"Quackery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Raymond Lulli, one of the most extraordinary men of his age; and, with the exception of his last boast about the six millions of gold, the least inclined to quackery of any of the professors of alchymy. His writings were very numerous, and include nearly five hundred volumes, upon grammar, rhetoric, morals, theology, politics, civil and canon law, physics, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... thousand men, having from one to three years' training, including over one hundred physicians with full medical training plus a course in osteopathy. There were means of learning fifteen years ago what was truth and what was quackery about the practice of osteopathy. By refusing to look for its truth and by concentrating attention upon its quackery the medical profession has lost fifteen years. Whereas the truth of osteopathy should have been adopted by the medical ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Ulster, at least. The differences between Irish Protestants and Roman Catholics were founded in principle, cherished deeply and warmly by them respectively, and were not, and are not, to be healed by the political or economical quackery of Mr. Disraeli, or politicians who, like him, share with neither party in the earnestness of their opinions. The Irish Protestant and the Irish Roman Catholic believe that the political ascendancy of their respective creeds is necessary to the development of their power and usefulness, and strive, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... women to dosing and drugging. "Nervousness." Qualms of the stomach. Eating between our meals—its mischiefs. Evils of more direct dosing. What organs are injured. Confectionery. The danger from quacks and quackery. ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Faculty: War and Peace Clearing away the Fog The Danger of living among Christians: A Question of peace or war Legislative Quackery, Ignorance, and Blindness to the Future Evils that need Attention What is Intellectual Greatness Spiritual Wonders—Slater's Tests; Spirit Pictures; Telegraphy; Music; Slate Writing; Fire Test MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE—Erratum; Co-operation; Emancipation; Inventors; Important ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... whether they come from Maine or California, they all succumb to the same allurements. The test here is the manner in which people use the wealth they have acquired. "Almost any man may quarry marble or stone," but how few can build a Rheims or "create an Apollo." When one thinks of the gambling, quackery, and other vocations far less respectable upon which vast fortunes are spent he thinks how dreadful the results of all of this spending. "What if all this wealth that is spent foolishly were used to advance ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... lack of supporters; republicanism has no lack of supporters; St. Simoninnism was followed by a respectable body of admirers; Robespierrism has a select party of friends. If, in a country where so many quacks have had their day, Prince Louis Napoleon thought he might renew the imperial quackery, why should he not? It has recollections with it that must always be dear to a gallant nation; it has certain claptraps in its vocabulary that can never fail to inflame a vain, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a study of quackery on one side and of gullibility on the other, founded on the mediaeval idea of the philosopher's stone,[155] and applies as well to the patent medicines and get-rich-quick schemes of our day as to the peculiar forms of quackery with which Jonson was more familiar. In plot and artistic construction ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Boies Penrose. He has a personality and contour that lend themselves to caricature. Only a few deft strokes are needed to make his ponderous figure and heavy jowl the counterpart of a typical boss, an institution for which the American people have a pardonable affection in these days of political quackery. For, when the worst is said of the imposing array of bosses from Tweed down to the present time, they could be forgiven much because they were what they were. That is why, perhaps, the altogether fanciful picture of Penrose, propped ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... heart a knave, I fancy, among whose dupes is himself. Did you not see our quack friend apply to himself his own quackery? A fanatic quack; essentially a ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... advertisement taken out. What is there to pay for the one insertion?" "Oh, nothing," I replied, "as the editorial probably did you more injury than the advertisement did you good." On leaving, with prophetic vision, he said, "I prophesy a short life for this paper; the business world is based on quackery, and you cannot live without it." With melancholy certainty, I replied, "I fear you ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... in law-books displayed, But we as wiseacres descend, ready made; And by right of our rank in Debrett's nomenclature, Are all of us born legislators by nature;— Like ducklings to water instinctively taking, So we with like quackery take to lawmaking; And God forbid any reform should come o'er us, To make us more wise than our ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... it may seem akin to quackery to recommend a uniform depth and distance, without reference to the character of the land to be drained; and it is unquestionably true that an exact adaptation of the work to the varying requirements of different soils would be beneficial, ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde, could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people the Negro lawyer or doctor was pushed toward quackery and demagogism, and by the criticism of the other world toward an elaborate preparation that overfitted him for his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... salts, and is followed up by quinine. Those persons who do not choose to employ medical advice on the subject, dose themselves with ginger-tea, strong infusion of hyson, or any other powerful green tea, pepper, and whiskey, with many other remedies that have the sanction of custom or quackery. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... story of the Cosmogony in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is a tine played on a barrel-organ. It is a common vehicle of discourse into which they get and are set down when they please, without any pain or trouble to themselves. Neither is it professional pedantry or trading quackery: it has no excuse. The man has no more to do with the question which he saddles on all his hearers than you have. This is what makes the matter hopeless. If a farmer talks to you about his pigs or his poultry, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... rare and precious stones for all and sundry diseases." It had been Dr. Flint's intention, besides presenting an educational display on the history of the medical arts, to warn the public against the perils of quackery and the faults of folk medicine, as well as to expose evils in drug adulteration. Today, we can see actual fulfillment of these intentions in the present exhibit at the medical gallery which has been executed recently on the basis of scientific, ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry. Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness, to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that attention, socialist leaders have always ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... greets you with a smiling countenance, and while one hand is employed in shaking yours, he is disembarrassing you of the contents of your pocket with the other. Underline is a gentleman of some literary attainments, though not entirely divested of quackery; he is particularly noted for the emphasis he gives to certain points in his discourse, and though in some cases, perhaps, he is a little too prodigal of this kind of effect, yet we could not well do without him. Undermine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... rejected medical advice; no reasoning, no entreaty, has availed to induce her to see a physician. After reading your letter she said, "Mr. Williams's intention was kind and good, but he was under a delusion: Homoeopathy was only another form of quackery." Yet she may reconsider this opinion and come to a different conclusion; her second thoughts are often ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... meant only for the writer's own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ready for the most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the merits of the occupant, and to suppose that he must be wiser than common men. He, however, who gains access to cabinets, soon finds out by what foolishness the world is governed. He finds that there is quackery in legislation as in everything else; that rulers have their whims and errors as well as other men, and are not so wonderfully superior as he had imagined, since even he may occasionally confute them in argument. Thus awe subsides into ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... through a motive of delicacy that he persisted in making a needless mystery of his suspicions. In any case he was evidently a man who despised all quackery from the bottom of his heart. The old doctor looked at him with a frown of disapproval, as if his frank confession had violated the unwritten laws of ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... in difficult and exceptional cases it cannot be too often repeated that a MAN is required, as well as a method. Without nerve nothing can be attempted; without patience and perseverance mere nerve will be of little use; all the quackery and nonsense that has been talked and written under the inspiration of the Barnum who has had an interest in the success of the silent, reserved, practical Rarey, must be dismissed. Horse-training is not a conjuror's trick. The principles may certainly be learned by once reading this ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... instructions and attempting to use our method, have patience, and note the result from day to day. The horse will quickly tell you. His action will expose quackery and unmask pretension. He will be no party to a fraud, no advocate of ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... in all its forms had inspired Average Jones with a profound contempt and dislike for the cruelest of all forms of swindling medical quackery. And this swollen, smug-faced intruder looked a particularly offensive specimen of his kind. Therefore the Ad-Visor ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy, perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature. Cynthia's Revels was a satire on the courtiers and the Poetaster on Jonson's literary enemies. The Alchemist was an exposure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with learning. Volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it depicts ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... but the idea once admitted that there may be many churches; that what is called the State can be separated from what is called the Church; the plea of infallibility and of authority soon becomes ridiculous—a mere fiction of political or fashionable quackery to impose upon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reward or consequence of superior temperance and piety. But the present workers of wonders are not raised above their fellows by superior temperance or sanctity. They do not cure for the love of God, but money. These are the priests of quackery, though it be true they have not the convenient expedient of selling masses for souls in purgatory, nor churches, where they can display crutches, and models of limbs made sound by ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... this, the Times catches my eye (it just came in) and something from the Lancet is extracted, a long article against quackery—and, as I say, this is the first and only sentence I read—'There is scarcely a peer of the realm who is not the patron of some quack pill or potion: and the literati too, are deeply tainted. We have heard of barbarians who threw quacks ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... S. Kirkham's new system of "English Grammar in familiar Lectures," I am satisfied that the pre-eminent advantages it possesses over our common systems, will soon convince the public, that it is not one of those feeble efforts of quackery which have so often obtruded upon our notice. Its decided superiority over all other systems, consists in adapting the subject-matter to the capacity of the young learner, and the happy mode adopted of communicating it to his ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... are kept comfortable by being given drugs whenever they demand them, thus satisfying their consciences that they are being "treated," while vainly waiting till they are sufficiently strong to get entirely off "dope." In such a house of quackery Marie stayed two years. Her remaining fifteen hundred dollars and a thousand of her sister's went for fake treatment. She learned to smoke cigarettes with the young doctor; she played cards, gossiped, ate, slept and was never ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... himself!) were, whether they wished it or not, thaumaturgi. If we set out with the principle that every historical personage to whom acts have been attributed, which we in the nineteenth century hold to be irrational or savoring of quackery, was either a madman or a charlatan, all criticism is nullified. The school of Alexandria was a noble school, but, nevertheless, it gave itself up to the practices of an extravagant theurgy. Socrates and Pascal were not exempt from hallucinations. Facts ought to explain themselves by proportionate ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... quackery; in this way the spectator would sit motionless, waiting, waiting for Niob to say something, and the piece would go ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... known ... in other directions. I could give you four addresses ... but of course I wasn't going to give her one. Though there again ... if she'd told me the whole truth!... My God, women are such fools! And they prefer quackery ... look at the decent doctors they simply turn into charlatans. Though, there again, that all comes of letting a trade work mysteriously under the thumb of a benighted oligarchy ... which is beside the question. ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... for aught I know, by her own hand. On examination, however, it proved to contain, not secrets of state, but recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, and all such matters of housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among which we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"! We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these anomalous necessities in such a methodical way. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... highly recommended, and if the wishes are not gratified by the attainment of the desired object, the consoling reflection will recur, that—"there are not quite two blanks to a prize"—which is more than can be said of quackery in general. Tickets and Quarters ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... run a whole profession. And Tom Van Dorn is a quack—a hair-splitting, owl-eyed, venal quack—who doles out the bread pills of injustice, and the strychnine stimulants of injustice and the deadening laudanum of injustice, and falls back on the body of the decisions to uphold him in his quackery. Justice demands that he take that fake corporation, made solely to evade the law, and shake its guts out and tell the men who put up this job, that he'll put them all in jail for contempt of court if they try any such shenanigan in his jurisdiction ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of medicine; for the disease would stand in visible and tangible presence before the eyes, and the employment of inventions, to counteract and finally conquer the eccentricities of nature, would be governed by science, and thus relieved from the suspicion of quackery, which at present more or less attaches to it. To pursue these speculations, however, would lead us too far; and before concluding, we must find room for a few more of our practical ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... succeed in mastering it." This was true. Paris was almost beside herself. As M. Sorel says: "The warm July evening drove into the streets a populace greedy of shows and excitements, whose imagination was spoiled by the custom of political quackery, for whom war was but a drama and history a romance[28]." Such was the impulse which led to Gramont's new demand, and it was made in spite of the remonstrances of the British ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... vice is of so general a kind as to remind us more of some of the old philosophers than of the Roman satirists. At the same time he says he has only spoken against impostors, and is only the enemy of false pretence, quackery, lies, and puffing. But we may suppose that he would not be sparing of his lash in any direction, for in the "Resuscitated Philosophers," he observes, "Philosophy says that ridicule can never make anything worse than it is in itself, and whatever ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... errors and follies committed by the Legislature to the lasting injury of the State, he is entitled to no praise or blame beyond the rest. He shared in that sanguine epidemic of financial and industrial quackery which devastated the entire community, and voted with the best men of the country in favor of schemes which appeared then like a promise of an immediate millennium, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... valuable, docile and manageable; comfortable, happy and contented by still further improving their condition, which can only be done by studying their nature, and not by the North and South bandying epithets—not by the quackery which prescribes the same remedy, the liberty elixir, for all constitutions. The two races, the Anglo-Saxon and the negro, have antipodal constitutions. The former abounds with red blood, even penetrating the capillaries ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... instrument ever made. The Black Ox haven't trod on her foot yet! Most like it was the air of London. But only fancy, if you had called in a doctor! Why, I shouldn't have let her take any of his quackery. Now, there!" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents. All took to it like ducks to the village pond. There was much quackery; some ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... Wesley's "sulphur and supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with medicine,—sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of admitting evidence,—that I could not help ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... occurred in time to relieve the abortive author, physiologist, and physicist from the intolerable position into which he had been thrown by his inability and his quackery. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... question: Can disease be healed through mental treatment? If so, under what conditions and subject to what limitations? Has mental healing a philosophical and scientific basis, or is it variously composed of quackery, superstition, and assumption? In the simplest terms, how much truth does it contain? Any candid inquirer will admit that even if a minimum of its claims can be established, the world needs it. If it can be of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... quackery very early, and administered solution for the eye in various parts of the streets pro bono publico. The Rais sent for me likewise, and I poured a few drops of caustic into his eyes. In fact, I was full of business, although but ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... are growing idle and discontented. They are all right when left alone. Everybody likes the Donegal peasants, and they deserve to be liked. Only leave them alone; that's what they want; and not Home Rule nor any other quackery." ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... solutions. Either he goes wrong from want of knowledge, in which case it is clear that he wants the highest intuitions of genius; or he sins against knowledge, in which case he must have been misled by the false promptings of a morbid vanity, eager for that applause of fools which always waits on quackery, and which is never refused to extravagance when tricked out in the guise of originality. It is difficult, from the internal evidence supplied by his works, to know which of these two theories to ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... wouldn't swap my modest victory for the vogue of the biggest boomster in England! [Boisterously.] Ha, ha, ha! Whoop! [Seizing ROOPE and shaking him.] Dare to preach your gospel to me now, you arch-apostle of quackery ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... nostrum manufacturer may profit thereby. Cures for incurable diseases are promised, and guaranteed. Every scheme that human and devilish ingenuity can devise to wring money from its victim is resorted to, which can be employed without actually bringing the advertisers into court. All this wicked quackery parades under the guise of 'patent' medicines, and asks the protection of our courts. It is time for the medical and pharmaceutic professions to unite, and unmask this monster, and show the public its true nature. And this can be accomplished ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... innovation has been introduced have grumbled and submitted; it has in some cases been a bitter pill, but the law-abiding character of the Englishman has caused it to be swallowed without noisy remonstrance. We cannot, without raising a suspicion of having practised educational quackery, retreat from the position which we have thus ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... started here, with wife, children, and all our servants. We have taken a house for two months, and have been here a fortnight. I am already a little stronger...Dr. Gully feels pretty sure he can do me good, which most certainly the regular doctors could not...I feel certain that the water-cure is no quackery. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... both in the city and country, with that of American artists' life there. The observations are throughout racily humorous, and those who have within a few years visited 'the Cradle of Art' cannot fail to recognize, as hit off with no sparing hand, more than one American notoriety. Art quackery as it exists, is well shown up in 'Americans in Rome;' the author having little in common with those amiable romancers who glorify every illiterate picture-maker, though he never fails to do justice to true genius. We believe, in short, that these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... life had been the conquest of the air by means of vessels which flew as a bird flew, that is to say by their own inherent strength, and without the aid of gas-bags or buoyancy chambers, which he, like all the disciples of Nadar, Jules Verne, Maxim and Langley, had looked upon as mere devices of quackery, or at the best, playthings of rich people, who usually paid for their amusement with ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... of many Frenchmen; the imprudent selections they had in some cases made, the extreme boldness of some foreign adventurers, the jealousy of the army, and strong national prejudices, all contributed to confound disinterested zeal with private ambition, and talents with quackery. Supported by the promises which had been given by Mr. Deane, a numerous band of foreigners besieged the congress; their chief was a clever but very imprudent man, and although a good officer, his excessive vanity amounted ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... to the king, and a favourite of Lord Hervey's, assuring him that a cordial with this name or that name was mere quackery, some usquebaugh was given instead, but was rejected by the queen soon afterwards. At last Raleigh's cordial was administered, but also rejected about an hour afterwards. Her fever, after taking Raleigh's ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... in less than five minutes after Miss Monro had left the room, and walking up and down in all the restless agony of body that arises from an overstrained mind. But soon Miss Monro reappeared, bringing with her a dose of soothing medicine of her own concocting, for she was great in domestic quackery. What the medicine was Ellinor did not care to know; she drank it without any sign of her usual merry resistance to physic of Miss Monro's ordering; and as the latter took up a book, and showed a set purpose of remaining with her patient, Ellinor was compelled ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... which, under the pretext of religion, I might erect a little empire to myself. I have never been seen evangelizing my ideas, either in temples or in public meetings. I have never likewise practiced that quackery of beneficence, by which a certain divine, imposing a tax upon the generosity of the public, procures for himself the honors of a more numerous audience, and the merit of distributing at his pleasure a bounty which costs him nothing, and for which he ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... promise, but very defective. By erasures here and skillful touches there he had hoped to assist nature in carrying out her evident intentions. The tragedy that well-nigh resulted taught him that human lives are dangerous playthings, and that quackery in attempting spiritual reform involved more peril than ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... was his quackery, don't you see, to set the audience guessing When Niobe would speak; ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... for representation, as it alone shows the exact conformity and order, the idea of which it was the purpose of the architect to present, and which constitutes the beauty. The "pyramid" rule is manifestly absurd, and seldom has even a tolerably good effect. It was the quackery of a day.[5] The good masters did not work upon it. It is, in fact, a little truth taken out of a greater, and misapplied—a part of that circular character of composition, as it were a principle of reflection, by which lines close in upon or recede ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Dousterswivel and his patron in the ruins of St. Ruth, and frankly confessing that he could not resist the opportunity of decoying the adept once more to visit the tomb of Misticot, with the purpose of taking a comic revenge upon him for his quackery. He had easily persuaded Steenie, who was a bold thoughtless young fellow, to engage in the frolic along with him, and the jest had been inadvertently carried a great deal farther than was designed. Concerning the pocket-book, he explained that he had expressed his surprise ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... exclusive portion of the nobility of this kingdom. To this fortunate circumstance are we indebted for the production of those brilliant efforts of genius, his fashionable novels, which so long as good taste, unsullied by exaggeration, cant, and quackery, continues to exist, cannot fail to instruct and amuse the thinking portion ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... ophicleide, of the bassoon, of every unwieldy and unmanageable instrument in fact, are particularly abundant; and perhaps the most popular of all are the particularly clever gentlemen who, by dint of a dozen years' or so unremitting practice, have succeeded in making one instrument sound like another. Quackery as this is, it is enormously run after by no small proportion of the public. Not that they do not appreciate the art of the device at its proper level, but that the trick is curious and novel; and most people, even the dignified classicists, have a gentle toleration for a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... plague by Moses, upon what seems to have been a sudden inspiration, was a stroke of genius in the way of quackery. He was, indeed, in this way almost portentous. It had a great and terrifying effect upon the people, who were completely subdued by it. Against corporeal enemies they might hope to prevail, but they were helpless against the plague. And they all cried out with one accord, "Behold we die, we ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... make an analogous remark. If a man's aim in becoming rich is of the vulgar kind; if he wishes to make an ostentatious display of wealth, and to spend his money upon demoralising amusement; or if, again, he tries to succeed by quackery instead of by the production of honest work, he is, of course, so far mischievous and immoral. But a man whose aims are public-spirited, nay, even if they be such as simply tend to improve the general comfort; who develops, for ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... well as physical, effects of Christian Science were lacking, the premium would go down. That it continues to rise, and the demand to increase, shows its real value to the race. Even doctors will agree that infidelity, ignorance, and quackery have never met the growing wants of humanity. Christian Science is no "Boston craze;" it is the sober second thought ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... I say?" he repeated wonderingly. "But of course you know! Imagine the horror of it—a health-food for the mind! Huge sums of money rolling in from the pockets of credulous people, money stinking with the curse of vulgarity and quackery! It is almost like a false note, dear, to speak of it out here, but I must tell you because they are angry with me. I am afraid that your father will send me away, and I am afraid that our little dream is over and that I shall not wander with you any more evenings ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... William Euen, A short expose on quackery ... or, introduction of his son to physicians and ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... one himself, but had no money, and was further restrained by a sense of conviction that his father would say it was all nonsense and quackery. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... book, written against the quackery of Paracelsus, by Leonard Doldius, a Nurnberg physician, and translated into Latin and augmented, by Andreas Libavius, doctor and physician of Rotenburg, alludes to the same story, and gives the Jew a new name nowhere else met with. After having referred to a report that Paracelsus ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... contrived to declare war against a new and influential body of enemies. This was the medical faculty, which he had slightly attacked in the "Festin de Pierre." Every science has its weak points, and is rather benefited than injured by the satire which, putting pedantry and quackery out of fashion, opens the way to an enlightened pursuit of knowledge. The medical faculty at Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century, was at a very low ebb. Almost every physician was attached ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... than other people; I only say that their temptations are as great, and that an honest man—a man perfectly honest every how and every where—is a wonder. Whatever an honest man does is a benefit to all the rest of us. If he become a lawyer, justice is more secure; if a doctor, quackery is in danger; if a clergyman, the devil trembles; if a shoemaker, we don't wear rotten leather; if a merchant, we get thirty-six inches to the yard. I have been long in business. I have met many honest merchants. But I know that 'tis hard for a merchant to be honest in New York. Will you show ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... consider whether by deterring his associates from quackery and false seeming he did not directly stimulate them to the pursuit of virtue. (1) He used often to say there was no better road to renown than the one by which a man became good at that wherein he desired to be reputed good. (2) The truth of the concept he enforced as follows: "Let us ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... knows. But Dr. Floddin has an honest face, and keeps a little drug store on State street below Eighteenth. He usually charges fifty cents a visit, which is all he believes his services to be worth. This piece of quackery would ruin his name with Lockwin, were it known to him, or ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... a mass of discontent which does not know what remedy is to be sought. All sorts of cures will be tried, many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... chiefly known to the world as a trance lecturer under what claimed to be spirit influence. Although speaking in the interest of a faith generally unpopular, and involved in no slight degree in crudities, extravagance, and quackery, she was herself neither fool nor fanatic. She was a true child of nature, direct and simple in her manners, and impatient of the artificiality and formal etiquette of fashionable society.' These poems are characterized by great case of style, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their fellow-monk. Falsehood and fraud are described as dwelling ever with them. Their unholy life and unseemly quarrels are held up for reprobation. Nor do the nuns escape the imputation of unchastity. The quackery of pardoners, with their pardons and indulgences from pope and bishop, is treated with contempt and scorn. Bishops are criticised for their undivided attention to worldly matters; and even the Pope himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... and evil spirits of every kind rebuked—these, like the holy water, the robes of the priest, and the sign of the cross, the Calvinists considered either with scorn and contempt as the tools of deliberate quackery and imposture, or with horror and loathing, as the fit emblems and instruments of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Law as a profession, in spite of the aspersions cast upon it by disappointed suitors, over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signal advantage over all other business callings,—that eminence in it is always a test of ability and acquirement. While in every other profession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor, forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profound learning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and the charlatan, who in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... credulity of devout enthusiasts by fetishism and shrine quackery is not altogether confined to the ecclesiastics. A Spanish layman in Yloilo, some few years ago, when he was an official of the prison, known as the "Cotta," conceived the idea of declaring that the Blessed Virgin and Child Jesus had appeared ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... have been justly rewarded for his quackery, for he lost both his wife and his son by sickness. He himself, however, being of an iron constitution, made a second marriage, in spite of his advanced age, being led into it by the following circumstances. After the death of his wife he arranged a marriage between ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... man had acquired reputation for ability was this,—he never pretended to any branch of knowledge of which he was ignorant, any more than to any virtue in which he was deficient. Honesty itself was never more free from quackery or deception than was this embodied and walking Vice. If the world chose to esteem him, he did not buy its opinion by imposture. No man ever saw Lord Lilburne's name in a public subscription, whether for a new church, or a Bible Society, or a distressed family, no man ever heard of his doing ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... no sooner ended his remarks when a score of Saints and Sinners sprang up to protest against this ribald quackery. The utmost confusion prevailed for several moments. Finally the venerable Dr. Poole was accorded the floor. "Far be it from me," said he, solemnly, "to lend my approval to any enterprise that contemplates bibliomania as a disease instead of a crime. (Applause.) I live in Evanston, the home ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... time when the partition-wall between Jew and Gentile of the medical world is pretty thoroughly breached, if not thrown down, and quackery and imposture are tolerated as necessary evils, it is agreeable to meet with a real work of science, emanating from the labors of a regular physician, concerning the influences exerted by electricity on the human body, both ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... kind of cheating is quackery.—The quack is liar, thief, and murderer all in one. For in undertaking to do things for which he has no adequate training and skill, he pretends to be what he is not. He takes money for which he is unable to render a genuine equivalent. And by inducing people to trust their ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... depression and want of confidence, all trade had well-nigh stopped, and political quackery, with its cheap and dirty remedies, had full control of the field. In the very face of miseries so plainly traceable to the deadly paper currency, it may seem strange that people should now have begun to clamour for a renewal of ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... the public to obtain a satisfactory test of medical efficiency, that it was certainly not practicable if the competition by the private teachers were suppressed, that otherwise the medical examination might become as great a quackery as the medical degree, and that the whole question was a mere squabble between the big quack and the little one. He unfolds his ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... be more true, than the proposition ludicrously illustrated in this passage, that real science is in most instances of slow growth, and that the discoveries which are brought to perfection at once, are greatly exposed to the suspicion of quackery. Like the ephemeron fly, they are born suddenly, and may be expected to die ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the curious ugliness of his face and figure. It is most unlikely that his success as a practitioner in a branch of the medical art in which imposture is the most easily detected, could have been earned by mere quackery; and he seems, moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds than one. The probability is that the worst that could be alleged against him was a tendency to scientific pedantry in his published writings, which was pretty sure to tickle the fancy of Mr. Sterne. Unscrupulously, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... vain employs, away From this too oft deluded breast! No longer will I court thy stay, To be my bosom's teasing guest. Thou treacherous medicine—reckon'd pure; Thou quackery of the harass'd heart, That kills what it pretends to ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... it and has succeeded only in making unto itself a barbarous jargon, leaving obscurity more obscure than before. As for us, who hunger after lucidity, let us relinquish abstruse theories to whoever delights in them and confine our ambition to observable facts, without pretending to explain the quackery of the plasma. Our method certainly will not reveal to us the origin of instinct; but it will at least show us where it would be waste of time to look ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... loved at home, how ample, The tribute to that modest spirit paid! To pushing quackery a high example, A calm ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... the Kremlin." His anxiety to show the French that, even during his hottest campaigns, his mind continued to be occupied with them and their domestic administration has already been alluded to. There was audacious quackery in ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... employed. But this indifference on the part of the patient does not obviate the necessity for a thorough, scientific education on the part of the practitioner. Notwithstanding all the laws enacted to raise the standard of medicine, and thus protect the public from quackery, there yet exists a disposition among many to cling to all that savors of the miraculous, or supernatural. To insure the future advancement of the healing art, physicians must instruct mankind in Physiology, Hygiene, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... with two articles, are called common. This word common requires explanation— it is not used in the same sense as that in which we say, that quackery is common in medicine, knavery in the law, and humbug everywhere— pigeons at Crockford's, lame ducks at the Stock Exchange, Jews at the ditto, and Royal ditto, and foreigners in Leicester Square— No; a common noun is one that is both masculine and feminine; in one sense of the word ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... suspect all other styles,—and this of itself shows what improvement has taken place in the Surrey region. If at first he indulged in rant, he has now subsided into an even vein; he puts things plumply, and tells his feelings gravely, and makes his points without quackery. So it is plain that when he gives notice of a contribution for his college, in which young men are trained for the ministry, and states simply, in justification, that one hundred and fifty have already left it, and are now engaged in preaching the dissenting word, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... liberal rules of interpretation, which it is now the fashion to apply to the first chapter of Genesis, will relieve the reader from any scruples on the former account; and as to the latter, in these days of scientific quackery, it would be quite too harsh to make any great complaint about such peccadilloes. The writer has taken up almost every questionable fact and startling hypothesis, that have been promulgated by proficients or pretenders ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... intellectual act, however you may distinguish it by name in respect of the originating faculties, is truly the act of the entire man; the notion of distinct material organs, therefore, in the brain itself, is plainly absurd. Pressed by this, Spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... can doubt the swift and stern termination of institutions introduced by so unnatural and irrational a process. I would address myself to the English Radicals. I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the nonce the false colours of the movement; but I mean that honest and considerable party, too considerable, I fear, for their happiness and the safety of the State-who have a definite ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... conclude our astrological strictures with the following advertisement, which affords as fine a satirical specimen of quackery as is to be met with. It is extracted from "poor Robin's" almanack for 1773; and may not be without its use, to many at the present day. We will vouch for it being harmless, but as we are not in the secret of all that it contains, our readers must endeavour to get the information that ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... socially and commercially. Dr. Lindsay's offices probably "took in" more in a month than "old Dr. Green" made in a year, without the expense of advertising. Lindsay would lose much more by adopting the methods of quackery than he could ever make: he would lose hospital connections, standing in the professional journals, and social prestige. Lindsay was quite shrewd in sticking to the conventions of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... quack, Sir John Hill, who, with his insolent attacks upon the Royal Society, pretentious botanical and medical compilations, plays, novels, and magazine articles, has long sunk into utter oblivion. It is said of him that he pursued every branch of literary quackery with greater contempt of character than any man of his time, and that he made as much as L1500 in a year;—three times as much, it is added, as any one writer ever made in ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... unseat kings, whose dogma of "Divine-right" had by the French Revolution been shown to be only insidious political quackery, in the past sustained largely by the sword. The common people were wrestling to grasp this monarchic sword away, and here and there had already seized the hilt or the blade—it mattered not which!—and the dynasties of Hohenzollern, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... by the latter;—such appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, which he found the best-humoured vent for his impatience under argument, and to which, notwithstanding the venerable name and services of Mr. Bentham himself, the quackery of much that is promulgated by his followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope. Romantic, indeed, as was Lord Byron's sacrifice of himself to the cause of Greece, there was in the views he took of the means of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hardly with these gentlemen, it is because he will bear "no brother near the throne" of humbug and quackery. Like a steward who tricks his master, but keeps the rest of the servants honest, PUNCH will gammon the public to the utmost of his skill, but he will take care that no one else shall exercise a trade of which he claims ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... destroys sound judgment, and dissolves the sense of reality which it has taken modern science many generations to build up. Science has all along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to supplement the inadequate evidence of "thought-transference," ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... after Owen came into possession of The Glen Tower, Morgan discovered that he had saved as much money for his old age as a sensible man could want; that he was tired of the active pursuit—or, as he termed it, of the dignified quackery of his profession; and that it was only common charity to give his invalid brother a companion who could physic him for nothing, and so prevent him from getting rid of his money in the worst of all possible ways, by wasting it on doctors' bills. In a week after Morgan ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... accused of quackery, and on one occasion when the Herald touched on the same subject, it brought him to our office and he exhibited diplomas, certificates and ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... simply an invitation to quackery. The man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied ethics, is the revived and reinforced Sklavenmoral ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... self-sacrifice of these men. The doubt which may be reasonably felt and expressed as to the consistency of their attitude reflects no discredit on them personally. Nevertheless, the alternative must be faced, that a 'modernised' Catholicism must either descend to deliberate quackery, or proclaim that the bank from which the main part of her revenues ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... difficult!—so long it will have plenty of "facts" to fall back upon. Who can blame a man for being satisfied with the argument, "I was ill, and am well,—great is Hahnemann!"? Only this argument serves all impostors and impositions. It is not of much value, but it is irresistible, and therefore quackery is immortal. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of course, appears to me true and relevant; but I cannot help feeling that it is, after all, but a poor piece of quackery to comment on a multitude of phenomena without adverting to the principle which lies at the root, and gives the true meaning to them all. Now this principle I seem to myself to find in the state of mind which is attributed to Teufelsdrockh; in his state of mind, I say, not in his opinions, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... a man of extravagant pretensions ... exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His "Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense, affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery, glittering and rancid obscenities." ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... contrivance is necessary. It is contrivance, and the love of contrivance, that spoil all. We are destroying ourselves by a remedy which no evil called for. We are ruining perfect health by nostrums and quackery. We have lived hitherto under a well constructed, practical, and beneficial system; a system not surpassed by any in the world; and it seems to me to be presuming largely, largely indeed, on the credulity and self-denial of the people, to rush with such sudden and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... defeat, and its apices of triumph and power? A banality this, you will say. But need we not be reminded of these wholesome truths, when the striving after originality nowadays is productive of so much quackery? The impulse of perfectibility, we repeat, whether at work in a Studio, or in a Factory, or in a Prison Cell, is the most noble of all human impulses, the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... philosophical existence. They write, not because they have made a discovery, but because their period of hybernation has expired. Still, in England, there is a strong vein of original thought. Competition, if it lead to puffing and quackery, yet stimulates the perceptions; and, in England, competition has done its worst and its best; in original chemical discovery, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... people sat in closely-packed rows, listening to the pretentious instrumental noises which were impudently offered to them as a substitute for melody. While these docile victims of the worst of all quackeries (musical quackery) were still toiling through their first hour of endurance, a passing ripple of interest stirred the stagnant surface of the audience caused by the sudden rising of a lady overcome by the heat. She was quickly led out of the concert-room (after ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... progress, of philanthropy, or, in material sciences, comparative anatomy, phrenology, electricity, exalted into leading ideas, and keys, if not of all knowledge, at least of many things more than belong to them,—principles, all of them true to a certain point, yet all degenerating into error and quackery, because they are carried to excess, viz. at the point where they require interpretation and restraint from other quarters, and because they are employed to do what is simply too much for them, inasmuch as a little ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... true,—but weak to assist as well as to oppose a government, weak to withstand a mob. Nowhere, nowadays, is a mob so powerful as in Paris: the political history of Paris is the history of snobs. Centralization is an excellent quackery for a despot who desires power to last only his own life, and who has but a life-interest in the State; but to true liberty and permanent order centralization is a deadly poison. The more the provinces govern their own affairs, the more we find everything, even to roads ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amount in all cases of indebtedness—was not yet dreamed of. New York was then a sound and healthful community; making its mistakes, doubtless, as men ever will err; but the control of things had not yet passed into the hands of sheer political empirics, whose ignorance and quackery were stimulated by the lowest passion for majorities. Among other things that were then respected, were wills; but it was not known to a single individual, among all those who thronged the dwelling of Deacon Pratt, that the dying man had ever mustered the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... and at twenty past you'll be as well as ever you were in your life. Now, keep your eye on the clock, and see if I am not right." Next day, as likely as not, her mother will be in, weeping tears of joy; and another miracle has been added to Cullingworth's record. It may smell of quackery, but it is exceedingly useful to ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... As for quackery and mountebanks, of which the town was so full, I listened to none of them, and have observed often since, with some wonder, that for two years after the plague I scarcely saw or heard of one of them about town. ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... protection of her husband was removed by the hand of a medical prodigy who advertised himself as the discoverer of a new and infallible cure for cancer, and whom Mrs. Marrineal, with an instinctive leaning toward quackery, had forced upon her spouse. Appraising his prospective widow with an accurate eye, the dying man left a testament bestowing the bulk of his fortune upon his son, with a few heavy income-producing properties for Mrs. Marrineal. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... lamented friends, the Whigs, have gone to enjoy a virtuous retirement and dignified ease, we have taken no delight in politics. There is no fun going on now-a-days—no quackery, no mountebankery, no asses, colonial or otherwise. The dull jog-trot fellows who have got into Downing Street have made politics no joke; and now that silence, as of the tomb, reigns amongst quondam leaders of the Treasury Benech—now that the camp-followers have followed the leader, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... self-doubts, hates, goodness, devotedness, and noble world-love; this is not done under pretty flowers of metaphor in the lispings of a pet parson, or in the strong but uncertain fashion of the American school; still less in the dry operose quackery of professed doctors of psychology, mere chaff not studied from nature, and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless; but with the firm knowing hand of the anatomist, demonstrating and making clear to others, that the knowledge may be applied to purpose. All this difficult task is ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... nevertheless, is a subject upon which even ingenious men are often singularly negligent. There is, perhaps, no trade or profession existing in which there is so much quackery, so much ignorance of the scientific principles, and of the history of their own art, with respect to its resources and extent, as are to be met with amongst mechanical projectors. The self-constituted engineer, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... patients were playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the yearly return, twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole hospital rested as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth, scandals, gossip, on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral institution extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He knew that Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of Ward No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... anasbleki. Quack cxarlatano. Quackery cxarlatanismo. Quadrangle kvarangulajxo. Quadrant kvadranto. Quadrate kvadrato. Quadrate kvadrata. Quadratic kvadrata. Quadrature kvadrato. Quadrille kvadrilo. Quadruped kvarpieda. Quadruple kvarobla. Quaff glutegi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... The nation was divided into three classes; the possidenti, the dotti, and the commerrianti. The landholders, to be taxed; the literary men, to be silenced; and the merchants, to have all the ports shut against them. These sounding words in Italian are even better adapted to the purposes of quackery than ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... against each other only by the lucky thought that they can do more execution by being converged upon him. Had he appeared as an intelligent, knowing, and efficient controversialist on the side of the traditions of his profession, his wholesale denunciation of quackery, vulgar or genteel, might be referred to conceit; had he turned state's evidence against the accredited deceptions of his own profession, and gone over entirely to the enthusiasts who think that medicine is not an experimental science, but a series of hap-hazard hits at the occult laws of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... strong affinity Intellectual non-combatant It is so hard to prove a negative Let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept Life becomes to them as death and death as life List of things that everybody says and nobody thinks List of things that everybody thinks and nobobody says Lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of evidence Meddling with things that can take care of themselves Most persons have died before they expire No company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things Not love in word, neither in ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... to the Queen of a drawing made by her, and presented by the Empress to M. Gerard, chief clerk of Foreign Affairs, on the occasion of his going to Vienna to draw up the articles for her marriage-contract. "I should blush," said she, "if that proof of the quackery of my education were shown to me. I do not believe that I ever put a pencil to that drawing." However, what had been taught her she knew perfectly well. Her facility of learning was inconceivable, and if all her teachers had been as well informed and as faithful to their duty as the ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Averroes, who, according to Leo Africanus, heard his lectures, and learned physic of him. He belonged, in many respects, to the Dogmatists or Rational School, rather than to the Empirics. He was a great admirer of Galen; and in his writings he protests emphatically against quackery and the superstitious remedies of the astrologers. He shows no inconsiderable knowledge of anatomy in his remarkable description of inflammation and abscess of the mediastinum in his own person, and its diagnosis from common pleuritis as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... limits in mathematics, and those that assert there are, are infinite ruffians, ignorant, lying blackguards. There is no differential calculus, no Taylor's theorem, no calculus of variations, &c. in mathematics. There is no quackery whatever in mathematics; no % equal to anything. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... excellence, the country of bluff, of quackery in patent medicines, and of the booming of unworthy ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... Cheselden, to have asked them to try his experiment over again, and have been guided by their answers. But the good bishop got excited; he pleased himself with the thought that he had discovered a great panacea; and having once tasted the bewitching cup of self-quackery, like many before and since his time, he was so infatuated with the draught that he would insist on pouring it down the throats of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as know that Mr. Smith's uncle is a large proprietor in the puffing newspaper; and that he wrote the articles in question in a much warmer strain than that in which they appeared, the editor having sadly curtailed and toned them down. In the long run, all this quackery does no good. And indeed long accounts in provincial journals of family matters, weddings and the like, serve only to make the family in question laughed at. Still, they do harm to nobody. They are very innocent. They please the family whose ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd |
