"Mendacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mouth, except in the presence of a woman," observed Vivian, with impudent mendacity; and he looked ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Europe." In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do not know how the Americans are reputed ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... people were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever aroused ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... struck at Eugene's way of confessing to his sweetheart, she does not betray any suspicion of mendacity. She can truly say she likes Pauline, and that she is glad of the engagement, that she and Polly are certain to be the best of friends. The warms arms around her are so fond, the kisses so delicately ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... succeeded in compressing a greater amount of concentrated mendacity into one set of human bodies, above every other description, it is in the advertising quacks. Pacific Medical and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... morality compares so unfavourably with intellectuality, which is the product of the upper sections of society and flashes out new lights every moment. But even morality changes. The Spartans, a highly moral people, thought it positively indecent not to steal. A modern vice, such as mendacity, was accounted a virtue by the greatest nation of antiquity. A modern virtue, like that of forgiving one's enemies, was accounted a vice proper to slaves. Drunkenness, reprobated by ancients and moderns alike, became the mark of a ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... false assertion. This much I knew, but why she had done if, I did not know. Not until I was forced to do so, would I believe that even her falsehood in the matter meant that she herself was guilty. There must be some other reason for her mendacity. ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... remark that some cases of apparent mendacity or inaccuracy on the part of a President—especially if he were as voluble and busy as Roosevelt—must be attributed to forgetfulness or misunderstanding and not to wilful lying. A person coming from an interview with him might construe ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... mildly, "Mr. Nixon should have avoided that trap of an empty leadership. Mr. Nixon is no stripling; he knew Tammany and those elements of mendacity and muddy intrigue which are called its 'control'; he knew Mr. Croker, who in these last days was faithful to no promise and loyal to no man. Why did he permit himself to be flattered, cozened and destroyed? Why? He added inexperience to vanity and betrayed himself. It was the old story—the conference ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... important group which fall under the general head of untruthfulness. Insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,—their name is Legion. That externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is almost too obvious to need demonstration. In school the child lives in an atmosphere of unreality and make-believe. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... relations of our Protestant missionaries with those of the Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, or any other Romish order, and the difference which he cannot fail to perceive between the plain truth of the one and the audacious and elaborate mendacity of the other may lead him to a just ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... deserting the closet for the corners of streets, and charity (not the giving of alms) has got to be so earnest in the demonstration of its nature, as to be pretty certain to "begin at home," and to end where it begins. Even the art of mendacity has been aroused by the great progress which is making by all around it, and many manifest the strength of their ambition by telling ten lies where their fathers would have been satisfied with telling only one. This art has made an extraordinary progress ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... detail Tasso's use of the phrase to which so much importance has been assigned in the foregoing paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia. Sofronia, of all the heroines of the Gerusalemme, is the least interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity and Jesuitical acceptance of martyrdom. Olindo touches the weaker fibers of our sympathy by his feminine devotion to a woman placed above him in the moral scale, whose love he wins by splendid falsehood equal to her own. The episode, entirely idle in the action of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... amused at the story of Dr. Francia ordering an army contractor who had cheated the government of Paraguay to be promenaded for an hour under the gallows, and he wished that more of them might be treated in that manner. He thought the torrent of mendacity which accompanies our presidential elections must have a bad influence on the ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... reverse." Not that by suggesting this motto I would for a moment be understood as expressing a wish for OSCAR's once again dropping into poetry—that OSCAR should once again take to the other sort of Lyre; far from it. No; let him remain the head professor of the gay science of mendacity in the Cretan College. Now, when a Professor and double M.A., i.e., Master of the Mendacious Art in the Cretan College, says or writes one thing, he must be taken as meaning exactly the opposite. Otherwise he is no Cretan, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... Papers (1859), who wrote under the name "John Phoenix." As has been justly said, "Derby, Shaw, Locke and Browne carried to an extreme numerous tricks already invented by earlier American humorists, particularly the tricks of gigantic exaggeration and calm-faced mendacity, but they are plainly in the main channel of American humor, which had its origin in the first comments of settlers upon the conditions of the frontier, long drew its principal inspiration from the differences between that frontier and the more settled and compact regions ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... at home,' answered Louise, with bold mendacity. 'And a very good thing too. I should be sorry for her to see you ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... that the then newly-realized possibilities of steel construction were sending skyward along lower Broadway, in New York, Mr. Sullivan reads in them a denial of democracy. To him they signify much more than they seem to, or mean to; they are more than the betrayal of architectural ignorance and mendacity, they are symptomatic of forces undermining ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... replied quietly, with that gentle mendacity which can scarcely be grudged to women, because they are so poorly armed. "I should think so. You know what these men are. Every hour they have in Loango demoralises them more ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... return of evil for good appears to have been a new experience for Hawthorne, but those who are much concerned in the affairs of the world soon become accustomed to it, and pay little attention to either the malice or the mendacity ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the winter I think of 1837, I heard of an association of gentlemen formed to investigate this terrible subject of mendacity in our city, and to find some way of methodizing our chari-[93] ties and protecting them from abuse. I went down immediately to Robert Minturn, who, I was told, took a leading part in this movement, and told him that I had come post-haste ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... late, and then there had been the excitement of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length jacket and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... to the heart she wind, And leave the venom there she did not find; 50 What marvel that this hag of hatred works[sf] Eternal evil latent as she lurks, To make a Pandemonium where she dwells, And reign the Hecate of domestic hells? Skilled by a touch to deepen Scandal's tints With all the kind mendacity of hints, While mingling truth with falsehood—sneers with smiles— A thread of candour with a web of wiles;[sg] A plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming, To hide her bloodless heart's soul-hardened scheming; 60 A lip ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... with splendid mendacity, "it's the best thing that can happen for you, for if they collar him you git the property, and ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... ceremonies due to une jeune fille honnete. For he had at once detected the girl's reckless temper. From what social stratum did she come—she and the brother? In her, at least, there was some wild blood! When he sounded Madame Cervin, however, she, with her incurable habit of vain mendacity, had only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie felt certain ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of libellous pamphlets and placards, of which he had not less than twenty-two on his table directed against himself, which he carefully preserved as his best eulogium and claim to immortality. He advocated the severe repression of the seditious; yet, with a stretch of hypocrisy and mendacity uncommon even with a Guise, he expressed himself as for his own part very sorry that such "grievous executions" had been inflicted upon those who went "without arms and from fear of being damned to hear preaching, or who ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Christopher, is still extant in the archives of Stuttgart.[30] Little known, but authentic beyond the possibility of cavil, this document deserves more attention than it has received from historians; for it places in the clearest light the shameless mendacity of the Guises, and shows that the duke had nearly as good a claim as the cardinal, his brother, to the reputation which the Venetian ambassador tells us that Charles had earned "of rarely telling ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... snatched at the prey, though it was her assistance rendered or proffered to Austria in 1798-9 which gave Napoleon his pretext for crushing her. Her recent struggle for independence, though fruitless, was respectable, and protracted beyond the verge of Hope; and not even Royalist mendacity has yet pretended that her revolt from Austria, or her prolonged defence under bombardment and severe privation was the work of foreigners. But the Croat again lords it in her halls; Trieste is stealing away her remnant of trade; and the Railroads which should regain or replace it are ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... bit of the road home with him. 'I am struck by your grip on these difficult problems, Mr Brand,' he told me. 'There is much I can tell you, and you may be of great value to our cause.' He asked me a lot of questions about my past, which I answered with easy mendacity. Before we parted he made me promise to come one ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... behold a cat—a harmless, necessary cat.' Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable aversion. When 'Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had the whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape of his dagger,' was convicted of mendacity and cowardice, Bertram exclaimed, 'I could endure anything before this but a cat, and now he's a cat to me.' The force of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... him all his mendacity for the sake of a new accomplishment he had brought back with him, and which beat all his others. He could actually turn a somersault backwards with all the ease and finish of a professional acrobat. How he got to do this I don't know. It must have been ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... materials of war upon the Spaniards, who wasted or pocketed them, they kept their own army unsupplied with money, transport, or clothes. Unsupported by the home authorities, the British commanders had yet to struggle with the faithlessness, mendacity, and inertness of the Portuguese and Spanish authorities, and were hampered with obstacles such as never beset a British commander before. Still, in spite of this, British genius and valour triumphed over all difficulties, and Wellesley delivered Lisbon ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... third of his race to perish in the New Forest, the scene of the Conqueror's cruelty to his people. He was a thick-set man with a red face, a debauchee of the deepest dye, mean in money matters, and as full of rum and mendacity as Sitting Bull, the former Regent of the Sioux Nation. He died at the age of forty-three years, having reigned and cut up in a shameful manner for ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures—quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the world ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... bible? Why didn't He give a few leaves to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Take from the bible the miracles, and I admit that the good passages are true. If they are true they don't need to be inspired. Miracles are the children of mendacity. Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, sublime, and eternal march of cause and effect. Reason must be the final arbiter. An inspired book cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. Is a man to be rewarded eternally for believing without evidence or against evidence? ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rejoicing devilry of Glengarry, and from Charles's increasing distress and degradation, it is almost a relief to pass for a moment to the harmless mendacity of a contemporary spy, Rob Roy's son, James Mohr Macgregor, or Drummond. This highland gentleman, with his courage, his sentiment, and his ingrained falseness, is known to the readers of Mr. Stevenson's 'Catriona.' Though unacquainted ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn. There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... who paddles for port as if the devil were after him whenever a capful of wind threatens a storm of exposure; but a bold, sea-going liar, who spurns a continent, striking straight out for blue water, with his eyes fixed upon the horizon of boundless mendacity. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... described as "immoral," the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... offer no defence." Against such a pressure of public opinion the archbishop of Trondhem dared no longer stand, and on the 22d of September despatched Sunnanvaeder to the king, adding, with the mendacity of a child, that he had detained him in Norway only in order that he might not flee. Gustavus, with grim humor, thanked him for his solicitude, and begged him now to return all other refugees. Sunnanvaeder was kept in jail till the 18th of February, 1527. He was then brought before a tribunal ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... from office without a stain upon his ermine. Millions might have been amassed by venality. He retires as poor as when he entered, owing nothing and owning little, except the title to the respect of good men, which malignant mendacity cannot wrest from a public officer who has deserved, by a long and useful career, the grateful appreciation of his fellow-citizens. We think that we may safely predict that, in his new place, Justice Field will fulfill the sanguine ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... O'Connor, who sat beside him, to sing; but Edward whispered, "For Heaven's sake don't stop the flow of the lava from that mighty eruption of lies!—he's a perfect Vesuvius of mendacity. You'll never meet his like again, so make the most of him while you have him. Pray, sir," said Edward to the colonel, "have you ever been in any of the cold climates? I am induced to ask you, from the very wonderful anecdotes you have told of the ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... however, to make a last overture for peace, despatched John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry to the aid of Pinckney, the three to knock once more at France's doors for a becoming admission. In vain. The only effect was a new chapter of French mendacity and insolence, furthering America's wish and preparations for war. Napoleon's recent Italian victories, terrifying Europe, had puffed up France with pride. Talleyrand assumed to arraign us as criminals, and what was worse, pressed us, through ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... one day, after he had been kept out with the loud, stolid "Not at home" of practiced mendacity, he watched, and ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... whom she speaks, blushes. He is ashamed of the misery whence he comes, whither he must return. He lowers his head and lies, perhaps without realizing the extent of his mendacity: "No, after all, we're not unhappy, it isn't ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Mendacity follows the flag. There never yet was an invader who did not, in obedience to a kindly human instinct, lie abundantly respecting the people whose country he had invaded. The reason is very plain. In all ages men delight ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... part in the matter. He does not seem to know that the attitude of British Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity. ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... client trespasses. Madame Draga's establishment was a meeting-ground for naked truths and over-dressed fictions, and it was here, the Woman felt, that she might make a final effort to recall the artless mendacity of past days. Madame herself was in an inspiring mood, with the air of a sphinx who knew all things and preferred to forget most of them. As a War Minister she might have been celebrated, but she was content ...
— Reginald • Saki
... do you think of him? Lie upon lie he has given us; he has been proven a chronic liar; are you to believe this last and fearfully impossible lie? Gentlemen, I can only ask that you reaffirm your judgment. And to those who may doubt his mendacity,—surely there are but few,—let me state, that if his story is true; if he broke salt with this man, John Borg, and lay in his blankets while murder was done; if he did hear, unmoved, the voice of the man calling to him for help; ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... I assented, with just the shade of irony necessary to rob the assertion of its mendacity. "But go on, go on. You have not begun to satisfy me yet. You did not stop with finding a motive for the crime ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... pretence of indifference to them. An impostor is always supposed to be in earnest. The commonplace impostor is so: he has staked everything on the appearance of being sincere. He, on the other hand, who is reckless in mendacity, who cheats with a laughing eye; who, while silently strenuous in a given cause, appears to take seriously neither it, himself, nor those on whom both depend, irresistibly strikes the vulgar as moved by something greater than himself or they. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... public, and impudent piece of mendacity, we might expect Knox to protest in his "History"; to denounce it as a cause of God's wrath. On the other hand he states, with no disapproval, the childish quibbles by which his party ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... I placed a trustful reliance in advertisements. I have since learned that the most truthful people are apt to indulge a slight vein of exaggeration in describing their own possessions, as though the mere circumstance of going into print were an excuse for a certain kind of mendacity. But I did not fully awaken to this fact until a much later period, when, in answering an advertisement which described a highly advantageous tenement, I was referred to the house I then occupied, and from which a ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... with Falstaff that give him his perennial attraction. It is the personality that owes nothing to history with which Shakespeare's imaginative power clothed him. The knight's unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way of life supplies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from the highest manifestations of humour. The Elizabethan public ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... hauling a mitrailleuse if he could help it. Yet the War dog worships the Army; it represents a square meal and a "cushy" bed. The new draft takes him for a mascot; but the old hand knows him better. A shameless blend of petty larceny, mendacity, fleas, gourmandism, dirt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... Observations recueillies en Angleterre, 1835, I, 129 f. The Athenian laws (?), that fixed prices should be asked, and that sellers should not sit down that that they might sell more rapidly, points to something similar. (Athen., VI, 226 f. Plato, De Legg., XI, 916 f.) Athenian law prohibiting mendacity in the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Christianity itself might remain, it had to let itself be overcome by the spirit of antiquity—for example, the idea of empire, the community, and so forth. We are suffering from the uncommon want of clearness and uncleanliness of human things; from the ingenious mendacity which ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to lying? By a frank admission—how many faults you might redeem! Really, you are far less intelligent than I supposed!" In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing any universal system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she contented herself, merely, whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything that she had done, with not telling him of it. So that a lie was, to her, something to be used only as a special expedient; ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Persian for mendacity is proverbial. One instance of this national weakness was attended with considerable inconvenience to us. By some mischance we had run by the village where we intended to stop for the night, which was situated some distance ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... very large supply of pigs"—even after the enormous number she has exported to Belgium. Germany, however, does not only export pigs; her trade in "canards" with neutrals grows and grows, chiefly with the United States, thanks to the untiring mendacity of Bernstorff and Wolff. Compared with these efforts, the revelations of English governesses at German courts, which are now finding their way into print, make but a ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... from the standpoint of the artist, and the artist alone, who never takes account of ethics, but uses right and wrong indifferently as colours of his palette. "The Decay of Lying" seemed to the ordinary, matter-of-fact Englishman a cynical plea in defence of mendacity. To the majority of readers, "Pen, Pencil and Poison" was hardly more than a shameful attempt to condone cold-blooded murder. The very articles which grounded his fame as a writer, helped to injure his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... attitude of expectancy to ensnare and destroy him, Captain Tremayne hesitated to step from the solid ground of reason, upon which he had confidently walked thus far, on to the uncertain bogland of mendacity. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... he remarks, likewise with a grin, that he will come again to-morrow with three thousand light horsemen, and he gallops away; but in many cases he does not return. The secret of the fellow's success lies mainly in his unblushing impudence, his easy mendacity, and that intimate knowledge of every highway and byway of the country which, thanks to the military organisation of the Prussian army, he has acquired in the regimental school. He gives himself out to be the precursor of an imminently advancing ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... with one final effort of mendacity, 'he's fine to look at, but he has no grit in him. Any mongrel from a kraal can make him turn tail. Besides, he is a born fool and can't find his way home. I'm thinking of getting ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... had honestly and openly withdrawn from the position that Henry would be able to go to the prize-giving. They seemed to have silently agreed to bury the futile mendacity of the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... mild deliquescence; and the pillars were spotted as if Nature had dropped over the too early ruin a few unclean tears. The house itself was lifted upon a broad wooden foundation painted to imitate marble with such hopeless mendacity that the architect at the last moment had added a green border, and the owner permitted a fallen board to remain off so as to allow a few privileged fowls to openly explore the interior. When Miss Sally Dows played the piano ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the impression made by his mendacity] I should never have dreamt of writing poems to her. The thing ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... like to know myself," I confessed candidly. Then I added with pardonable mendacity: "I think I must have been taken for somebody else, if it was anything more than a desperate freak of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... doctrines of Hume.[418] This leads to an application of the methods expounded in the 'Introduction,' in order to show how the various motives or 'springs of action' and the 'sanctions' based upon them may affect the trustworthiness of evidence. Any motive whatever may incidentally cause 'mendacity.' The second book, therefore, considers what securities may be taken for 'securing trustworthiness.' We have, for example, a discussion of the value of oaths (he thinks them valueless), of the advantages and disadvantages of reducing evidence to writing, of interrogating witnesses, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of mistaking them. Hence you must suppose that they were due to devils in A.D. 30, and to nervous disorders in A.D. 1894. On the other hand, if you choose the other horn, you must accept either the hypothesis of the ignorance or that of the mendacity of Christ.' ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... according to longevity statistics, she was much too young to die. As a matter of fact, she was little more than a bride. That probably accounts for the brand-new mink coat and muff she was sporting. Moreover, it accounts for Mort's surprising mendacity and even more amazing humility in relation to the taking-off of Mike. No doubt in similar circumstances, he would have told his second wife, who died when she was pretty well along in years, that he'd show her who was boss in his home, and ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... great joy, for she knew that while he was there no questions would be asked of her. He was always very gentle to her, treating her with an old-fashioned, polished respect—except when compelled on that one occasion by his sense of duty to accuse her of mendacity respecting the purveying of victuals—, but he had never become absolutely familiar with her as his wife had done; and it was well for her now that he had not done so, for she could not have talked about Lady Lufton. In the evening, when ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... "rocks the boat" of happiness at least once during a love affair—usually by trying to leap out of it before it lands in the port of Matrimony. All a man needs in order to win any woman is a little audacity, a little mendacity and plenty of pertinacity. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... Russia have already frequently attempted to sow discord in these good and sincere relations, but such efforts are vain. The Russian truth-loving national soul, sensitive of any display of mendacity or insincerity, was able to sift the chaff from the wheat, and faith in our friends is unshaken. There is not a single cloud on the clear horizon of our lasting allied harmony. Heartfelt greetings to you, true friends, rulers of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... superstitiously—startled by a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him—he will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor was I quite ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... drunken father, a slatternly mother. Brought up in a comfortless, poverty-stricken home, without any religious teaching or influences, what wonder that they became addicted to most of the petty vices,—that they acquired an unenviable reputation for mischief, mendacity, and thieving ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... Mrs. Bartlett," said Yates, "that I am the innocent cause of Miss Kitty's mirth. You see, madam—it's a pathetic thing to say, but really I have had no home life. Although I attend church regularly, of course," he added with jaunty mendacity, "I must confess that I haven't heard grace at meals for years and years, and—well, I wasn't just prepared for it. I have no doubt I made an exhibition of myself, which your ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... studio, where I treated it as I should a most distinguished sitter—as a picture or an etching—throwing my artistic soul into the Board, which gradually became a Board no longer, as it grew into a picture. You say they say it was only a butterfly. Mendacity could go no further. I painted a lion and a butterfly. The lion lay with the butterfly—a harmony in gold and red, with which I had taken as much trouble as I did with the best picture I ever painted. And now ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... the man at the paddle, 'you fairly corrupt me with your mendacity. Be off and unlimber yourself in the fog; I see ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Protection of the Young had put up a Howl because the Game diverted the Attention of Urchins from their Work in the Public Schools and tended to encourage Mendacity among Office Boys. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... I seek to perfect myself, does my attainment of any grade of improvement prevent or further another step? All will agree that it simply opens a new door. Perhaps I am seeking to withdraw from habits of mendacity, and beginning to tell the truth. Then every time I tell the truth I shall discover more truth to tell. And will this process ever come to an end? I have nothing to do with "evers." I can only say that each time ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... generally (objectively false) and untruth in communication (lie, deception) —> 544. Falsehood. — N. falsehood, falseness; falsity, falsification; deception &c. 545; untruth &c 546; guile; lying &c. 454; untruth &c 546; guile; lying &c. v. misrepresentation; mendacity, perjury, false swearing; forgery, invention, fabrication; subreption[obs3]; covin[obs3]. perversion of truth, suppression of truth; suppressio veri[Lat]; perversion, distortion, false coloring; exaggeration ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fierce resentment. Deerslayer looked upon these impotent attempts to arouse him as indifferently as a gentleman in our own state of society regards the vituperative terms of a blackguard: the one party feeling that the tongue of an old woman could never injure a warrior, and the other knowing that mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect those who resort to their use; but he was spared any further attack at present, by the interposition of Rivenoak, who shoved aside the hag, bidding her quit the spot, and prepared to take his seat at the side of his prisoner. The old woman ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... its lazy hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious: this man is capable of shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges of lies and ignominious wrappages, and of intimating to it afar off that there is still a Veracity in Things, and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in the well-known strain.[17] It is impossible to overrate the truly supreme importance of the violent break-up of Europe which followed the death of the Emperor Charles VI., ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley |
