"Confutation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frame of government, without seeing that it is called a constitution. This may well be appalling to him. It threatens his whole doctrine of compact, and its darling derivatives, nullification and secession, with instant confutation. Because, if he admits our instrument of government to be a constitution, then, for that very reason, it is not a compact between sovereigns; a constitution of government and a compact between sovereign powers being ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... immediate successors of the events I am relating that in a letter written in confutation of the assertion that Gilbert a Beckett had been an editor of Punch, Shirley Brooks said: "From the first the editorship was in the hands of my predecessor, Mark Lemon; the opening address was from his pen, and he was ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... influence at London, the committee at Newcastle appointed Mr. Robert Blair, for his dexterity in dealing with the Independents; Mr. Robert Bailey, for his eminence in managing the Arminian controversy; and Mr. George Gillespie for his nervous and pithy confutation of the English ceremonies, to accompany the three noblemen, as their chaplains: And Messrs. Smith and Borthwick ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... be Faults enough to offer ample {290} matter for a large Confutation; yet I am scarce inclined to believe, that any will bestow so much pains upon it. For, if that be true, which (in his Preface) he saith of himself, Aut solus insanio Ego, aut solus non insanio: it would either be Needless, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Northern Pactolus, Pandore et sa Boite, Cancer and Capricorn, Phoebus et Selene followed each other in leisurely succession. And he also found time for those controversies that so moved and amused the world; among others, his famous and triumphant confutation of Canon ——, on one hand, and Professor ——, the famous scientist, on the other, which has been compared to the classic litigation about the oyster, since the oyster itself fell to Barty's share, and a shell to each ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... indeed Mr. D'Anvers told me, that you must retract that opinion, and that he had, or would speak to you to do it; yet by some it is still so acknowledged to be; and in particular, by your great helper, Mr. Denne, who strives to maintain it by several arguments; but your denial may be a sufficient confutation to him; so I leave you together to agree about it, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... lifetime, "because I knew his temper so well, that I should have expected it would have killed him; as Dr. Bentley, Bishop Stillingfleet's chaplain, told me, that he believed Mr. Locke's thorough confutation of the Bishop's metaphysics about the Trinity hastened his end." Pope writhed in his chair from the light shafts which Cibber darted on him; yet they were not tipped with the poison of the Java-tree. Dr. Hawkesworth, died of criticism.—Singing-birds ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation of Political Justice. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with him till ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... transcribed, with no small part of the Levitical law; in the same code are inserted many of the Saxon institutions, though these two laws were in all respects as opposite as could possibly be imagined. These indisputable monuments of our ancient rudeness are a very sufficient confutation of the panegyrical declamations in which some persons would persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had attained an height which the united efforts of necessity, learning, inquiry, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... depressed him to complaint. While the distributors of literary fame were endeavouring to depreciate and degrade him, he either despised or defied them, wrote on as he had written before, and never turned aside to quiet them by civility, or repress them by confutation. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... has excited much less attention than its merit deserves, (I have not been able to trace a single quotation from it in any author during the last century,) is entitled "Tetractys Anti-astrologica, or a Confutation of Astrology." Lond. 1681, 4to. I may mention while on the subject of More, that the second and most valuable part of the memoir of him by Ward, his devoted admirer and pupil, which was never printed, is in ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... his wine, he decoyed this pedagogue into a debauch, during which his caution forsook him, and he exposed himself to the censure of the company. Sometimes, when the conversation turned upon intricate subjects, he practised upon him the Socratic method of confutation, and, under pretence of being informed, by an artful train of puzzling questions insensibly betrayed ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... that can be said by a modest and judicious reader is that any one of these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola, that a Renan is no safer than a Cumming, from the chance of confutation as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance: but that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad without ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... desire or an action. It is altogether indifferent to Aesthetic whether the artist have had only an aspiration, or have realized that aspiration in his empirical life. All that is quite indifferent in the sphere of art. Here we also find the confutation of that false conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... and unqualified contradiction. I do not know that there is any punishment for a thing of this kind, and if there were, I should not feel disposed to pursue this ingenious mountebank farther than was necessary for his confutation; but thus far it may be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... his head. 'I must not forget my situation so far as to attempt a formal confutation of that opinion; but, notwithstanding your success and the valour which achieved it, you have undertaken a task to which ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... shows that he was under a misconception. He fancied a possibility of preaching a pure religion. What followed? He was, he must have been defeated. That is, practically, else why did he not persist? But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience. It was no go. That he found too surely. But why? I am sure that he never found out. Enough that he felt—that under a strong instinct he misgave—a deep, deep gulf between him and them, so that neither could he ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... failed, then they would fly to this, that such or such things pleased our ancestors, and it were well for us if we could but match them. They would set up their rest on such an answer, as a sufficient confutation of all that could be said, as if it were a great misfortune that any should be found wiser than his ancestors. But though they willingly let go all the good things that were among those of former ages, yet, if better things are proposed, they cover ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... saying about the man whom the woman rides (vulg. St. George, in France, le Postillon); "Cursed be who maketh woman Heaven and himself earth!" Some hold the Koranic passage to have been revealed in confutation of the Jews, who pretended that if a man lay with his wife backwards, he would beget a cleverer child. Others again understand it of preposterous venery, which is absurd: every ancient law-giver framed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... of this legerdemain, which he carried to such a pitch of assurance, as to declare, in the midst of a mathematical assembly, that he intended to gratify the public with a full confutation of Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy, to the nature of which he was as much a stranger as the most savage Hottentot in Africa. His pretensions to profound and universal knowledge were supported not only by this kind of presumption, but also by the facility with ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... It may perhaps be doubted, whether this cast of temper be the effect of nature or education; but, in either case, it is an incontestable symptom of a mean and contemptible disposition, and is alone a sufficient confutation of the extravagant panegyrics, which many hypothetical writers have bestowed on the ingenuity and capacity of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr |
