"Disingenuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Gladstone and Lewis, sought an explanation from Russell and was informed that the Government was not inclined at present to change its policy but could make no promises for the future[798]. This appeared to Adams to be an assurance against any effort by Great Britain and has been interpreted as disingenuous on Russell's part. Certainly Adams' confidence was restored by the interview. But Russell was apparently unconvinced as yet that a suggestion of armistice would necessarily lead to the evil consequences prophesied by Lewis, or would, indeed, require ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... art confounds me; its transitoriness, again its brevity, its dust and ashes—that is what robs me of faith and courage. Art at a given moment is more powerful, may be, than nature; for in nature is no symphony of Beethoven, no picture of Ruysdel, no poem of Goethe, and only dull-witted pedants or disingenuous chatterers can yet maintain that art is the imitation of nature. But at the end of all, nature is inexorable; she has no need to hurry, and sooner or later she takes her own. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to laws, she knows not art, as she knows not freedom, as she knows not good; from all ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... that Mr. Causton discovered not only reluctance and perversity in explaining and authenticating his accounts; but, by disingenuous insinuations reflected on the conduct of Oglethorpe, "as if he very well knew that extraordinary occasions had created these great exceedings, which the Trustees approving of, he [Causton] was given up to be driven to utter ruin."[1] Mr. Jones deemed ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... "I smiled at this disingenuous creature. He was saving me for the dry hour. He could point out Mulehaus in any passing chair, and I would give some coin to be rid ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... After his stay in England we have his Brutus (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his Zaire (1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if sometimes rather disingenuous, strife with a superior power. Throughout, the poet and man of taste struggles against the philosophic freethinker: he loves the surface impressions, perhaps the reflective illusions; "his sentiments are worth more than his ideas." The English Letters of 1735, written ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Mr. Pewtap," he said, "I am human, and it would be disingenuous for me to pretend that I am not pleased by the fact that my name has been mentioned in connection with the bishopric. I can conscientiously affirm, however, that the good of the church is more dear to me than ambition. Even were it not, I ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... requested him to remove his Hand; for which he pulled me by the Nose. I would not resent it in so publick a Place, because I was unwilling to create a Disturbance; but have since reflected upon it as a thing that is unmanly and disingenuous, renders the Nose-puller odious, and makes the Person pulled by the Nose look little and contemptible. This Grievance I humbly request you would endeavour ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... expects that fathers and mothers will still send their boys to such a place as that? I am very much mistaken if he will not find it altogether deserted before Christmas. Lord Carstairs is already gone." [This was at any rate disingenuous, as she had been very severe when at Buttercup on all the Carstairs family because of their declared and perverse friendship for the Doctor.] "Mr. Momson, though he is quite incapable of seeing the meaning of anything, has ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... confused or deliberately disingenuous, since he shifts his ground several times. On occasion he argues merely in the role of a moderate man who is shocked by the extravagances of the playwrights, and on other occasions as an ascetic to whom all worldly diversion, however innocent of any obvious offence, is wicked. At one time, moreover, ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... half-hearted homage to it, and our own people, whether at home, or in other parts of the Empire, or in India itself, whether statesmen or soldiers, or administrators or merchants, succumb to the temptation of trying still to combine with it in practice a disingenuous survival of the old idea of domination of one race over another, after we have so solemnly repudiated it, we shall drift the more rapidly and disastrously on to the quicksands of racial strife and chronic ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... held negligently in one hand, one hip sunk lower than the other, a faint, elusive smile playing dimly around her mouth. The smile was really not a smile, but only the wraith of one, and the eyes were wide, disingenuous, mock-simple. The picture because of its simplicity, appealed to him. He did not know that Mrs. Carter had never sanctioned its display. "A personage," was Cowperwood's comment to himself, and he walked into the photographer's ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... go about the streets of his town the subject of their implacable denunciation, the community's obloquy, and Aurora's cold evasion. So much, should he sell. On the other hand, to decline to sell was to enter upon that disingenuous scheme of delays which would enable him to avail himself and his people of that favorable wind and tide of fortune which the Cession had brought. Thus the estates would be lost, if lost at all, only when the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... that this book's miraculous stupidities were studied and disingenuous; but no one can read the volume carefully through and keep that opinion. It was written in serious good faith and deep earnestness, by an honest and upright idiot who believed he knew something of the English language, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... little consequence as Blifil himself conceived them to be; and Mr. Allworthy, who said "he would on no account be accessory to forcing a young lady into a marriage contrary to her own will," was satisfied by his nephew's disingenuous statement that the young lady's behaviour to him was full as forward as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... reply is disingenuous. According to our investigation, Ciganowic, by order of the police prefect in Belgrade, left three days after the outrage for Ribari, after it had become known that Ciganowic had participated in the outrage. In the first ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... belong to any of the suffrage or other woman's organizations in New York, may I say in your columns that for the honor of my sex, if for no other reason, I hope the Mayor will consent to the obliteration of those disingenuous posters addressing "American citizens," and so cunningly worded and signed as to produce an impression of representing the women of the United States? If the people that are spending their thousands so freely had come out frankly and stated that they ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... hostile laws daily accumulated on one another, the American leaders seem to have had the greatest difficulty in bringing up their people to a declaration of total independence. But the Court Gazette accomplished what the abettors of independence had attempted in vain. When that disingenuous compilation and strange medley of railing and flattery was adduced as a proof of the united sentiments of the people of Great Britain, there was a great change throughout all America. The tide of popular affection, which had still set towards the parent country, began immediately ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the young man, meekly, "I see;" which was disingenuous. He silently debated whether this meant a species of letter of recommendation, but ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Russian domination and pursuing their own conflicting ambitions, and by the folly of the Allies themselves in ignoring the principle impressed upon them since 1917, that it was legitimate to assist Russians against the Germans but not against one another, were harassing enough. The half-hearted, disingenuous, and misguided military efforts made by the Allies in Russia introduced alien irritants into the domestic situation and prolonged that painful process of internal evolution which could alone produce a satisfactory solution in a stable Russian government. If the responsible Allied statesmen ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... see his cousin. Privately, he reflected that if Lizzie Acton had had no news of his son, Clifford must have gone to Boston for the evening: an unnatural course of a summer night, especially when accompanied with disingenuous representations. ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... then till the bird came back to the lure, fill his void mouth with grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and love—a passion he held in great contempt as being in its essence complex and disingenuous—and afterwards we found we had learnt much of what the marriage laws of Utopia ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... is that they are not content to feel and express but must needs invent an intellectual concept to stand target for their emotion. From the nature of their emotions they infer an object the existence of which they find themselves obliged to prove by an elaborately disingenuous metaphysic. The consequence is inevitable; religion comes to mean, not the feeling of an emotion, but adherence to a creed. Instead of being a matter of emotional conviction it becomes a matter of intellectual propositions. And here, very properly, the sceptic steps ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Woe to him who yields himself to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous. She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the shop over ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... but is entirely ignorant of his patron's prowess, the opinions of the illiterate concerning the personal characteristics of the genius obtain a very remarkable value as being honest criticism by man of man, uninfluenced by the spirit either of disingenuous adulation or of equally disingenuous depreciation. That these opinions are in the eyes of a disciple of the great man quaint, almost insolently crude is a matter of course. But when they tend to show the master not only great ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... had been full of whispers of scandalous doings in the business department, and the chorus of dissatisfaction with the artistic results of his directorate, which had begun in the first season, had been swelling steadily. Two seasons before he had put forth a disingenuous apology for his administration, comparing the cost and difficulties of producing opera in the preceding season with the cost and difficulties under Mr. Grau. The matter was one which affected the stockholders of his company only so far as the finances ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cannot understand any really intelligent opposition to them. I can, however, understand a partial and silly application of them. It is most important that our good-class families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of the timid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed up with ideas of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would be to apply this—as that Fabian tract I mention does—only to the poor mother. To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other people severely ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... tew-tew-tews! And nothing is so mortal to thought and sentiment as that same derisive tew-tewing, disingenuous and non-committal! Day by day, and that is why I roll my rs, I must witness this debasing of language and ideals. It's enough to ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... infamous) little anthology of thirty leaves has been singularly unfortunate in its title-pages. It was first published in 1599 as The Passionate Pilgrims. By W. Shakespeare. At London. Printed for W. Jaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. This, of course, was disingenuous. Some of the numbers were by Shakespeare: but the authorship of some remains doubtful to this day, and others the enterprising Jaggard had boldly conveyed from Marlowe, Richard Barnefield, and Bartholomew Griffin. In ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the opinion of Languet that the Emperor affected ignorance of the plot at its commencement, that he afterwards affected an original connivance, and that he was equally disingenuous in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rank of life whatever; rustic, native grace; unaffected modesty, and unsullied purity; nature's mother-wit, and the rudiments of taste; a simplicity of soul, unsuspicious of, because unacquainted with, the crooked ways of a selfish, interested, disingenuous world; and the dearest charm of all the rest, a yielding sweetness of disposition, and a generous warmth of heart, grateful for love on our part, and ardently glowing with a more than equal return; these, with a healthy frame, a sound, vigorous constitution, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... has been somewhat disingenuous with me on the subject. I think he tried to prevent the matter coming to my ears; and when I asked him about it, he certainly implied—in fact, I grieve to say he left me under the impression that he had ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Godounoff before them was a remorse-stricken regicide, whose good works, if he did any, had to be summed up for their imagination in the fact that he loved his son. In all this, and also in some of its music, the new opera was of the opera operatic. But to the unhappily disingenuous (or perhaps it would be better to say, to the instructed) there was much more in the new opera; and it was this more which so often gave judgment pause, even while it stimulated interest and irritated curiosity. It was a pity that a recent extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm about a composer ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... paper deemed its terms to be a series of studied insults added to a long inventory of injuries. Said another, Germany's mood is still that of a madman. A third comment on the note described it as "a disingenuous effort to have international petty larceny put on the same plane as international murder and visited with the same punishment." A fourth paper remarked: "If an American can read the note without his temples getting hot then his blood is poor or his understanding ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... others the ungrateful task of trying to reconcile all these decisions."[221] The nearest precedent was Gitlow v. New York.[222] Here "we put our respect for the legislative judgment in terms which, if they were accepted here, would make decision easy. * * * But it would be disingenuous to deny that the dissent in Gitlow has been treated with the respect usually accorded a decision."[223] But the case at bar was a horse of a different color. "In contrast, there is ample justification for a legislative judgment that the conspiracy now before us is a substantial threat to national ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... that rankles in the bosom of his "Englishmen in the West Indies," sufficiently proves the utter hypocrisy of his recommendation, that the freest opportunities should be offered to Blacks of the said exceptional order. The very wording of Mr. Froude's recommendation is disingenuous. It is one stone sped at two birds, and which, most ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... in which he gave particular directions to the Methodists as subjects under the civil constitution, as members of the Church of Christ, as parents, as children, as individuals. He animadverted on the groundless and disingenuous aspersions that had been thrown out through the press against Methodism, on account of the suspected loyalty of its constitutional principles. He warmly insisted on a vigorous observance, support, and respect for the Civil Government, both from the beneficence of its laws and ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... easy, in these days, when machinery—that "Star called Wormwood"—dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony. The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference and ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... possible that, though Lockwood could not have told when and how the acquaintance between him and Felice began and progressed, the young woman herself could. But this is guesswork. Felice being a woman, and part Spanish at that, was vastly more self-conscious, more disingenuous, than the man, the Anglo-Saxon. Also she had that fearlessness that very pretty women have. In her more refined and city-bred sisters this fearlessness would be called poise, or, at ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... enough. It meant that the Tract-writers avowed the principle of keeping back part of the counsel of God. It meant, further, that the real spirit of the party was disclosed; its love of secret and crooked methods, its indifference to knowledge, its disingenuous professions, its deliberate concealments, its holding doctrines and its pursuit of aims which it dared not avow, its disciplina arcani, its conspiracies, its Jesuitical spirit. All this kind of abuse was flung plentifully on the party as the controversy became ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... favourable reception to any further matrimonial project on Mirliflor's behalf—at all events from her. So she merely informed him that Mirliflor had left Clairdelune to seek a bride for himself, and that he might be absent for some time. She did not mention his transformation, and was disingenuous enough to agree with the King that the Prince had behaved most unfilially in departing without permission. But King Tournesol was too glad that his son's thoughts had again turned to marriage to be very seriously angry, and the Fairy ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... Massachusetts people should oppose these attempts to alter the methods of government which had been in vogue for half a century was inevitable, though some of the means they employed were certainly disingenuous. Their leaders, both lay and clerical, were unsurpassed in genius for argument and at this time outdid themselves. When Palmer was able to show that, according to English law, their land-titles were in many cases defective, they ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... plainly in explaining the situation to their superiors at home. To be sure, Gage was a trifle disingenuous in reviewing the past. While admitting that the recent trials at arms proved the rebels "not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be," he ignored his original boast concerning lions and lambs. In stating that in all previous wars the Americans had never showed so much "conduct, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... the methods proper to that sphere were imperative and final. The scientist accepted the fact that Religion had a right to speak in matters that lay beyond scientific data; the theologian no longer denounced as fraudulent or disingenuous the claims of the scientist to exercise powers that were at last found to be natural. Neither needed to establish his own position by attacking that of his partner, and the two accordingly, without prejudice or passion, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... justice, many of their number, and especially Sullivan. He speaks, however, in high terms of Henry and Small; and both of these, in their letters referred to above, paint the conduct of the French and Indians in very dark colors, throwing the blame on them. Legrace is certainly disingenuous in suppressing all mention of the wrongs done to the Americans. For Filson's career and death in the woods, see the excellent Life of Filson, by Durrett, in the Filson ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... speech Mr. Harvey formulated with equal clarity what the voters of 1920 had in their minds. That is a rash thing to do, and, if you simply assume that all who voted your ticket voted as you did, then it is a disingenuous thing to do. The count shows that sixteen millions voted Republican, and nine millions Democratic. They voted, says Mr. Harvey, for and against the League of Nations, and in support of this claim, he can point ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the imprisonment of Flinders until the French could complete their own charts for publication. The talk about not knowing what Flinders' names were, the affected ignorance of his prior claims, were crudely disingenuous. Freycinet knew perfectly where Flinders was, and why his charts were not issued. The Moniteur contained several references to his case. Sir Joseph Banks repeatedly pressed leading members of the Institute to lend their influence to secure his liberation. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... counter-proposals were somewhat obscure, and also rather disingenuous. It will be remembered that those clauses of the Reparation Chapter which dealt with the issue of bonds by Germany produced on the public mind the impression that the Indemnity had been fixed at $25,000,000,000, ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... the unavoidable accidents of life, they are very certain ways. And then he will have a fair chance to grow up neither a smart and hustling cheat—for the American at his worst is no more and no less than that— nor a sluggish disingenuous snob—as the Briton too often becomes—but a proud, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... he paused for breath, his look fell on those limpid blue eyes of my mother, and that honest open brow of hers, which had certainly nothing in common with Sphinxes, Fates, Furies, or Valkyrs; and whether his heart smote him, or his reason made him own that he had fallen into a very disingenuous and unsound train of assertion, I know not, but his front relaxed, and with a smile he resumed: "Ellinor was the last person in the world to deceive any one willingly. Did she deceive me and Roland, that we both, though not conceited men, fancied that, if we had dared ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strangeness of his position, and his consciousness of it, suffice in themselves to make him interesting. But it is disingenuousness that makes him delightful. And the greatest of all delights that a law-court can give us is a disingenuous witness who is quick-minded, resourceful, thoroughly master of himself and his story, pitted against a counsel as well endowed as himself. The most vivid and precious of my memories is of a case in which a gentleman, now dead, was sued ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... W. N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control, has explained that the report which we published of his speech is unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith. This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing 'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... never showed to better advantage; he was, as always, moderate and reasonable; but above all the wonderful element was the quick wit and ready skill with which he turned to his own service every query which was designed to embarrass him; and this he did not in the vulgar way of flippant retort or disingenuous twistings of words or facts, but with the same straightforward and tranquil simplicity of language with which he delivered evidence for the friendly examiners. Burke likened the proceeding to an examination of a master by a ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... and Senator Patterson of New Hampshire were found by the Committee, and believed by the people to have been disingenuous in their account of the transaction. The Senate Committee of investigation reported a resolution for the expulsion of Senator Patterson. The case was a very hard one indeed for him. The Senate adjourned, and his term ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... of one of your fellow Senators, and in the very similar words of another—both uttered on the floor of the Senate—"if the abolitionists come to the South, the South will hang them." Pardon the remark, that it seems very disingenuous in you to draw conclusions unfavorable to the sincerity of the abolitionists from premises so notoriously false, as are those which imply, that it is entirely at their own option, whether the abolitionists shall have their "societies and movements" in the free or slave ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... an affected air of displeasure, that no man could be justly condemned for being subject to the impressions of fear, and therefore his cowardice might easily be forgiven: but there was something so presumptuous, dishonest, and disingenuous, in arrogating a quality to which he knew he had not the smallest pretension, that he could not forget his misbehaviour all at once, though he would condescend to communicate with him as formerly, in hopes of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... issue were put to a popular vote in Massachusetts was unfair and misleading; the epithets applied to the "Moderate" or loyal party were offensive and unjust; and the statements of Palfrey, respecting the acts of the King immediately following the vacation of the Charter, are very disingenuous, not to say untrue. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... nullifiers in 1832, if the State had seceded, and that therefore his great example could not be quoted in favor of "coercion." It is not believed that Mr. Davis had the slightest authority for this aspersion upon the memory of Jackson. It seems rather to have been a disingenuous and unwarranted statement of the kind so plentifully used at the time for the purpose of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to give ingress to the family on the day of recapture. He glanced around the room; nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nevertheless he was uneasy. The suspicions of a frank, trustful nature when once aroused are apt to be more general and far-reaching than the specific distrusts of the disingenuous, for they imply the overthrow of a whole principle and not a mere detail. Clarence's conviction that Susy had seen Pedro recently since his dismissal led him into the wildest surmises of her motives. It was possible that without her having reason to suspect Pedro's greater crime, he might have ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... anywhere. I once carried one from Chicago to Cape Town to find on arriving I could buy the bed there at exactly the same price I had paid for it in America. I also found them in Tokio, where imitations of them were being made by the ingenious and disingenuous Japanese. They are light in weight, strong, and comfortable, and are undoubtedly the best camp-bed made. When at your elevation of six inches above the ground you look down from one of them upon a comrade in a sleeping-bag with rivulets of rain and a tide of muddy water rising above him, your satisfaction, ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... "Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It's always the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection for Rose, was more than I could stand. I don't apologize ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... naturalism hitherto has not been developed in all its extent: unprejudiced persons however, will, at least, be enabled to know whether the author has reasoned well or ill; whether or not he has attempted to disguise the most important difficulties; distinctly to see if he has been disingenuous; they will be competent to observe if, like unto the enemies of human reason, he has recourse to subterfuges, to sophisms, to subtle discriminations, which ought always to make it suspected of those who use them, either that they do not understand or else ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... of defensive preparation advanced by the statesmen, Prussian and others, in apology for competitive armaments is a diplomatic subterfuge,—there are indications that such has commonly been the case; but even if it commonly is visibly disingenuous, the need of making such a plea to cover more sinister designs is itself an evidence that an avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets with the requisite popular approval. Even if an exception ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps there is something left for me to do in the world: there seems no reason otherwise why I should ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The grey eyes, meeting eyes dark, kindly, and penetrating, flickered and fell; so much emotion they betrayed, no more, and that as disingenuous ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... of which the upshot left him gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament—not even then did the author of Hypatia display such a daring and immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed himself "aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is Dekker's and all the poetry Massinger's." Now ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that many women are disingenuous in regard to these irregularities of conduct was forced upon me some years ago in a conversation with Kendall Brown, who, for all his eccentricities, is a keen observer ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... in his notice of Jasmin's works, frankly admits the local jealousy which existed between the Troubadours of Gascony and Provence. There seemed, he said, to be nothing disingenuous in the silence of the Provencals as to Jasmin's poems. They did not allow that he borrowed from them, any more than that they borrowed from him. These men of Southern France are born in the land of poetry. It breathes in their native air. It echoes round them in its varied measures. Nay, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... bundle of habits; till the bundle is made up, we may continually increase or diminish it. Children who are zealous in defence of their own perfections, are of all others most likely to become stationary in their intellectual progress, and disingenuous in their temper. It would be in vain to repeat to them this sensible and elegant observation—"To confess that you have been in the wrong, is only saying, in other words, that you are wiser to-day than you were yesterday." This remark will rather pique, than comfort, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... hoped than believed, came so unexpectedly, felt her mind momentarily bewildered; and she scarcely knew whether to weep or to rejoice. Still she was the first to speak; since Eau-douce could utter naught that would be disingenuous, or ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... holding a new command, and gaining further wealth. But Theophanes's want of honesty does not go so far to make this story credible as does Pompey's own nature, which was averse, with all its ambition, to such base and disingenuous ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... seen them all go.'" The compliment was well paid to General Parsons, and it may have been some consolation for a sore heart: that keen spirit had to be content to be left behind. Major-General W.B. Hickie, C.B., who had greatly distinguished himself in France, now took over command. It would be disingenuous to say that John Redmond was not content with this change; but his brother was deeply impressed by the hardship ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... impression that this incident constitutes the sum total of the eugenic idea, while the truth is that the eugenist is only slightly concerned with its modus operandi. This feature has been so magnified by widely published disingenuous discussion that it has assumed the aspect of a test problem, a judgment on which shall decide the utility of the science itself. Should this decision be unfavorable, it would seem, according to its exponents, that it would not be worth while promulgating the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... comment upon this grossly disingenuous document is that which is afforded by certain passages in Mr. Reitz's book, A Century of Wrong, which was written in anticipation of the outbreak of war and issued so soon as this ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent and disingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by Frank Harris, in Pearson's Magazine for ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... opinion; which I think I have discovered ground for. In what I first writ, I with an unbiassed indifferency followed truth, whither I thought she led me. But neither being so vain as to fancy infallibility, nor so disingenuous as to dissemble my mistakes for fear of blemishing my reputation, I have, with the same sincere design for truth only, not been ashamed to publish what a severer inquiry has suggested. It is not impossible but that some may think my former notions right; and some (as ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... known The lustrous lurements of their gorgeous zone, As in the field some skilful ranger sets The fraudful cordage of his specious nets, Places some fragrant viand in the snare, And captive takes the unsuspicious hare; So the bold strangers with superior will Lay their base plans with disingenuous skill, Ope their stored treasures and with art display Their worthless figments to the air of day, Roll their large lids, and with grave gestures laud Each tinsel trinket and each painted gaud; With mystic ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... and blackens whate'er most delights, And renders us haters of loveliness, The lowest of the fiends: ambition led The higher on, furious to dispossess, From admiration sprung and frenzied love. This disingenuous soul-debasing passion, Rising from abject and most sordid fear, Stings her own breast with bitter self-reproof, Consumes the vitals, pines, and never dies. Love, Honour, Justice, numberless the forms, Glorious and high the stature, she assumes; But watch the wandering changeful ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... helpless way of conducting himself before a jury that deceived them into believing that his inexperience required their help and his disinterestedness their loyal support. Both of them were apparently fair-minded, honest public servants; both in reality were subtly disingenuous to a degree beyond ordinary comprehension, for years of practise had made them sensitive to every whimsy of emotion and taught them how to play upon the psychology of the jury as the careless zephyr softly draws its melody from the aeolian harp. In a word they were a precious pair ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... requires not acuteness of understanding, so much as a little common honesty. "There is indeed no surer mark of a false and hollow heart, than a disposition thus to quibble away the clear injunctions of duty and conscience[81]:" It is the wretched resource of a disingenuous mind, endeavouring to escape from convictions before which it cannot stand, and to evade obligations which it ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... their real owner which clothes so often have the power of conveying. Baubie's slim figure had caught the flat-backed, square-shoulder form of her little neighbor, and her face, between the smooth-laid bands of her hair, seemed to have assumed the same gravely-respectable air. The disingenuous roving eye was there all the time, could they but have noted it, and gave the lie to her compressed lips and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... suffer you to delude yourself with the hopes of sudden wealth (and when I say sudden, I would give you a term of ten years) from the practice of the law, unless you should plunge into that practice with the most unqualified disregard to all that rectitude demands, would be to act the cowardly disingenuous hypocrite; and entirely to forget the first ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... German, a man in his prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt |
