"Balderdash" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great land of ours? That we sing of loving 'thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills'—although the word 'templed' savors of paganism and does not belong in a national hymn? And that it is all balderdash?" ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "Shaf on your balderdash," said Dick of the Syke; "die-spensying and die-spensying. You've no' but your die-spensy for everything. Tommy's rusty throat, and John's big toe, and lang Geordie's broken nose, as Giles Raisley gave him a' Saturday neet at the Pack Horse—it's ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... with balderdash, such as this, Mr. Buckram beguiled the few minutes necessary for removing the bandages, hiding the bottles, and stirring up the cripples about to be examined, and the heavy flap of the coach-house ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... scribes of that day, will find but little difficulty in believing this assertion to be true, when they reflect upon the atrocious and cowardly language of the ministerial hirelings of the present day, and read the obscure balderdash and blood-thirsty principles published in the Dull Post, the Mock Times, and the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... a story of the Peninsular war, announcing it as "by the author of Charles O'Malley." Heaven knows that injured individual has sins enough of his own to answer for, without fathering a whole foundling hospital of American balderdash; but this kidnapping spirit of brother Jonathan would seem to be the fashion of the day! Not content with capturing Macleod, who unhappily ventured within his frontier, he must come over to Ireland and lay hands on Harry Lorrequer. Thus difficulties ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... said I, somewhat captivated by the balderdash, "there is, after all, colour in words. Don't you remember how delighted you were with the name of a little town we passed through on our way to Orleans—Romorantin? You were haunted by it and said it was like the purple note ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... indifferent. In the second place, it isn't sold to the gullible public, it's sold to equipment manufacturers who have their own test engineers and who have to keep their products up to legal safety standards. He didn't know this balderdash of his was going straight to the Times as fast as he spouted it; he thought I was taking it down in shorthand. I knew exactly what Dad would do with it. He'd put it on ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... that is the error. Only! how like a woman that is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile roulades in music, tawdry crudities in painting, cheap balderdash in print—all that will do for the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... it? Why, that your poor dear father was off his head, of course," I answered, testily. "I guessed as much that night, twenty years ago, when he came into my room. You see he evidently hurried his own end, poor man. It is absolute balderdash." ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... squirt of a lawyer pointing his finger at me and trying to make me change the story; or some other limb of the law interrupting me with objections that it was incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial, not the best evidence, hearsay, a privileged communication, and a lot of other balderdash. This is what took place, just as I have stated it; and this is all the Vandemark Township, Monterey County, or Iowa history there was in the battle so far as I know—except that Iowa had more men in that fight than any other state in proportion ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... that can be carried on at home. In one of the narrowest parts of the street a small newspaper shop made him stop. It was betwixt a hairdresser's and a tripeseller's, and had an outdoor display of idiotic prints, romantic balderdash mixed with filthy caricatures fit for a barrack-room. In front of these 'pictures,' a lank hobbledehoy stood lost in reverie, while two young girls nudged each other and jeered. He felt inclined to slap their faces, but he hurried across the road, for Fagerolles' house happened to be opposite. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... for he attached great importance to my discoursing on the subject personally. Quite uncertain as to whether I could really persuade myself to do this, I attended the meeting, and there, owing to the intolerable balderdash uttered by a certain barrister named Blode and a master-furrier Klette, whom at that time Dresden venerated as a Demosthenes and a Cleon, I passionately decided to appear at this extraordinary tribunal with my paper, and to give a very spirited reading of it to about ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... sound, dead letter, vox et praeterea nihil[Lat]; "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... collection of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on. The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool. We use strong language, but should any of our readers peruse the book, (from which ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... biological science owe to the objective method the progress that, from the times of Bacon and Galileo, has transformed the face of the world; social science must henceforth replace rhetoric, scholasticism and all balderdash of that kind; affirmations, a priori, and excommunications, by the rigorous scrutiny of facts: Unity of Method will ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... as far as any thing can really be exprest by English Letters, without bodging patching, or bungling balderdash or barbarous gallimofry of our Romantic Letters, obscurer than the Egiptian Hieroglifix. I will subscribe an old saing in English, as easy as any thing, if custom ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... to tell me that you believe, for one moment, in this balderdash?" demanded Ralph Mainwaring, at the same time rising and striding about the room in his wrath. "The utter absurdity of the thing, that such a will ever existed, in the first place, and then that it would be secreted all these years only to be 'discovered' just at ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... the romantic reek of India (and camphor) in the tiger-skin of the rugs that strewed his hall and surged like a rising tide up the wall, with his haughty and gallant manner, with his loud pshawings and sniffs at "nonsense and balderdash," his thumpings on the table to emphasize an argument, with his wound and his prodigious swipes at golf, his intolerance of any who believed in ghosts, microbes or vegetarianism, there was something dashing and risky about him; you felt that you were in the presence ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... tremens that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."—A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling[A] as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer," rises to the lofty grandeur of the "Novum Organon,"—a sight that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the sea if you go on talking balderdash," said Bob. "Now, look here, you hain't got nothin' to ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of the Seven Gables would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine, and Jane Eyre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance—the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Texas; sit here, and act in concert with us Union men, we will make him a very efficient agent in accomplishing that object."[927] But to the obdurate mind of Wigfall this Union talk was "the merest balderdash." Compromise on the basis of non-intervention, he pronounced "worse than 'Sewardism,' for it had hypocrisy and the other was bold and open." There was, unhappily, only too much truth in his pithy remark that "the apple of discord is offered to us as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... thrust bodily out of his house, and if anybody ever stopped at the farm to inquire the time of day he was informed that it was "twenty minutes past six bells," or "nineteen minutes of three bells," or some other unmeaning balderdash according to the position of the sun. When the farmhouse needed painting, instead of renewing the soft and lovely white that had made it a grateful sight to the eye for centuries, Noah had it covered with ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... Jenkins, "that's enough of your sophisticated balderdash. Do you not know that a London pledge is not ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... and explosively. "Don't talk any more about that damned ghost. Nobody ever saw it. The whole story is balderdash." ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... will happen, it is a great mercy that they do not use such absurdly fine words. The Stranger's talk is sham, like the book he reads and the hair he wears, and the bank he sits on, and the diamond ring he makes play with—but, in the midst of the balderdash, there runs that reality of love, children, and forgiveness of wrong, which will be listened to wherever it is preached, and sets ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray |
