"Poltroonery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friend of Algiers' excuses, and appoints a new consul, specially charged "to conduct himself in a manner agreeable to you." The nation paid a pension of L600 a year to Mr. Fraser as indemnity for its Government's poltroonery. ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... But scorn him not for yielding. Think how he was beaten. Could he help it that the life in him proved too much for the death with which he had sided? Was it poltroonery to desert the cause of ruin for that of growth? of essential slavery for ordered freedom? of disintegration for vital and enlarging unity? He had "said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... take our turn at these great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and splendid—that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the doctors sell—why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Regiment ANDLAU; I had to yield myself prisoner, and was taken to General Loudon. He asked me, "Don't you know the rules of war, then; that you fire after chamade is beaten?" I answered in my heat, "I knew of no chamade; what poltroonery or what treachery had been going on, I knew not!" Loudon answered, "You might deserve to have your head laid at your feet, Sir! Am I here to inquire which of you shows bravery, which poltroonery?"' ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... story lies. It lies in the cool impertinence and heartlessness of his visitors. To put the emphasis on the rejection of their proposal—to make a point of that—is to insult the reader. Of course it was rejected. How should it possibly, by any stretch of poltroonery and ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... prowess and suffering, of terrible woe in time of disaster and defeat, and of the glutting of ferocious vengeance in the days of triumphant reprisal. They contain tales of the most heroic courage and of the vilest poltroonery; for the iron times brought out all that was best and all that was basest in the human breast. We read of husbands leaving their wives, and women their children, to the most dreadful of fates, on the chance that they themselves might thereby escape; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... kept within the almost boundless limits of the libel law. Jim had publicity enough, and he did not care to add to it by a libel suit, nor could he bring himself to make a personal attack on any of his pursuers. His discretion took on the look of poltroonery and he ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... were now too cold and hungry to do more, they grumbled and cast sullen looks upon their leaders. Dick emptied his purse among them, leaving himself nothing; thanked them for the courage they had displayed, though he could have found it more readily in his heart to rate them for poltroonery; and having thus somewhat softened the effect of his prolonged misfortune, despatched them to find their way, either severally or in pairs, to Shoreby and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... five unpoisoned oranges, and the skin of a sixth, and so crept upstairs. His situation was, perhaps, rather novel. With murder in his remorseless heart, he yet hoped against hope, out of his very poltroonery, that murder had not been done. At the girl's door he waited and listened, his face horribly agitated and shining wet. All was silent. His heart was sounding hoarsely within him, like a dry pump: he heard it, so noisy and so distinct that he almost feared it ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... shield which brave Massachusetts held over the New England settlements, through the time of her traitors of the Revolutionary age, down to the time of her Butlers and her Marcys, her Van Burens and Hoyts, poltroonery and corruption have with her ruled the hour. Nature has her freaks, and in one of them she gave a great man, John Jay, to New York. Hamilton was a waif from the West Indies on her spirit- barren strand, and Rufus King from Massachusetts. No ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar |
