"Toady" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others might ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... adequate quantity those of us who can afford the expense go swarming over sea to struggle for front places in his attention. In this blind and brutal scramble for social recognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has many chances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls of his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur the risk of erring on the wrong side, take ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... can ever have stood by his art with a quieter dignity than he always did. Nothing would have induced him to lay it at the feet of any human creature. To fawn, or to toady, or to do undeserved homage to any one, was an absolute impossibility with him. And yet his character was so nicely balanced that he was the last man in the world to be suspected of self-assertion, and his modesty was one of his ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... jealously upheld—everyone of these rights. To do this work, will require that the writer of this history shall have been identified with this command during its existence—he must have been a soldier. Again, he must be a man who acts up to his convictions; no toady nor any apologist is desired. If he was a Confederate soldier from principle, say so, and apologize to no one for the fact. If he loved his State and the Southland and wished their independence, say so, and "forget not the field where ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation of the person whom she most loved and respected, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, unflinching, into a toady, a ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... thrill of pride when she saw how much his residence in Boston had improved him, and how handsome he really was. But any attempt to converse with him was rendered impossible by Henry Lincoln, who, toady as he was, thought proper to be exceedingly polite to Mary, now that the Seldens noticed her so much. Seating himself by her side with all the familiarity of an old friend, and laying his arm across the back of the sofa, so that to William it looked as if thrown around her shoulders, he commenced ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... minutes to play, the Convalescents, who had shown great form, required only twelve runs to win the match. Kippy and Gunner Toady shared the batting. A pretty glance to leg for two by the Gunner was all that could be taken out of the penultimate over, and Kippy at the pergola end faced Mark Styles, the postman, to take the first ball of the last over. Two singles were run, and then Kippy placed one nicely into the herbaceous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... unlike the less reasonable human race, would feel offended if it were not cut. Then the wines were few. Some sherry, with a pedigree like an Arabian, heightened the flavour of the dish, not interfered with it; as a toady keeps up the conversation which he does not distract. A goblet of Graffenburg, with a bouquet like woman's breath, made you, as you remembered some liquid which it had been your fate to fall upon, suppose that German wines, like German barons, required some discrimination, and that hock, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... to read Sir Walter with the same breathless eagerness as they used to do—how many years agone? It is chiefly for their sakes that I have added several interludes, telling how Sweetheart, Hugh John, Sir Toady Lion, and Maid Margaret received my petty larcenies from the full ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... roofer from Cedarville," answered John Fenwick, a small youth usually called Mumps. He was known as a toady and a sneak, and was very chummy ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... justly due to those placed by Providence farther up the social scale. Yet doubtless there are persons to whom the sneakiest manner is agreeable,—who enjoy the flattery and the humiliation of the wretched toady who is always ready to tell them that they are the most beautiful, graceful, witty, well-informed, aristocratic-looking, and generally-beloved of the human race. You must remember that it depends very much upon the nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... imperfect as all others. Whatever has been, has been right and proper for its time, but now a change is called for. The advancement of the race demands it. No more shall one man amass great wealth, and in so doing leave thousands penniless; no more shall politicians, who twaddle and toady for offices, deprive themselves and others of manhood and all that is noble; no more shall the pastor love his money, his position, and the praise of men, better than an opportunity ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... (for there was a plot), but only the denouement. I had offended a certain Mr. Fane, toady-in-ordinary to ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... thing that no sanctimonious Brahman would have dreamed of doing, for fear of being defiled by the touch of a casteless foreigner; so he was either above or below the caste laws, and it is common knowledge how those who are below caste cringe and toady. So he evidently reckoned himself above it, and the Indian who can do that has met and overcome more tyranny and terrors than the ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... humiliation of any disguise. She is ready to be cast down before swine, or raised high before the eyes of fools. She is used as a tool or a stepping-stone—the humble handmaid of the tuft- hunter and the toady. She is dragged through the mire of the slums to the dwellings of the wealthy and idle. She is hounded up and down the world—the plaything of Fashion, the trap of the unwary, the washerwoman of the unclean who wish to try the paths of virtue— for a change. And she is still Charity, and she lives ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... he was one of those valuable courtiers whose vigilance and acuteness of perception threw all other favorites into the shade, and counterbalanced, by his close attention, the servility of Dangeau, who was not the favorite, but the toady of the king. M. de Saint-Aignan began to think what was to be done in the present position of affairs. He reflected that his first information ought to come from De Guiche. He therefore set out in search of him, but De Guiche, whom we saw disappear ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was so intensely delighted that his eyebrows expanded, his eyes smiled, and he felt eager to toady to the Magistrate (by presenting the girl to him). He hastened to employ all his persuasive powers with his daughter (to further his purpose), and on the same evening he forthwith escorted Chiao Hsing in a small ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 'bout it," rejoined Theodore. "It put me up a peg when folks begun to call me Theodore 'stead of Tode or Toady, an' so I thought you'd feel the same way. 'Course, if you like to be ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartly," came down upon him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a "diner-out of the first water" in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even.—If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... now. Cook and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop. James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big deal on Coates's shares. Ca' canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the Irish Field now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make it tender enough for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... de Montmorency—of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an excellent person"—through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... zere themselves. France do more for America zan any ozare nation, but ze Americans forget. Zey forget Lafayette. Zey forget France make it possibul for zem to conquaire Engalande an' get ze freedom zey ware aftaire. An' now zey—zey—what you call eet?—toady to Engalande. Zey pretende to love ze Engaleesh. Bah! Uncale Sam an' John Bull both need to have some of ze conaceit ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... which I have been latterly assailed. This matter, however, will remedy itself. At the very first blush of my new prosperity, the gentlemen who toadied me in the old, will recollect themselves and toady me again. You, who know me, will comprehend that I speak of these things only as having served, in a measure, to lighten the gloom of unhappiness, by a gentle and not unpleasant sentiment of mingled pity, merriment and ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... fellow is flattered. They see the hold they have, and stick to him like leeches. All for want of money, of course. Our aristocrats begin to see that they can't get on without money nowadays; they can't live on family records, and they find that people won't toady to them in the old way just on account of their name. Why, it began with Eldon's father—didn't he put his pride in his pocket, and try to make cash by speculation? Now I can respect him: he at all events faced the facts ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... deplorable step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a snob—he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs—and that thus Mr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr. Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated him with an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge could not construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his own inferiority, for it was ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... either, there would be a quid pro quo, as Josiah says, to be given, afore we got the fisheries, if we ever got them, at all. 'So,' sais I, out of a bit of fun, for I can't help taken a rise out of folks no how I can fix it, 'send us a lord. We are mighty fond of noblemen to Washington, and toady them first-rate. It will please such a man as Pierce to show him so much respect as to send a peer to him. He will ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... for any one who doesn't toady to him," thought Captain Cartwright moodily. "I can see that I've got to make it my business to take the conceit ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... pretty bubbles, bubbles, Riding on the little brook; See the spiders try to catch them, And old Mr. Toady Frog sings 'Po-dunk!' and jumps down deep. Oh, green old Mr. ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... too stunned for a moment to reply, while Laura, who had gone quite beyond the point where she knew or cared what she said, went on with a rush of words: 'I mean to tell you, now that I am started, that anybody who isn't blind can see why you toady to the Winships, who have money and social position, and why you are so anxious to keep everybody else from getting into their good graces; but they are so partial to you that they have given you ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "You all of you know I'm with the class I belong to; I ain't a toady to no rich folks; I don't think no more of 'em than you do, and I don't want any favors of 'em—all I want is pay for my honest work, and that's an even swap, and I ain't beholden, but I want to look at things fair and square. I don't want to be carried away because ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not fame, and the bodkin used for fastening the "back hair" was called "Glorvina" in her honor. Like many attractive women of decided character, she had her full share of faults and foibles. Superficial, conceited, sadly lacking in spirituality and refinement, a cruel enemy, a toady to titles, a blind partisan of the Liberal party,—that is her picture in shadow. Her style was open to severe criticism, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth suggests mildly that Maria, in reading her novel aloud in the family circle, was obliged to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... badness with his eyes open. He had known what was wrong, and had done it, having taught himself to think that bad things were best. But poor Mr Bott had meant to do well, and thought that he had done very well indeed. He was a tuft-hunter and a toady, but he did not know that he was doing amiss in seeking to rise by tuft-hunting and toadying. He was both mean and vain, both a bully and a coward, and in politics, I fear, quite unscrupulous in spite of his grand dogmas; but he believed that he was progressing ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... when you write, sayin', 'I just about make a live of it'? Singular we think the country's goin' to hell, we fellers, in a two dollar suit, wadin' around in the mud or sweatin' around in the hayfield, while you fellers lay around New York and smoke and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires?" ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... that old disguster, Boswell. Bah! I have no patience with the toady! I suppose "my mind is not yet thoroughly impregnated with the Johnsonian ether," and that is the reason why I cannot appreciate him, or his work. I admire him for his patience and minuteness in compiling such trivial details. He must have been an amiable man, to bear Johnson's brutal, ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... refreshment which he permitted himself on the road from Cambridge to Norwich; although he consented to dismount at the end of every ten miles to stretch his limbs. Sidling up to Sergeant Earl, as there was no greater man for him to toady, Francis North offered himself as the old man's travelling companion from the university to the manufacturing town; and when Earl with a grim smile accepted the courteous suggestion, the young man congratulated himself. On the following ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... was willing to toady to Mills and Devoe, and tell everybody they're the finest football leaders that ever came down the pike, it would be different," he sneered angrily. "Maybe then Mills would give me private instruction in goal-kicking and let me black his ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Heriot on the terrace! She is going to be the piquant young woman who aggravates by indifference, and disdains rank and splendour; the kind of girl who has her innings in novelettes—but not out of them. The successful women are those who know how to toady in the right way and not obviously. Walderhurst has far too good an opinion of himself to be attracted by a girl who is making up to another man: he's ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thou dost preserve me and prosper me with fatness! Boundless abundance, yea, sublime abundance dost thou bring me! Praise, profit, pleasure, jollity, festivity, feasting, trains of victuals, eatables, drinkables, satiety, joy! Never will I toady to human being more, I now resolve it. Why, I can bless my friend or blast my foe, now that this delightful day has loaded me down with its delightful delightfulness! I've landed a legacy stuffed fit to burst, and not a single ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... organise his party, but it was a failure; Fulbert said he had made an engagement, and would not break it; he was not bound to toady old Froggy, nor in bondage to any old fogeys of a dean and chapter; and he walked off the faster for Clement's protest, leaving Lance to roll on the floor and climb the balusters backwards to exhale his desire to follow. He was too ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... subserviency; abasement; prostration, prosternation^; genuflection &c (worship) 990; fawning &c v.; tuft- hunting, timeserving^, flunkeyism^; sycophancy &c (flattery) 933; humility &c 879. sycophant, parasite; toad, toady, toad-eater; tufthunter^; snob, flunky, flunkey, yes-man, lapdog, spaniel, lickspittle, smell-feast, Graeculus esuriens [Lat.], hanger on, cavaliere servente [It], led captain, carpet knight; timeserver, fortune hunter, Vicar of Bray, Sir- Pertinax, Max ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... been altered. They have had their day, and most of them are fit now only for fancy-balls and old-clothes' shops. Nothing is so short-lived as a good uniform; it varies with the taste of a commander-in-chief, or a commander-in-chief's toady; or the fancy of some royal favourite. It's like the wind in the Mediterranean; you never know what is coming upon you till you are in the midst of it; and so it is with your uniform. Get a new one, and the probability is that you will not show it on parade half-a-dozen times before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the lords out after the bishops, and throw the throne into the Thames after the peers and the bench. Is that man more modest than I, who take these institutions as I find them, and wait for time and truth to develop, or fortify, or (if you like) destroy them? A college tutor, or a nobleman's toady, who appears one fine day as my right reverend lord, in a silk apron and a shovel-hat, and assumes benedictory airs over me, is still the same man we remember at Oxbridge, when he was truckling to the tufts, and bullying the poor under-graduates ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have any trip-up in the matter," answered the toady, with a doubtful shake of his head. Mumps had gone into the whole scheme rather unwillingly, but now saw no way of ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... Augustus Myrtle sought only the intimacy of the rich and well bred, you must not suppose he was a toady, or practised obsequiously. Not at all. He mingled with his associates, assuming to be one of them—their equal. True, his want of money led to desperate economical contrivances behind the scenes, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... hero, like the first man wounded in a war. The town rallied to his support. Emma was a heartless wretch, who had insulted a faithful lover because he would not become as abject a toady to the hateful East as she was. Her new name became a byword. Her pronunciations were heard everywhere in the most ruthless parody. She was accused of things that she never had said, things that nobody ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... secrecy. As it is, it 'll go badly against poor Chiallo. Taste for fencing won't be much improved by the affair. They quarrelled in the dressing room, and fetched the foils and knocked off the buttons there. A big rascal toady squire of Morsfield's did it for him. Morsfield was just up from Yorkshire. He said he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await it, declined provocation for the present. May ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and its influence. Have you been following the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is not polite to be plain spoken! My dear, there are times when to be merely "polite" is to be a toady! There are times when politeness is a pillow of hen feathers, wherewith to smother honor and strangle truth. If all you care for is to be popular, to go through life like a molasses-drop in a child's mouth, why, then, choose your ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... always despised that poor toady," the bishop went on. "And yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... to hear them, played the spaniel to people she despised; and it soon became open talk, that no matter what you said to her, Laura Rambotham would not take offence. You could also rely on her to do a dirty job for you.—A horrid little toady was the verdict; especially of those who had no objection to ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... Macklin is doing pretty well, too," put in Buster, referring to a small lad who had once been a toady to Gus Plum, ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... Lady Storms, whom he encountered in Vienna, he heard more than from any other. She had crossed the Channel with her Chaplain, her spaniel, her toady, and her parrot, in search of enlivenment for her declining years, and hearing that her Apollo Belvidere was within reach, sent a message saying she would coax him to come and make love to an old woman, ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thought good enough, as any toilet is considered sufficiently attractive for home use. A singular impression has grown up that formal politeness and the saying of gracious and complimentary things betray the toady and the hypocrite, both if whom ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... he sneeringly called Gus "Cotton's jackal." Todd was exactly of the material which makes a good jackal, though he never became quite Jim Cotton's toady. He was a sharp, selfish individual, good-looking in an aimless kind of way, with a slack, feeble mouth, and a wandering, indecisive glance. He had a quick, shallow cleverness, which could get up pretty easily enough of inexact knowledge to pass muster in the schools. Old ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... had employed as a servant in the East, and whom he had been obliged to get bastinadoed for petty theft. In England we run after we know not whom; in America, if a lord be run after, there is at all events a strong presumption in favour of his being at least a gentleman. We toady our Indian swells, and they toady their English swells; and I trust, for our sake, that in so doing they have a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... a strip of leather on the floor with an angry gesture. "Yet I know who has been playing tricks here, and why I am no longer wanted. It is because I do not flatter and toady as certain people do. I am in the habit of speaking the truth in all places and to all persons," he continued proudly, "God be with these children, for my leaving them will benefit them little, whereas I—well, by God's help I may be able ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... treated as such. Thenceforward, the fortunate man must seek the society of the unfortunate man, or he will never have it. The former may give practical recognition of entire equality, to the best of his ability, but it will avail nothing, for the latter will not "toady" to his friend, nor be "patronized" by him. At last the fortunate man becomes tired of the effort to make his unfortunate friend understand him, and he kicks him and his memory aside, and calls it a friendship closed forever, without fault upon ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... which is a man's way when he seeks to interpret a woman's mind. Mrs. de la Vere, like the rest, was dazzled by Bower's wealth. After ignoring Helen during the past fortnight, she was prepared to toady to her instantly in her new guise as the chosen bride of a millionaire. The belief added fuel to the fire already raging in ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... ignorance is affected in American society respecting the manner in which the British landocrats came by their property. It is enough that "my lud" has a handle to his name, and Murray Hill shoddyocracy will wine and dine and toady him, and perhaps for his title marry him to some sweet, pure and good American girl, whose life hereafter will be a purgatory to herself and ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... fell on this brilliant spectacle, Mrs. Dewey assumed a stately air, showing, on all occasions, a conscious superiority that was offensive to our really best people. There are in all communities a class who toady to the rich; and we had a few of these in S——. They flattered the Deweys, and basked in the sunshine of ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur |
