"Sophistry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the limit for all Moslems at four lawful wives; and in spite of the arguments of R. Bosworth Smith, we must regard it as a most damning after-thought that made the first and only exception to accommodate his own weakness. By that act he placed himself beyond the help of all sophistry, and took his true place in the sober judgment of mankind. And by a law which is as unerring as the law of gravitation, he became more and more sensual as age advanced. At the time of his death he was the husband of eleven wives. We are not favored with a list of his concubines:[107] we only know ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... don't know how to answer the simplest questions. I'm a plain tanner who never in my life studied sophistry, yet I know why I must honour ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... forged on, "the work should be its own reward, its own justification. At least would-be artists are told so repeatedly. Whenever one rebels at the injustice the world is there with this sophistry, feeds him with it as a nurse feeds pap to a crying child, until he's full and temporarily comatose. But just suppose for an instant that the same argument were used in any other field of endeavor. Suppose, for instance, you ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... That there is "sophistry" on one side or other, is certain; but now it matters not on which. On my part it has not been a question of words. Yet your understanding or mine must be strangely warped—for what you term "delicacy," appears to me to be exactly the contrary. I have no criterion ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... of singular skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was a master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... species of political sophistry Hamilton was a master. It is, to say the least, strange that the misstatement of historical facts, false analogies and juggling of popular catch-words which constitute his defence of the Federal judiciary should have been so often referred to as an example ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... into the subject, and of all the thousands of political speeches I have heard it was the most effective. It was eloquent, but it was far more than that; it was HONESTLY argumentative; there was no sophistry of any sort; every subject was taken up fairly and every point dealt with thoroughly. One could see the supports of the Greenback party vanishing as he went on. His manner was the very opposite of Mr. Conkling's: it was kindly, hearty, as of neighbor with neighbor,—indeed, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... era in which, a semi- understanding of the antinomies of reason having given birth to the art of sophistry, the characteristics of the false and the true were confounded, and in which, instead of doctrines, they had nothing but deceptive mental tilts. Thus the industrial movement faithfully reproduces the metaphysical ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... brushes away the Cobwebs of sophistry and religious paternalism by which the Sabbatarian sects sought to close the Gates ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... feeling of responsibility, the warmer the passion with which he clung to Scripture; and a strong instinct for the sensible and the fitting really helped him over many dangers. His discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact, let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Clue or landmark there was absolutely none! My feet left no signs on the granite and shingle. My brain throbbed with agony as I tried to discover the solution of this terrible problem. My situation, after all sophistry and reflection, had finally to be summed up in ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... And yet—and yet—what shall we say? And what shall we say of God's fatherhood? Shall we say as some do that as Judge He must do cruel things which as Father He would shrink from? God forbid! The Judge and the Father are one. Men would never use such sophistry about the character of God if it were put into plain words. "Ye must ken," said a godly old Scotchman, "that the Almighty may often have to do in His offeeshial capacity what He would scorn to do as a private individual!" I ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... most secret as well as the most shameful actions. You kneel down at his feet and whisper in his ear your most intimate thoughts and desires, and your most polluting deeds; because your church, by dint of cunning and sophistry, has succeeded in persuading you that there was no impropriety or danger in doing so; that the man whom you chose for your spiritual guide and confident could never be tempted or tainted by such foul recitals. But that same church, through some mysterious providences, is made to acknowledge, in ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... but the sophistry here is plain enough, although it is not always detected. Great genius and force of character undoubtedly make their own career. But because Walter Scott was dull at school, is a parent to see with joy that his son is a dunce? ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the son of an old friend? Besides"—his glance again seeking the envelope—"it is my privilege to learn whether I have fought with a gentleman or a renegade." But even as he meditated, he felt the sophistry of this last argument, while through his brain ran the undercurrent: "He has wooed her—won her, perhaps!" Passion, rather than injured hauteur, stirred him. At the same time a great indignation filled his breast; how Saint-Prosper had ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... to add that all this talk about expenditure of vitality is full of sophistry. Lecturers and writers speak of our stock of vitality as if it were a vault of gold, upon which you cannot draw without lessening the quantity. Whereas, it is rather like the mind or heart, enlarging ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... a provincial assize not long since, in Ireland, an attorney was tried upon a capital charge of forgery. The trial was extremely long, when after much sophistry from the counsel, and the most minute investigation of the judge, it appeared to the complete satisfaction of a crowded court, that the culprit had forged the signature of a man who ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... adopt the doctrines in whole, or in part, of the sage who had seen his natural genius, and who had urged him to exert it in examining, detecting, and declaring for himself, and thus flattery gave proselytes to infidelity, which could not have been gained by all the powerful eloquence or artful sophistry of the infidel. ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... HUMAN NATURE. A moral theory that is merely coercive and arbitrary, therefore, is not in a genuine sense moral. A morality, to justify itself, must appeal to the heart of man. The good which it recommends must be a good which man can without sophistry approve. And the good for which man can whole-heartedly strive is not determined by logic, but, in the last analysis, by biology. Human beings cannot freely call good that to which they have no spontaneous prompting. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... how far the United States Supreme Court, supposed to be an impartial tribunal and generally held in such high esteem and treated with such reverential fear, has been guilty of inconsistency and sophistry in its effort to support this autocracy in defiance of the well established principles of interpretation for construing the constitutions and laws of States and in utter disregard of the supremacy of Congress in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... and his friends discuss is, the endurance of pain. Is it an unmixed evil? Can anything console the sufferer? Cicero at once condemns the sophistry of Epicurus. The wise man cannot pretend indifference to pain; it is enough that he endure it with courage, since, beyond all question, it is sharp, bitter, and hard to bear. And what is this courage? Partly excitement, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... LION.—Blush, brother, blush; such sophistry is only worthy of the Common Pleas, where I know you picked it up. To be sure, if both of us were the most abandoned of beasts, we surely should have some excuse for our wickedness in the profligate company we are obliged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... Sophistry! sophistry! even supposing he was the greatest of villains, does that make her less a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... of Dogmatism was its absolute reliance on the wisdom of Hippocrates, and Methodism was marred by its insufficiency and sophistry. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... sob, that vibrated with the obstinate resentment of a child that knows it is to be argued out of its instincts by adult sophistry. What had become of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... was sophistry or truth. Beltran had said it,—that was enough; so strongly did she feel his personality in what he wrote, that the soul was exultant, jubilant, defiant, within her. Other words there were in the letter, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of sophistry as was devised by Agesilaus, in that great perplexity of the people as to the treatment to be given to those who had played the coward at the battle of Leuctra, when after that unhappy defeat, he decreed, that the laws ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... past, as also in part of our time, said Luther, it was dangerous studying, when divinity and all good arts were contemned; and when fine, expert, and prompt wits were plagued with sophistry. Aristotle, the Heathen, was held in such repute and honour, that whoso undervalued or contradicted him was held, at Cologne, for the greatest heretic; whereas they themselves understood not Aristotle. The Sophists did much more ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment, if it were to be accepted by the people; and added that Negro suffrage was all the strain that the Republican party could bear at this time; but neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton were fooled by this sophistry. They knew that Republican politicians saw in the Negro vote in the South the means of keeping their party in power for a long time to come, and could entirely overlook justice to Negro women since they were assured of enough votes without them. The women of the North need not be considered, since ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... secure uniformity in the several Federal circuits and correct errors, it has been proposed to establish a central court of patent appeals in Washington. This I believe in; but this court should also contain at least two scientific men, who would not be blind to the sophistry of paid experts. [7] Men whose inventions would have created wealth of millions have been ruined and prevented from making any money whereby they could continue their careers as creators of wealth for the general good, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... antiquity and an English prosodist settle this."—Rush, on the Voice, p. 140. "This phillipic gave rise to my satirical reply in self-defence."— Merchant's Criticisms. "We here saw no inuendoes, no new sophistry, no falsehoods."—Ib. "A witty and humourous vein has often produced enemies."—Murray's Key, p. 173. "Cry holla! to thy tongue, I pr'ythee: it curvetts unseasonably."—Shak. "I said, in my slyest manner, 'Your health, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... many millions of people could not have sugar to sweeten their tea. Fires and murders have been argued to be beneficial, as they serve to fill the newspapers, and for a subject to talk of— this is a sort of sophistry that it might be difficult to disprove on the bare scheme of contingent utility; but on the ground that we have stated, it must pass for a mere irony. What the proportion between the good and the evil will really be found in any of the supposed cases, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Thirty-first Congress purposed also to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction in all the other unorganized Territories. This contention was one of those non-sequiturs of which Douglas, in the heat of argument, was too often guilty. Still more regrettable, because it seemed to convict him of sophistry, was the mode by which he sought to evade the charge of the Appeal, that the act organizing New Mexico and settling the boundary of Texas had reaffirmed the Missouri Compromise. To establish his point he had to assume that all the land cut off from Texas north of 36 deg. 30', was added to New ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the use of animal food is not forbidden, provided the individual has not himself been an agent in depriving it of life. The doctrine of prohibition, however, although thus regulated, like many others of the Buddhists, by subtleties and sophistry, has proved an obstacle in the way of the Missionaries; and, coupled with the permission in the Scriptures "to slay and eat," it has not failed to operate prejudicially to the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but that does not afford me confidence to begin that, or the like of that, again." Still, he was nearing the end of his doubts and self-torturing sophistry. A last glimpse of his imperious curiosity, kept alive by saucy hopes and fears, is seen in his letter to Speed of the 5th of October. He ventures, with a genuine timidity, to ask a question which we may believe has not often been asked by one civilized ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... life with conclusions so evident that no spoken word can add to their clearness. There is no need of comment; neither is there room for doubt. The bare facts stand naked. No sophistry can dull their outlines nor soften the insistence of their high lights; nor can any reasoning explain away the results that will follow. Both women, without the exchange of a word, knew instantly that ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... opinion of those that have grounds to hope better of them. (7.) As to all that have unduly suffered in these matters (either in their persons or relations), through the clouds of human weakness, and Satan's wiles and sophistry, I do truly sympathize with them; taking it for granted that such as drew themselves clear of this great transgression, or that have sufficient grounds so to look upon their dear friends, have hereby been ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... forces being reduced by the deep snow of a very severe winter, he relapsed into such an illness as confined him all that season to his bed. Early in the spring he was sent to St. Andrews, to hear the lectures of John Major, who, though very old, read logic, or rather sophistry, in that university. The summer after, he accompanied him into France; and there he fell into the troubles of the Lutheran sect, which then began to increase. He struggled with the difficulties of fortune ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... mar, Nor sophistry distract; No parrying counsel jar With the eternal fact;— Keep watch, my soul, in fear, The Judge of ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... itself closely with credulity, for it was directed against reason itself; and though he has expressed in admirable language many true and beautiful thoughts, the glamour of his style too often concealed much weakness and uncertainty of judgment and much sophistry in argument. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the introduction. There is scarcely any thing there which I have not heard from him in our various private, though official discussions. The very turn of the arguments is the same, and others will see as well as myself that the style is Hamilton's. The sophistry is too fine, too ingenious, even to have been comprehended by Smith, much less devised by him. His reply shows he did not understand his first speech; as its general inferiority proves its legitimacy, as evidently as it does the bastardy of the original. You know we had understood that Hamilton ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... A: What poor sophistry from the poor sophists who have taught you. Indeed you are in a bad way to be free like your dog! Do you not eat, sleep, propagate like him, even almost to the attitude? Do you want the sense of smell other than through your nose? Why do you want ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... "Meditations" were false, the existence of God would pass with me for a truth at least as certain as I ever judged any truth of mathematics to be, altho indeed such a doctrine may at first sight appear to contain more sophistry than truth. For, as I have been accustomed in every other matter to distinguish between existence and essence, I easily believe that the existence can be separated from the essence of God, and that thus God may be conceived as not actually existing. But, nevertheless, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... party. I am only insisting upon religious obedience to Law. I am preaching the texts before me. Such obedience is a religious duty. It is the will of God. I appeal to the texts. They proclaim the Law of God. Peaceful subjection to government is his law; and men are guilty of sophistry and falsehood, when, to excuse wicked evasion of Law or violent resistance, they pretend to appeal to what they call "the higher laws of God." There are no such higher laws. The texts before me are his law. If one man has a moral right, either cunningly ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phaedo, but, who, himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared to me that he was ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... for it is contrary, to that evident and undeniable rule of justice which I have mentioned above, of not doing to anyone what you would not have him do to you. But, however, these refined pieces of casuistry and sophistry, being very convenient and welcome to people's passions and appetites, they gladly accept the indulgence, without desiring to detect the fallacy or the reasoning: and indeed many, I might say most people, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... refute his assertions or to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the Company and the British nation. And when the glorious victories of Sir Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of supplies,—and when, since the departure of that excellent ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... might say of Giri what Scott wrote of patriotism, that "as it is the fairest, so it is often the most suspicious, mask of other feelings." Carried beyond or below Right Reason, Giri became a monstrous misnomer. It harbored under its wings every sort of sophistry and hypocrisy. It might easily—have been turned into a nest of cowardice, if Bushido had not a ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... would have turned his back upon such sophistry, and scorned such a diabolical medium, how fair soever. He had not, however, been at Vine Cottage a week, every day in the society of one whose situation so much appealed to his sympathy and kindness, when he became conscious that he had been taken into a high mountain, and had not ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... to read the puritanic scrawl. Damn'd sophistry! Ye heavens! thou God of nature! thou Redeemer of mankind! ye look down with approving eyes on a passion inspired by the purest flame, and guarded by truth, delicacy, and honour; but the half-inch soul of an unfeeling, cold-blooded, pitiful presbyterian bigot,[69] cannot forgive anything above his ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... own opinions. Have the men of genius who allowed themselves license of conduct been any the better for it? the happier? the greater? Schopenhauer himself, for instance!" She smiled at him with honest eyes when she had spoken, and took another sandwich. "But don't let us talk sophistry and silliness," she proceeded, "nor the kind of abstract that serves as a cover for unrighteousness. Those tricks don't carry conviction to my uncultivated mind. I ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... employer with which he had laid the foundation of his fortune. It was the first half-million that came hard. It was this first half-million that bore the stain of shame. He had justified it with fine sophistry until he counted himself a benefactor to Woodman, but the grim fact stood out in his memory with growing clearness as his millions piled up with each ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... would have been sensitive to the appeal at the beginning of Savonarola's speech; but at this moment she was so utterly in antagonism with him, that what he called perplexity seemed to her sophistry and doubleness; and as he went on, his words only fed that flame of indignation, which now again, more fully than ever before, lit up the memory of all his mistakes, and made her trust in him seem to have been a purblind delusion. She spoke ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Mrs. Piozzi (formerly Mrs. Thrale), and on the latter’s publication of Johnson’s letters, she writes:—“Greatly as I admired Johnson’s talents and revered his knowledge, and formidable as I felt the powers to be of his witty sophistry, yet did a certain quickness of spirit, and zeal for the reputation of my favourite authors, irresistibly urge me to defend them against his spleenful injustice—a temerity, which I was well aware made him dislike me, notwithstanding the coaxing regard he always expressed ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... him? What book contains one of his maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him, and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and fury, so much intrigue and sophistry, and self-seeking, and now the silence ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... shall they rot—Ambition's honoured fools![bz] Yes, Honour decks the turf that wraps their clay![66] Vain Sophistry! in these behold the tools,[ca] The broken tools, that Tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human hearts—to what?—a dream alone. Can Despots compass aught that hails their sway?[cb] Or call with truth one span of earth their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... States are supreme; and that where there is one supreme there cannot be a concurrent authority; and further, that where the laws of the Union are supreme, those of the States must be subordinate; because there cannot be two supremes. This is curious sophistry. That two supreme powers cannot act together is false. They are inconsistent only when they are aimed at each other or at one indivisible object. The laws of the United States are supreme, as to all their proper, constitutional objects; the laws of the States are supreme ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... Miss Leavenworth, it is this thing which makes your cousin's position absolutely dangerous. It is a fact that, left unexplained, must ever link her name with infamy; a bit of circumstantial evidence no sophistry can smother, and no denial obliterate. Only her hitherto spotless reputation, and the efforts of one who, notwithstanding appearances, believes in her innocence, keeps her so long from the clutch of the officers of justice. That key, and the silence ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis—to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry—to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... and his weakness. Half a million circulation daily, three quarters of a million on Sunday—how mighty as a direct influence upon the people! Its clearness and vigour, its intelligence, its truth-like sophistry—how mighty as an indirect influence upon the minds of other editors and of public men! "Power—Success," he repeated to himself in an exaltation of vanity ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... phantom diffuse peritonitis, said young man is not in line for saving life; on the contrary, he is liable to mismanage and meet with as great a failure, and be the cause of as unnecessary a death as was the good doctor from whom we are quoting and of whose medical sophistry I am trying to give the ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... cannot be justly punished, but is answerable only to God: Or should the same be offered in behalf of a divine, who would preach against religion and moral duties; in either of these two cases everybody would find out the sophistry, and presently answer, that although common men are not exactly skilled in the composition or application of medicines, or in prescribing the limits of duty; yet the difference between poisons and remedies is easily known by their effects, and common ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... all such concurrent verdicts, a strain of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed so ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... more probable. But even that was doubtful. Her trenchant remark about civilization wasn't the product of a conditioned mind. But why was he worrying about her attitudes? They weren't important—she wasn't even human. He shook his head. That was a sophistry. The fact that she wasn't human had nothing to do with the importance of her attitude. "I suppose there is a reason," he agreed. "But I don't know it. I haven't been here long enough to ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... and communism. At Lucca, too! It was horrible! By some means such an incendiary must be got rid of. Next to the foul Fiend himself established in the city, he could conceive nothing more awful! It was a Providence that Marescotti could not marry Enrica! He should tell the marchesa so. Such sophistry might have perverted Enrica also. It was more than probable that, instead of reforming him, she might have fallen a victim to his wickedness. This reflection was infinitely comforting to the much-enduring cavaliere. It lightened also much of his apprehension in approaching the marchesa, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the worst form; for he was not going boldly up to the new resolution with his eyes open, but had resigned himself to the tide, which was gradually rising in one united flux of love, pride, impatience, sophistry, and inclination; which he watched with a certain passive content, knowing that the stormy current would carry ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... mind, and, like furies armed with fiery scourges, seemed determined to drive him to despair. As he combated these horrible recollections with distracted feelings, but with a resolved mind, he became aware that his arguments were answered by the sophistry of another, and that the dispute was no longer confined to his own thoughts. The Author of Evil was present in the room with him in bodily shape, and, potent with spirits of a melancholy cast, was impressing upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... and shameful sophistry neither moved nor convinced her; but she had not the courage to resist the tearful entreaties of her mother, who ended by falling on her knees, and with clasped hands imploring her child to save her ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... which he sees spread with wrecks, is natural to the sailor. I had before my eye so many critical adventures ended in miscarriage, that caution was forced upon me. I encountered in every page wit struggling with its own sophistry, and learning confused by the multiplicity of its views. I was forced to censure those whom I admired, and could not but reflect, while I was dispossessing their emendations, how soon the same fate might happen to my own, and how ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... easy to conceive how Dona Leonor de Cisneros had been induced apparently to abandon the faith to which she had so long adhered. Falsehoods and devices of all sorts had been employed to induce her to make her peace with Rome. Every argument which sophistry could invent had been brought forward to shake her belief. There was a rack, with other fearful tortures, and the stake, on the one hand, and forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church on the other—ay, and a happy life with her Antonio. When at last the inquisitors found her stubborn, ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... man fails except by his own choice. You might have been master of the vineyard, but you have preferred to have the vineyard master you. Confronted with an uncongenial task, you slunk away from it and shielded yourself behind the sophistry that the work was unworthy of you. As if any work were ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... what would I do? I will tell you. Were I in love with a woman, I would make myself a child, and adore her, and sell my soul for her caresses; and make my brain the tool of my infatuation by yielding to her false, fatal sophistry, because that sophistry would be uttered by red lips, and would become truth in the dazzling light of her seductive smiles. Do you expect me, because I know it is all a lie, to resist sighs and murmurs, and those languid glances, which women employ to gain ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... in the Jesuit College of St. Xavier in Bombay, entered our carriage at one of the stations. Soon he could contain himself no longer, and joined in our conversation. Smiling and rubbing his hands, he said that he was curious to know on the strength of what sophistry our companions could find anything resembling a philosophical explanation "in the fundamental idea of the four faces of this ugly Shiva, crowned with snakes," pointing with his finger to the idol at the entrance ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... was born in that city about 296. At the council of Nice, though then but a deacon of Alexandria, his reputation for skill in controversy gained him an honorable place in the council, and with signal ability he exposed the sophistry of those who pleaded on the side of Arius. Six months after, he was appointed the successor of Alexander. Notwithstanding the influence of the emperor, who had recalled Arius from banishment, and, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry; for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject for ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... a while to think, not pausing that she might answer her aunt's sophistry, which she hardly noticed, but that she might consider, if it were possible, what it was that she was about to do;—that there might be left a moment to her before she had surrendered herself for ever to her doom. And then she spoke. "Aunt Charlotte," ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... but by falling on its face. But there is no more curious quality in its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of hurry and fatigue, with which it flings down its argument—or rather its refusal to argue. It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything. It does not so much poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one. For instance, one of these papers printed an article on Sir Stuart Samuel, who, having ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... truckling to the sets of men, whom he was accustomed to dignify with the name of the public, had a profound deference or the principles, character, and station of Mr. Effingham, that no sophistry, or self-encouragement in the practices of social confusion, could overcome; and he paused before he communicated the next resolution to his employers. But perceiving that both the latter ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... but Pierre Leroux, with his tone of profound conviction and his thorough appreciation of the great problems awaiting solution, exercised a still more potent influence, and we did not see the shortcomings of his studies and the sophistry of his mind. My customary course of reading was Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Reid, and Dugald Stewart. In the way of religious books, my preferences were for Bossuet's Sermons and the Elevations sur les Mysttres. I was very familiar, too, with Francois de Sales, both ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Sophistry suggested that it might be the missing girl, Esmay, and certainly she who had walked here was the veiled woman of the temple worshippers; there were the footprints, broader and heavier in appearance, of her companion, and the halting progress of the black-chapped ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... will stick to the business, and protect ordinary people from the new sophistry both by speech and writing. So few people have any intellectual grip that everything may depend on the leadership of a few men like yourself, who can speak with knowledge and authority, and will take the trouble to put concrete ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... fixed list of the victims; a fixed price to be paid per head, a fixed exemption for the murderers from his own law 'De Sicariis.' Modern idolaters of a policy of blood and iron may profane history by their glorification of human monsters; but no sophistry can blind an independent reader to the real nature of Sulla's character and acts. He organized murder, and filled Italy with idle soldiers instead of honest husbandmen. He did so in the interests of a class—a class whose incapacity for government he had discovered; ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... failed, but which on the other hand have brought comfort, solace, and permanent joy to the hearts of hundreds of thousands—nay, millions surely,—of earth's weary pilgrims. Words which declared a truth since tested by every possible subtlety and sophistry which the ingenuity of man could suggest or devise, but which has stood firmly through every ordeal. Words which declare a truth that has already become the firm foundation of faith for an ever progressive Spiritual Church, made up of almost every nation of the earth, ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... is talking to himself. There are deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a bitter word; Say rather fear—of what belongs to Heav'n. Was there no crime, Anselmo, when thou stol'st, Like a disguised thief, this trusting heart? What sophistry can'st thou put forth to show Thou should'st retain thy ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... this people. Where others only see sand and reefs, not worth the trouble of cultivation, the Englishman discovers some productive germ that with his indefatigable energy brings forth a thousand fold. Nor is Colonial work, industrial activity and commercial thrift disturbed by bureaucratic sophistry or immoderate fiscal pretentions, that so frequently suffocate the most promising and audacious undertakings ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Christ created angles by running vertical lines through the ecclesiastical and hypocritical conventionalities of their day. The new angles and curves thus produced by the bold philosophy of the humble Nazarene have confronted with impregnable firmness during the intervening ages the sophistry of the Pharisees. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... was perhaps as subtle as the finest sophistry; it was a sort of dialogue between the mind and the conscience. "If I should lose Brigitte?" I said to the mind. "She departs with you," said the conscience. "If she deceives me?"—"How can she deceive ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and harassed condition, the sophistry illuded her; she was sensible only of the menace his words distilled. She saw herself tricked and trapped, meshed in a web of damning circumstance; everything was against her—appearances, the hands of all men, the cruel accident that had placed the necklace in her keeping, even her parentage. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... people of the poorer class were to be seen here and there, but they were in the decided minority. Shirley, herself a daughter of the Revolution, was a staunch supporter of the immortal principles of Democracy and of the equality of man before the law. But all other talk of equality was the greatest sophistry and charlatanism. There could be no real equality so long as some people were cultured and refined and others were uneducated and vulgar. Shirley believed in an aristocracy of brains and soap. She insisted ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... members of those Chambers should thenceforth be appointed by the Senate, and not by lot; for the principle of the lot, he quaintly urged, was hostile to the right of election which belonged to the Senate. Against such conscious sophistry all the bolts of logic were harmless. The question was left undecided, in order that the Senate might forthwith declare in favour of its own right to determine every year not only the elections to, but the exclusions ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives of the people. Books tell me so much that they inform me of nothing. Sophistry, the bane of freemen, launches forth in all her deceiving attire! After all, most men reason from passions; and shall such an ignorant individual as I am decide, and say this side is right, that side is wrong? Sentiment and feeling are the only ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... guessed. But however our faith in her may be justified by the ridiculous ease of her previous conquests, we cannot regard without trepidation her entrance into the arena with this particular and widely renowned king of beasts. Innocence pitted against sophistry and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the degradation of morals, for they dissected and represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, What is there in it?—and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast. Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to be denied that though his life as a whole was pure, he had yielded to temptation, not without ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... considered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses? I can see clearly enough where the contributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also understand how one accustomed to value realities only as they resembled fables should be won with such pensive sophistry; and I can certainly sympathize with his feeling that the mariner's failure to reappear according to appointment added its final and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and completed the mystery from which the man emerged and which swallowed ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Johnson's malignity, is the manner in which he has treated the character and conduct of Milton. To enforce this charge has wearied sophistry, and exhausted the invention of a party. What they cannot deny, they palliate; what they cannot prove, they say is probable. But why all this rage against Dr. Johnson? Addison, before him, had ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... it! out on it! what sophistry. Count Horn murdered a banker, like a common thief, for his gold, and this unhappy lord hath done the deed for which he must suffer in a mistaken sense of honor, and with all tenderness compatible with such a deed. There is nothing similar or parallel in the two ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... that it is the chiefest of cruelty and unkindness, the chiefest of madness, to incite these poor and ignorant people—ever ready to follow the voice of sophistry or selfishness—to believe that their burglary of the house of success is right and reasonable; because it is certain that such burglary will be met in the South by the law, by the White Justice, and that, if need ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... denunciations lose their effect when repeated. Again, he knew that she would not believe him. Never in his life had Isaac Worthington been so ignored, so put to shame, as by this school-teacher of Brampton. Before, self-esteem and sophistry had always carried him off between them; sometimes, in truth, with a wound—the wound had always healed. But he had a feeling, to-night, that this woman had glanced into his soul, and had turned away from it. As he looked at ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tells you about him, do not come forward at once to pay this chief tribute like every one else?" I replied by asking, "How could I know that this was a chief, who had allowed me to remain a day and a half near him without giving me any thing to eat?" This, which to the uninitiated may seem sophistry, was to the Central Africans quite a rational question, for he at once admitted that food ought to have been sent, and added that probably his chief was only making it ready for me, and that it would ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... For wisdom in the famished ass Who breaks his neck a weed to crop, When tethered in the luscious grass. And now, thank God, his hateful name Shall never rescued be from shame, Though seas of venal ink be shed; No sophistry shall reconcile With sympathy for Erin's Isle, Or sorrow for her patriot dead, The weeping of this crocodile. Life's incongruity is past, And dirt to dirt is seen at last, The worm of worm afoul doth fall. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... fortified on the intellectual side, that they could not blind themselves to the light of truth, however really desirous of doing so; they could not, with all the inclination in the world, pass off upon themselves bad arguments for good ones. If the sophistry of the intellect could be rendered impossible, that of the feelings, having no instrument to work with, would be powerless. A comprehensive classification of all those things which, not being evidence, are liable to appear such to the understanding, will, therefore, of itself include all errors of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... churches would be an incalculable blessing, by securing to all minds a free investigation upon religious subjects. But infidelity desires no more powerful coadjutor than human reason in its freest exercise, because it is so liable to be led away by sophistry, and its invariable tendency is to reject as myths and fables all things which it cannot comprehend or for which it cannot see a material cause. Perfect reason is the twin brother and strongest supporter of faith; but reason as it exists in the present ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... necessity of making a degrading use of my faculties. I was born a racehorse; and after near forty years of successful racing, I am now drawing the waggon—nay, to be the teacher of French to my copyists, and the critic of English to my translators!-to write sophistry about criticism, which I always considered a sort of literary quackery, and to put together paltry articles for works which I never read. Indeed, if I have not undergone the doom of almost all individuals whose situation becomes ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... an artistic whole. Both the serious discussions and the jests are sometimes out of place. The invincible Socrates is withdrawn from view; and new foes begin to appear under old names. Plato is now chiefly concerned, not with the original Sophist, but with the sophistry of the schools of philosophy, which are making reasoning impossible; and is driven by them out of the regions of transcendental speculation back into the path of common sense. A logical or psychological phase takes the place of the doctrine of Ideas in his mind. He is constantly dwelling ...
— Statesman • Plato
... drilled?' I believe in insurrection. Everlasting debate—and it is not genuine debate, for nobody really ranges himself alongside his enemy's strongest points—demoralises us all. It encourages all sorts of sophistry, becomes mere manoeuvring, and saps people's faith in the truth. In half an hour, if two persons were to sit opposite one another, they could muster every single reason for and against Free Trade. What is the use of going on after that? Moreover, insurrection ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... very soundly deprecated war and pictured its horrors. But he could not forget that he was appealing to a large class that held the German viewpoint. He therefore found it necessary to soften his phrase with some hyphenated sophistry. He dared not say that Germany was the culprit and would be the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... the demagogue, and thus depriving the intelligence of the country of the power to control it. The specious argument that if a man is compelled to serve in the militia and defend the country, he should be entitled to vote, was his. Its sophistry is as palpable to Jefferson as to every thinking mind. Government is the most abstruse of the sciences, and should, for the security of all, be controlled by the intelligence of the country. During the world's ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... "No, that is sophistry," her clear, straight glance was on him searchingly. "You tell me that a statesman must be first a politician; that a politician must consort with rowdies, ballot-box stuffers, gamblers—even thieves. David Broderick, you're wrong. Women have their ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... would he attempt to reason himself out of these dreadful visitations, by the shallow sophistry of ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton |
