are living fast—faster than our physical and mental make-up can long stand; that we have already reached the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher's name, listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... thus breathed his passion, in a diatribe which beats in abomination any slang that was ever ranted out of a tub by a mountebank saint, he harps back upon the prodigious attractiveness of his mistress, in the following pathetic, though not very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... of his audience by his patriotic eloquence. The countenances of his judges remained as cold to him as ever, and he turned to the serious business of his defence. His quick intelligence saw that the telling point in Coke's diatribe had been the emphasis he had laid on Raleigh's intimate friendship with Cobham. He began to try and explain away this intimacy, stating what we now know was not exactly true, namely that his 'privateness' with Cobham only concerned business, in which the latter ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... their opportunity for pouncing on their quondam associate. This he himself furnished by the famous North Briton, No. 45. That paper may now seem, to those who read it, a not very powerful, and not very daring diatribe. But the times were inflammable—the nation was frantic with rage at the peace—the ministry were young, and willing to flesh their new-got power in some victim or other; and Wilkes, in this paper, had now exposed himself to their fury. Warrants were instantly issued to arrest ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... closed by saying that while the officers of the bank refused to talk until the examiner had finished his work, it was known that securities aggregating a million and a quarter were missing. Then there was a diatribe on the possibility of such an occurrence; on the folly of a one-man bank, and of a Board of Directors that met only to lunch together and to listen to a brief report from the cashier, and on the poor policy of a government that arranges a three or four-day examination twice a year. The ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The famous diatribe against Jesuitism in the Latter-Day Pamphlets,[20] one of the most unfeignedly coarse and virulent bits of invective in the language, points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly unjust, because it takes for granted that Loyola and all Jesuits were deliberately conscious ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... with exceeding bitterness and party bias, he had some warrant for his diatribe. In the Injunctions of Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich[71] (1569), he says: "Item, that no person or persons calling themselves lords of misrule in the Christmas tyme, or other vnreuerent persons at any other tyme, presume ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... stranger listening to your gallant diatribe would inevitably conclude that your mother was as unnatural and unamiable as Lord Byron's; and that I, your most devoted, meek, and loving cousin, was quite as angelic as Miss Edgeworth's ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... diatribe against members of Voluntary Aid Detachments. They do not, as a rule, pretend to be what they are not, and I have found them splendid workers in their own department. They are not half-trained nurses but fully trained ambulance workers, ready ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... off wounded unto death. His sympathy for the natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of suffering and oppressed humanity. Some ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... into a controversy wherein the issue is of facts alone?" Suppose I were all that my enemies say of me, the question is not of my guilt, but of the truth of my charges. I was not surprised to read on the morning of Tuesday, the 13th of December, the diatribe printed below. It was published in the leading papers of the country in the form of an advertisement, in great type ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... jealous and vainglorious Frenchmen, succeeded in producing a bitter enmity between them. Voltaire resolved to set his mark—a mark never to be effaced;—on the forehead of Maupertuis, and wrote the exquisitely ludicrous Diatribe of Doctor Akakia. He showed this little piece to Frederic, who had too much taste and too much malice not to relish such delicious pleasantry. In truth, even at this time of day, it is not easy for any person who has the least perception of the ridiculous to read the jokes ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a few pairs of stockings, and a few handkerchiefs; I was disposed to let him take everything, having a presentiment that I would win back all I had lost; a very common error. A few years later I took my revenge by writing a diatribe against presentiments. I am of opinion that the only foreboding in which man can have any sort of faith is the one which forbodes evil, because it comes from the mind, while a presentiment of happiness has its origin ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... citizen, Nathanael Greene, was one of them. AEdanus Burke, a judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, wrote a violent pamphlet against the society of the Cincinnati under the pseudonym of Cassius, the slayer of tyrants; and this diatribe, translated and amplified by Mirabeau, awakened dull echoes among readers of Rousseau and haters of privilege in all parts of Europe. A swarm of brochures in rejoinder and rebutter issued from the press, and the nineteenth century had come in before ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... furious; he appealed again to the casual policeman, who, although reluctantly admitting he could give him no information, sympathized with him in his diatribe against the stupidities of the authorities. The policeman had himself been married by the registrar, and some time was lost in vain reminiscences; he at last suggested that inquiry could be made at a ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... editor of this brochure explains that the document here made public, called Croquis ou Projet de Revolution de Monsieur de Mirabeau, was seized at the house of Madame Lejai, the wife of Mirabeau's publisher, on October 6, 1789. Beginning with a diatribe against the French monarchy, the document goes on to say that "in order to triumph over this hydra-headed monster these ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Florence alone, understood the beatings of his heart in every page! And now!—it so chanced that the work was reviewed in the paper he read—it was not only a hostile criticism, it was a personally abusive diatribe, a virulent invective. All the motives that can darken or defile were ascribed to him. All the mean spite of some mean mind was sputtered forth. Had the writer known the awful blow that awaited Maltravers at that time, it is not in man's nature but that he ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... diatribe concerning the lively Judith: "Surely you remember her, Jeff. She used to come here selling blackberries when she was a kid—a little barefooted girl and as pert as you please even then. After old Dick Buck died she used to trap ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... 12, 1848, was an elaborate defense of the Whig doctrine summarized in a House resolution passed a week or ten days before, that the Mexican War "had been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President," James K. Polk. The speech is not a mere party diatribe, but a terse historical and legal examination of the origin of the Mexican War. In the after-light of our own times which shines upon these transactions, we may readily admit that Mr. Lincoln and ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... talked herself out of breath, and we should have been very glad to fill up the necessary pause as chorus, but we did not exactly know what to say, or which man had suggested this diatribe against the sex; so we only joined in generally, with a grave shake of the head, and a soft murmur of ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that strangers should build themselves fine houses! My Pablo said a little time ago that people said your father's riches were going astray. Me, I did not listen. Now I know he spoke true." The senora's tongue wagged on in a diatribe of accusation ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... to Jimmy that he turned his back on Pettigrew, and Gilray broke in with a diatribe ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... should have been quicker. He begged my pardon. His cold voice really maddened me, and I burst out into some foolish, contemptible diatribe, called him a machine, taunted him, then—as I felt that loathsome thing nestling once more to me,—begged him to assist me, to stay with me, not to leave me alone—I meant in the company of my tormentor. Whether he was frightened, or whether ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which magnifies the image, while a convex mirror was likened to a rarer medium. This line of attack also failed him, as did various attempts to find relations between his measurements of refraction and conic sections, and he broke off suddenly with a diatribe against Tycho's critics, whom he likened to blind men disputing about colours. Not many years later Snell discovered the true law of refraction, but Kepler's contribution to the subject, though he failed to discover the actual law, includes ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... voice was hoarse with shouting, but he had the natural eloquence of the demagogue. He was delivering the creed of the propaganda of rebellious poverty, the complaints of the dissatisfied, the demands of the idle agitators. He spiked his diatribe with threats flavored by anarchy. He pointed to policemen who had taken refuge in strips of shade which had been cast grudgingly by the high buildings. He reminded his hearers that those policemen ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... encouraging of the peace party at Paris, with a view to the revocation of the aggressive decrees of the Convention. In private, Fox had admitted that they were wholly indefensible; and yet, in order to snatch an oratorical triumph, he fired off a diatribe which could not but stiffen the necks of the French Jacobins. At such a crisis the true statesman merges the partisan in the patriot and says not a word to weaken his own Government and hearten its opponents. To this height of self-denial Fox rarely rose; and the judgement alike of his fellows ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose |
