"Polemical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I had confidence in our cause, both in itself, and in its polemical force, but also, on the other hand, I despised every rival system of doctrine and its arguments too. As to the high Church and the low Church, I thought that the one had not much more of a logical basis than the other; while I had a thorough ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Taylor, whose works are only represented by "The Great Exemplar of Sanctity" (London, 1667), "Ductor Dubitantium" (London, 1696), which is still the chief English treatise on casuistry, and "A Collection of Polemical and Moral Discourses" (London, 1657). The Library contains two editions of the works (1683 and 1716) of Isaac Barrow, whom Charles II. described as "the best scholar in England." Other eminent writers of this period represented in the Library are Thomas Fuller, Richard Baxter, William Chillingworth, ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Neither the polemical Erasmus nor the witty humorist had been lost in the erudite divine and the disillusioned reformer. The paper-warrior we would further gladly have dispensed with, but not the humorist, for many treasures of literature. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... may excite an artist's imagination are infinitely numerous and belong to every variety of conceivable life. A Coleridge or a Renan will make literature out of polemical theology; a Huxley will write on the physical basis of life with emotion and in such a way as to infect others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will give what color he please to the story ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... Doubtless you include yourself among that numerous tribe of Texas titans who can "unhorse" me as easily as turning a hen over; and having accorded you unlimited space in which to acquire momentum, I would certainly dread the shock were I cursed with an atom of polemical pride. Frankly, I wish you success—trust that you can demonstrate beyond a peradventure of a doubt that all my objections to the Single Tax are fallacious, that it is indeed the correct solution of that sphinx riddle which we must soon ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... of again and again repeating its injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in conscious opposition to "the things that we do here this day," and throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming party at Jerusalem. As the Book ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... soon involved in lawsuits, into the details of which it is needless to go, but in the course of which he published a series of memoirs, or statements of his case for the public at large. These memoirs are among the most vigorous of all polemical writings; they were very clever and very witty; they were vivacious and audacious; they were unfailingly interesting; and they were read as eagerly as the 'Letters of Junius.' Personal at first, the suits soon became political; and part of the public approval given to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... is nothing left for them to do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations, and by the number of volumes given to the world." Theory-ridden Zola's polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... was anything but polemical; he cared not to spend time even over those authors whose attacks on the outposts of science, or whose elaborate reconcilements of old and new, might have afforded him some support. On the other hand, he altogether lacked that breadth of intellect which seeks to comprehend all the results of speculation, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Golden Bough is for religious anthropology, and its dictum is: "Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty." The thesis of the second is that Masonry is founded upon Egyptian eschatology, which may be true; but unfortunately the book is too polemical. Both books partake of the poetry, if not the confusion, of the subject; but not for a world of dust would one clip their wings of fancy and suggestion. Indeed, their union of scholarship and poetry is unique. When the pains of erudition ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... controversy, and wrote on subjects of polemical divinity; but his mind was principally drawn towards language and the rules of its construction. He especially gave much of his time to the study of Latin grammar, and feeling dissatisfied with the elementary books which were then in use, he drew up one himself, which ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous, polemical, sophistic—three bad things. I wrote it, and I let it stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in general about Michelangelo's ideal of form. He was essentially a Romantic as opposed to ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... polemical works also emanate at different times from the press, all of them neatly and well printed, nay, highly creditable to the Indian compositors who ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... polemical expression beamed from Father Beret's eyes, and a very expert physiogomist might have suspected duplicity from certain lines ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... he assisted in the council held 1059 (the year wherein the ban of the Church was finally and formally taken from Normandy), at which the famous Berenger, Archdeacon of Angers (against whom he had waged a polemical controversy that did more than all else to secure his repute at the Pontifical Court), abjured "his heresies" as to the Real Presence in the sacrament of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that, in his opinion, such an answer might, without much difficulty, be written, but declined the controversy on the plea of reverence for the memory of his deceased master. This plea the King considered as the subterfuge of a vanquished disputant. [47] Had he been well acquainted with the polemical literature of the preceding century and a half, he would have known that the documents to which he attached so much value might have been composed by any lad of fifteen in the college of Douay, and contained nothing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and dimly known periods, critics are perhaps most apt to show their defects of temper, and Scott often commented on the acerbity of spirit which such studies seem to induce. "Antiquaries," he said, "are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and which are least valuable if the truth could be ascertained; and which therefore we would gladly have seen handled with more diffidence and better temper in proportion to their uncertainty."[90] ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... life began like Whittington's; John Smeaton, the engineer of Eddystone Lighthouse, the first who placed civil engineering in the rank of a science; the two Reverend Milners (Joseph, and Isaac, Dean of Carlisle), great polemical giants in their day, authors of "The History of the Church of Christ;" Dr. Priestly, inventor of the pneumatic apparatus still used by chemists, and discoverer of oxygen and several other gases; David Hartley, the metaphysician whom Coleridge so much admired that he called ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... science and astrology, such as the reform of the calendar, attracted his attention. His other works consisted of theological essays, ascetic or exegetic, questions of ecclesiastical discipline and reform, and of various polemical writings called forth for the most ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... had given rise. Catholicism, it was thought, if it were to hold the field as a world-wide religion, must be remodelled so as to bring it better into line with the conclusions of modern philosophy. Less attention should be paid to dogma and to polemical discussions, and more to the ethical and natural principles contained in the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble cause, it ought on the other hand to be observed, that some of the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... all the different colors that are generally supposed to express anger. She had been attacked more openly than the others, it is true; but her attitude toward the prayer-class would go to show that she was naturally polemical. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... friends, the truly kind and accomplished Sir William Trumbull, served him in that way, and perhaps in another eventually even more important. The library of Pope's father was composed exclusively of polemical divinity, a proof, by the way, that he was not a blind convert to the Roman Catholic faith; or, if he was so originally, had reviewed the grounds of it, and adhered to it after strenuous study. In this dearth of books at his own home, and until ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... 224 of the Tatler, Addison, speaking of polemical advertisements, says: "The inventors of Strops for Razors have written against one another this way for several years, and that with great bitterness." See also Spectator, Nos. 428, 509, and the Postman ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... pulpit-thumping orator. The first half of his letter is a prelude in the form of a sermon upon Faith, all very trite and obvious; and the notion of this excommunicated friar holding forth to the Pope's Holiness in polemical platitudes delivered with all the authority of inspired discoveries of his own is one more proof that at the root of fanaticism in all ages and upon all questions, lies an utter lack of a sense of fitness and proportion. Having ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... no place for polemical discussion, and we will therefore leave those painful arguments unrecorded. Suffice it, that Marie's intimate acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures in their original tongue—the language of her own ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... star in Danish literature ascended at this time. Heinrich Hertz published his "Letters from the Dead" anonymously: it was a mode of driving all the unclean things out of the temple. The deceased Baggesen sent polemical letters from Paradise, which resembled in the highest degree the style of that author. They contained a sort of apotheosis of Heiberg, and in part attacks upon Oehlenschl ger and Hauch. The old story about my orthographical errors was ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... contention. Here are written many things concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious, because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an infallible authority ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... "censorious criticism" the prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire of modern times, was the principal agent in fixing its present polemical and urban associations upon a term originally steeped in the savour of rustic revelry. In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty, but, as far as one can yet see, to remain a joy ...
— English Satires • Various
... of the origin of evil, or predestination in the Calvinistic sense. The vivid contrasts of light and shade in his picture express his judgment on the tragic fate of the Jewish people, The Gospel is not a polemical treatise, but it bears traces of recent conflicts. St. John wishes to show that the rejection of Christ by the Jews was morally inevitable; that their blindness and their ruin followed naturally ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in detail those various points on which we have already dwelt. Spite of all the ghastly sufferings the War is bringing in its train, nay, in a sense, because of them, it has linked together the Empire in the closest bonds, allayed political and polemical strife, evoked a wealth of heroism, self-sacrifice, prayer, and benevolence, and braced up the ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... believe, is never without his polemical intentions, and I should like, for a moment, to ask whether his discussion of his problem, taken on its own merits, is altogether the best way to discuss things. Mr. Shaw has an ideal of life: he asks that men and women should be perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons |
