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Reactionary   Listen
noun
Reactionary  n.  (pl. reactionaries)  One who favors reaction, or seeks to undo political progress or revolution.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Reactionary" Quotes from Famous Books



... It illustrates forcibly the religious and ethical ideas of antiquity; the deep sense of the jealousy of the gods, who would not endure pride in any one except themselves; the impossibility, for any man, of realizing to himself more than a very moderate share of happiness; the danger from a reactionary Nemesis, if at anytime he had overpassed such limit; and the necessity of calculations taking in the whole of life, as a basis for rational comparison of different individuals. And it embodies, as a practical consequence from these feelings, the often-repeated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... satisfactory outside conditions; but since I've known you, I've felt a lightening, a brightening, an intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness as anything I've ever felt, and I don't want to lose it on account of a reactionary old couple like that ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller

... of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless the duke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in a little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man can get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is no natural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... propositions which make up the true theoretic basis of a conservative creed, are proper for the hustings, or expedient in an election address or a speech in parliament. We do say that if these high and not unintelligible principles, which alone can give to reactionary professions any worth or significance, were present in the minds of men who speak reactionary language, the country would be spared the ignominy of seeing certain real truths of society degraded at the hands of aristocratic adventurers and plutocratic parasites ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption... and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted hearts. But absolute power should be preserved—the tool ready for the man—for the great autocrat of the future. Razumov believed ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays," and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... Europe suppressed free speech, democratic movements, political liberties, university freedom, and liberalism in government and religion. The governments in this Alliance redirected and restricted the people's schools, as much as could be done, to make them conform in purpose to their reactionary ideas. In consequence, the development of popular education in Germany, as well as in France and other continental lands, was for a time checked. The great start obtained by Prussia and the German States before 1820, though, was such that what had been done there could not be wholly undone. In ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... of passivism at last passed by; earnest thinkers had not believed in them; they knew they were simply reactionary, and could not last; and the century was not twenty years old when the world found itself in a storm of active effort never known in its history before. Religion, politics, literature, and art were called upon to get up and shake themselves free of ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... Bonn, Ewald of Goettingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Doellinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... others have followed the multitude, and conformed to the reigning 'churchmanship.' It is the old story enacted in the Catholic revival of the end of the sixteenth century, and at other times before and since. The reactionary clergy have succeeded in getting themselves regarded as the Swiss Guard of the throne. They stand between Royalty and Revolution. All the places in the gift of the crown—and all the places are in the gift of the crown—are filled on party considerations. Learning ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... and the communist stepped on it, and started his talk. "Tovarishshi," he said, "the time has come."... They all applauded, though nobody knew what was going to be next, and the speaker could even have been a reactionary. ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... this kind in Saga, in Higo, in Akizuki, and in Choshu occurred, but they were all put down without difficulty or delay. The promptness with which the government dealt with these factions boded no good to the reactionary movements that were ready to break out in ...
— Japan • David Murray

... cleaning house. A rupture at that time would have destroyed all the efforts of the Foreign Office to keep the German military machine within bounds. It would have over-thrown von Jagow and von Bethmann-Hollweg and put in von Tirpitz as Chancellor and von Heydebrand, the reactionary leader of the Prussian Diet, as Secretary of State. At that time, all the democratic forces of Germany were lined up with the Foreign Office. The people who blushed for Belgium, the financiers who were losing money, the shipping interests whose tonnage was locked ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy. He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent its ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... the courage to resist this reactionary tendency, to stand steadily on the height he has reached and put out his foot in search of yet another step, why should he not find it? There is nothing to make one suppose the pathway to end at a certain point, except that tradition ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... weak. You see, we only pulled him round the corner at three o'clock this morning; and the great thing now is to avoid any risk of reactionary fever. Well, you know yourself . . I may speak frankly?" She inclined her head. "Your coming, besides being emotionally disturbing, will make something of a complication under the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's modern conqueror, then impotent in action, but most efficient in remembrance, although isolated on his prison-rock. Foresti's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... then, that the renderings of the New York Rendering Company are likely to be reactionary as well as suicidal, (perhaps suetcidal might be a better word here,) in their results. Their "offence is rank," and has reached the nose of authority, for we find it stated that "Mayor HALL has already made complaint ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various

... banish, or kill the king's subjects, on mere suspicion, often prompted by private malice, and having no better warrant than anonymous information. But for all this the Irish parliament and the new reactionary viceroy freely granted acts of indemnity. According to Earl Fitzwilliam 'whole parishes, baronies, and even counties, were declared to be ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... discomposing the placid shallows of British culture. Standing in the broad light of European art, these can hardly detect that sacred taper which the New English Art Club is said to shield from the reactionary puffings of the Royal Academy. And, although it is a dangerous thing in the suburbs to ignore nice points of precedence and venerable feuds, such magnanimity makes for progress. Mr. Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Epstein, and Mrs. Bell, at any rate, are all cut by Tooting, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice than from rational conviction. Had the poem itself perished (and all the extant ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... This reactionary powder (taken so largely by the human race I am inclined to regard it as the Universal Medicine once sought for in Laboratories) is capable of being made up in another form for birthday use. Anybody's long-lost brother will do ill to turn up on a birthday. If I ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too—had a colt every year—but in her affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has a large ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... was I? Oh, yes—one must conform. Especially if one belongs to, or has married into, the Claiborne family. Of all the men in England the Earl of Claiborne is the most conservative, the most reactionary, the most deeply encrusted with prejudice. He would stop at little where the question concerned the prestige of the aristocracy in general; he would stop at nothing where the Claiborne ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... given to the citizens, and not the political independence of the State, that made a country really free. Unfortunately, just as their proposals began to gain followers, Spain became involved in war with England, because the Spanish King, then as now a Bourbon and so related to a number of other reactionary rulers, had united in the family compact by which the royal relatives were to stamp out liberal ideas in their own dominions, and as allies to crush England, the source of the dissatisfaction which threatened ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... America. He had thought too long the other way. Being of a choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—containing the fearless exposure of Washington's chicanery—he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... and tendencies of the Democratic party, its jealousy of national authority, its want of genuine patriotism, its reactionary policy as to tariff laws, its lawless disregard of fair elections, both north and south, the criminal gangs that disgrace our cities, and its low tone on all questions affecting good order and morals. In my view the choice ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... by his failure to cooeperate with the Senate in the formulation of American policy and in the appointment of the Peace Commission, and which had opposed his departure in person to Paris—all those elements now had their chance. Having won a difficult victory over reactionary forces in Europe, Wilson was now compelled to begin the struggle over again at home. And whereas at Paris he had displayed some skill in negotiation and an attitude of conciliation even when firm in his principles, upon his return he adopted a tone which ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... godfather, with a purse of six shining Louis in my pocket, and a letter to my colonel, I set forth for Metz. I had breakfasted with Colonel Mahon, who, amid much good advice for my future guidance, gave me, half slyly, to understand that the days of Jacobinism had almost run their course, and that a reactionary movement had already set in. The republic, he added, was as strong, perhaps stronger than ever, but that men had grown weary of mob tyranny, and were, day by day, reverting to the old loyalty, in respect for whatever pretended to culture, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... provide signals by which the admiral can order such movements not only by any squadron, but even by any subdivision he pleases. The freedom of individual initiative it is true is gone, but this, as the Admiralty MS. indicates, was done deliberately, not as a piece of reactionary pedantry, but as the result of experience in battle. In all other respects the tactical flexibility that was gained is obvious, and was fully displayed in the first engagements in which the ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... where the accused, a person not perhaps of altogether blameless life, was clearly not guilty of any indictable offence. The accused, however, a former prefet, appointed by a government now become very unpopular, and known as a reactionary and an aristocrat, was pursued by the animosity of the whole democratic population of the town and province. The president, in the face of openly expressed hostility in court, acquitted him. In the evening the president remarked, not without a touch of humour: "There, ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... stage of development, but what they may become when development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than the courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism, and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which makes creative living and working possible. The familiar companionship of the great Idealists is one of the ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... but got no further. The next year Cuthbert introduced a similar bill with the same result, and again in 1803. The reason for the failure of these attempts was that any legislation on slavery would in view of the decisions of the courts be reactionary and change for the worse the condition ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... the death warrant of the two atrocious villains who did the deed, and for allowing them to be executed. The fact that he was blamed, and very bitterly, gives some idea of the stupid and senseless prejudice against the popes which was the result of Antonelli's narrow and reactionary policy. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... the institution of marriage is menaced by two opposite forces; on the one hand, by a revolutionary type of socialism, and on the other, by the reactionary influence of self-interested individualism. (a) It is contended by some advanced socialists that among {226} the poor and the toiling home life is practically non-existent; indeed, under present industrial conditions, impossible. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... plausibility to these assumptions is summed up in the now current phrase about the "masses" and the "classes". We all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, i.e., thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. The Radical calls his opponent Tory and reactionary. The wicked Tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the House of Lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against every attempt at a juster distribution; selfishness ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... relations of the Russo-Greek Church to the Empire; his frankness in speaking of the Church. His hostility to Western civilization. His discussion of revolutionary efforts in Russia. His theory of Russian public instruction. His ultra-reactionary views. His mingled feelings regarding Tolstoi. His love for American literature; his paradoxical admiration for Emerson, his translation of Emerson's "Essays"; his literary gift. Feeling toward him in Russian ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... the somewhat threadbare subject of the causes of unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples—for the most part so gallant, so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable—by the passing tantrums of ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... occupation of Rome, the brilliant essays of liberalism of Pius IX., the Republic, the siege of Rome, the reactionary government of late years, have alike supplied matter for Master Pasquin, which he has shaped according to the fashion of the times. He still pursues his ancient avocation. Res acu tetigit. But the point of the needle is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of prehistoric man Remains of man found in caverns Unfavourable influence on scientific activity of the political conditions of the early part of the nineteenth century Change effected by the French Revolution of to {??} Rallying of the reactionary clerical influence against science ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... element in the population of every village and county which threatened at one time with its passive resistance to overturn the whole scheme of the rebellion, stands now exposed to the full influence of the reactionary tide which has now begun to set back toward the Union. The change may not be at once, but the same motive which led the Union man of Tennessee to return to loyalty, will prove equally effective with his whole ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... army of feeble imitators, also produced in the ranks of poetry a vindication of what was good in the old; new theories, and a very different estimate of poetical subjects and expression. The first poet who may be looked upon as leading the reactionary party is Alfred Tennyson. He endeavored out of all the schools to synthesize a new one. In many of his descriptive pieces he followed Wordsworth: in his idyls, he adheres to the romantic school; in his treatment ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... announcing that "these lions are not to be shot." The Secretary, in seconding the resolution, humorously alluded to the doctor's gown, hood, and cap, in which Mr. Roosevelt received his degree, as a possible example of what America sometimes regards as the gilded trappings of a feudal and reactionary Europe.—L.F.A. ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... is a greater rebellion; and though you sell your prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and they sat ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... CHAPLIN has been correctly reported he is even more of a reactionary than most of his opponents imagined. In the course of the debate on the Sunday Closing Bill he is said to have delivered himself as follows:—"Drunkenness is diminishing, and I say Thank God; long may it continue." The pious ejaculation would seem to be an expression of gratitude ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various

... after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... with all these in this respect are the men who represent the extreme conservative or reactionary spirit, who as a rule are as ignorant of English as the great reformers are the reverse. We may cite, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... had held to the Government—to save their slaves—resenting Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... called "Rebellion." The catalogue told us that it represented "the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and the reactionary resistance of tradition." The picture showed a crowd of scarlet figures rushing forward in a wedge. Before them went successive wedge-shaped lines, impinging upon dull blue. They represented, we were told, the vibratory ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... before the revolution. But a conviction of the necessity of immediate change gradually came to all. The Czar himself brought matters to an issue. His vacillation, his appointment of ministers who were not only reactionary, but were suspected of being German tools, were too much for even honest supporters of the Imperial regime. Some of these reactionaries, it is true, were easily driven from power. In 1915 Sukhomlinov and Maklakov were overthrown ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... question of adequate pacification. "Democratisation and Pacification march side by side."[9] Unless we realise that fact we are not competent to decide on a sound European policy. For there is an intimate connection between a country's external policy and its internal policy. An internal reactionary policy means an external aggressive policy. To shut out English influence from Germany, to fortify German Junkerism and Militarism, to drive Germany into the arms of a yet more reactionary Russia, is to create a perpetual menace, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... corruption or familiarisation of the word Mercia, with a Roman pun included. We learn from early manuscripts that the place was called Vilula Misericordiae. It was originally a nunnery, founded by Queen Bertha, but done away with by King Penda, the reactionary to Paganism after St. Augustine. Then comes your uncle's place—Lesser Hill. Though it is so close to the Castle, it is not connected with it. It is a freehold, and, so far as we know, of equal age. It has always belonged ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... Already a reactionary policy is being enacted in several countries where for years the State-School was the only one to share in the public treasury. In Holland, the Parliament of June, 1920, by a vote of 72 against 3, passed a ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... think alike as to men and measures? Impossible! Even for our great party! There is not a reactionary among us. All Democrats are Progressives. But it is inevitably human that we shall not all agree that in a single highway is found the only road to progress, or each make the same man of all our worthy ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... Elsa perhaps for the sake of Frederick which inspires Ortrud, but her whole passion is revealed only in the scene of the second act where, after Elsa's disappearance from the balcony, she rises from the steps of the minster, and invokes her old, long- forgotten gods. She is a reactionary person who thinks only of the old and hates everything new in the most ferocious meaning of the word; she would exterminate the world and nature to give new life to her decayed gods. But this is not merely an obstinate, morbid mood in Ortrud; ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... not to have ought to do!" The peace with France was hardly signed when his distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's withdrawal to the French court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was the signal for a reactionary movement. From France the king forbade the summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct breaches of the Provisions of Oxford, but Henry ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... popular stir that might lead to a triumph. Whence the suggestion came is not known, but its execution, so far as the libretto was concerned, was left to Gieseke. Under the Emperor Leopold II the Austrian government had adopted a reactionary policy toward the order of Freemasons, which was suspected of making propaganda for liberal ideas in politics and religion. Both Schikaneder and Mozart belonged to the order, Mozart, indeed, being ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... character exhibits a very curious mixture of autocratic ambition and a mystical vein of sheer undiluted idealism. Probably it would be true to say that he began by being an idealist, and was forced by the pressure of events to adopt reactionary tactics. Perhaps also, deeply embedded in the Russian nature we generally find a certain unpracticalness and a tendency to mystical dreams, far remote from the ordinary necessities of every day. It was Alexander's dream to found a Union ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... of years there existed a want of confidence between the king and the Norwegian people. The king did not like the democratic spirit of the Norwegians, and the reactionary tendencies of his European allies had quite an influence upon his actions. In 1821 he proposed ten amendments to the constitution, looking to an increase of the royal power, among which was one giving the king an absolute instead of a suspensive veto; another giving him the right to appoint the presidents ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... you notice, for the new avenues of beauty which we had opened out for him; no gratitude for the great revelation that art was not bounded by aspidistras nor comfort by chiffoniers; nothing but that old reactionary spirit to which, if I may speak of lesser things, the Russian Revolution was due. Like Mr. Perkins, the Bourbons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various

... exercised by the women I admire and love. It is all very well to say that the presence of woman at the ballot-box would purify it, and restrain the manners of the men around it; but I have seen enough of the world to learn that all human influence is reciprocal and reactionary. Man and the ballot-box might gain, but woman would lose, and men and the ballot-box themselves would lose in the long run. The ballot-box is the bass, and it should be man's business to sing it, while woman should give him home melody with which ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... popular demand for immediate legislation by the People,—this twentieth-century appeal to the Agora and Forum methods which antedate the era of Christ. It is true the world outgrew them two thousand years ago, and they were discarded; but, living in a progressive and not a reactionary period, all that, we are assured, is changed! The heart is no longer on the right-hand side of the body. To secure desired results it is only necessary to start quite fresh, as a mere preliminary discarding all lessons ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... Emancipation and then for Repeal of the Union. In the former he succeeded because enlightened public opinion in both countries was on his side: in the latter he failed utterly, both parties in Great Britain and a large section in Ireland being inflexibly opposed to any such reactionary experiment. In the end O'Connell died disillusioned and broken-hearted, and the Repeal movement disappeared from the field of Irish politics till revived many years later in the form of ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... speaking, been tied to his caudal appendage. Every large business office has its Skinner—a queer combination of decency, honesty, brains and brutality, a worshiper at the shrine of Mammon in the temple of the great god Business, a reactionary Republican, treasurer of his church and eventually a total loss from diabetes, brought on by lack of exercise and worry ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... and I consider it just and fair that they should strain every effort to put a stop to such atrocities as have been witnessed by the civilized world within a few years. But it must be borne in mind that it is the Russian government, the Russian reactionary party, including the Russian Church, and not the Russian people, that are responsible for the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... voted down. Webster, like Randolph, of Virginia, and Rhett, of South Carolina, urged that property should rule in every well-ordered community, and what Webster, Randolph, and Rhett urged, their respective States adopted. Even more reactionary was little Rhode Island, where privilege and inequality were as firmly intrenched as anywhere else in the country. The suffrage was limited to freeholders and representation was denied the majority of the people. The control of governor, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... representative institutions made rapid headway; a National Assembly for Germany was constituted, and Schleswig was claimed as an integral part of the German dominions. In Italy also the Revolution, though premature, was serious. The Pope, not yet reactionary, declared war against Austria; the Milanese rose against Radetzky, the Austrian Governor, and King Charles Albert of Sardinia marched to their assistance. A republic was proclaimed in Venice, but these successes were afterwards nullified, and a Sicilian rising against Ferdinand ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... the measures taken by the king to secure the peace of his good city of Nimes, they had nevertheless been reactionary; consequently the Catholics, feeling the authorities were now on their side, returned in crowds: the householders reclaimed their houses, the priests their churches; while, rendered ravenous by the bitter bread of exile, both the ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... be the opening of the new post-office, when Hong Yung-sik would give an official banquet to which all must come. During the dinner, the detached palace was to be set on fire, a call was to be raised that the King was in danger, and the reactionary Ministers were to be killed as they rushed to his help. Two of the students were appointed sentries, two were to set fire to the palace, one group was to wait at the Golden Gate for other members of the Government who tried to escape that way. Four young Japanese, including ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... knowledge of the Southern Cross and other stars famous in the story of exploration, such as Dante shows in the first canto of his Purgatorio. But the geographical doctrines of Islam, compounded from the Hebrew Pentateuch and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy, had a more immediate and reactionary effect on knowledge. The symmetrical Greek divisions of land into seven zones or climates; and of the world's surface,[10] into three parts water and one part terra firma; the Indian fourfold arrangement ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... under shell—fire or bomb-fire, in hearts stricken by personal tragedy or world-agony, will prevail over the old order which dominated the nations of Europe, and the old philosophy of political and social governance will be challenged and perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are thwarted by reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to its old-fashioned discipline under their authority, there will be anarchy reaching to the heights of terror in more countries than those where anarchy now prevails. If by fear or by wisdom the new ideas ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... cheerfully acknowledged intellectual talent in others, he took a pride in having remained a learner all his life, but he hated arrogant amateurishness. He was not a church-goer; he declined to be drawn into the circle of religious schemers and reactionary fanatics; he would occasionally speak in contemptuous terms of "the creed of court chaplains"; but, writing to his wife of that historic meeting with Napoleon in the lonely cottage near the battlefield of Sedan, he said: "A powerful contrast with our last meeting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... originated at Jena, under the patronage of the grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, and rapidly spread, the Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft being established in 1818. The loud political idealism of the Burschen excited the fears of the reactionary powers, which culminated after the murder of Kotzebue (q.v.) by Karl Sand in 1819, a crime inspired by a secret society among the Burschen known as the Blacks (Schwarzen). The repressive policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees (q.v.) was therefore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... 1900 saw an outbreak of religious and anti-foreign fanaticism in China which rapidly assumed alarming proportions. A sect or society known as the Boxers, founded in 1899 originally as a patriotic and ultra-conservative body, rapidly developed into a reactionary and anti-foreign, and especially anti-Christian organisation. Outrages were committed all over the country, and the perpetrators shielded by the authorities, who, while professing peace, encouraged the movement. Thousands of ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... in a commonwealth founded by a social contract. The society that is established there is an association of individuals coming to an agreement with one another to invent a set of laws and observe them. Thus while Iceland on the one hand is a reactionary state, founded by men who were turning their backs on the only possible means of political progress, cutting themselves off from the world, and adhering obstinately to forms of life with no future before them, on the other ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... countenance from which every human emotion had been eliminated until it was as expressionless as a bronze Buddha. If she had ever known sorrow, delight, affection, surprise, it was so long ago that her reactionary system had forgotten how to reflect these sensations. It was obvious that nothing concerned her outside her immediate calling and that she accepted this with a stoical immovability which was neither to be ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... identified in this hostile mind with Church ascendancy, just as Coryston was identified with landlord ascendancy. If there were anywhere to be found a narrower pair of bigots than Lord and Lady William Newbury, or a more poisonous reactionary than their handsome and plausible son, Atherstone didn't know where to lay ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... conservative; every one has a liking for his old habits and his old associates. There is something comic in a well-nourished rich man who believes that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. For real clotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing to match the table-talk of any aged parliamentary Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it will be patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, superstitiously reverential of the past, sticky and, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... Reformation as representing the ideal state of the British polity. His sympathy with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries predisposed him to this position. He would have been more intelligible if he had been more distinctly reactionary. For all that, his views show the presence of a leaven which was materially to affect the later development of English opinions. That Jacobinism meant anarchy, and that anarchy led irresistibly to military ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... a hero. The administration of General Grant might well be called the recoil of the cannon: it was the reactionary effect of a great military movement on civil affairs. Sumner alone withstood the shock of it, and he fought against it for four years like a veteran on his last line of defence, feeling victory was no longer possible. Many of his friends found the current too strong ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... popular government but in continued disturbance. Factions with differing creeds raised revolts in various sections of the country until, in February, 1913, Madero was overthrown by one of these groups, led by Felix Diaz and General Victoriano Huerta, and representing a reactionary tendency. Madero and his vice president Pino Suarez were killed, it was believed by order of Huerta, and on the 27th of February, in the City of Mexico, Huerta was proclaimed President. Don Venustiano Carranza, Governor of the State of Coahuila, straightway ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... election under the new conditions, Krueger, who represented the extreme reactionary party, was elected President, although he had accepted office under the British Government, while Joubert, who had declined any dealings with them, was defeated, being suspected of sympathising with the Uitlanders. His defeat does not prove him to have ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... worst characteristics. The object undertaken apparently in the interests of democracy can only be accomplished by the wholesale suppression of democratic rights, and involves an organised manufacture of imperialistic emotion which ends by delegating the authority of the State to a reactionary triumvirate of bureaucracy, jingoism and vulgarity (or Tory, Landowner and Journalist). The guarantees of democracy, the rights of free thought and free speech, every sort of civil liberty and every defence against the servile state, will all ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targe, who issued a circular commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen from them, to the Chamber ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... profession to assail his theories and, secretly and openly, certain of them charged that the result in Dr. Earl's case was but the natural one where "standard methods" of practice were set aside for the, as yet, "unscientific paths of suggestive therapeutics," as these reactionary medical men denominated Earl's system, for he had cured through suggestive methods a score of patients who had been condemned to the operating table by other surgeons, and as a result he had aroused the resentment of such surgeons in particular and the condemnation in general of all those who ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... not slavery, and may be introduced without a violation of their pledge. Although formally admitting negro testimony, they think that negro testimony will be taken practically for what they themselves consider it "worth." What particular shape the reactionary movement will assume it is at present unnecessary to inquire. There are a hundred ways of framing apprenticeship, vagrancy, or contract laws, which will serve the purpose. Even the mere reorganization of the militia upon the old footing will go far towards accomplishing ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... spots so hard no yeast can move them; there are others so light the yeast burns them out. Taken as a whole, the change is labored and painful. So our new notions worked on women. There were groups which resented and refused them, became reactionary at the stating of them. There were those which grew grave and troubled under them, shrinking from the portentous upheaval they felt in their touch, yet sensing that they must be accepted. There were still others where the notion ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... "An ultra-conservative—reactionary might be the better term—organization devoted to witch hunting and such in its efforts to maintain the status quo, major. Once again, history repeats itself. Such groups invariably evolve when basic change threatens a socio-economic ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... means death for Christianity as certainly as it does for any other vital movement. Stagnation, not change, is Christianity's most deadly enemy, for this is a progressive world, and in a progressive world no doom is more certain than that which awaits whatever is belated, obscurantist and reactionary. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... positive realization. Keep them sacred. Let them become the ideals of your life. Make them glow with the fires of your energies. They spell success and victory. They will crown your life, if you will breathe your life into them. Let your ambition make you irrepressible. Avoid reactionary influences. Keep away from dull, stupid, ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... the great literary dictator in Percy's day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism. But in the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... that the time was coming when they must fight for national existence; but to the opposition it seemed no more than a restatement of time-hallowed American principles of government, necessary to save liberty from a reactionary faction. Party hatred now rivalled that between ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... the fixing of constitutions? Ruskin asks a pertinent question. What is it after all but "sentiment," he inquires, that prevents a man from killing his grandmother in time of hunger? Sentiment is the most respectable thing in human psychology. No one believes in it more thoroughly than your reactionary Tory. But he wears his heart on his sleeve with a difference. He is so greedily patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism in the world to himself. That he should love his country is natural and noble, a theme so high as to be ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... voters as expressed in the last election," met with approval on every side. The "Anti-Revolutionary" lion lay down with the "Christian-Historical" lamb; the "Liberal" bear and the "Clerical" cow fed together; and the sucking "Social-Democrat" laid his hand on the "Reactionary" adder's den. It was idyllic. Real ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton

... the enormous power of the dynasty and the political system which supports it, we understand why in the past Austria has always played the part of the most reactionary, autocratic and tyrannic state in Europe. Hopes have indeed been expressed by some Austrophils in the good-will of the new Austrian Emperor on account of his amiable character. The Slavs have ample reason to distrust ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... President is the central figure round which revolves each policy and its success or failure. At the same time, it is his party more than he that is to be blamed for the failures. He made a distinct move toward a reduction of the tariff, and while this failed, leaving us with the reactionary result of higher duties than ever before, it is not impossible that the words, actions, and sacrifices of Cleveland will be the foundation of a new tariff-reform party. Allusion has been made to his soundness on finance. His ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... such as these the proletariat would have protested the Roman numeral long ago. If they are willing to let its reactionary use on tablets and monuments stand it is because of their indifference to influences which do not directly affect their pocketbooks. But if it could be put up to them in a powerful cartoon, showing the Architect and the Stone-Cutter dressed in frock coats ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... the bad in all men. The world has learned since the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there is ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... ages, when a reactionary movement was beginning to secretly undermine accumulated property, that the influence of Christianity was first ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... of the sons of Ogotai, and consequently first cousin to Kublai. He held some high post in Mongolia, and he represented a reactionary party among the Mongols, who wished the administration to be less Chinese, and who, perhaps, sighed for more worlds to conquer. But he hated Kublai, and was jealous of his pre-eminence, which was, perhaps, the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... your criticisms, don't you know that I am become a reactionary and secret friend ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... halting in front of the Greek, a reactionary pallor on his countenance, "the effort thou art making to get away from God proves how greatly He is a terror to thee. The Academy is only a multitude thou hast called together to help hide thee from Christ. Thou art an organizer of Sin—a disciple ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... either a separate peace with Germany or the utter military defeat of Russia in the war. In this object Rasputin and his allies nearly succeeded. It was to avert this that practically all the social elements, both liberal and reactionary, united with the revolutionists ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... Jagan helped to organize the Peoples Progressive Party of British Guyana. Twice Jagan won a popular electoral majority and was established as Prime Minister of the British Colony. His two periods of administrative responsibility were badgered and hectored by every reactionary force that could be mobilized inside and outside British Guyana, from the British appointed governor to the domestic and foreign business interests and the urban trade unions. Before a third election British and American governments, business and labor interests ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... I said. "You're going to bring out of bed with you that hard reactionary bureaucratic spirit which all but ruined Russia and is in process of ruining Germany. It will be just as if the TSARITSA got loose and began to have her own way again. By the way, Francesca, what does one do when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various

... "that the system of education on which we lavish funds with such generous, even prodigal, hand, falls short of fulfilling its true democratic function; and that particularly in the so-called higher branches its tendency appears daily more reactionary, more feudal. It is not an agreeable reflection that so many of our university graduates lack the trained ability to see clearly, and to think clearly, concisely, constructively; that there is perhaps more showing of cynicism than good faith, seemingly more distrust of men than confidence ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and sincere ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... is Home, and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... in 1814, Savoy, Genoa and Nice were assigned to Piedmont. This was not popular in Genoa which, hitherto a Republic, was now handed over to Victor Emmanuel I, a reactionary of the most extreme type. The old privileges of the Church and nobility were restored to them. The Jesuits were allowed to overrun the country and were given the control of education, and in the army ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... a reactionary swell helped him too much, and next moment the three men went, heads, hands, and brushes, plunging against ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... is, in some respects, a reactionary one; and race hatred is one of its most manifest results. It is not merely a rising of the East against the West; it is also a conflict between Mohammedans and Hindus. In Eastern Bengal, where the Mussulmans are in a large ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... interest, and they will be always at variance. Consider how parties within a single state are at variance, Conservatives and Radicals, in any country in Europe. The proposals of one are always insidious, dangerous or reactionary, as the case may be, in the eyes of the other; and in no case will the parties agree; they will at times even charge each other with treachery; there is never peace. It is the rule of party war. Who, then, can hope for ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... which was agreed upon by all parties after several years of wrangling as to whether a certain kind of mangle which was much in use among washerwomen should be saved or no. It was at last ruled to be dangerous, and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which it would be beyond my ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... straight-line coffee pot in England begins to give way to the reactionary movement in art favoring bulbous bodies and serpentine spouts; the sides are nearly parallel, while the dome of the lid is flattened to a slight elevation ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... been waiting at Ghent, immediately returned to the Tuileries, and to his foolish task of posing as a liberal king to his people, and as a reactionary one to his royalist adherents. The country was full of disappointed, imbittered imperialists, and of angry and revengeful royalists. The Chamber of Peers immediately issued a decree for the perpetual banishment of the family of Bonaparte from French soil; the extremists demanding that ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... provinces; especially to Flanders, ever ready to stand forward in fierce vindication of freedom. For a season all is peace and joy; but the duchess is young, weak, and a woman. There is no lack of intriguing politicians, reactionary councillors. There is a cunning old king in the distance, lying in wait; seeking what he can devour. A mission goes from the estates to France. The well-known tragedy of Imbrecourt and Hugonet occurs. Envoys from the states, they dare to accept secret instructions from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Army Committees were formed by the soldiers at the front to combat the reactionary influence of the old regime officers. Every company, regiment, brigade, division and corps had its committee, over all of which was elected the Army Committee. The Central Army Committee cooperated with the General Staff. The administrative ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... to that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... times which followed, when Smenkhkara held the throne for a year or so, and afterwards, when Tutankhamon became Pharaoh, Horemheb seems to have been the leader of the reactionary movement. He did not concern himself so much with the religious aspect of the questions: there was as much to be said on behalf of Aton as there was on behalf of Amon. But it was he who knocked at the doors of the heart of Egypt, and urged the nation to awake ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... neither his old associates nor with the times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple trees. Monroe came to laugh ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... business—the maintenance, by force, of the possession of land obtained by force, being ever called in question by any human mind. It is, nevertheless, the nearest task of our day to discover how far original theft may be justly encountered by reactionary theft, or whether reactionary theft be indeed theft at all; and farther, what, excluding either original or corrective theft, are the just conditions of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... Ellenborough. He was chief counsel for Warren Hastings, and his famous speech in defense of his client is well known. He became Chief Justice and was raised to the peerage in 1802. He opposed all efforts to modernize the criminal code, insisting upon the reactionary principle of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... new environmental conditions (never mind whether these be new stimuli to variation, or only acting as their selectors or censors), and moreover secures separation from the original stock and thus eliminates or lessens the reactionary dangers of panmixia. Darwin accepted Wagner's theory as "advantageous." Through the heated polemics of the more ardent selectionists Wagner's theory came to grow into an alternative instead of a help to the theory of selectional evolution. Separation ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... violently. "There's not a gram of metal inside the fourth zone—within a hundred thousand kilometers—and yet they must be close to send such a wave as that. But the Second thinks not—what do you think, Costigan?" The bluff commander, reactionary and of the old school as was his breed, was furious—baffled, raging inwardly to come to grips with the invisible and undetectable foe. Face to face with the inexplicable, however, he listened to the younger ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize about this reactionary scepticism is that as it is bound to be unlimited in theory, so it is bound to be unlimited in practice. In other words, the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable it to advance, not only towards Eugenic ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... Freemason, but he was not a Carbonaro in the technical sense, though both friends and foes believed him to be one. He knew, however, more about this and the other secret societies then existing in Italy—even those of the reactionary party—than did most of the initiated. In an amusing passage in his memoirs he relates how, when once forcibly detained in a miserable hostelry in the Calabrian Mountains, a den of brigands, of whom the chief was the landlord, he guessed that this man was a Calderaio, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... in which this disputation at Marburg was conducted with the previous character of the contest, in which the one party had denounced their opponents as diabolical fanatics, and the other as reactionary Papists and worshippers of 'a god made of bread,' it will be evident that some results of importance at least had been attained by the discussion itself and the mode in which it had been held. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... resume his seat in the Lords, he could make his power felt only through his pen. As he was thoroughly cured of his Jacobite sympathies, the doctrine he proclaimed was a Toryism stripped of the reactionary element. He proposed to make the State dominate over all the interests—land, Church, trade, and the like. That this might be done, and the government by a class for a class abolished, he appealed to the crown. The ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... God experimentally. They must be prepared to face the crises of life as they occur individually and socially with courage and a desire to lead the way for their fellow men. Instead of this, we find that church people have the reputation of being ultra-conservative, reactionary, and lovers of the status quo. The children of light, as it were, are being dragged along by the children of darkness, and are being compelled by them to face up to responsibilities which they ought to have assumed ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... who later had the recall of Alcibiades decreed by the Athenian people; in 'The Birds' Aristophanes represents him as a cowardly braggart. He was the reactionary leader who established the Oligarchical Government of the Four Hundred, 411 B.C., after the failure of the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al



Words linked to "Reactionary" :   Colonel Blimp, reaction, ultraconservative, blimp, right, conservativist, far-right, reactionist, conservative



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