"Mendacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no use hiding from the truth. Somebody had blundered—a fatal blunder—and they were going to pay for it! Mark Forepaugh kicked the pile of hydrogen cylinders. Only a moment ago he had broken the seals—the mendacious seals that certified to the world that the flasks were fully charged. And the flasks were empty! The supply of this precious power gas, which in an emergency should have been sufficient for six ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... must admit exactly fitted the lock of Fiddles's bedroom door), his Honor could still be made to believe the perjured testimony of the cobbler—Fiddles's enemy, as had been abundantly proved in the previous rabbit case, when the same mendacious half-soler and heeler had informed on my friend—well and good; but if not, then, the resources of my Government would be set in motion ...
— Fiddles - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a horse or driving a carriage along it. Ireland, as our English readers ought to know, has always been a country teeming with abundance—a happy land, in which want, destitution, sickness, and famine have never been felt or known, except through the mendacious misrepresentations of her enemies. The road we speak of was a proof of this; for it was evident to every observer that, in some season of superabundant food, the people, not knowing exactly how to dispose of their shilling loaves, took to paving the common roads with them, rather than they should ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... their kindly attempts to help me out of the mess into which I had got the plot. I did not like to wound their feelings by saying straight out that they had failed, one and all, to hit on the real murderer, just like real police, so I tried to break the truth to them in a roundabout, mendacious fashion, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... that Nation they helped place on the map of the world. How do you old Confederates, who followed Pat Cleburne, relish having this blatant tramp defame your dead commander? Can you believe, on the unsupported testimony of this mendacious mountebank, that Father Ryan's tribute to the Stars-and-Bars was rank hypocrisy —that the poet-priest was the political tool of a foreign power? Sherman died a Catholic. Fighting Phil Sheridan was a Catholic. Old Pap Thomas, "the Rock of Chickamauga," was a Catholic. ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... cooly, who had been summoned from the ricefields, appeared upon the scene and took up my Gladstone bag. Nothing remained for me but to pay my mendacious Malay half the number of florins he demanded and ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... of the good. It has maintained customs and ideas that had ceased to be effective and true, and in order to preserve them it has resorted to forced interpretations and has invented accounts of their origin. It has thus in many cases been obscurantive and mendacious. It has tended to make the essence of religion consist in outward observances, and has not infrequently degraded the placation of the deity to a matter of bargaining—it has sold salvation for money. Priests have not always escaped the danger ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... that terminated in the disastrous railway panic, were ready to give scientific evidence on engineering questions, with less regard to truth than to the interests of the persons who paid for their evidence. Having by mendacious evidence gravely injured a cause in which Mr. Hill was interested as counsel, and Mr. Tite, the eminent architect, and present member for Bath, was concerned as a projector, this witness was struck with apoplexy and died—before ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... street-passengers, once dispersed by the Guard, carried the matter abroad, and there was no end of sympathetic exaggerations. Report ran in Berlin, for example, that the poor Princess was killed, beaten or trampled to death; which we clearly see she was not. Voltaire, in that mass of angry calumnies, very mendacious indeed, which he calls VIE PRIVEE DU ROI DE PRUSSE, mentions the matter with emphasis; and says farther, The Princess once did him (Voltaire) the "honor to show him a black mark she carried on her breast ever after;"—which is likelier to be false ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on one side, rubbed his chin with nice consideration, and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... masses, just as a fire is set by the rubbing together of tree-boughs in primeval forests, and the dusky redman incontinently roasted in his uncontaminated innocence. The longer I live the less faith I have that a man evolves any thing from his inner consciousness. Fancies are only the lies of the mendacious brain, which perceives one thing and declares ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... man whose very thought is a lie to him and to us! He too is a frightful man; repeating about this Universe on every hand what is not, and driven to repeat it; the sure herald of ruin to all that follow him, that know with his knowledge! And would you learn how to get a mendacious thought, there is no surer recipe than carrying a loose tongue. The lying thought, you already either have it, or will soon get it by that method. He who lies with his very tongue, he clearly enough has long ceased ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... itself, in the more Celtic parts of England proper, a good many relics of the old Welsh Caers still bespeak the incompleteness of the early Teutonic conquest. If we might trust the mendacious Nennius, indeed, all our Casters and Chesters were once good Cymric Caers; for he gives a doubtful list of the chief towns in Britain, where Gloucester appears as Cair Gloui, Colchester as Cair Colun, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... followed Ruth's bravely mendacious assurance. Amy lay down at length and drew the coverlet over her head. The thumping of Ruth's heart gradually steadied into an ordinary beat. Just as she was telling herself that Amy's foolish fancies ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... in the Rogron household while he, the colonel, had no hold there except by the extremely hypothetical tie of his mendacious affection for Sylvie, which it was not yet clear that Sylvie reciprocated. When the lawyer told him of the priest's manoeuvre, and advised him to break with Sylvie and marry Pierrette, he certainly flattered Gouraud's foible; but after analyzing the inner purpose of that advice and examining ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... nauseating result, over the hard veal, the tough chicken, the "mousey" quails, and the tasteless beef and mutton, which are never roasted, but are baked or stewed in boiling fat—though shamelessly described as "rotis" in the pretentious and mendacious "menu" placed on the dinner-table. The consequence is that the tourist, who has been overfed at home, eats very little, and his health benefits. But in such an hotel the man who lives carefully when at home, and desires a simple but properly cooked meal, is reduced ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... fond of my old cricketer, in spite of a certain mendacious and malign element in him. His yarns of gallant stands and unexpected turns of fortune, of memorable hits and eccentric umpiring, albeit tending sometimes incredibly to his glory, are full of the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... He hardly dared scan the faces of those directors in the flesh, but they were all scanning him. He stood at the end of the table and fastened his eyes on a railway map that bedecked the opposite wall, one of those mendacious maps showing a trans-continental line of unbroken tangent; three thousand miles of railway without a curve, the opposition ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... with bland simplicity, "the coin has fallen by its own weight." The striking feature in this matter is the audacity of the king. He trusted that the people generally would not have access to the documents which we now possess to contradict him. After issuing this mendacious letter, he approached the Stockholm merchants, and, by certain persuasive arguments whose nature it is easy to conceive, prevailed upon them to deposit all their "klippings" in the treasury, to be weighed and bought by the Government at their actual bullion value. He then began the issue of ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... be imagined when I found the noble beast to be a miserable 8-pointer, which I would never have fired at if I could have seen its head properly. Heartily consigning the shikari, together with the mendacious villager and all his kind, to a hot place, I dolefully stumbled away downhill again in the gathering dark, and finally deposited my weary and dejected self on board the boat, after fourteen hours of the hardest walking I ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... thoroughly in character here; this observation is quite in keeping with the general veracity of his account of his travels in Guiana, one of the most mendacious accounts of adventure ever told. Naturally, the scholarly researches of Westermarck have failed to discover this people; perhaps Lady Helen might best be protected among the Jibaros of Ecuador, where the men marry ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... "Mendacious?" Diavolo repeated; "that's do I tell lies, isn't it? Well, you see, sir, it's like this. If I'd been up to something, and you asked me if I'd done it, I'd say 'Yes' like a shot; but if Angelica had been up to something, and I knew all about it, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... us,[84] on one occasion "lodged some pellets in Massena's left eye while letting fly at a pheasant," and then without the least hesitation accused "the faithful Berthier" of having fired the shot, an accusation which was at once confirmed by the mendacious but courtierlike victim of the accident. Wellington also, Lady Shelley records, "after wounding a retriever early in the day and later on peppering the keeper's gaiters, inadvertently sprinkled the bare arms of an old woman who chanced to be washing clothes at her cottage window." ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... bigotry and historical ignorance; which may, we hope, be cured by the new bonds of alliance betwixt the Old and the New Englands. As Mr. McGavack well demonstrates, most of our Anglophobia is manufactured by the alleged "historians" who poison the minds of the young through mendacious textbooks. This species of false teaching, an evil potently fostered by the Fenians and Sinn Feiners who lurk serpent-like in our midst, is one which cannot too soon be eradicated; for the cultural identity ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... responsible for the misery inseparable from human existence itself; which is, to speak mythically, the curse that was laid on Adam, and through him on the whole race. But never has that delusion been proclaimed in a more mendacious and impudent manner than by the demagogues of the Jetstzeit—of the day we live in. As enemies of Christianity, they are, of course, optimists: to them the world is its own end and object, and accordingly in itself, that is to say, in its own ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a daily occurrence, which the repeated reprobation of the Imperial power failed to check or punish. These inflammatory appeals to the ignorance and superstition of the masses, mendacious and absurd in their accusations and deeply hostile in their spirit, could not but work cumulative harm. They aimed at no particular class of foreigners; they were impartial in ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... so pleasantly occupied that he entirely failed to perceive, for instance, the behaviour of an acquaintance, who stopped and started as he met him at the entrance of the Kinder lane, made as though he would have spoken, and, thinking better of it, walked on. Reuben—the mendacious Reuben—had done very well with his summer stock—very well indeed. And part of his earnings was now safely housed in the hands of an old chapel friend, to whom he had confided them under pledge of secrecy. But he took ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... in our time, and we have seen, in the case of neutral nations and of a section of our own nation, what chances they have of succeeding. They have only to fill their people and the world at large with counter-charges, resolutely mendacious, and many will throw up their hands in presence of the mutual accusations and declare that it is impossible to assign the responsibility. That is a fatal concession to immorality, and we must hold that in some one or more of the combatant nations the Churches have, for some ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe |
