"Claptrap" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Progress at first enjoyed the moral and financial support of many men, both Christians and Jews, to whom its methods and secret currents were a sealed book. For a time the Young Turks, like the Magyars farther west, deceived foreign opinion by claptrap phrases from the repertory of modern democracy. But "murder will out," and the Committee—despite the tiny group of able, and in certain cases honourable, men who control its destinies—has gradually been revealed in its true colours, as a parasitic ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... and all kind was the old vicar; and how attentively he listened with Mrs. Goodheart to the eye-witness of England's great deeds! And then—no, he did not give Joe a claptrap maudlin sermon, but treated him as a man subject to human frailties, and, only hoped in all his career he would remember some of the things he had been taught at the ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... of all these things because all these things, or nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of those who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly "put off" (as the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of claptrap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he suffers from the very fact of his success; his play with these topics was so good that every one else has played with them increasingly since; he may indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... us. Your patriot risks death in order to obtain some good for his 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 ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... layers of just such city parlors. Two 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 and its pigeonholes bulging ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 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 accuracy of the statements, one ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... 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 Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... novel. Books of such different appeal as Zola's and Feuillet's (not to mention for the present a capital example to be noted below) boasted ten times the number. But it dared an extremely non-popular subject, and treated that subject with an audacious disregard of anything like claptrap. There is no love in it and hardly a woman; there is no—at least no military—fighting; no adventure of any ordinary sort. It is neither a berquinade, nor a crime-story, nor (except in a very peculiar way) a novel of analysis. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... byplay 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 what ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... syl.), the chief character of The Rehearsal, a farce by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (1671). Bayes is represented as greedy of applause, impatient of censure, meanly obsequious, regardless of plot, and only anxious for claptrap. The character is meant for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... hocus-pocus of ritual and password and countersign had to be resorted to. He'd been in conspiratorial work of other kinds, and knew that there was a sound psychological basis for most of what seemed, at first glance, to be mere melodramatic claptrap. ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... again, with snow over the north, and Anglo-Saxon claptrap in the town. This is my desolate period; my wheels stop, my hair stops growing, my nails stop growing, everything stops growing but the days of my life. And it is well that my days increase—from now on ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... 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
... never recovered, and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as their limited intelligence enabled them to ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... things, truth—which teaches utter horror of a lie, which insists on the bare, bald reality in heaven and earth, which has taught men hatred of the false as the meanest and most unmanly thing existing—this religion took its rise in claptrap miracles, was puffed into popularity by boasting pretensions, was born in trickery and nurtured by legerdemain! Its loftiest hopes, its deepest consolations are the offspring of clumsy jugglery ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... such a completeness about them that death does not leave imperfection. He never had the air of sitting up with his own reputation. He let his books toss in the waves of criticism and make their ports if they deserve to. He had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the disease of pruriency which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. He simply told his story, with no condescension, taking the readers into his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... unpopular speaker will receive a fair hearing. A fair hearing does not express it. The silence of a Sheffield audience, the manner in which they drink in every word of a stranger, carefully watching for the least symptom of humbug, and unreduced by the most tempting claptrap, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... upturned smiling eyes of his patient compeers, and Sheridan—or was it Fox?—begged the gentleman to tell him where the fork was to be had which belonged to the knife, why, even that were not only unworthy of the man, but so utterly unlike him, for he never indulged in rhetoric or rhodomontade or claptrap, that one would be inclined to think he was beside himself, or had been dining out, like Daniel Webster when he proposed, in the Senate Chamber, to plant our starry banner on the outermost verge, the Ultima Thule, of our disputed territory, heedless of consequences. Both Pierpont and Calhoun certainly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Bianca, whom no amount of 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
... monster upon whom he had bestowed a pension. In spite of his semi-humorous Jacobitism, there was probably not a more loyal subject in his majesty's dominions. Loyalty is a word too often used to designate a sentiment worthy only of valets, advertising tradesmen, and writers of claptrap articles. But it deserves all respect when it reposes, as in Johnson's case, upon a profound conviction of the value of political subordination, and an acceptance of the king as the authorized representative of a great principle. There was no touch of servility ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... sages and drink like swine. Peace with Honour! . . . How that old Jew took our English measure, eh? How he laughed in his sleeve at our infatuation for a phrase like that. Peace with Honour! The sort of claptrap that makes a man feel so jolly comfortable inside, so damned satisfied with everything like after a good deed. And that sentimental primrose business. Dizzy as flower-expert! What cared he for primroses? Votes and moneybags was what he was after. But he knew the British Public. And ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... wondering at it (as the bench was there, I thought I might as well take advantage of its accommodation), and thinking that while some of the details—as roses, gold cups, jewels, &c., were very prettily painted, it was on the whole an enormous piece of claptrap; the room, almost vacant when I entered, began to fill. Scarcely noticing this circumstance (as, indeed, it did not matter to me) I retained my seat; rather to rest myself than with a view to studying this huge, dark-complexioned ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no 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
... so tawdry and 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 heavens are ready ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... 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 of ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... Rowe's "Tartuffe," Moliere's Theatre and church and playgoers Theatrical dress claptrap, Addison on property, Sir R. Steele on Theatricals began, Hour Thomas, Augustus Thomson's "Sophonisba" Thurmond, John Toasts Toasting glasses Tofts, Mrs. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... of bold metaphor transferred from one art to another, they would deliberately invite prosecution, and then in the witness-box make fools of those plain men, the judge and jury, by showing that this apparently meaningless claptrap could, with sufficient ingenuity, be made to yield some sort of sense, and during this period no art critic was ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Nicias, in the Knights of Aristophanes, i. 83, 84, that in the time of Pericles it was popularly believed by the Athenians that Themistocles died by poison; and from motives that rendered allusion to his death a popular claptrap. It is also clear that the death of Themistocles appears to have reconciled him at once to the Athenians. The previous suspicions of his fidelity to Greece do not seem to have been kept alive even by the virulence of party; and it is natural to suppose that it must have ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I'll give you another hint, since you appear grateful. It is a species of claptrap in a novel, which always takes—to wit, a rich old uncle or misanthrope, who, at the very time that he is bitterly offended and disgusted with the hero, who is in awkward circumstances, pulls out a pocket-book and counts down, say fifteen ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT on account of the much 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 |
