"Truckling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... absurdity, and thanklessness, have risen up before me; and I remember offers that would have involved no sacrifice of my clerical obligations—offers that I would not even consider—classing them all as 'mere truckling with my conscience.' What did ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... preserved his self-respect; bequeathing no property, but leaving no debts; having had no "testimonial" of acknowledgment or reward,—seeking none, nay, avoiding any; making millions his debtors for intense delight, and acknowledging himself paid by the poet's meed, "the tribute of a smile"; never truckling to power; laboring ardently and honestly for his political faith, but never lending to party that which was meant for mankind; proud, and rightly proud, of his self-obtained position, but neither scorning nor slighting the humble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... though you are not lacking in the courtesy which good and polite men should have, yet there is great need of a flattering manner which, however faulty and discreditable in other transactions of life, is yet necessary during a candidateship. For when it makes a man worse by truckling, it is wrong; but when only more friendly, it does not deserve so harsh a term; while it is absolutely necessary to a candidate, whose face and expression and style of conversation have to be varied and accommodated to the feelings and tastes of everyone ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the flood. Men fight and make up; repent and go at it; feast and starve; laugh and weep; pray and curse; cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen, defraud, fib, lie, beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown—as in the laughing and weeping, tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that have been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions but revivals of things previous. In the books of the past we learn naught but of the present; in those of the present, the past. All Mardi's history—beginning middle, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the vacancies occurring from time to time in the various offices gave everybody something to look forward to. There was room for ambition, and, I am bound to add, room for a good deal of petty scheming, on the one hand, and truckling to the abbot, on the other; but it all went towards relieving the monotony of the life in the cloister—a monotony which has been very much over-stated by those who have never studied the subject. To begin with, it does not follow that what would be very dull to us would be dull and insipid to the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... would rather have the approval of my own conscience, I would rather walk in the star-light and look up to them and to the God who made me free and independent, than to seek the highest station upon the earth by truckling to any man or to any set of people, or giving up my ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Fortunately, he had his mother's fortune of L40,000, which his grandfather had wisely provided should not be invested in Irish lands, having, in fact, established a contingency in case his grandson should be dispossessed of the property he had held for generations, by a Government truckling to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... been far more likely to sweep them and him into captivity, as they did Lot and his household. Besides, Abraham had neither "Constitution," nor "compact," nor statutes, nor judicial officers to send back his fugitives, nor a truckling police to pounce upon panic-stricken women, nor gentleman-kidnappers, suing for patronage, volunteering to howl on the track, boasting their blood-hound scent, and pledging their "honor" to hunt down and "deliver up," provided they had a description of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... acquit Douglas of truckling to the South at this time. No doubt he would have been glad to let bygones be bygones, to close up the gap of unpleasant memories between himself and the administration, and to restore Democratic harmony. For Douglas loved his party and honored its history. To him the party of Jefferson and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... hot cabal Of treasury bench, and bench episcopal? These monstrous portents that before me rise Of mitred pimps, and coronetted spies! This deep, dark plotting, spreading net and snare, By hands that used their country's ark to bear? This hateful truckling to misguided power, Combined in palace, temple, hall, and bower, To crush an outcast Queen, with evidence By facts refuted, ridiculed by sense?— Tales that would merit but an equal fate, Told of the veriest wench in Billingsgate! FATHERS! and BRITONS! whence this ...
— The Ghost of Chatham; A Vision - Dedicated to the House of Peers • Anonymous
... here and there politicians with elements of greatness in them, who fought hard for the right. But these men were lonely figures as yet, and I am bound to say of the people's leaders generally, at the time of my journalistic enterprise, that they were a poor, truckling, uninspired lot of sheep, with a few clever wolves among them, who saw the people's madness and folly and preyed upon it masterfully by every trick within ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... howled the irate father. "He wants America to enrich him quickly at the expense of the old Spaniard, and that is the reason for so much truckling, so much psalm-singing and so much nobility! ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... something less than nought. Let him put forth his power, attest his sway, Howe'er he will—a momentary show, A little brief authority in heaven! Aha, I see out yonder one who comes, A bidden courier, truckling at Zeus' nod, A lacquey in his new lord's livery, Surely on some fantastic errand ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... order the luminous intelligence of this 'Lord Chancellor of nature?' Grant that you do so—and what guarantee have you for the virtue and the happiness which you assume as the concomitants of the gift? See Bacon himself; what black ingratitude! what miserable self-seeking! what truckling servility! what abject and pitiful spirit! So far from intellectual knowledge, in its highest form and type, insuring virtue and bliss, it is by no means uncommon to find great mental cultivation combined with great moral corruption." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... being as a man than this king could scarcely have been found, "a mixture of narrow-mindedness, selfishness, truckling, blustering, and duplicity, with no object but self, his own ease, and the gratification of his own fancies and prejudices."[97] "A more despicable scene," continues Mr. Greville, "cannot be exhibited than that which the interior of our Court presents—every ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... had met one who was not intent on truckling for place and pelf. His ideals were as high and excellent as her own—his mind more sincere. Life was more to him than to her, because he was working his energies up into art, and she was only allowing her ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... of Hibernians and other Irish societies were showered upon Congress—in almost unending procession they clogged the pages of the Congressional Record; public meetings were held in New York and elsewhere where denouncing an administration that disgraced the country by "truckling" to Great Britain. The President was accused of seeking an Anglo-American Alliance and of sacrificing American shipping to the glory of British trade, while the history of our diplomatic relations was surveyed in detail for the purpose of proving that Great Britain had broken every treaty ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... four years I held to that opinion, and felt that my poor Carey and I could have loved each other better if our relative situations had been different, and we had not seen so much of one another. My life used to seem to me half-unspoken remonstrance, half-truckling compliance, and nothing but our mutual loyalty to old times, and dear little Babie's affection, could ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sir, so it is; but the interest is now bound to the chariot wheels of the truckling Toryism of our time—to the sycophants who basely made vaccination permissive, and paltered with the Conscientious Objector. These badges, sir'—the client pointed to his own crimson decorations—'proclaim that I have been vaccinated on both arms, as a testimony to the immortal though, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact; never universal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence: but a great state is too much envied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... total unsettlement of men's minds, the bringing into contempt all the institutions which have been hitherto venerated, the aggrandisement of the power of the people, the embodying and recognition of popular authority, the use and abuse of the King's name, the truckling to the press, are things so subversive of government, so prejudicial to order and tranquillity, so encouraging to sedition and disaffection, that I do not see the possibility of the country settling down into that ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... that all danger of war has blown over? I appeal to the Conservative Members of this House. I ask them whither we are hastening? I ask them what is to be the end of a policy of which it is the principle to give nothing to justice, and everything to fear? We have been accused of truckling to Irish agitators. But I defy you to show us that we ever made or are now making to Ireland a single concession which was not in strict conformity with our known principles. You may therefore trust us, when we tell you that there is a point where we will stop. Our language ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the disagreement which had plunged the committee into trouble extended to the convention. The debate became hot and bitter. In a speech of remarkable power, William L. Yancey of Alabama upbraided the Northern delegates for truckling to the Free-soil spirit. "You acknowledged," he said, "that slavery did not exist by the law of nature or by the law of God—that it only existed by state law; that it was wrong, but that you were not to blame. That was your position, and ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Rutter's heart—down underneath the strata of pride and love of power, there could be found the heart of a father—indeed he had often predicted to himself just such a coming together. It was the boy's pluck and manliness that had done it; a manliness free from all truckling or cringing. And then his tenderness over the man who had of all others in the world wronged him most! He could hardly keep his glad hands off ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Pecksniff to change his mind so suddenly, and with hearty contempt for his truckling action, he left that very hour in the rain, though he had only a single silver piece in his pocket. Tom Pinch, in great grief for his trouble, ran after him with a book as a parting gift, and between its leaves Martin found another silver ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... it as an outrage, an affront, a deliberate slap in the face for an established, vested, and prodigal support of the newspaper press. What the devil did The Patriot mean by it; The Patriot which sorely needed just their class of reputable patronage, and, after sundry contortions of rate-cutting, truckling, and offers of news items to back the advertising, was beginning to get it? They asked themselves, and, failing of any satisfactory answer, they asked The Patriot in no uncertain terms. Receiving vague and pained replies, they even went to the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... see how this could consistently be done if Prince Frederick succeeded in gaining a formal audience and placing his case before the government. Already, it seemed, the jingo papers were taunting the administration with undue truckling to the wishes of Germany, with a lack of stamina and backbone in short—with something like treachery toward Prince Ferdinand and treason toward the royal family, with which the ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... treachery, the truckling and pusillanimous reptile, Crippled-Speech Trollop, has gone over to the enemy. It is contended, now, that he has been a friend to the bill, in secret, since the day it was introduced, and has had bankable reasons for ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... him, is always free to seek harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings. Being mere data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull them to sleep by any means at his command. Truckling, compromise, time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, {105} would be on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... to avoid the legal obstructions placed in the way of play-acting. "Histrionic academies" tried to sneak in on the stage; and in 1762 a clever manager gave an entertainment whose playbill I present as the most amusing example of specious and sanctimonious truckling extant. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... they came from his having, early in life, worked for Maxwell, of Keir, a Scotch gentleman of great dignity and worth, who gave to all those under him a fine impression of the governing classes." Old Carlyle had no shame in standing with his hat off as his landlord passed; he had no truckling spirit either of paying court to those whose lot in life it was ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... constantly send forth men endued with every form of virtue. And these seminaries would produce a still greater number of inestimable scholars hereafter if sordidness did not obscure the splendid light, corruption interrupt, and certain truckling harpies and beggars envy them their usefulness. Nor can any one be so blind as not to perceive this—any so stolid as not to understand it—any so perverse as not to acknowledge how sacred Theology has been contaminated by those notorious idiots, and the celestial ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... an American subject. "British residents or travellers in Italy," writes one to us, "will never have any comfort or satisfaction under the union-jack, until the present race of consuls and plenipotentiaries, sitting in high places, truckling with petty kings and grand dukes, is hanged, every one of them. There is an obliging old consul at ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... He was in nowise offended. The women of his more intimate acquaintance did not scruple to bargain their charms. From such trollops, he gained his estimate of the sex. The sordid pretense by Plutina completed his delusion. The truckling of familiars had inflated conceit. He swelled visibly. The finest girl in the mountains was ready to drop into his arms! ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily |
