"Plausibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some slip, described as being at the southeast corner. Some of the earlier charts of Cooperstown were drawn with the lake front at the bottom of the map, for convenience of reference, thus reversing the north and south of the usual cartography. It may plausibly be conjectured that Cooper had one of these maps before him as he wrote, and unthinkingly recorded, in this instance, its transposed points of the compass. This labored exposition of a small matter would be an inexcusable pedantry, except that the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... he still remained firm, they took other grounds, and plausibly argued that the troops and other officials needed aid as well as the poor; and, as by the words of his vow, he had bound himself to distribute the contents of the treasury to those who had ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... the Art of the Greeks we come to what, more plausibly than any other, may be regarded as the central point of their scheme of life. We have already noticed, in dealing with other topics, how constantly the aesthetic point of view emerges and predominates in matters with ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of the league, and also that many honorable and patriotic men do not feel as I do on this subject, I am personally unwilling to take part in an agitation which may have some tendency to cause a public enemy to persist in armed resistance, or may be, at least, plausibly represented as having this tendency. There can be no doubt that, as a matter of fact, the country is at war with Aguinaldo and his followers. I profoundly regret this fact;... but it is a fact, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... could not have passed either at a public school or a university. Born without shyness or trepidation, from her youth upwards she had perfect self-possession and patience. She loved dialectics and could put her case logically, plausibly and eloquently; and, although quite as unemotional as her brothers, she had more enterprise and indignation. In her youth she was delicate, and what the French call tres personelle; and this prevented her going through the mill of rivalry and ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... temperature. Unless we put a strained and somewhat arbitrary interpretation on the facts of the geological record, earlier ages knew nothing of our division of the year into pronounced seasons and of the globe into very different climatic zones. It might plausibly be suggested that we are still living in the last days of the Ice-Age, and that the earth may be slowly returning to a warmer condition. Shackleton, it might be observed, found that there has been a considerable shrinkage of the south polar ice within the period of exploration. But we shall ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... to Vulcan on behalf of the Divinity of the Imperial House by the people of the locality, possesses much interest. The dedicators describe themselves as vicani Vindolandenses, and thus give proof that the civilians living outside the fort at Chesterholm formed a vicus or something that could plausibly be described as such; further, they teach the proper name of the place, which we have been wont to call Vindolana. See further ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... of Macaulay, from his youth up; and his remarkably tenacious memory—abnormal, as it seems to me—enabled him to bring his vast store of facts to support plausibly any position he chose to take. At fifty years of age, he had probably read more books than any man in Europe since Gibbon and Niebuhr; he literally devoured everything he could put his hands upon, without cramming for a special object,—especially ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Sattagydians (supposed in highlands of upper Helmund and the plateau of Ghazni), Dadicae (suggested to be Tajiks), Aparytae (mountaineers, perhaps of Safed Koh, where lay the Paryetae of Ptolemy), Gandarii (in Lower Kabul basin) and Paktyes, on or near the Indus. In the last name it has been plausibly suggested that we have the Pukhtun, as the eastern Afghans pronounce their name. Indeed, Pusht, Pasht or Pakht would seem to be the oldest name of the country of the Afghans in their ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... propels every bullet and every shell is released by destroying by instantaneous combustion a certain amount of valuable chemical products. Then, besides all this direct destruction of commodities which must ultimately be replaced, or which at least some kind contractor may plausibly offer to replace, consider for a moment the increased wear and tear of every sort of equipment both civil and military, from steam-rollers and rolling-stock to boots and bandages and walking-sticks, which a state of ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... the case, to Mr. Carlyle, so plausibly put, that he began to think it might be all for the best. He had great reverence for his sister's judgment; force of habit is strong upon all of us. Still ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Spencer, Haeckel had satisfied her intellect if they had failed to content her soul. The theory of evolution as applied to life on her own little planet appealed strongly to her because it accounted plausibly for the presence of man on earth. The process through which we had passed could be understood by every intelligence. The blazing satellite, violently detached from the parent sun starting on its ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... view of man's dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without which we cannot understand how this great popular civilization was created—or how ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... democracy is so universal among British Socialists that Belloc, Chesterton and other Liberals accuse them plausibly, but unjustly, of actually representing an aristocratic standpoint. In an article entitled "Why I Am Not A Socialist," Mr. Chesterton expresses a belief, which he says is almost unknown among the Socialists of England, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality is distilled which affects everything one does. Those who have known sorrow can best depict it—not perhaps most plausibly, but most convincingly—and with fewer ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... visitors is not easily answered. That the circular temple in Mayapan, with four doors, specified by Landa as different from any other in Yucatan, was erected to Quetzalcoatl, by or because of the Aztec colony there, may plausibly be supposed when we recall how peculiarly this form was devoted to his worship. Again, one of the Maya chronicles—that translated by Pio Perez and published by Stephens in his Travels in Yucatan—opens ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... as it well might, like the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition; and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system, such, for instance, as the power of potentiality ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... deliberation, had decided to accompany Demming to Charleston. He excused his interest in the man so elaborately and plausibly that his daughter was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... the earliest adventurers in America were men of Norse stock. More than a thousand years ago Greenland was explored by Vikings from Iceland, and a hundred years later Leif Ericsson discovered a land—Markland, the land of woods—which is plausibly identified with Newfoundland. Still keeping a southern course, the adventurer came to a country where grew vines, and where the climate was strangely mild; it is likely enough that this landfall was in Massachusetts or Virginia. The name Vinland was given to the newly-discovered ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... his cattle over to Baker once a year, and let him drive them with his own down the long mountain road to Springtown, and it was understood than he did not inquire too curiously in the matter of commissions. The stores and fodder which Enoch delivered over to him in exchange, together with a plausibly varying amount of hard cash, seemed to Simon an ample return for the scrawny cattle he sent to market. And Enoch, for his part, was always willing to testify that Amberley was a pleasant man to ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... store of fishes; as the ocean, it presents the most fitting type of the infinite. It cleanses, it purifies; it produces, it preserves. "Bodies, unless dissolved, cannot act," is a maxim of the earliest chemistry. Very plausibly, therefore, was it assumed as the ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... speech admits of dexterity and politeness, provided that a pleasant way of putting it does not destroy the power of the rebuke, for impudence and coarseness and insolence, if added to freedom of speech, entirely mar and ruin the effect. And so the harper plausibly and elegantly silenced Philip, who ventured to dispute with him about proper playing on the harp, by answering him, "God forbid that you should be so unfortunate, O king, as to understand harping better than me." But that was not a right answer of Epicharmus, when Hiero a few days after putting ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... necessity of the case came in aid of the favorite disposition of their minds. They charged their victims with being the authors of that cruelty, which had its true origin in their own remorseless hearts. Their plea for additional rigor, being plausibly urged, was favorably received by a community darkened by prejudice. Few regarded with pity, and most with stoical indifference, this barbarous correction for crimes anticipated, and rigorous penance for ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... claimed that this language, in view of the statute of 1888, should not be construed as permitting the Government to retake the property for the purpose of selling it, because that is not stipulated in the bill. For that reason it would be plausibly urged that the lease was paramount to the power of sale contained in the law of 1888 and that the omission of any provision that possession might be resumed for the purpose of sale plainly indicated that "the interests ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... mischievous in its effect on the parties concerned, and through them on the community, than the other end. Thus we see that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a revolt against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... another? In other words, why not have the duty committed to himself and his people? Not improbably the charge might be proposed to him; he would wait awhile, and see; if, however, he had to formally request it, could anything be more plausibly suggestive than the relation between the captaincy of that Port and residence in the Palace of Julian? The idea was too natural to be refused; if granted, he was master of the situation. It would be like holding the keys ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... of Joan are, it must be admitted that they are very naturally worked out and very plausibly presented. Altogether this is an excellent story ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... many other things which I will not here write down. She spoke pleasantly and plausibly, too, until for a moment I forgot who she was, and thought her to be truly a lovable and motherly ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... strange custom, half Roman, half Medieval, in accordance with which a baron or knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities, deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued— plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.—that this offering was a formal recognition ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was also plausibly supported, went to charge this horrid crime upon the late tenants of Derncleugh. They were known to have resented highly the conduct of the Laird of Ellangowan towards them, and to have used threatening expressions, which every one supposed them capable of carrying ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they displayed of the English language. He overheard words exchanged between them which were as easy to understand as much of Teddy's talk. They must be, therefore, in frequent communication with white men. Their location was so far north that, as Richter plausibly inferred, they were extensive dealers in furs and peltries, which must be disposed of to traders and the agents of the American Fur and Hudson Bay Companies. The Selkirk or Red river settlement also, must be at ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... us to have a general orgie the next night. She was now aware of our summer house doings—only of late begun, as she supposed—for my story had been too plausibly off-hand not to deceive her, especially as she had felt convinced by all that occurred on our first fucking that she had had the delightful pleasure of taking my maidenhead. She was quite satisfied on that head. But she now suspected that what I had just begun I should be too glad to repeat. ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... satisfactory, and then, after further consideration, finding them to be worthless, be driven by their previous admission to make war, after all, not on the single issue of "equality all round," but on an issue that might be plausibly represented to South Africa and the world as the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... necessities of the case, he brought into his perilous profession some brilliant qualities— intrepidity, address, promptitude of decision; and, if to these he added courtesy, and a spirit (native or adopted) of forbearing generosity, he seemed almost a man that merited public encouragement; since very plausibly it might be argued that his profession was sure to exist; that, if he were removed, a successor would inevitably arise, and that successor might or might not carry the same liberal and humanizing temper into his practice. The man whose skeleton was now before us had ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Howe's greatly inferior squadron.[31] The influence exerted upon these two admirals by the mere approach of a hostile fleet, when decisive advantages depended upon their holding their ground, may be cited plausibly in support of the most extreme view of the effect of a "fleet in being;" but the instances also, when the conditions are analysed, will suggest the question: Is such effect always legitimate, inherent in the existence of the fleet itself, or does it not depend often upon the characteristics ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... plausibly said. But one has to consider what sort of wife and daughter yours are, and what part of your life will have to be devoted ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in 1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III, who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by the crimes he had to commit in ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... a would-be pupil in the art of taking tobacco that if he pleases to be a practitioner, he shall learn in a fortnight to "take it plausibly in any ordinary, theatre, or the Tiltyard, if need be, in the most popular assembly that is." The Tiltyard adjoined Whitehall Palace and was the frequent scene of sports in which Queen Elizabeth took the greatest delight. Here took place, not only tilting properly ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... be planned for seven days of the week. Let the hum of the mills and the roar of commerce go on. Take no note of the Sabbath day, either in business or recreation or worship, and conditions will soon be upon us, such that we may urge as plausibly, that the Sabbath is effete, possible to our slow going fathers but inconsistent with the ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... had glibly and plausibly explained away every sinister aspect of the note he had written to Nita Selim that day, Special Investigator Dundee was recalling with verbatim vividness his argument with Captain Strawn of the Homicide Squad immediately after his arrival into ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... demonstrate that an Attack, provided your Artillery preparation is sufficiently thorough, and you are prepared to set no limit to your expenditure of Infantry, must ultimately succeed. To do him justice, the Boche supported his assertions very plausibly. His phalanx bundled the Russians all the way from Tannenburg to Riga. The Austrians adopted ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... Rowe made unresisting, and the rest followed him. Sir Thomas Hammer seems to have supposed unresisting the word in the copies, from which he plausibly enough extracted unresting, but be grounded his emendation on the very syllable that wants authority. What can be made of unsisting I know not; the best that ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... more often happens that the detective appears to be in the writer's pay, and aids the deception by leading the reader off on false scents. Be that as it may, the professional sleuth is in nine cases out of ten a dummy by malice prepense; and it might be plausibly argued that, in the interests of pure art, that is what he ought to be. But genius always finds a way that is better than the rules, and I think it will be found that the very best riddle stories contrive to drive character and riddle side by side, and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the true bearings of science upon life, and especially of those facts and deductions about biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power. One peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism, and that is its emphasis on ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... with her, of every circumstance, and filling her imagination with all that might come to pass from the adventures of the night, whilst Caroline, too sleepy to be able to answer judiciously, or even plausibly, said, "Yes," "No," and "Very true," in the wrong place; and at length, incapable of uttering even a monosyllable, was reduced to inarticulate sounds in sign of attention. These grew fainter and fainter, and after long intervals absolutely failing, Rosamond with some surprise ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... so well? Everyone liked him, despite his borrowing propensities. He was so infernally pleasant, and always on the spot. He had a lovely varnish of culture; it was more than varnish; it was a veneer, a patina, an enamel: weather-proof stuff. He could talk most plausibly—art, music, society gossip—everything you please; everything except scandal. No bitter word was known to pass his lips. He sympathized with all our little weaknesses; he was too blissfully contented to think ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... for the Union it is needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... better known at Lincoln's Inn as the "affidavit." In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and most sparkling is the Advertisement, but the grandest, ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear God, worship Mammon, revere big wigs right or wrong, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... reasonably proportioned; and, to be quite serious, the only feature obviously wrong was the substitution of a low 'chancel wall' with iron gates for the rood screen with the loft and rood. But this, it might plausibly be contended, was merely an adaptation of the old idea to modern requirements, and it would have been quite difficult to explain why the whole building, from the mere mortar setting between the stones ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... be discussed and entertained without any disparagement of the soundness of the policy, as best adapted to existing circumstances, of the system when first applied. The theory of free trade may be, in its entirety, as plausibly it is presented to us, founded on just principle; the abstract truth and perfection of which are just as unimpeachable as that of the social theory propounded by Rousseau in the Savoyard's profession of faith, or that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Hannibal not only dazzles the imagination, but takes captive the heart. He stands out as the incarnation of magnanimity and patriotism and self-sacrificing heroism, no less than of incomparable military genius. Napoleon, the only general who could plausibly challenge the Carthaginian's supremacy, had throughout the greater part of his career an immense superiority to his adversaries in the quality of the forces which he wielded. He had the enthusiasm of the Revolution behind him, and he was unhampered by authorities at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... plausibly set forth; and certainly the project, as a notion, had many things to recommend it; but we had no funds adequate to undertake it; so, on the score of expense, knowing, as I did, the state of the public income, I thought it my duty to oppose ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... to talk it over with you, eh?" Bill sneered. "Told you it was all on the square, did he? Explained it all very plausibly, I suppose. Probably suggested that you try smoothing me down, too. It would be ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... now, at the close of the grandest of all our wars, it was quite natural for the country's defenders to claim its supposed benefits. Congress was flooded with their petitions, and it required uncommon political courage to oppose their wishes. It was very plausibly urged that the Nation, with its heavy load of debt, could not pay a bounty in money, and that it should be done by drawing liberally upon the thousand million acres of the public domain. Some of the advocates of this policy openly favored the repeal of the ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... is curious that no passage in Mandeville can be plausibly traced to Marco Polo, with one exception. This is (Halliwell's ed., p. 163) where he states that at Ormus the people, during the great heat, lie in water,—a circumstance mentioned by Polo, though not ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... analogy would press the conclusion still further; while he admits that "the more distinct the forms are, the more the arguments fall away in force." To command assent we naturally require decreasing probability to be overbalanced by an increased weight of evidence. An opponent might plausibly, and perhaps quite fairly, urge that the links in the chain of argument are weakest just where the ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... young lady, of the name of Booth, who was on a visit at Newstead, being one evening with a party who were diverting themselves in front of the abbey, Lord Byron by accident pushed her into the basin which receives the cascades; and out of this little incident, as my informant very plausibly conjectures, the tale of his attempting to drown Lady Byron may have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... depends on that action's separate consequences, need seldom be at a loss for a pretext for committing the most heinous of crimes. A husband who, hating his wife, had his hate returned, and loving another woman, had his love returned, might plausibly reason thus within himself: The prescribed objects of life are the multiplication of happiness and the diminution of misery; here are three of us, all doomed to be miserable as long as we all three live; but the wretchedness of two ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... backs on Me.' You remember the information I received—in perfect good faith on his part—from the man who keeps the inn? The visit to the London doctor, and the assertion of failing health, were adopted as the best means of plausibly severing the lady's connection (the great lady now!) with a calling so unworthy of her as the keeping of an inn. Her neighbors at the seaport were all deceived by the stratagem, with two exceptions. They were both men—vagabonds who had pertinaciously tried to ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... a substratum of fact at the root of the legend, basing her conclusions on a pamphlet of Dr. Meinardus, Der historische Kern, which I have not seen. She does not, however, give any well-authenticated historical event at Hameln in the thirteenth century which could have plausibly given rise to the legend, nor can I find any in the Urkundenbuch of Hameln (Luneberg, 1883). The chief question of interest attaching to the English form of the legend as given in 1839 by Elder, is whether it ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... in the country that there were never fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell had more than three days' hunting in the season. Whatever may have been the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion with which the latter clung to the heels of ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... perceivers—find the ease of slighting what they cannot refute, and are determined, as I hear, to hold it not worth the answering. In which number I must be forced to reckon that Doctor who, in a late equivocating Treatise plausibly set afloat against the Dippers, diving the while himself with a more deep prelatical malignance against the present State and Church Government, mentions with ignominy the 'Tractate of Divorce;' yet answers nothing, but ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what he was. They are better, and worse, than himself. They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Jesus commanded him to do. He said to this very man: "Stretch forth thy hand." Does not that look like an unreasonable command? The man might have plausibly said: "I cannot do this. I have not been able to reach my hand to my mouth in the past year. I can not do as you tell me." But instead of urging objections he instantly obeyed, for the words, "Stretch forth thy hand," were not more than out of the Lord's mouth when we read, "And he did ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... would foster internal traffic. But when Richelieu had put an end to civil war, Frenchmen did not take to the sea with the eagerness and success of the English and Dutch. A principal reason for this has been plausibly found in the physical conditions which have made France a pleasant land, with a delightful climate, producing within itself more than its people needed. England, on the other hand, received from Nature but little, and, until her manufactures were developed, had little to export. Their many ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... Vesuvius rose. In the city, newspaper vendors shrilly hawked denunciations of the American ships because of the danger that their atom bombs might explode. Well outside the harbor, a Navy crew of experts worked to make quite impossible the detonation of atomic bombs in a stubby tramp-steamer which had—plausibly, at least—been sent to make those same newspapers' prophecies of ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Starr explained plausibly his haste, sent a friendly message to the mother and Luis, and rode on thoughtfully. Now and then he turned to glance behind him at the dust cloud rolling rapidly around the head of ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... "receives the Signification of his Majesty's pleasure"; from whence he concludes that "he will give no directions but what he knows to be agreable thereto", and therefore "every order coming from a Minister of State, must be suppos'd to come immediately from the Crown"—This is reasoning plausibly enough; but before I can give my full Assent to the Conclusion, I must have good Grounds to believe this same Secretary to be a Man of Wisdom and Integrity; a Character, which however requisite, does not always belong to a Minister of State. If he is deficient in both or either of these, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... page 268.—I have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as I could, in my Psychology, and talked truly (as I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invincibly ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... miles in hour...." He was figuring the maximum distance which could plausibly be accepted as a day's journeying by air. He surveyed the maps again. "The plateau of Cuyaba, at a guess. Hm.... Fleets of aircraft could practise there and never be seen. An army could be maneuvered without being reported. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... who had arrived from the battle-field. Why, then, did he not push on in search of the enemy, instead of remaining at New Germany until 5.30 p.m.? is another question. Excuses are easily framed and plausibly given in reports, but the country generally, and his soldiers particularly, have always thought that he might have managed to have got into a conflict with the enemy in some way. Col. Peacocke was a very fine gentleman, and had the reputation of being ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... and collect levies in the aptest way to fill their own pockets; money being the object, the man having money, whether loyal or disloyal, would be a victim. This practice doubtless existed to some extent, and it was a real additional evil that it could be, and was, plausibly charged to exist in greater ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... to speak of the *factitious rights and wrongs*, supposed to be created by law. Of these there are many. Thus one mode of transacting a sale or transfer is in itself as good as another; and it might be plausibly maintained that, if the business be fairly and honorably conducted, it matters not whether the legally prescribed forms—sometimes burdensome and costly—be complied with or omitted. The law, it may be said, here creates an obligation for which there is no ground in nature ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... do?" The lady murmured this much so far under her breath that the words might have been mistaken for anything else—most plausibly, perhaps, for, "Who cares if it is?"—nor further did she acknowledge John's profound inclination. Frigidity and complaint of ill-usage made a glamour in every fold of her expensive garments; she was large and troubled ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... will induce swift and painless repose. This school advises The Wealth of Nations, Rome under the Caesars, The Statesman's Year Book, certain novels of Henry James, and The Letters of Queen Victoria (in three volumes). It is plausibly contended that books of this kind cannot be read (late at night) for more than a few minutes at a time, and that they ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... what language could the unrighteous principles of denying freedom to colored people in this country, (which amounts to the same thing as demanding the expulsion of those already free,) be more effectually and yet more plausibly inculcated than in those very words of Gen. Harper you have, with so much ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... Margaret began, half angrily; "but what about the children?" she was going to add. But somehow the arguments she had used so plausibly did not utter themselves easily to Mother, whose children would carry into their own middle age a wholesome dread of her anger. Margaret faltered, and ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... the world goes," said Burr, "is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. But I wish to speak to you of the prospect opening before us in the Mississippi Valley. Here are you, commander-in-chief of the Western troops and governor of Upper Louisiana. Immense power rests in your hands. Now, if it be the will of the people of Kentucky ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... distribution of its guilt among its particular acts, or painfully to determine how far this or that story concerning it is literally true, or what has to be allowed in candor, or what is improbable, or what cuts two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be plausibly defended; a religion such that men look at a convert to it with a feeling which no other denomination raises except Judaism, socialism, or Mormonism—namely, with curiosity, suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be, as if something strange had befallen him, as if he had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the privy-council, he was committed to a kind of honorable custody, in which he appears to have remained till his death, which took place a few months afterwards. These punishments were slight compared with the customary severity of the age; and it has plausibly been conjectured that the anger of Elizabeth on this occasion was rather feigned than real, and that although she thought proper openly to resent any attempt injurious to the title of the queen of Scots, she was secretly not displeased to let ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the skin of liquor decreased. They are perfect dogs in this fashion. I may here add, that although the Abban in this speech seemed to show so much consideration for my property, by several recent tricks of his I entertained much suspicion of his honesty; and this little address, though uttered plausibly, was too common and transparent a trick in the East to beguile me. All Orientals have a proverbial habit of saving their master's property to leave greater pickings for themselves, and such I considered was ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... more than brief, for Milly is certainly doomed. But when she dies, and Densher is free for Kate again, who will be the worse for the fraud? Milly will have had what she wants, her two friends will have helped themselves in helping her. So Kate argues plausibly; but it all depends on keeping poor exquisite Milly safely in the dark. If she should discover that Kate and Densher are in league to profit by her, it would be a sharper stroke than the discovery of her malady. And by this autumn ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men suffered more than did the West India planters from ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... to Edward VI, and entitled Elpine. Puttenham and Meres in dealing with pastoral writers also mention one Challener, no doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the Mirror for Magistrates, and Nashe in his preface to Menaphon adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to Watson's Hecatompathia and various sententious fragments to England's Parnassus, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of Catullus which might almost be taken as a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... deeply, and he turned his eyes wistfully to the upland slopes of his farm. Mr. Weeks had talked plausibly, and if all had been as he represented, the plan would not have been a bad one. But the widower did not yearn for the widow. He did not know much about her, but had very unfavorable impressions. Mrs. Holcroft had not been given to speaking ill of anyone, but she ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... well. And after all, why not go to America—not on Monday, for he was quite aware that no boat left on Monday—but in a few days, after he had received the whole sum that Thomas Batchgrew held for him. He could quite plausibly depart on urgent business connected with new capitalistic projects. He could quite plausibly remain in America as long as convenient. America beckoned to him. He remembered all the appetizing accounts that he had ever heard from American ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... day came fresh tidings, new fuel for the flames. Mr Gainsborough had driven again into Blentmouth and taken the train for London. Two portmanteaus and a wicker-crate, plausibly conjectured to contain between them all his worldly possessions, had accompanied him on the journey. He was leaving Blent then, if not for ever, at least for a long while. He had evaded notice in his usual fashion, and nearly driven ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... this, because it may be thought pertinent {205} to the present inquiry; but as this use of the word has been plausibly supposed to be derived from the Welsh Bach, a hook, it seems to have nothing to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... lead of their leader, Dumont's National Woolens Company, in making sweeping but stealthy changes in their prices, wages, methods and even in their legal status. They hoped thus to enable their Legislature plausibly to resist Scarborough's demand for a revision of the laws—why revise when the cry of monopoly had been shown to be a false issue raised by a demagogue to discredit the tried leaders of the party and to aggrandize himself? And, when ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... and Mortimer protested against the succession of Philip of Valois. Admitted that the exclusion of women from the monarchy was already established by two precedents, could it not be plausibly argued that a woman, incapable herself of reigning, might form "the bridge and plank"[1] (as a contemporary put it) by which her sons might step into the rights of their ancestors? Strange as such a conception seems to our ideas, it was not unfamiliar to the jurists of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for what we call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of his commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where everything moves in circles and all ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and who, if they were not inclined to attack the reigning family, yet considered the introduction of that family as, at best, only the least of two great evils, as a necessary but painful and humiliating preservative against Popery. The Minister might plausibly say that Pulteney and Carteret, in the hope of gratifying their own appetite for office and for revenge, did not scruple to serve the purposes of a faction hostile to the Protestant succession. The appearance of Frederick at the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had announced his intention of carrying on with the Tanith Adventure, and had started construction of a new ship at the Gorram yards. This had served plausibly to explain all the activities of preparation for the invasion of Glaspyth, and had deceived Duke Omfray completely. Omfray had already started a ship of his own; the entire resources of his duchy were thrown into an effort to get her finished ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... undetermined. Theoretically the first depends on the second, for its purpose is twofold: the excitation of worthy religious emotions and the attaining of our desires; and how shall these objects be attained unless we know him whom we worship and to whom we pray? But it is plausibly maintained that the reverse is true, namely, that theology rests on cult. In the beginnings of consciousness instinctive reactions precede definite thoughts, and even in mature life thoughts often ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... approval. Lester, standing in the front row of the onlookers, turned to scan the crowd for the beaming faces of the happy parents. In a side-road which led to the railway station he saw a cab; entering the cab with every appearance of furtive haste were the dark-visaged couple who had been so plausibly eager for the "pretty idea." The sharpened instinct of cowardice lit up the situation to him in one swift flash. The blood roared and surged to his head as though thousands of floodgates had been opened ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... necessity of apostolical succession, in order to give efficacy to the sacrament, may be clearly deduced from any recorded words of our Lord, that there are no words[5] of his from which it can be deduced, either probably or plausibly; none with which it has any, the faintest, connexion; none from which it could be even conjectured that such a tenet had ever been in existence. I am not speaking, it will be observed, of apostolical succession simply; but of the necessity of apostolical succession, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... story of the horse had been a myth later invented by the sheepman to scatter the pursuit by making it appear that the robber had come from a distance. As the street had been quite deserted at the time this detail could be plausibly introduced with no chance ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... had been waiting in the dark at the top of the stairs, listening, was infinitely rejoiced that her project had been explained so plausibly, and yet in such perfect good faith, and she flew off to dress in high spirits. Had she mentioned it to her father, he would have doubted, taken it as her scheme, and perhaps put a stop to it: ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Broadway applauded—all but Merton Gill, who stared moodily into his coffee cup or lifted bored eyes to the scene of revelry. He was not bored, but his various emotions combined to produce this effect very plausibly. He was dismayed at this sudden revelation of art in the dance so near him. Imogene Pulver had once done an art dance back in Simsbury, at the cantata of Esther in the vestry of the Methodist church, and had been not a little criticised for her daring; but Imogene had been abundantly clad, and ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia, and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might he traced to the following circumstance:—The natives were a pastoral people, and would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of very limited value in solving the problem of the origin of the ethnic religions. Much, however, has been learned from observing the rites and beliefs of existing savage nations. Not a few religious notions and ceremonies, once in vogue among cultivated heathen peoples, may be plausibly considered a survival from a more remote and barbarous ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... think of it," replied Buller with equal directness. "I'm pleased with what I hear of you, and I like a gentleman, but Bradley explains his puzzling conduct very plausibly: it is no use being factious and hindering business in the House, as he says. And it can't be denied that there's Tory members in the House as factious as any of them pestilent Radical chaps that get up strikes out of doors. I'm not ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... do it; which makes the publication of such quibblings and refinements the more pernicious. I am no skillful casuist nor subtle disputant; and yet I would undertake to justify and qualify the profession of a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly, as to make many ignorant people embrace the profession, as an innocent, if not even a laudable one; and puzzle people of some degree of knowledge, to answer me point by point. I have seen a book, entitled 'Quidlibet ex Quolibet', or the art of making anything out of anything; which is ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... set with sparse pines and covered, in patches, with growths of wild grape, the fruit half ripened. Within the amphitheatre, at various levels, rose grimly a few stumps and shreds of cedars long dead and long indifferent to the future ravages of the enemy. The whole scene was, to-day, plausibly gentle and inert. It was indeed a bridal of earth and sky, with the self-contained approval of the blue deep and no counter-assertion from ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... nondescript fashion; and it is not impossible that if Plato had his Dialogues to compose among us, he would give his whole strength to working up our own resources, and not trouble himself with Greek. The popular dictum—multum non multa, doing one thing well—may be plausibly adduced in behalf of parsimony in ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... as it were. Given courage, physical vigour, and fair practical aptitude, a lawyer, a merchant, or a civil engineer could take sword in hand and at short notice head a squadron or muster an army. This view has so far as I know been set forward by no one more plausibly than by Jacob D. Cox, a stout civilian soldier who led well the Twenty-third Corps and later became Governor of Ohio and a successful Secretary of the Interior. I once met General Cox in an interesting ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... against [Greek: choikos]—[Greek: ho Kyrios]. Remove [Greek: ho Kyrios], and some substitute for it must be invented as a counterpoise to [Greek: choikos]. Taking a hint from what is found in ver. 48, some one (plausibly enough,) suggested [Greek: epouranios]: and this gloss so effectually recommended itself to Western Christendom, that having been adopted by Ambrose[555], by Jerome[556] (and later by Augustine[557],) it established itself in ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... figures by his dead-reckoning; but the carefully kept log-book also showed longitude by chronometer sights, taken when the sun shone, with his old quadrant and older watch, and corrected to bring a result plausibly near to that of the reckoning by log and compass. But the log-book contained no reference to the loss of the chronometer. That was to ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... apprehension upon his arm, from which, in her embarrassment, she forgot to remove it. But the artist did not fail her, and in answer to Mr. Burleigh's eager questions as to the cause of the accident, explained all so plausibly, and in such a matter-of-fact manner as left little more even to be surmised. His brief and prosaic history of the affair concluded with the following implied tribute to his companion, which still further relieved her from ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... principles in our national administration, but in preserving for their local communities the benefits of social order and economical and honest government. At least until the good offices of kindness and education have been fairly tried the contrary conclusion can not be plausibly urged. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... such a proclamation—also threatening an immediate rupture of friendly relations,—for the whole populace was claiming that an act of treason had been committed, plausibly asserting that the announcement of the Commission applied for by Admiral Dewey was a ruse, and that what General Otis was scheming for was to keep us quiet while he brought reinforcement after reinforcement from the United ...
— True Version of the Philippine Revolution • Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy
... proper sense of the word, are not to be had. We are beyond the region of demonstration, and have duly probabilities to consider. What are these probabilities? What work will this hypothesis do to establish a claim to be adopted in its completeness? Why should a theory which may plausibly enough account for the diversification of the species of each special type or genus, be expanded into a general system for the origination or successive diversification of all species, and all special types or forms, from four or five remote primordial forms, or perhaps from one? ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... sympathy whatever with those who seem to rake in to the credit of their own country every discovery and invention they possibly or plausibly can. We did much towards the commencement of steam navigation, but we did not begin it. We pushed considerably in advance of other nations in the invention of apparatus by which boats might be propelled by steam; we constructed ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... It followed this concession by another ordinance nullifying the Force Bill. The practical effect of this was nil, for there was no longer anything to enforce. It was none the less important. It meant that South Carolina declined to abandon the weapon of Nullification. Indeed, it might plausibly be urged that that weapon had justified itself by success. It had been defended as a protection against extreme oppression, and the extreme oppression complained of had actually ceased in consequence of its use. At any rate, the effect was certainly to strengthen rather than to ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... with the speech in which Kenna had promised a hundred hides of land to every man on the ship; but on my making this remark, the three chiefs seemed very surprised and hurt by my suspicions, and explained very plausibly that, as the Britons needed them as a guard, they could not aid them better than by settling on the soil, and so being continually at hand in order to help them. In time, they said, they hoped to raise and train the natives to such a point that they would be able to look after ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "But the difference will be that for a married woman it won't matter. It only matters for girls," he plausibly continued—"and then only for those on whom ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... dependence upon them. "You are in truth, my advisers," he said, "for when I ask you for information I will have no way of checking it up, and must act upon it unquestioningly. We will be deluged with claims plausibly and convincingly presented. It will be your task to establish the truth or falsity of these claims out of your specialized knowledges, so that my positions may ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... this remark lies in its implied reference to Japan, as at one time it might have applied to Russia. Fear of Japan's aims in China is not confined to China; the fear is widespread. An international economic arrangement may therefore be plausibly presented as the easiest and most direct method of relieving China of the Japanese menace. For Japan to stay out would be to give herself away; if she came in, it would subject Japanese activities to constant scrutiny and control. There is no doubt that part of the fear of Japan regarding ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... public mind. They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown. There was nothing to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... confidante of troubled ministers, bishops and generals. Jane alone, an early simple friend of Paul, I found credible and charming, and thanked heaven for her sake that Paul married his Princess. It is indeed a romance gone wrong. Perhaps it is a more difficult thing plausibly and readily to sustain one's fancy in a modern setting, with modern folk, than in the fair realm of Tushery with rapier-wielding demigods. Yet I think that the dead HARLAND and the living HOPE (himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching. They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike both, that man is "the hardest of all animals to govern." Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being "the Tories of speculation," have commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according to that doctrine to have been ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the higher animals living today have the original adult stages telescoped into their embryos, and the statement that the resemblance between certain characters in the embryos of higher animals and corresponding stages in the embryos of lower animals is most plausibly explained by the assumption that they have descended from the same ancestors, and that their ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... jest—Nancy's telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise of the train ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... directly unselfish. The analysis, indeed, is so defective that it can hardly be applied intelligibly. Hume observes that no man would rest his foot indifferently upon a stool or a gouty toe. The action itself of giving pain would be painful, and cannot be plausibly resolved into an anticipation of an 'end.' This, again, is conspicuously true of all the truly social emotions. Not only the conscience, but the sense of shame or honour, or pride and vanity act powerfully and instantaneously as present motives without necessary reference to any future results. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... you up from the ruck of things." Reason would have plausibly said, "it's by virtue of feverish toil that you have become what you are. Being endlessly industrious is the best road—for you—to the heights." And, self-reassured, they would then have had orgies of work; and thus, by devoted exertion, have blocked their advancement. Work, and ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... so often and so plausibly presented in favour of Home Rule, which urges that the Imperial Parliament is overburdened with local affairs, contains an element of truth. It would, however, be more in accordance with the facts to put the case the other way round: for ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... man was bound to be the idol of his sailors and one of them quite plausibly related that "so great was the confidence he inspired that if he but looked at a sail through his glass and told the helmsman to steer for her, the observation went round,'If she is an ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... powerful. Massachusetts {53} had guaranteed bonds of local roads to the extent of eight millions, without ever having to pay a cent of the interest; and though New York's experience had been more chequered, the successes were stressed and the failures were plausibly explained away. ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Charlotte a second time—compared with which the first was insignificant. And this time it was curious: he could not subdue her physique, as he did before; she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble, she was ready to jest. The reason being, that she fought now on plausibly good grounds: on behalf of her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... affect our judgments, the more convinced I am that, with the exception of such physical and moral facts as no one can now throw doubt upon, all else is matter of opinion and argument; and we know well that there is hardly an argument to be found anywhere, against which another argument cannot plausibly be adduced. Hence, though it is plain that the various opinions of men differ greatly in probability and in the weight which should be attached to them, it seems to me that we are wrong when we blame those who differ ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... severe; in the first place, there is no necessity that we should reconcile ourselves to him. In this consists a part of the wonderful beauty of the character of Helena—a part of its womanly truth, which Johnson, who accuses Bertram, and those who so plausibly defend him, did not understand. If it never happened in real life, that a woman, richly endued with heaven's best gifts, loved with all her heart, and soul, and strength, a man unequal to or unworthy of her, and to whose faults herself alone ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... a child belonging to the saloon-keeper testified that the satchel was much heavier on the first night than on the second. It has been conjectured, very plausibly, that the valise contained Pearl Bryan's head, ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... a three days' halt on the river Zabatus, Clearchus endeavours to put an end to the distrust between the Persians and the Greeks by an interview with Tissaphernes. He is received so plausibly that he is induced to return on the following day, accompanied by five other generals and twenty captains, in expectation of being informed of the persons who had excited, by false reports, ill feelings between the two armies. The generals are conducted into the tent and put ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... office. A Calvinist Viceroy of India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... seemed to stalk behind them wherever they went. Some have deemed it prudent to retire for a time from practice. In fine, that this fever may occur spontaneously, I admit; that its infectious nature may be plausibly disputed, I do not deny; but I add, considerately, that in my own family I had rather that those I esteemed the most should be delivered, unaided, in a stable, by the manger-side, than that they should receive the best help, in the fairest apartment, but exposed to the vapors of this pitiless ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more reason why you should make no secret of it," he argued plausibly. "Come! Out with ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... him with the means of returning to Rome; he had observed that I had two mules, and if I would let him have one of them and would despatch with him a confidential servant to take charge of the relics, he would at once send them to me. This plausibly expressed proposition pleased me, and I made up my mind to test the value of the somewhat ambiguous promise at once;[22] so giving him the mule and money for his journey I ordered my notary Ratleig (who already desired to go to Rome to offer his devotions there) to go with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley |
