"Misstatement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... begun at about the same time with the organizing of the national temperance society was able at the end of five years to bear this testimony in the presence of those who were in a position to recognize any misstatement or exaggeration: ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... there been so much absolute misstatement as in this quotation. Jeremiah Curtin, a life-long student of the Indian, speaking of the same Indians, makes a remark which applies with force to ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... set of facts has made the actual nature of the original Charlemagne Romances the subject of much mistake and misstatement on the part of general historians of literature. The widely read and generally accurate Dunlop knew nothing whatever about them, except in early printed versions representing their very latest form, and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... style in dealing with these little difficulties. She was unwilling to say that she had dined in Porchester Terrace, for Harvey entertained something of a prejudice against that household. His remoteness nowadays from the world in which Alma amused herself made it quite safe to venture on a trifling misstatement. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... term would have made the subject intelligible to some minds, clear as it is to others; for do we not see even to the present day Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood? This reflection about Malthus has often comforted me when I have been vexed at this misstatement of my views. As for M. Janet, he is a metaphysician, and such gentlemen are so acute that I think they often misunderstand common folk. Your criticism on the double sense in which I have used Natural Selection is new ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... them would involve the quotation of passages so uninteresting to the general reader, that we shall ask him to be content with our assurance that these disgraceful attempts to injure a literary opponent and former friend assume severally the form of direct misstatement, suppression of the truth, prevarication, and cunning perversion; the manner and motive throughout being very shabby.[F] The purpose of all these attacks upon Mr. Dyce is not only to wound and disparage him, but to secure for the writer a reputation for superior sagacity and antiquarian learning; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Gladstone, or the Duke of Argyll, or some bishop had made a misstatement of this kind, how Mr. Huxley would have crushed him! But it is a mere error of careless reading, such as ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... word; as when a man is asked to tell the right road, and he silently points in the wrong direction. Obviously, also, the intention or purpose of deceiving is in the essence of the lie; for if a man says that which is not true, supposing it to be true, he makes a misstatement, but he does not lie; or, again, if he speaks an untruth playfully where no deception is wrought or intended, as by saying, when the mercury is below zero, that it is "good summer weather," there is no lie in ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... brilliant leaves are striking in appearance, and the shrub is inclined toward a trailing habit, much like that of some of the junipers. This species is one of my pets at Merribrooke, and a perennial source of wonder that nurserymen have not as yet pounced upon it for purposes of exaggeration and misstatement in their ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... can only account for his misstatement of facts as they were seen by several witnesses, by supposing that he was in such a rage at the time that he lost command of himself, and does not well remember what he then did, or what he then said. Some judgment as to the weight this statement should receive, ...
— 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
... untiring, unappeasable; pointing to a misstatement here, an exaggeration there, till Manisty was in a roar of argument, furious half with his friend, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed—not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... outset of the chapter immediately preceding this one I said the English had no night life. This was a slight but a pardonable misstatement of the actual facts. The Englishman has not so much night life as the Parisian, the Berliner, the Viennese or the Budapest; but he has more night life in his town of London than the Roman has in his town of Rome. In Rome night life for the foreigner consists ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... said at last, "the whole case hinges on the evidence of this man Rogers—Holladay's confidential clerk—and from what I know of Rogers, I should say that he'd be the last man in the world to make a willful misstatement. He says that Miss Holladay entered her father's office late yesterday afternoon, stayed there ten minutes, and then came out hurriedly. A few minutes later Rogers went into the office and found his employer dead. ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... pain I feel compelled to advert to a covert insinuation of the same charges, in a publication avowedly Catholic, and edited in my own diocese, consequently canonically subject to my correction. Should such a misstatement, made under my own eyes, be passed over by me, it might be surmised that it could not be contradicted; and whether chronologically it preceded or followed the French account it evidently becomes my duty to notice it, as French bishops have ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... in the hamlet of Angels, when truculent speeches are uttered, When bloodshed and life alone will atone for some trifling misstatement, Maidens and men in their prime recall the last hero of Angels, Think of and vainly regret the Bald-headed ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... which was duly jotted down to be passed into the Tribune's archives; and the following morning Tom, doing guard duty with his father, the two Helgersons and a squad of the yard men at the threatened plant, read a pointless editorial in which misstatement of fact and sympathy for the absent and struggling Farleys were equally and ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... of malicious detraction, and to be now persevered in from no other cause. In my reply to his article, which he himself challenged and then pusillanimously suppressed, he has had abundant means of information. If he now refuses to correct a misstatement which grossly injures me, after he has been informed of the truth, the refusal admits of but one interpretation, and throws a satirical light on the merely private 'regret' he professes. Inasmuch, however, ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... to-day, that beat the Dutch. It was Aunt Stanshy, and she did beat the Dutch; yes, she did, yaw, yaw, yaw! You see a parcel of young ones went up the lane in fine feather, colors flying and drums beat-in'." (This, to mildly put it, was a misstatement, as not a drum was there to be beaten; but Simes had a weakness for "misstatements.") "Well, they neared Water Street, and just then the enemy appeared, a lot of down-townies, yaw, yawl My, didn't those sojers scatter, ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... accusers alleged nothing against him which could be positively proved. One of them, being asked how he knew the men who defaced the images, replied, that he saw them by the light of the moon, making a palpable misstatement, for it was just new moon when the act was committed. This made all men of understanding cry out upon the thing; but the people were as eager as ever to receive further accusations. And, in conclusion, they sent the galley named the Salaminian ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... should be sorry to believe," said the cardinal, "that there was a particle of misstatement, or even exaggeration, either in the base or the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... extremely careful of facts and names. A nominating speaker at a great political convention ruined the effect of a speech by confusedly giving several first names to a distinguished man. It is embarrassing to a speaker to have to correct at the very beginning of his remarks a misstatement made by the presiding officer. But a man from one university cannot allow the audience to identify him with another. The author of a book wants its title correctly given. A public official desires to be associated in people's minds with the ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... business." It is they who by their acts have unsettled business; and the very men raising this cry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in securing, by speech, editorial, book or pamphlet, the defense by misstatement of what they have done; and yet when we correct their misstatements by telling the truth, they declaim against us for breaking silence, lest "values be unsettled!" They have hurt honest business men, honest working men, honest ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... duties of the legislature. Such opinions were uncommon, even amongst the Presbyterians, and his rigid respect for truth served to strengthen the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous. If he unintentionally made a misstatement—even about some trifling matter—as soon as he discovered his mistake he would lose no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it. "Why, in the name of reason," he was asked, "do you walk a mile in the rain for a perfectly unimportant thing?" "Simply because ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... positive assertion, and fortifying his falsehoods by a pretentious parade of figures and official documents. It is hardly going too far to say that, in (p. 207) Cooper's opinion, the remarks of James on American affairs combined all possible forms of misstatement from undesigned misrepresentation to deliberate falsehood. There may be difference of opinion on this point; on another there can be none. The period covered by the British writer is on the whole the most glorious in the long and brilliant naval history of the greatest ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... often exists even among those who profess the deepest scholarship and the most certainty of opinion as to the development of men of great wealth was instanced by a misstatement of Dr. Felix Adler, leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. In an address on "Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life" delivered some years ago, Dr. Adler asserted: "Before the Civil War there were three millionaires; now there are ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... to correct you in regard to a plain misstatement of fact. Sir, the Southern Confederacy was never defeated. It ceased to exist as a nation because we were exhausted—because our devastated country was exhausted. Another thing, sir, I am employed upon this paper, I gainsay you, as a reporter, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the story, told by one who knew Putnam intimately and who had it from his own lips, while neighbors were still living who were "in at the death" and could have refuted any misstatement or exaggeration. The deed, in truth, was characteristic of the dauntless young farmer, whose courage and heroic character (as his eulogist justly remarks) "were ever attended by a serenity of soul, a clearness of conception, a degree of self-possession, and a superiority to all vicissitudes ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... doubt whether the use of any term would have made the subject intelligible to some minds, clear as it is to others; for do we not see, even to the present day, Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood? This reflection about Malthus has often comforted me when I have been vexed at the misstatement of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Epistles or Anacreon's Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a ready reply which would have been equally effective with his Sunday-school teachers and their disputants. Hence we conclude this prodigality of misstatement, this exuberance of mendacity, is an effervescence of zeal in majorem gloriam Dei. Elsewhere he tells us that "the idea of the author of the 'Vestiges' is, that man is the development of a monkey, that the monkey ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... duty of seizing arms and ammunition collected for the purpose of warring against the king. The colonial orators and newspaper writers affirmed then, as they have affirmed since, that, up to the day of Lexington, no one had a thought of firing a shot against the Government. A more barefaced misstatement was never made. Men do not carry off cannon by scores, and accumulate everywhere great stores of warlike ammunition, without a thought of fighting. The colonists commenced the war by assembling in arms to oppose the progress of British troops obeying the orders of the Government. It matters ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty |
