Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Fanatic   /fənˈætɪk/   Listen
Fanatic

noun
1.
A person motivated by irrational enthusiasm (as for a cause).  Synonym: fiend.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Fanatic" Quotes from Famous Books



... hoarsely. "The trumpets! Didn't you hear them?" The light in his eyes was fanatic. Instinctively Valerie shrank away. Regardless, he let her go. "I forgot. Gramarye—I'm pledged to her. It's too late, Valerie. Oh, why did you come?" He buried his face in his hands. "You'll never understand," he muttered. "I know you never will. It's no good—no ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... persevered in their recusant policy up to the practical result of secession. All who stopped short of that consummation (on whatever plea), are the 'chaff.' The writer is something of an incendiary, or something of a fanatic; but he is consistent with regard to his own principles, and so elaborately careful in his details as to extort admiration of his energy and of his ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... would have learned common sense in boyhood. As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the Scriptures and the daily memorizing ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... young men who represented intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a type of Conservatism he gives us Robert ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... twice-born, too, whereas ordinary men can be born but once, and born moreover not of Coronis [Footnote: Coronis was the mother of Asclepius; 'corone' is Greek for a crow.] nor even of her namesake the crow, but of a goose! After him streamed the whole people, in all the madness of fanatic hopes. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... replied to my jokes by calling names—a phrase, by the way, which, forgetting his Watts' Hymns, and failing to consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a "shallow, pretending ninny;" an "impudent illiterate lad;" "a fanatic" and a "frantic person;" the "low underling of a faction," and "Peter the Hermit;" and, finally, as the sum-total of the whole he assured me that I stood in his "estimation the most ignoble and despised ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... three or four years ago, God separated the fanatic conchologist from the collection that was his life. They found the aged man seated before his cabinet, opposite to his unique spiral. He had died alone, with his eyes fixed upon that which had possessed his affections ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... know this is God's cause, and as it rolled on through that cry at midnight, down to its closing scene, you all remember with what joy and glory I was filled, and how I publicly declared my faith, and stated that 'I might be called a FANATIC, but, I said, call me what you please, Christ will come,' &c. Well, these singular people are some of the very ones that used to hang on my words and others, who preached to them of this doctrine. And during this cry at midnight they made a sacrifice of all they had—(some ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates

... concerning it were gone, the sound was clearly no more than he had said. I recognized its nature. It might have intrigued a sane man for a day or a night. But it could never longer have deceived any but one whose mind was become fevered with fanatic ecstasy. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... fanatic in the hands of an agitator is the very devil. That is whence these fellows got their power. Half of them are fanatics and the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... usual order. In other countries, the radical of one century is the conservative of the next; in ours, the conservative of one generation is the radical of the next. The American conservative of 1790 is the so-called fanatic of 1820; the conservative of 1820 is the fanatic of 1856. The American conservative, indeed, descended the stairs of compromise until his descent into utter abnegation of all that civilized humanity holds dear was arrested by the Rebellion. And the reason of this strange inversion of conservative ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... returned to Monterey a rich man in something besides land. After that there was little conversation between himself and Polk on any subject but money and the manner of its multiplication; and, as the years passed, and Polk's prophecy was fulfilled, he gave the devotion of a fanatic to the retention of his vast inheritance and to the development ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the salvation of others. She attempted to revive the primitive rule and spirit of St. Francis in the convents of the diocese of Paris, Beauvais, Noyon, and Amiens; but met with the most violent opposition, and was treated as a fanatic. She received all injuries with joy, and was not discouraged by human difficulties. Some time after she met with a more favorable reception in Savoy, and her reformation began to take root there, and passed thence into Burgundy, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... by the fanatic Lord George Gordon. The mob raised the cry of 'No Popery' on account of a law then proposing to remove hardships from Roman Catholics. Riot and plunder were the real object of the mob. The disorder had to be suppressed by ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... devout as Columbus himself, always rendering thanks to the Almighty for His favors, but was by no means a fanatic in religion. While Columbus ascribes his discoveries to the especial favor of some particular saint, on occasions, or his deliverance from danger to the direct interposition of Providence, Vespucci makes no such superstitious claims for himself, ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... piety, whom the sufferer consulted gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... to the smoking room where we had the inevitable cup of South African coffee. I was prepared to find a fanatic and fire-eater. Instead I faced a thin, undersized man who looked anything but a general and statesman. Put him against the background of a small New England town and you would take him for an American country lawyer. He resembles the student more than ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... Diaz Tano — he who had saved ten thousand Indians for the King of Spain in his celebrated retreat before the Mamelucos down the Parana — and he was frequently insulted in the streets. Father Antonio Manquiano, a quiet and learned man, was almost murdered in open day by a furious fanatic, who fell upon him with the openly expressed ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... Calvinism in the streets of Nismes, was hanged and burnt. So had the score of judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to be in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against the ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole generation, in every university and school in France, had been howling down sound science, as well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-61, their debt was paid them in a very ugly way. News came down to the hot ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... talk—I've lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it is not a question of bread and butter. It's a question of giving the children bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the butter than ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... be partial revivals of religion, but no general reformation is to be expected; and after every refreshing, the declensions will probably be greater than before. Fanatic emotions, here and there, may flatter some who are friends to religion, but they only serve to ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... n't usually come out with that so soon!" Miss Ambient exclaimed, in answer to this piece of gossip. "Poor lady, she saw that I am a fanatic." "Yes, she won't like you for that. But you must n't mind, if the rest of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a 'purpose.' But she's a charming woman—don't you think her charming?—she's such ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... forest of Tarsheehhah, where the Shaikh of the principal village, that which gives name to the district, is a fanatic Moslem, who was then preaching religious revivals, and was said to engraft upon his doctrine the pantheism of the Persian Soofis. This was not considered improbable, seeing that the Moslems of the Belad Besharah are ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... woman, who would place the knife of Jacques Clement or of Ravaillac in the hands of a fanatic, would save France." ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... three preachers, ever preaching, Fill'd with eloquence and power:— One is old, with locks of white, Skinny as an anchorite; And he preaches every hour With a shrill fanatic voice, And a bigot's fiery scorn:— "Backward! ye presumptuous nations; Man to misery is born! Born to drudge, and sweat, and suffer— Born to labour and to pray; Backward!' ye presumptuous nations— ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... perhaps, that makes us feel his courage—not a self-courage, but a sympathetic one—courageous even to tenderness. It is the open courage of a kind heart, of not forcing opinions—a thing much needed when the cowardly, underhanded courage of the fanatic would FORCE opinion. It is the courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than of trying to force everyone to SEE that you believe in it—the courage of the willingness to be reformed, rather than of reforming—the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... comes!" he continued, with fanatic intensity. "This is our lord, in very truth, who now stands before us, calling upon his people to turn to him ere it be too late. Yet three days, and Doom, Doom the Mighty, is fallen, is fallen! He ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... himself that he had not always found the Socialists so proud, but kept the thought to himself, not wishing to hurt Hessel's feelings, who seemed to be an honest fanatic. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... Muller decides that 'we never find a religion consisting exclusively of a belief in fetishes, or totems, or ancestral spirits.' Here, at last, we are in absolute agreement. So much for totems and sign- boards. Only a weak fanatic will find a totem in every animal connected with gods, sacred names, and religious symbols. But totemism is a fact, whether 'totem' originally meant a clan-mark or sign-board in America or not. And, like Mr. Sayce, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Rhys, Dr. Robertson Smith, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... soon treated Mr. Sumner as a fanatic unfit to associate with them, and they refused him a place on any committee, as "outside of any political organization." This stimulated him in the preparation of a remarkable arraignment of the slave-power, which he called the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... day,[3233] ruling over it as well as over France.[3234] Of course, some guarantee is required from those who fill this place; there is not one of them who is not a revolutionary of long standing, an impenitent regicide, a fanatic in essence and a despot through principle; but the fumes of omnipotence have not intoxicated them all to the same degree.—Three or four of them, Robert Lindet, Jean Bon St. Andre, Prieur de la Cote-d'Or and Carnot, confine themselves to useful and secondary duties; this suffices to keep them ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... he sat wretchedly in his unfamiliar room and groaned about 'that accursed money.' His only relief was in bursts of anger. Why had he not the courage to go to Michael and say plainly what he thought? 'You have formed a wild scheme, the project of a fanatic. Its realisation would be a miracle, and in your heart you must know that Jane's character contains no miraculous possibilities. You are playing with people's lives, as fanatics always do. For Heaven's sake, bestow your money on the practical folks who make a solid business of relieving ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... it, as there are of the popular one; for no man holds his own creed and nothing more; and it is good for him, in this piecemeal and shortsighted world, that he should not. Were he over-true to his own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps a madman. And so the modern evangelical of the Venn and Newton school, to whom mysticism is neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of "spiritual experiences," uses the adjective in its purely mystic sense; while ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. His bending, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... "There was a fanatic of a praycher came to our meetin' one Sunday morning last winter, and discoorsed on that which goeth out of a man. He threeped down our throats that it was tobackka, and that it was the root of bitterness, and ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... in some of the other boroughs. One fanatic, imagining that Cardon himself was a crypto-Literate, drew a gun. Cardon's guards disarmed him and beat him senseless. At another headquarters, some character was circulating about declaring that not only Claire Pelton but her younger brother, Ray, as well, were Literates. Cardon's ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... conclusions they form, and what hopes they entertain. Do they hear of a new friend in office? That is encouragement enough to practise the city, against the opinion of a majority into an address to the Queen for repealing the sacramental test; or issue out their orders to the next fanatic parson to furbish up his old sermons, and preach and print new ones directly against Episcopacy. I would lay a good wager, that, if the choice of a new Speaker succeeds exactly to their liking, we shall see it soon followed by many new attempts, either in the form of pamphlet, sermon, or address, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... answer by Mrs. Stanton which not only pointed out how often the Republicans had failed women but reminded Garrison how he had welcomed into his antislavery ranks anyone and everyone who believed in his ideas, "a motley crew it was." She recalled the label of fanatic which had been attached to him, how he had been threatened and pelted with rotten eggs for expressing his unpopular ideas and for burning the Constitution which he declared sanctioned slavery. With such ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... cry," Pipper tells us, "Jabez smote his brow. 'At last!' he moaned in deep anguish. 'At last it has come!' Then he turned, and seizing a large milk bottle he battered the head of Aunt Topsy, crying the while in the voice of a fanatic, 'For my home town! For my home town! This is a just reprisal!!!' Then with a last look at the havoc he had wrought he went out of the house ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... the wife of one Lunel, a dealer in iron. A Spanish chaplain, belonging to the army of the Emperor Charles V, passing through Paris in order to repair to Flayers, threw himself in this man's way, and worked on his mind till he had made him a complete fanatic: "Your king," said the friar, "protects Lutheranism in Germany, and will soon introduce it into France. Be revenged on him and your wife, by serving religion. Communicate to him that disease for which no certain remedy is yet known."—"And ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... you, sir—he is neither. He is absolutely loyal. His patriotism is a religion. He has entered his dangerous and important mission with the zeal of a religious fanatic." ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... her feet, "I wish he loved you less, then! No, there is no use saying things like that, Helen; he is narrow and bigoted,—he is a cruel fanatic." She did not see that Helen had half risen from her chair, and was watching her with gleaming eyes. "He actually prides himself on being able to make you suffer,—you read me that yourself out of his letter. He's a bad man, and I'm glad you've done ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... the rest;— And they believe him!—oh, the lover may Distrust that look which steals his soul away;— The babe may cease to think that it can play With Heaven's rainbow;—alchymists may doubt The shining gold their crucible gives out; But Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood hugs it to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... distinguished University career at Oxford and in London, of which latter university she was a B.A. The theme of the electoral enfranchisement of Women had gradually possessed her mind to the exclusion of all other subjects; she became in fact a fanatic in the cause and a predestined martyr to it. In 1909 she had received her first sentence of imprisonment for making a constitutional protest, and to escape forcible feeding had barricaded her cell. The Visiting Committee had driven her from this position by directing ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... because they don't dare do anything else," Montano said, his face taking on the fanatic's light, "but some of us dare do something, some of us aren't going to sit forever and let them strangle all humanity, hold us down, let us die! It's war, Bart, war for economic survival. Do you suppose the Lhari would hesitate to kill anyone if we did anything to hurt their ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... their joy; to die, not knowing they are beaten, their reward. Nothing, too, is more to be remarked than the manner in which Life devises for each man the particular dilemmas most suited to his nature; that which to the man of gross, decided, or fanatic turn of mind appears a simple sum, to the man of delicate and speculative temper seems to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... gathering up ashes. But outside the ghat, where a golden mohur tree cast a wide shadow across the road there was a large crowd sitting and standing in rings around an absolutely naked, ash-smeared religious fanatic. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... else mattered; not money, not comforts, not benefits multiplied could weigh against it... He was true to his creed, honest in its prosecution, sincere in his beliefs and in his efforts to uplift the conditions of his fellow men. He was a fanatic, let it be admitted, but a fanatic who suffered and labored for his cause. He was stigmatized as a demagogue, and many of the attributes of the demagogue adhered to him. But he was not a demagogue, for he sought nothing for himself... His great shortcoming was singleness of vision. He fixed his ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... discourse with him, which now I cannot call to mind: and I fear I have already tired your Lordship. I shall only add one circumstance. That on his deathbed, he declared himself a Nonconformist, and had a Fanatic [the political designation of Dissenters] preacher to be his ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... the rules of propriety, and as seeking an overthrow of the established laws of nature! I have been thrust into prison, and amerced in a heavy fine. Epithets, huge and unseemly, have been showered upon me without mercy. I have been branded as a fanatic, a madman, a disturber of the peace, an incendiary, a cutthroat, a monster, &c. &c. &c. Assassination has been threatened me in a multitude of anonymous letters. Private and public rewards to a very large amount, by combinations of individuals ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... you believe Colonel Douglas Ashton, who heard the Marquis of A—— say in a public circle, but not aware that he was within ear-shot, that his kinsman had made a better arrangement for himself than to give his father's land for the pale-cheeked daughter of a broken-down fanatic, and that Bucklaw was welcome to the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... grand, and withal so terrible, that an involuntary murmur of mingled admiration and affright broke from the lips of all assembled, like a low wind surging among leaf-laden branches. This was Khosrul,—the Prophet of a creed that was to revolutionize the world,—the fanatic for a faith as yet unrevealed to men,—the dauntless foreteller of the downfall of Al-Kyris ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... the guard that there is a chance of your escape.... An officer may come at any instant on a round of inspection—my discovery as the Duke's kidnapper is a matter of minutes.... I have been watched and tested in a hundred ways; it was only to-day that I convinced them of my fanatic zeal." ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... preferment. And for what? For attempting to obtain a just judgment for the enemy of his faith; for holding out a brotherly hand to a man who might very probably not care to take it; for consorting with those who would at best regard him as an amiable fanatic. Was this worth all it would cost? Could the exceedingly problematical gain make up ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... the war will bring about that will make for world peace: a quickened general interest in its possibility. Another is the certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic characters available for disinterested effort. Whatever other outcome this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme economic and political dislocation. The credit system has been strained, and will be ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... was neither morbid nor fanatic. He did not lose his head over the horrors he encountered, studied, and exposed. No hair brained enthusiasm branded him. His humor saved him, as did his wide experience and his conservative philosophic temperament. Nor did he have any patience with lightning change reform theories. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London

... York—in London, for instance, in Paris, among the mountains of Switzerland, and the steppes of Russia—I do not doubt. But there is generally a vail thrown over the object of the worshiper's idolatry. In New York one's ear is constantly filled with the fanatic's voice as he prays, one's eyes are always on the familiar altar. The frankincense from the temple is ever in one's nostrils. I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money. I have never walked there with a companion without talking of ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer. In preaching this he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a very great man, and thus far a good man. He does not make an original revelation; he reproduces an old truth,—as old as the patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the primitive religions,—but an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by his countrymen, gradually lost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... only is she without a well-organized aristocracy skilled in political science, such as Hungary boasted; Ireland, as the term is understood by the National League, is without an educated class. Her intellect is represented by the moonlight maurauder and the fanatic priest. As regards England, the parallel is still more preposterous: She is not a military despotism, but a well-organized community, boasting parliamentary traditions of a thousand years. Her shores are guarded by sea from foreign interference. Notwithstanding many scandalous shortcomings ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have tried the soundest of heads, even had that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des Brigands, and declaring that the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... addressed to her. One thought possessed her mind to the exclusion of every other—the peril of the wounded Athenian. Should any sound or movement betray his presence to her fanatic uncle, she knew that the doom of Lycidas would be sealed, for he was yet by far too weak to defend himself with the faintest chance of success, and his recumbent position rendered him ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... A fanatic Abolitionist, John Brown, with a few followers, seized the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859, defended it heroically against overpowering numbers, but was finally taken, tried and condemned for treason. This incident served ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... to-day. But "Onuphrius" is Hoffmann Gautierised, German "Franciolated," a Walpurgisnacht softened by Morgane la Fee. "Elias Wildmanstadius," one of the earliest, remains one of the most agreeable, pictures of a fanatic of the mediaeval. The overture and the finale, both pieces in which the great motto "Trinq!" is perhaps a very little abused, nevertheless contain a considerable amount of wisdom, and the last not a little wit.[208] But ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!" "Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no more ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... German sentimentality or some other imported product. It came also with good grace from one whose life was noble, but it had a weak or dangerous or grotesque side that Emerson overlooked. Thus, every crank or fanatic or rainbow-chaser is also an individualist, and most of them believe as strongly as Emerson in the Over-Soul. The only difference is that they do not have his sense or integrity or humor to balance their individualism. While Emerson ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... a fanatic for prerogative, set his enginery in motion. The elections for the new Parliament were manipulated in his interest. If he disliked Pitt as the representative of the popular will, he also disliked his colleague, the shuffling ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... destroy the power of his enemies by depriving them of both authority and wealth, and on the other to consolidate his own by establishing a firm administration, he neglected no means of acquiring popularity. A fervent disciple of Mahomet when among fanatic Mussulmans, a materialist with the Bektagis who professed a rude pantheism, a Christian among the Greeks, with whom he drank to the health of the Holy Virgin, he made everywhere partisans by flattering the idea most in vogue. But if he constantly changed both opinions ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... house on my responsibility. Now I want you to know that he is, to put it mildly, an exceedingly dangerous fanatic—this ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... Republicans, that task would long ago have been finished. But it has to fight something infinitely stronger than these in fighting the economic ruin of Russia, which, if it is too strong, too powerful to be arrested by the Communists, would make short work of those who are without any such fanatic single-minded and perfectly ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... humanity when you said, Ama nesciri, et pro nihilo reputari. You did not know, in the depths of your humility, that each of us has a pretty little gilded idol which is labelled Self! And that each of us is a fanatic in seeking to make conversions to our own little god. And I am not at all sure but that education only helps us to put on a little more gilding and a little more tawdry finery on our hidden deity; and that even when we sit in judgment upon him, as we do when preparing for Confession, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... overthrow of Manasseh's successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother's influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance of Manasseh, were content ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... leave Fontainebleau when the last courier said that he did, he should certainly be here by now. There are strange whispers, strange waves of evil reports that spread through the waiting crowd: "A royalist fanatic had shot at the Emperor! the Emperor ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... of Gotham's Four Hundred. He will eat what would send a coyote howling out of the country. To him a jug of train-oil were as angel-food, a keg of stale soap-grease a ferial feast. During his entire life he enjoys but two baths—one when he is born, the other when he's buried. A religious fanatic, he obeys but one scriptural injunction—"Be fruitful and multiply." Even the Russian ladies wash only to suit the dresses they wear—high-necked or decollete. The average Slav is as stupidly ignorant as any Agency Indian. He respects no law ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... century and a half passed before the Place de Greve, in Paris, again witnessed the torment of a fanatic for an attack upon the sacred person of a King. On January 5, 1757, Louis XV. was slightly wounded by a young Frenchman, Robert Franc,ois Damiens. The injury was not severe, and the King's recovery was soon ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various operas—all the qualities that are combined in "Don Giovanni," are the qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and the fanatic ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... and the fact was a matter of common gossip. Some of these penitentes for a purpose had been men of great influence, and their initiations had been tempered to suit their sensitive skins. Others had been Mexicans of the poorer sort, capable of sharing the half-fanatic, half ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... millions who have neither time nor attainments for any regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or a book in an unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite literature, Macaulay has ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... succeeded in this mansion by a sour fanatic knight, a distant and collateral relation, who claimed the same merit for expelling the priestess of Baal, which his predecessor had founded on maintaining the votaresses of Heaven. Of the two unhappy nuns, driven from their ancient refuge, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... on democracy, as reports of him had declared, he had also beyond question the temper of the martinet. It was possible, no doubt, to recognise these strange contradictions, but at the first sight it seemed difficult. I had yet to learn that I was dealing with a type of the fanatic, and a representative of that type, moreover, who exemplified in his blood the fatalism of his ascendants. Yet the glimpse I had of the man was interesting. I began to understand him, and even to sympathise ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... become a shambles, and the very kennels ran with blood. The Royalist defeat was by now complete, and Cromwell's fanatic butchers overran the town, vying to outdo one another in savage cruelty and murder. Houses were being broken into and plundered, and their inmates—resisting or unresisting; armed or unarmed; men, women and children ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... connection with this discussion. Certainly I would rather be a pagan whose religion was actual, earnest, continual—for week days, work days, and song days—than I would be a Christian who, from whatever motive, shrank from hearing or uttering the name of Christ out of a 'church.' I am no fanatic, but I like truth and earnestness in all things, and I cannot choose but believe that such a Christian shows but ill beside such a pagan. What pagan poet ever thought of casting his gods out of his poetry? ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... in season to my Lady Jean, if I'm no sair mistaken"—and Jock chuckled to himself when Kirsty had gone—"and a warning to the laird micht no be amiss. It would be fine business for a Graham o' Claverhouse to marry a Covenantin' fanatic and the daughter o' sic a mither. Dod! it would be fair ruin for his career, and misery for himsel'. I'll no deny her looks, but I'll guarantee she has her mither's temper. What would Claverhouse have done without me—though I wouldna ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... In temperament a fanatic, in impulse a born revolutionist, the word conservatism was to him as a red rag to a bull. The first clash of arms was music to his soul. He laughed at the call for 75,000 volunteers, and demanded the immediate equipment of an army of a million men. He saw it grow to 2,000,000. ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... destiny, the bolt from the blue, the end of the chapter. A marvelous fanatic—a sort of reincarnation of the grimmest of the Covenanters—by one daring act shattered the machine and made impossible any further coalition on the principle of "nothing doing." This man of destiny was John Brown, whose attack on Harper's Ferry took place October ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... feature of all the great religions of the East; the secret of all strong souls lies in those times of loneliness when they were bound hand and foot as captives to the Everlasting Will. We deride such nowadays; call them mystic, contemplationist, fanatic. George Fox, sitting about in lonely places, reading his Bible in hollow trees, is hard to understand. But if it were anything but religion that was in quest, people would not laugh. Tell them of Demosthenes living in a ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris

... tradition it is as much a commonplace as to the partisans of the most absolute and unflinching rationalism. Yet in practice all schools alike are forced to admit the necessity of a measure of accommodation in the very interests of truth itself. Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who deserves to be called by it injures good causes by refusing timely and harmless concession; by irritating prejudices that a wiser way of urging his own opinion might ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... apprehension of that fanaticism, which for some time has interfered even with Parliament, and to which there has been too much concession, I incline to the opinion that enthusiasm, as fanaticism, is generally more hurtful to society than scepticism. The fanatic measures are evidently ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... longish life and have heard our ministers preach on universal peace hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room, I dared in the presence of forty persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... Political; Quacks scientific, Academical; all with a fellow-feeling for each other, and kind of Quack public-spirit! Not great Lavoisier himself, or any of the Forty can escape this rough tongue; which wants not fanatic sincerity, nor, strangest of all, a certain rough caustic sense. And then the 'three thousand gaming-houses' that are in Paris; cesspools for the scoundrelism of the world; sinks of iniquity and debauchery,—whereas without good morals Liberty ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... a few wise old men held out. As for Cheschapah himself, ambition and success had brought him to the weird enthusiasm of a fanatic. He was still a charlatan, but a charlatan who believed utterly in his star. He moved among his people with growing mystery, and his hapless adjutant, Two Whistles, rode with him, slaved for him, abandoned the plans he ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... extending it further into the hillside. People laughed at him for tunneling in that barren rock, for gold has never been found anywhere in it. But the fellow paid them no attention; and gradually he was accepted as a harmless fanatic, and was left unmolested to dig his way into the hill as far as he would. Years passed. No one knew how the fellow lived, for he held no human intercourse. Kind people often brought food and left it at the mouth of his cavern, but he would have none of it. They brought clothes, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... be a regular fanatic, Evadne, if you ring the changes on that subject so often. Doctor Jerome says he wants his people to have an intelligent idea of the progress of events. Of course ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... the hour! Corruption's band Is driven back; and periled right, Rescued by the "fanatic" hand, Spans our broad heaven ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy

... reading of the Irish education bill was moved in the house of lords by Lord Stanley on the 21st of July. The Earl of Shrewsbury opposed the measure. Government he said, had been overawed by the fanatic feeling of the English people; and he urged ministers to withdraw the bill for a season, and reintroduce it in a shape better suited to the wants and wishes of Ireland. The bill was further opposed by the Earl ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... is made up of ice and flame. He has no composition, no mean temperature. Hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... that the man was burning all the drugs in the world. "Don't you smell the poison?" said M. Rivals, indignantly. But the young people passed the house in silence; they instinctively felt that there were no kindly sentiments within those walls toward them, and, in fact, feared that the fanatic Dr. Hirsch was sent there as a spy. But what had they to fear, after all? Was not all intercourse between D'Argenton and Charlotte's son forever ended? For three months they had not met. Since Jack had been engaged ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... antichrist[obs3]; pagan, heathen; painim[obs3], paynim[obs3]; giaour[obs3]; gentile; pantheist, polytheist; idolator. schismatic; sectary, sectarian, sectarist[obs3]; seceder, separatist, recusant, dissenter; nonconformist, nonjuror[obs3]. bigot &c. (obstinacy) 606; fanatic, abdal[obs3], iconoclast. latitudinarian, Deist, Theist, Unitarian; positivist, materialist; Homoiousian[obs3], Homoousian[obs3], limitarian[obs3], theosophist, ubiquitarian[obs3]; skeptic &c. 989. Protestant; Huguenot; orthodox dissenter, Congregationalist, Independent; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... of the castle, made by William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650, after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist hands for his "seditious teachings," and who, firebrand and fanatic as he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... truth of her own pronouncement. She had come without scruple, to watch their effect. To weigh them in the balance of her scientific mysticism. She had come to watch the struggles of the young girl in the toils which enveloped her. Her mind was the diseased mind of the fanatic, prompted by a nature in which ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... Malthus were especially offensive to his brother clergymen, and created quite a furor. Many regarded him as an insane and unorthodox fanatic. A prevailing idea of the time was that of a "beautiful order Providentially arranged," and it was the custom to give everything a rose-colored hue. The poor were thought to be contented in their poverty, and the rich and the aristocratic considered themselves ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... man was lost once more in Calhoun the visionary, the fanatic statesman. He summed up, as though to himself, something of the situation which then ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... his disposition and the urbanity of his manners. His wide sympathies interested him in many causes, and even his antagonists were not enemies. Stephen, on the other hand, as Mr. Henry Adams says, was a 'high-minded fanatic.' To be interested in any but the great cause was to rouse his suspicions. 'If you,' he once wrote to Wilberforce, 'were Wellington, and I were Massena, I should beat you by distracting your attention from the main point.' Any courtesies shown by ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... Drapier's trumpet, a spirit arose among the people. Persons of all ranks, parties and denominations, were convinced that the admission of Wood's copper must prove fatal to the commonwealth. The Papist, the Fanatic, the Tory, the Whig, all listed themselves volunteers, under the banner of the Drapier, and were all equally zealous to serve the common cause. Much heat, and many fiery speeches against the administration were the consequence of this union; nor had the flames been allayed, notwithstanding ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... a muted bell presently interrupted the even tenor of their industry, causing Sturm to start sharply, drop his pen, and slue round in his chair, turning to Victor a livid face in which his dark eyes of a fanatic were live ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... would not desert the man, Mahomet Achmet, whom his cracked brain accepted as a prophet from Heaven, for any patriotic consideration, for he was a wrong-headed Irishman as well as a fanatic, and a man with a grievance to boot, and would glory in drawing his sword against England. And if he joined him and sought his aid, Harry Forsyth might find himself in the awkward fix of acquiescing, if not taking part, in war against his countrymen, or of losing ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... seated beside her grandmother, and it was for that that he called. Whilst listening with an inattentive ear to the old lady's rigmaroles and her interminable anecdotes of the emigration, he gazed upon Claire, as a fanatic upon his idol. Often in his ecstasy he forgot where he was for the moment and became absolutely oblivious of the old lady's presence, although her shrill voice was piercing the tympanum of his ear like a needle. Then he would answer her at cross-purposes, committing the most ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... poems, in four volumes, for which he received the sum of L200; and in this and the following year, he produced two works of fiction, entitled, "The Three Perils of Man," and "The Three Perils of Women," which together yielded him L300. In 1824, he published "The Confessions of a Fanatic;" and, in 1826, he gave to the world his long narrative poem of "Queen Hynde." The last proved unequal to his former poetical efforts. In 1826, Mr J. G. Lockhart proceeded to London to edit the Quarterly Review, taking along with ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... debts, supposes he has the same freedom from all obligations he owes humanity and his country, because he is not punishable for his ignorance and want of honour, no more than poverty or unskilfulness is in other professions, which the law supposes to be punishment enough to itself. He is like a fanatic, that contents himself with the mere title of a saint, and makes that his privilege to act all manner of wickedness; or the ruins of a noble structure, of which there is nothing left but the foundation, and that obscured and buried under the rubbish ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... "There is nothing joyless in my creed—above all, nothing stern. If it be fanaticism to desire for all the world that liberty of thought and speech and deed which I, for one, have assumed, then I am, perhaps, a fanatic. If it be fanaticism to detest violence and to deplore all resistance to violence, I am a very guilty woman, monsieur, and deserve ill of ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... limited. We may deliberately choose to forego the maximum of mechanical perfection for the sake of living our lives in a way more satisfactory to us than a constant care for that perfection would permit. Even the most ardent of health enthusiasts—unless he be an insane fanatic—draws the line somewhere. What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw the line somewhere else. They choose to run a certain amount of risk rather than have their health on their minds. To compel—whether by legal means or by social pressure—every ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... morbid from external suffering, prevents him (the Irishman) from becoming a fanatic and a misanthrope, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... mystery. Slipping into my clothes, I made my way softly to the spot. There in the seat where I was wont to pursue my even tenor as an orchid slumbered Martin Dyke, amateur desecrator of other men's houses, challenger of the wayward fates, fanatic of a will-o'-the-wisp pursuit, desperate adventurer in the uncharted realms of love; and in his face, turned toward the polychromatic abominations of the house, so soon to be deserted, was all the pathos and all ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... of the Founder of the Church of Kilmallie, the author has endeavored to trace the effects which such a belief was likely to produce, in a barbarous age, on the person to whom it related. It seems likely that he must have become a fanatic or an impostor, or that mixture of both which forms a more frequent character than either of them, as existing separately. In truth, mad persons are frequently more anxious to impress upon others a faith in their visions, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... altar is lit," he addressed me, oracularly, while the fanatic light of a devotee burned in his eyes. "Shall we ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... relation to one another.... I, dear Jean, have no solidarity with you, but I promise you as a literary man perfect freedom so long as you live; that is, you may write where and how you wish, you may think like Koreisha [Footnote: A well-known religious fanatic in Moscow.] if you like, betray your convictions and tendencies a thousand times, etc., etc., and my human relations with you will not alter one jot, and I will always publish advertisements of your books ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... persons to undervalue the New England Puritans, as if they were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-minded fanatics. But all the charges brought against these large-minded and far-seeing men are precisely those which a really able fanatic, Joseph de Maistre, lays at the door of Protestantism. Neither a knowledge of human nature nor of history justifies us in confounding, as is commonly done, the Puritans of Old and New England, or the English Puritans of the third with those of the fifth decade ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... moment when the English commodore reached the camp, a horrible event had occurred at El Arish. The grand vizier had collected around him an army of seventy or eighty thousand fanatic Mussulmans. The Turks were joined by the Mamluks. Ibrahim Bey, who had some time before retired to Syria, and Murad Bey, who had descended by a long circuit from the cataracts to the environs of Suez, had become the auxiliaries of their former adversaries. The English had made for ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... dwelt on these tales foretold with confidence that the unborn infant would be a boy, and offered to back their opinion by laying twenty guineas to one. Heaven, they affirmed, would not have interfered but for a great end. One fanatic announced that the Queen would give birth to twins, of whom the elder would be King of England, and the younger Pope of Rome. Mary could not conceal the delight with which she heard this prophecy; and her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... footfall. I touched the wooden bolt with a finger tip; I pressed my ear against the panel. And now, every fibre of my being at tension, my senses quickened by the unseen but certain presence of danger, I could hear at the other side of the thin boards the eager breathing of the fanatic devil of a priest who had come to slay me, miserably trapped like a panther in a pit. At this thought the very blood froze in my veins. My hand relaxed its hold on the lamp, and in its fall the light ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell

... Pope, and had a sturdy solid contempt for Methodism. Cowper's guide, Newton, would have passed with him for a nuisance and a fanatic. Crabbe is a thorough realist. In some ways he may be compared to his contemporary Malthus. Malthus started, as we know, by refuting the sentimentalism of Rousseau; Crabbe's Village is a protest against the embodiment ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... an austere man, he upholds propriety of conduct both by example and precept. He is generous to the poor, and hospitable to the rich; in matters of religion he is sincere, and yet no Pharisee; he is in earnest, and yet no fanatic. On the whole, the Archdeacon of Barchester is a man doing more good than harm,—a man to be furthered and supported, though perhaps also to be controlled; and it is matter of regret to us that the course of our ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... fanatic glow. "You die," said she, "and I shall live, will live, to see how God will avenge you upon these evil-doers. I will live, that I may constantly think of you, and in every hour of the day address to God my prayers for vengeance ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... Johnston, Lord Wariston, a fierce fanatic, was parliamentary commissioner for the administration of justice in Scotland and a member of Cromwell's House of Peers. On the revival of the Rump he became president of the Council of State, and permanent president of the Committee of Safety. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... since if he chose to do so, without doubt he could prove that she had sworn a false oath for her own purposes. Also that lie weighed upon her mind, although it had been spoken in a good cause; if it was good to save a wretched fanatic from the fate which, were the truth known, without doubt ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... wish about pretty Tessa was almost immediately eclipsed by the recurrent recollection of that friar whose face had some irrecoverable association for him. Why should a sickly fanatic, worn with fasting, have looked at him in particular, and where in all his travels could he remember encountering that face before? Folly! such vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, with tickling importunity—best to sweep them away at a dash: and Tito had ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... asked him, and by trying to protect her, often without her knowledge, from any kind of pain or trouble. She would have been amazed had she realised the violence of his devotion to her. Apparently cool and matter-of-fact, he was in reality a reticent fanatic. He neither analysed nor showed his sentiment, nor did he himself know its extent. He wondered why certain people, certain subjects gave him pain. He trusted Valentia absolutely, nor could she in his eyes do wrong, and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... are in that perplexed condition about creeds which was their actual state after the political and social and religious chaos produced by Henry VIII. Gardiner is a Catholic, but not an Ultramontane; Lord William Howard is a Catholic, but not a fanatic; we find a truculent Anabaptist, or Socialist, and a citizen whose pride is his moderation. The native uncritical tendency of the drama is to throw up hats and halloo for Elizabeth and an open Bible. In place of this, Cecil delivers a well-considered analysis ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... sailors as to their true distance from Spain, as evidence of a false nature. He is charged with ambition, cupidity, and arrogance, in demanding titles, dignities, and money as fruits of his discoveries. He was, we are told, a fanatic, a visionary, a tyrant, a buccaneer, a liar, and a slave-trader. He was proud, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... old and tired and sad; it was plain that he expected attack and equally plain that he would meet it with fanatic serenity. And yet, the magnificent blunderer presented so fine an aspect of the tortured Olympian, he confronted us with so vast a dignity—the driven snow of his hair tousled upon his head and shoulders, like a storm in the higher altitudes—that he regained, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... the Treaty of Westphalia applicable to you? Not mere fanatic mystics, as Right Reverend Firmian asserts; protectible by no Treaty?" That was Friedrich Wilhelm's first question; and he set his two chief Berlin Clergymen, learned Roloff one of them, a divine of much fame, to catechise the two Salzburg Deputies, and report upon the point. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... lecturer under what claimed to be spirit influence. Although speaking in the interest of a faith generally unpopular, and involved in no slight degree in crudities, extravagance, and quackery, she was herself neither fool nor fanatic. She was a true child of nature, direct and simple in her manners, and impatient of the artificiality and formal etiquette of fashionable society.' These poems are characterized by great case of style, flowing rhythm, earnestness ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... L'Estrange. In levelling his reproaches, the satirist was not probably very solicitous about genealogical accuracy; as, in the eighth line, I conceive Sir John Dryden to be alluded to, although he is termed our poet's grandfather, when he was in fact his uncle. Sir Erasmus Dryden was indeed a fanatic, and so was Henry Pickering, Dryden's paternal and maternal grandfather; but neither were men of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... Russian make. Barring a dog or two either lying asleep along the wall, or scraping a heap of refuse in the hope of satisfying hunger—there is hardly a soul walking about. Attracted by a crowd in the distance, one finds a fanatic gesticulating like mad and shouting at the top of his voice before an admiring crowd of ragamuffins squatting round him ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the curious sensation that while the experiment was obviously coming to an end, in the midst of its privations it yet embodied the peace of mind which comes to him who insists upon the logic of life whether it is reasonable or not—the fanatic's joy in seeing his own formula translated into action. At any rate, as we reached the common-place southern town of workaday men and women, for one moment its substantial buildings, its solid brick churches, its ordered streets, divided ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... misunderstood. Such words as fanatic, pretender, agitator, heretic, renegade and "dangerous" were freely hurled at him. They said he was pulling down the pillars of Society. He seriously considered retiring entirely from the pulpit; and as a personal vindication and that his thoughts might ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... Then I had what I can only regard as an inspiration. As a Pressman, I felt sure from what I had been told that I could never hope to get into touch with this cantankerous Professor. But these recriminations, twice mentioned in his skeleton biography, could only mean that he was a fanatic in science. Was there not an exposed margin there upon which he might be accessible? I ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... was a fanatic, he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. When questioned in the presence of the queen and council to discover his accomplices, his constancy wholly forsook him, and he said whatever was suggested. In particular he accused the admiral ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... more honest than saying you believe what is contrary to all human experience. Look back on your life. Has its course been of your own shaping? Compare yourself of to-day with yourself of four years ago; has the change come about by your own agency? If you are wrong, are you to blame? Imagine some fanatic seizing you by the arm, and shouting to you to beware of the precipice ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... love thee? How else could I borrow Pride from man's slander, and strength from my sorrow? Laugh when they sneer at the fanatic's bride, Knowing no bliss, save to toil ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... Eastern races. By an effort of the will they send through the nerves a flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant. Carried into its fullest expression it drives a man amok or makes of him a howling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir. In lesser intensity it produces the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that performs prodigies of abandoned grace. Suddenly the sensuous exaltation had come upon Jethro Fawe. It was as though he had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... that wild and fanatical sect, claims to the wandering preachers of his tribe the merit of converting the borderers. He introduces a cavalier, haranguing the Highlanders, and ironically thus guarding them against the fanatic divines: ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... shown by those who listened. Some knelt and prostrated themselves. Others, including Anazeh, sat bolt upright, closing their eyes dreamily at intervals. Over the way, Jim Suliman ben Saoud Grim was especially formally devout. His very life undoubtedly depended on being recognized as a fanatic of fanatics. [*A Moslem priest ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... said the little man—and about this time I noticed that he had the bright eyes of a fanatic—"I've been cruising with this Parnassus going on seven years. I've covered the territory from Florida to Maine and I reckon I've injected about as much good literature into the countryside as ever old ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... gas. Security takes care of that. When I said where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything checked. If I live through this, I'll bet I stay a fanatic about cautiousness ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... of Jesus, a fanatic. He died at 33 when he might have lived to a good old age and done ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... around their lines, instead of trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the tournament! She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put down a less ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden a young fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion, and has often been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour of gaiety after poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The good man must have turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in courtyard or antechamber, with a ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... already Nelson was carrying a load equal to his strength, and he told himself that he could not afford to be distracted, even temporarily, by the irresponsible actions of a maniac. One never could tell what a madman would do. And Gray had confessed himself a madman—a fanatic of the most dangerous type. There was but one course of action open—viz., to eliminate him, destroy him without delay. That was no easy task, even in these lawless times, but the stakes were too high to permit of half measures. There must be ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... large and remarkable collection of snakes, all Indian, and "millions" of pigeons. He pays fabulous prices for any bird or animal to which he takes a fancy, and is, of course, duly victimized by cunning dealers. He is a fanatic in religious observances, and confines himself within the palace walls, from one year's end to another, with his tigers, snakes, pigeons, priests, and women. He permits tourists to visit his grounds, but will himself see no one. It would not seem that he owes any affection to the English, who, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... portions of it. His visit was, I believe, prompted by the affection he bears me, but he appeared utterly incapable of understanding the depth of feeling under which that letter was written. The editor's remarks were deeply trying to him. Friend B. seemed to think they were the ravings of a fanatic, and that the bare mention of my precious brother's name was a disgrace to his character, when coupled with mine in such a cause and such a paper, or rather in a cause advocated in such a way. I was so astonished and tried that I hardly knew what to say. I declined, however, to write to W.L.G., ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney



Words linked to "Fanatic" :   partisan, enthusiast, fanatism, passionate, overzealous, partizan



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com