"Claptrap" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of such a saying in the mouth of a man who was drawing a salary of five thousand pounds a year did not appear to occur to anyone. On the contrary, the hired scribes of the capitalist Press wrote columns of fulsome admiration of the miserable claptrap, and the working men who had elected this man went into raptures over the 'Brilliant Epigram' as if it were good to eat. They cut it out of the papers and carried it about with them: they showed it to each other: they read it and repeated it to each other: they ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... exposure of platitudes. Popular government is no more free from catchwords and platitudes than any other political, religious, or social cause which interests a great many people, and is the subject of much discussion. Even the Historical Method has its own claptrap. But one must not make too much of these things. "In order to love mankind," said Helvetius, "one must not expect too much from them." And fairly to appreciate institutions you must not hold them ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I, consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books. Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject—the frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted, betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... forward, struck the keys, giving him the note and again she sang, this time the Libiamo, which, old as the hills, claptrap, utterly detestable, none the less served to display the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... supporting idea that something has been changed in the whole situation or that some helpful influence has made the improvement possible. Medicines of colored and flavored water, applications of electric instruments without currents, in extreme cases even the claptrap of a sham operation with a slight cut in the skin, may touch those brain cells which words alone cannot reach with sufficient energy and may thus secure the desired psychophysical effect. The patient who ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In a page and a half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina endeavours to ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... crowd for railsplitting! The log-cabin tradition! Genius and statesmanship have been set aside for a popular symbol, railsplitting. A party of moral ideas has reverted to claptrap. These are the bitter comments of Seward's beaten army. Then there are curses for Greeley. Greeley has avenged Seward's lifetime enmity. He has slaughtered the great man of the party. Why? The old ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... of choosing good leaders; Lecky has demonstrated the danger of the corruption of the democracy by evil politicians; Belloc has shown how it tends to develop, and then become a slave to, a bureaucracy; Graham Wallas has portrayed the psychological peril of its hypnotization by colours and claptrap. All the dangers thus enumerated are real and formidable. They have, however, to be faced and overcome by men of goodwill: for there is now no alternative to democracy but anarchy. Fortunately they may be faced in confidence and hope. For the British democracy—as ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... simple verse—would have prepared the way for your dramatic poem. Suppose Goethe had begun his literary career with the second part of 'Faust'! He was too wise for that, and wrote himself into popularity with a claptrap novel." ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... lets a day pass without an ugly caricature of him. What I object to in this is that it is talking Brummagem—it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful, superficial, illiberal things. It is claptrap and temporary deception of the "Patriotism before Politics" order. . ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... said Carton, "I am bound to avow to you, when you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap, I don't know that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it.—Mind! I say when I rendered it; I am ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... should like to know, supposes he goes to prison to improve it. Again, I say, "Serve him right!" and if he is let out some eighteen months hence well broken down, perhaps the experience will teach him to hold his tongue in future, and not go posturing on a platform with his political claptrap, for the purpose of interfering with the vested ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... his audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated patriotism leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vulgar bit of claptrap. If any reader will take the trouble to compare De Quincey's account of a kind of anticipation of the Balaclava charge at the battle of Talavera, with Napier's description of the same facts, he will be amused at the distortion of history; but whatever the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... philosophy, his style forgiveness. And for this temperate and logical and laconic work—giving nothing to the world for its mere enjoyment, but going beyond all that to ennoble each reader by his perfect renunciation of artistic claptrap and artistic license—for this aim he needed a mental method that could entirely command itself, and, when necessary, weigh and gauge with the laborious fidelity of a coal-surveyor, before the account was rendered with pen and ink upon paper. When he brought within ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... pious claptrap. It is not recorded in the annals of the regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before the moment when it became absolutely necessary to quit the neighborhood if they were not to be seen, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology,[50] they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their souls, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and claptrap of "Affinities" so often seen and heard nowadays, where all previous obligations are ignored, and personal responsibilities set at naught, only serve to emphasize the real law of harmony and constructive evolution, by showing ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... conscientiously to accept the mad reasoning of theologians and the impudent claims of Rome had been the stumbling block to his own and his family's dearest earthly hopes. He knew that popular Christianity was a disfigurement of truth. He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a travesty of the divinely simple teachings ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... hot-tempered and revengeful as the Moors. If not, why not? They all have the gold standard. You may say that this answer is foolish, and I don't think much of it myself, but it is strictly according to Scripture (Proverbs xxv. 5). The retort is on a par with the proposition, and both are claptrap. The progress of nations and their rank in civilization depend on causes quite aside from the metal basis ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... campaign; publicity is the word—I have Mr. McVickar for my authority. Anybody who wants to know anything about the railroad company's business in this State can learn it for the asking, and at first-hand. Secrecy and all the various brands of political claptrap that have been admitted in the past are to be shown the door. This is the intimation that was made to me: wasn't it ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... larger number of people admitted into some share of government. What general cultivation must come from that, and what security! Of course, everything has its wrong side; and from this number of people let in there comes declamation and claptrap and mob-service, which is much the same thing as courtiership was in other times. But then, to make the comparison a fair one, you must take the wrong side of any other form of government that has ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... agree with you there," said Kenelm, dryly. "And you seem to me to utter a claptrap beneath the rank of your understanding. However, this warm weather indisposes one to disputation; and I own that a petticoat, provided it be red, is not without the interest ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Parable About the 12th of July Pardonable Solicitude Perennius AEre Periodical Literature Philadelvings Plays and Shows Please the Pigs Plea for Protection Pluckily Patriotic, Still Poems of the Cradle Popularity, Our Political Claptrap Police Report, Our Possible "Why" of it, The Portfolio, Our Prospectus Pump, The Punchinello's New Charter Punchinello in Wall Street Punchinello's Lyrics Punchinello and the Aldermen Punchinello on the Jury Punchinello Is Sorry ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... piece was hurried through, with reference, of course, only to the time in which it could be achieved; and of Madame Ristori's once fine delineation of the character, which, when I first saw it, atoned for the little merit of the piece itself, nothing remained but the broad claptrap points in the several principal situations, made coarse, and not nearly even as striking, by the absence of due preparation and working up to them, the careless rendering of everything else, and the slurring over of the finer ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... to talk to her about himself, but found it hard to avoid the claptrap with which a man of the world attempts to awaken interest in woman. He had always done it artistically: the weariness, the satiety, the mental grasp of nothingness,—these had been ever revealed in flashing glimpses, in unwilling allusiveness; the hope that he had finally stumbled upon ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... am not unfaithful to them, and will use every means in my power; feeble they are, and I lament it; but God is strong and is just and good; and the issue is in His hands.' That is what he was thinking of. When he talked of 'the sacred purposes of humanity' it was not artificial claptrap ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and it is a matter of authentic history that he struggled to bring and ultimately succeeded in bringing back religious ordinances to France. He declared that no good government could exist for long without it. His traducers proclaimed him an atheist, and we hear the same claptrap from people now who have not made themselves acquainted with the real history of the man and his times. We do not say he was a saint, but he was a better Christian, both in profession and action, than most of the kings that ruled prior to and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... of the majority, of course—I admit it amply. I, on the other hand, am with the benighted minority who believe that the world, so far as it has lived to any purpose, has lived by the head,' and he flung the noun at Robert scornfully. 'But I am quite aware that in a world of claptrap the philosopher gets all the kicks, and the philanthropists, to give them their own label, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... know no more of the reason for those cures than you. Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... pen of one unaccustomed to dramatic composition, yet familiar with stage effect," added the journalist. "And yet, without the least claptrap, with but little melodramatic power, against strong opposition and bitter prejudices, and without claqueurs, its own native force and the popularity of the principles it supports have carried it triumphantly through the ordeal ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... country; the mother, that she may save the child; the physician, that he may cure his patient. What would be the good of all these sacrifices if nothing were to be got by them? My dears, do let me beg of you not to be caught by claptrap. There's a deal of it in the world just now. And silly stuff it is, I assure you. Self-sacrifice is as beautiful as you please when it is a man's duty, and as a means of good; but self-sacrifice for its own sake, and without an object, is not ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... come, Paddy! none of your claptrap with me: I'm too sceptical for it. I'm not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... industrial ill, another a more drastic system of protection. One assures us that the silver-habit is dragging us down to the demnition bow-wows, another that only an heroic dose of white dollars will save us from industrial death. Political claptrap to corral the succulent pie— "issues" to get office. We have had high and low tariff, the gold and silver standard, greenbackism and "wild-cat" currency; we have had presidents of all shades of political faith and congresses of every kind of economic ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... does his own gyrations in his cage;—whereas if you found Tao,—if you lived balancedly,— if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,— there would be no political evolution at all—no squirreling,— but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys. Suddenly the notes of the organ rolled out into the hall, and he became aware that the overture or prelude had begun. This, too, seemed to him a piece of claptrap, but he didn't wait to think of it; he instantly edged out of his place, which he had chosen near the end of a row, and reached one of the numerous doors. If he had had no definite plan he now had at least an irresistible impulse, and he felt the prick of ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... narrow front windows looked down into Ninety-third Street and there were closed white folding doors with again a rented piano against them. A pretty screen of Japanese paper with a sprig of wistaria across it shut off a bureau with a layout of much juvenile claptrap of hair ribbons, side combs, and the worthless treasures of childhood. Between the windows a "lady's" desk with hinged writing slab, really Lilly's, but mostly the dangling place for a pair of Zoe's roller skates ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... is the favorite claptrap of the "natural frontier." The Frenchman yearns to be bounded by the Rhine and the Alps; and next follows the cry, "Let France take her place among nations, and direct, as she ought to do, the affairs of Europe." These ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... claptrap: the dirty boards, the grossly painted scenery, the dingy workmen shuffling about grumbling and gruff, ordered and scolded by a vulgar superior. Of course the stars do not see all these things, because they only appear when the ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... false teaching &c. 538. sophism, solecism, paralogism[obs3]; quibble, quirk, elenchus[obs3], elench[obs3], fallacy, quodlibet, subterfuge, subtlety, quillet[obs3]; inconsistency, antilogy[obs3]; "a delusion, a mockery, and a snare" [Denman]; claptrap, cant, mere words; "lame and impotent conclusion" [Othello]. meshes of sophistry, cobwebs of sophistry; flaw in an argument; weak point, bad case. overrefinement[obs3]; hairsplitting &c. v. V. judge intuitively, judge by intuition; hazard a proposition, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... But Ole Bull gradually formed a style of his own which was the outcome of his passion for descriptive and poetic playing, and the correlative of the mode of composition which he adopted. In still later years Ole Bull seems to have returned again to what might be termed claptrap and trickery in his art, and to have desired rather to excite wonder and curiosity than to charm the sensibilities or to satisfy the requirements of ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Irishmen and felt to them as an Irishman, whether they were disaffected or not. I wish I did. When I landed the other day, I thought myself passably cured, and could have said that rhetoric is the fire-water of our country, and claptrap the springboard to send us diving into it. I like my comrades-in-arms, I like the character of British officers, and the men too—I get on well with them. I declare to you, Patrice, I burn to live in brotherhood with them, not a rift of division at heart! I never show them that there is one. But ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... head. "I'm not your man, Fulkerson," he said, compassionately. "You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch with what's going. I'm getting further and further away from this century and its claptrap. I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't respect it, and I won't have anything to do with it. It would-choke me, that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... subtle one, a shrewd one! On my word, I hardly had suspected you so deep. What time I have been wasting! Mr. Faust, At last I know you for a prince of men— A brilliant mind, a high intelligence, A spirit incorruptible. The trash, Baubles and claptrap which the foolish herd Snatch at, you scoff—and rightly. I will not With one more word of it insult your mind That admirably penetrates to deeps Where I, too, love to dwell. I put aside All trivialities, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... not write, we have no reason to suppose that Ann Hathaway could, and this little explanation about the daughter is so very good that it deserves to rank with that other pleasant subterfuge, "The age of miracles is past"; or that bit of jolly claptrap concerning the sacred baboons that are seen about certain temples in India: "They can talk," explain the priests, "but being ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... prayers of its rightful owners are answered, it will still stand there in the happy days to come when fair Alsace shall be a part of France again and Kaiser Bill and all his clanking claptrap are gone ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh |
