"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... enlisted with one of the lieutenants and mustered in with the troop, was not in the service for the first time; that he had enlisted twice before and then succeeded in getting discharged for disability. The informant intimated that the fellow had no intention of doing duty, would shirk and sham illness and probably get into the hospital, where the chances were he would succeed in imposing on the surgeons and in getting discharged again; that it was pay he was after which he did not propose to earn; least of all would ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... cared nothing either for subject or treatment, and would have given a cartload of them for a drawing by Hunt of a bird's nest. Wanting an ear for music and an eye for pictorial merit, I believed, or affected to believe, that the raptures of people who possessed the ear and eye were a sham. It irritated me to hear my aunt play, although she had been well taught in her youth and was a skilful performer. I know she would have liked to feel that she gave me some pleasure, and that her playing ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... laeva cito, tum dextra First to the left, and then t' other way; Aspice retro in vultu, You look at her, and she looks at you. Das palmam, Change hands ma'am Celere—run away, just in sham. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... stands for all that is bad in country life. In London he would keep his place. He would belong to a brainless club, and his wife would give brainless dinner parties. But down here he acts the little god with his gentility, and his patronage, and his sham aesthetics, and every ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... man who, in himself and his external circumstances, shall be equally and totally false: his fortune resting on baseless credit,— his patriotism assumed,—his domestic affections, his honor and honesty, all a sham. His own misery in the midst of it,—it making the whole universe, heaven and earth alike, all ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... centre Caesar erected an obelisk one hundred and thirty-two feet high, brought from Egypt. The seats were arranged as in the theatre. Six kinds of games were celebrated: 1st, chariot racing; 2d, a sham-fight between young men on horseback; 3d, a sham-fight between infantry and cavalry; 4th, athletic sports of all kinds; 5th, fights with wild beasts, such as lions, boars, etc.; 6th, sea fights. Water ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... Church established there, you ought, in order to carry out your system, to establish Prelacy in Scotland, and Catholicism in England; though, if you were to attempt to do either the one or the other, it would not be a sham but a real insurrection that you would provoke. There must be equality between the great religious sects in Ireland—between Catholic and Protestant. It is impossible that this equality can be much ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... polemics; debate &c (discussion) 476; war of words, logomachy^, litigation; paper war; high words &c (quarrel) 713; sparring &c v.. competition, rivalry; corrivalry^, corrivalship^, agonism^, concours^, match, race, horse racing, heat, steeple chase, handicap; regatta; field day; sham fight, Derby day; turf, sporting, bullfight, tauromachy^, gymkhana^; boat race, torpids^. wrestling, greco-roman wrestling; pugilism, boxing, fisticuffs, the manly art of self-defense; spar, mill, set-to, round, bout, event, prize fighting; quarterstaff, single stick; gladiatorship^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... you idiot!" cried Guerchard. "You've sent Victoire away in a sham prison-van—a prison-van belonging to Lupin. Oh, that scoundrel! He always has something up ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... a rather definite type of explanation offered is, we think, distinctly suggestive. If one tries to correlate and group the death ideas, one sees that they are all delusions of death or of loss of energy or complaints of hysterical symptoms that look like sham death. If the lack of energy complained of be looked upon as lifelessness, one can conceive of these explanations being variations of one theme, namely, that of death. In the last chapter it has been shown that a delusion of dying, being dead, or having been ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... men explained that smoke as "a dummy factory set up by Mark Hanna with Wall Street money to make a smoke and fool the people into thinking that it was a real factory and that industry was reviving under a Republican tariff." The orators said the best proof that it was a sham mill lay in the fact that the plutocrats claimed it was a tin mill, while "everybody knows it is impossible to ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... had worked myself into a rigorous sort of philosophic desperation which made me as cool as a cucumber. To seem to empty the contents of the wallet into my lap was my next object, and this I succeeded in, without his suspecting that my movement was a sham only. The purse thus made up, I emphatically told him was all I had—this was the truth—and then came the crisis. His trick was to be employed now or never. It was employed, but he had become so nervous, that I caught a sufficient glimpse of his proceedings. I saw the slight o'hand ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... dinner had only just time to go over my part and drive to the theater. My dear, delightful Portia! The house was good, but the audience dull, and I acted dully to suit them; but I hope my last dress, which was beautiful, consoled them. What with sham business and real business, I have had ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Empire style, hung and furnished in yellow satin, whose high white panels were decorated with trophies of antique weapons carved in wood and gilded. A dauber from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts would have branded with the epithet "sham" the armchairs and sofas ornamented with sphinx heads in bronze, as well as the massive green marble clock upon which stood, all in gold, a favorite court personage, clothed in a cap, sword, and fig-leaf, who seemed to be making love to a young person in a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... has so far complied with the taste of the age, that his whole book is overrun with texts of Scripture, and the notion of pre-existence, supposed to be stolen from two verses of the prophets." The sincere believer is usually the first to detect and be disgusted with the sham one; and Addison was always a sincere believer, but he had also that happy nature in which disgust is carried quickly and easily off through the safety-valve of ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... individual venture. It was allowed for a short time to have a conditional endorsement from the A.M.A., which was soon withdrawn and the enterprise disowned. This has swallowed up thousands of dollars of the money of benevolence, and yet it has all the time been a sham and a falsehood. There was nothing of it. When a lady newspaper correspondent called to visit the institution, ten or a dozen children from a neighboring private school were borrowed and paraded as orphans, when at the time there were only two little children ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., June, 1888., No. 6 • Various
... appreciate, and be capable of applying them, he enters into details as to the physiological circumstances connected with the procreation of the species. The Solicitor-General says—and that was the first proposition with which he started—that the whole of this is a delusion and a sham. When Knowlton says that he wishes that marriage should take place as early as possible—marriage being the most sacred and holy of all human relations—he means nothing of the kind, but means and suggests, in the sacred name of marriage, illicit intercourse between the ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... months after this treaty, they induced a large number of Indians, from the various tribes, to come to the same place, and where all the militia of the provinces had assembled, and while professing to practice some sham evolutions, the Indians were suddenly surrounded and captured. Many of the prisoners so treacherously obtained were executed, and others sold into slavery for having been in ...
— The Abenaki Indians - Their Treaties of 1713 & 1717, and a Vocabulary • Frederic Kidder
... somehow into the very centre of his being and become convinced that the dictates which proceed from that centre are the most fundamental things in life. This has always formed the kernel of religion, however often men, failing to reach that kernel, have lived on the husks. But even this very sham notifies some small attempt in the right direction. In modern times—in the various forms of Idealism and Pragmatism—such a need of getting at the core of being and of being convinced that the effort is worth while, ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... governed him now. He was not exactly the man to go back on a friend, but Castine no longer had any particular claims to friendship. The last time he had heard Vanne's whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property of the old seigneur. The two had come out of the melee with bruised heads, and Vanne with a bullet in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... more clearly to the clarifying tension of that night than the fact that Rustum Khan with his notions about gipsies could compel himself to lie still with a gipsy's head within three inches of his own, and sham sleep while the gipsy whispered to him. I was not the only one who observed that marvel, although I did not know that ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... reading Clarendon's Hist. Rebell. at present, with which I am more pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It is a pet idea of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists—wolves in sheep's clothing—simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it—or rather, why they thought they did it; and to learn that, you should go to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dictate to the sovereign. The citizens of London assembled by tens of thousands to burn the Pope in effigy. The government posted cavalry at Temple Bar, and placed ordnance round Whitehall. In that year our tongue was enriched with two words, Mob and Sham, remarkable memorials of a season of tumult and imposture. [21] Opponents of the court were called Birminghams, Petitioners, and Exclusionists. Those who took the King's side were Antibirminghams, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sooart o' pop. By th' heart an' it wor pop too. "Dun yo mak this yoursen, mistress?" aw axed. "By gingo, this licks awr traitle drink into fits, yo mun give me th' resait, if yo have it." "This is shampane, sur," shoo said. "Aw dooant care whether it's sham or not, it's as gooid as owt o'th' sooart aw've tasted, aw'll thank you for another drop," "Help yourself, my friend," said th' maister, an aw did, aboon a bit, but ha long aw wor at it or ha monny ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... vicinity of the tiny kitchen. But these inconveniences, if they were so to be called, merely added to my zest and enjoyment. Here, indeed, was agreeable and talented society! Aunt Agnes was right,—my associates hitherto had been frivolous and volatile. The world of fashion was a sham. What a contrast,—I could not help making it,—between the insipid speeches of my former friends and the clever talk of this purely literary circle, where ideas and scholarship were recognized ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... that, you know, unless, possibly, the ideals are very low; but more than I can hope to find elsewhere. Even now I am certainly happier in the work than I have been for years." She looked up at him quickly, her eyes pleading. "It is not the glitter, the sham, the applause," she hastened to explain, "but the real work itself, that attracts and rewards me—the hidden labor of fitly interpreting character—the hard, secret study after details. This has become a positive passion, an inspiration. I may never ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... Some trink des Königs wein; Some fill deir hats mit rasbry sham, Und prandy beeches fein. Hans Breitmann in de gitchen Vas shdare like avery ding, To see vot lots of victual-de-dees Id dakes to feed ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... either, she felt herself braced. She could envisage the past, collect it, display it in her lap without fear. "Here's my life's work, so far as it has gone. Now beat me, if you will; I'm not afraid of honest blows." She knew there would be no sham outcries from this high-looking ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... write another line unless you wish it, and then you may write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are going right away from this howling cockpit, and never need set foot in it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free—free! Do you hear, you tired hack? Too tired to prick your ears, eh? Ah, well, wait ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... our citizens from proper treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... home, after depleting their salmon rivers, deer runs and seal floes to the danger point. And there is no reason to suppose that an excellent population in so many ways would be any harder to deal with in this one than the hordes of poachers and sham sportsmen ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... not a vital one with either male or female voters, and it is impossible to get up any enthusiasm on the subject. As a test question upon which to try the desire of the women of the State to become voters, it is a palpable sham. Our Revolutionary fathers would not have fought, bled and died for such a figment of a right as this; and their daughters, or grand-daughters, inherit the same spirit, and if they vote at all, want something worth voting for. The result is, that the voting has been largely done by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... contributed two "bed-spreads," and a "sheet-sham," and a set of antimacassars. If the reader wishes to know what "bed-spreads" and "sheet-shams" are, let him ask his intended, and let him see to it that he marries a woman who cannot ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the truth, even now, if—if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one, in just a few months—in the time that it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at all—but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain my case, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other people's heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and all his children ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... more civilised building. The addition of a weather-board front, which was subsequently erected, greatly enhanced its attractions. Mr. Faahan can boast of having had the first two-storeyed house in the town; though the too critical might hold that the upper one, being merely a sham, could not be counted as dwelling-room. There was no sham, however, about the festive character of those ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... one side I must break my word, on the other I must prostitute myself. There is no middle way. You live here surrounded by all sorts of impossible ways of looking at life. How can your outlook be sane when it is founded on a sham morality? You think the body is indecent and ugly, and that the flesh is shameful. Oh, you don't understand. I'm sick of this prudery which throws its own hideousness over all it sees. The soul and the body are one, indissoluble. Soul is body, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... in honest hope to wave The dire debasement of a youth so brave, Produc'd this purpose, with such reasoning grac'd, 'Twas with the general plaudit soon embrac'd: ''Twas urg'd,' he said, 'and sure the offence he blam'd, Their queen by base comparison was sham'd; That he, the prisoner, with strange fury mov'd, Had prais'd too proudly the fair dame he lov'd; First, then, 'twere meet this mistress should be seen There in full court, and plac'd beside the queen; So might they judge of passion's mad pretence, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband. The girls, again, are so artificial that it is impossible to know what they really are, except from the way they dance; their figures and movements alone are not a sham. But what has alarmed me most in this fashionable society is its brutality. The little incidents which take place when supper is announced give one some idea—to compare small things with great—of what a popular rising might be. Courtesy is only ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... That is only a sham to get rid of your attendance. The husband will be given to understand that you were hurriedly called in, and that, my assistance being unneeded, they did not ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle—not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... explanations of your wife's brother; he is a knave whom you ought not to hear to the prejudice of the most tender and most faithful mistress that ever was. Above all, do not allow yourself to be moved by that woman: her sham tears are nothing in comparison with the real tears that I shed, and with what love and constancy make me suffer at succeeding her; it is for that alone that in spite of myself I betray all those who could cross my love. God have mercy on me, and send you all the prosperity that ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... book-reviewing; but oh, the ghastly farce of book-reviewing! To read futile writing and sham writing of a hundred degrading varieties—and never dare to utter a truth about them! To labor instead to put one's self in the place of the school-girl reader and the tired shop-clerk reader and the sentimental married-woman reader, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... would not grant an injunction against him) be so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass; and no great matter as regards HIM. But it would be a sad thing for me to find myself hanged; and for what, I beseech you? for murdering a sham, that was either nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often. But if you show to Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man will not be much like Wordsworth—the great man will not be Wordsworth's doppelganger. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... long to find out that the khedive's newly discovered zeal in putting down the slave-trade was 'a sham to catch the attention of the English people,' but the weapon had been thrust into his hands, and he meant to use it for the help of the oppressed tribes. Difficulties he knew there would be, and ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... author holds, is like "measuring the letters of the sign-boards by the roadside instead of profiting by the directions they offer." She would have us know also that "it is not the people who make small technical mistakes or even blunders, who are barred from the paths of good society, but those of sham and pretense whose veneered vulgarity at every step tramples the flowers in the gardens of cultivation." To her mind the structure of etiquette is comparable to that of a house, of which the foundation is ethics and the rest good taste, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... is the view of the desert of Sham; mighty in their desolation are the ruins of Palmyra, the city razed by the spirits of darkness. But Antar, the man of the desert, braves them, and dwells serenely in the midst of the scenes of destruction. Antar has forever forsaken ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... a real object. This psychological truth, though proven through observation, has made itself acceptable only with great difficulty. It has had to struggle on the one hand against the prejudices of common-sense for which imagination is synonymous with sham and vain appearance and opposed to the real as non-being to being; on the other hand, against a doctrine of the logicians who maintain that the idea is at first merely conceived with no affirmation of existence ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of no Christian perfection other than to love God with our whole heart and our neighbour as ourselves. All other perfection is falsely so entitled: it is sham gold that ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... The sheep and the goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for sham. ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... recently followed. It was but justice to him. Then she could laugh at Time and Fate and the juggling unseen Controller who had played with him and her, had wrecked their little lives, forced their little passions under a sham security, then snapped the thread on which she hung for everything, killed the better part of herself, and left her all alone without a hand to shield or a heart to pity. In the darkness, as the moon stole away and her ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... upon mischief, dispose explosive spiders and chair-crackers about the carpet;—one little mischievous fellow wishing he had brought some pepper to strew on the floor, and make 'em sneeze; however, they get up a little excitement another way with the sofa-pillows, a sham fight, in which a parian Amazon falls beside Marian Bell, who "didn't go to do it;" so dancing is relinquished for games to suit all parties:—Hunt the Slipper, a sport carried on with great spirit, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... which we write Mrs Twitter happened to have a "few friends" to tea. And let no one suppose that Mrs Twitter's few friends were to be put off with afternoon tea—that miserable invention of modern times—nor with a sham meal of sweet warm water and thin bread and butter. By no means. We have said that Samuel Twitter was rich, and Mrs Twitter, conscious of her husband's riches, as well as grateful for them, went in for the substantial and ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... just now is to prevent the coming of Socialism. I do not say it as a sneer, but, on the contrary, as a compliment; a compliment to their political instinct and public spirit. I admit it may be called an exaggeration; but there really is a sort of sham Socialism that the modern politicians may quite possibly agree to set up; if they do succeed in setting it up, the battle ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... pretendin' you was dead while a big bear was poundin' you that hard that you begin to believe you ain't shammin'. An' when that ugly brute hauls off an' hits me agen, I decides then an' there that there's no occasion to sham it. But just as soon as I makes up my mind I'm dead, the bear leaves me; an' when I can no longer hear him breathin', I peeps out of a tiny little hole, and sees the big brute maulin' me old friend the Injun. Then I takes another peep roun', an' don't see no escape 'cept by way o' them three trees, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... McMath, a young New Licht minister in Tarbolton. From the evidences of the letters, we are justified in accepting at its face value the profession of reverence for true religion made by Burns in this epistle; his hatred of the sham needs ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... it, but what there is is pucka! There's nothing the matter with this representative of the people in the question of taste. Four Aubusson chairs... A bureau signed 'Percier-Fontaine,' for a wager... Two inlays by Gouttieres... A genuine Fragonard and a sham Nattier which any American millionaire will swallow for the asking: in short, a fortune... And there are curmudgeons who pretend that there's nothing but faked stuff left. Dash it all, why don't they do as I ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... her invalid airs. She will talk to you in such a depressing way of the electuaries and of the soothing draughts which she has taken, of the agues which she has had, of her plasters and cataplasms, that she will fill you with disgust at these sickly details, if all the time these sham sufferings are not intended to serve as engines by means of which, eventually, a successful attack may be made on that singular abstraction known as ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... companions, some of whom, conceiving fresh importance from the overstrained politeness with which they had been received, were now attempting a transformation of their usual loundering gait into a martial stride, with the result of a foolish strut, very unlike the dignified progress of the sham earl, whose weak back roused in them no suspicion, and who had taken care they should not see his face. Across the paved court, and through the hall to the inner court, Tom led ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... hadst once some inkling of: That there is justice here below; and even, at bottom, that there is nothing else but justice! Forget that, thou hast forgotten all. Success will never more attend thee: how can it now? Thou hast the whole Universe against thee. No more success: mere sham-success, for a day and days; rising ever higher,—towards its Tarpeian Rock. Alas, how, in thy softhung Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of red-tape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities, Parliamentary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Pretense and sham always hardened her. "Then," she said slowly, "I will be definite. I will tell you the things it would have been better for you to tell me. Your early home was in New York, but you had a cousin living in Springfield, where there was a very ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... verses on Vergil, your Greek prose on Thucydides, your English on Matthew Arnold, but don't think for yourself. Don't be original.' If anyone big began to think he'd see what a farce it all is; and then where would all these fossils be? It's all sham; look at the reports. Bradford gets told he's a good moral influence. Mansell works hard and deserves his prize. It is hoped that confirmation will be a help to me. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... and, in order to get rid of a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to, seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a sham, a Barnum's-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon his intelligent children! And now people talk about geological epochs and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly as if they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers. Ten ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of the few things that he could not do, he was obliged to let the boy go while he watched Maroney. The affair seemed to have come to the sticking point. Maroney's face showed deep anxiety, and his limping was all a sham. The boy had taken a note to some place, but ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... with a Lutheran minister at Ebersdorf, had been promptly excluded from the Holy Communion, and now came whimpering to Herrnhut, and lifted up his voice against the Lutheran Church. he did not possess the garment of righteousness, he decked himself out with sham excitement and rhetoric; and, as these are cheap ribbons and make a fine show, he soon gained a reputation as a saint. He announced that he had been commissioned by God with the special task of reforming Count Zinzendorf; described Rothe as the "False Prophet" and Zinzendorf ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... by which experience in the art of directing operations of war—of command-in-chief—can be stored, is by far the most comprehensive and thorough; for while utility cannot be denied to annual manoeuvres, and to the practice of the sham battle, it must be remembered that these, dealing with circumstances limited both in time and place, give a very narrow range of observation; and, still more important, as was remarked by the late General Sherman, the moral elements of ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the separation of his legs draws the silk comparatively taut, though, against a moderately dark background, it remains wholly invisible. When he first places the figure on the ground, he does so simply, and the figure naturally falls. He makes a few sham mesmeric passes over it, but still it falls. At the third and fourth attempt, however, he places it so that the little hooks already mentioned just catch the thread, and the figure is thus kept upright. When the music commences, ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... need of, it is here. Yet it is here in sham, in effigy, in tortured compromise. The dead have need of silk. Yet silk is dear, and there are living backs to clothe. The rolls are paper.... Do not ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... you to remember my last words. Addressing myself to you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is a sham and a delusion—what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors, that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal acquaintance with the facts, be they few or many.* ([Footnote] *It has been suggested to me that these words may be taken to imply a discouragement on my ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... go up to town; he wouldn't know whether you were wearing them or not. But there! if it comes to that, we could easily get them copied in paste; they imitate them so closely you can't tell the real from the sham. Fact. Why, half the women in London are wearing shams, and nobody's any ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... return the letter. It is, as you say, very genuine, truthful, affectionate, maternal—without a taint of sham or exaggeration. Mary will love her child without spoiling it, I think. She does not make an uproar about her happiness either. The longer I live the more I suspect exaggerations. I fancy it is sometimes a sort of fashion for ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... also revealed beavers in the moon, exhibiting most remarkable intelligence. Pictures of some of these and of moon scenery accompanied the article. The fraud was so clever as to deceive learned and unlearned alike. The sham story was continued through several issues of the Sun, and gave the paper an enormous sale. As it arrived in the different places, crowds scrambled for it, nor would those who failed to secure copies disperse ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... fellows. Given such a body of supermen, well agreed among themselves, and knowing what they want, supplied with every temptation to feed on the necessities of the weak, armed with extravagant legal powers, even fortified with a philosophy in the sham Darwin doctrine that, with nations as with men, the poverty of one is the wealth of another—there, my dear sir, you have a menace against which, could they realise it, all moderate citizens would be fighting for their lives. . . . But it is close upon dinner-time, and I refuse to extend ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mean anything of the kind," replied Lashmar. "To Dymchurch of course I shall speak quite freely: there's no choice. To Miss Bride I shall only say that I want our sham engagement to come to an end, because I am in love with you. The presence of Dymchurch here will be quite enough to explain my sudden action don't you see? I assure you, she must be made our friend, and ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the name of his own father! a precious fellow! Didn't I tell you 'twas a sham father? So now for the roasting I owe you, Mr. Jew." There was a large fire in the school-room; Mowbray, by a concerted movement between him and his friends, shoved the Jew close to the fire, and barricadoed him up, so ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... for vagabonds, who formerly begged about under pretence of having been discharged destitute from ships and hospitals; whence an idle malingerer wanting to enter the doctor's list is said to "sham Abraham." From a ward in Bedlam which was appropriated for the reception of idiots, which was named Abraham: it is a very old term, and was cited by Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy so far back ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... month," said Rob-in, "Under this green wood tree. It were great sham-e," said Rob-in, "A knight alone to ride, Without squy-er, yeoman or page, To walk-e by his side. I shall thee lend Little Johan my man, For he shall be thy knave; In a yeoman's stead he may thee stand If ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... us with a grin, and if we are not inclined to grin in return, as superficial observers of our civilization are wont to do, we may indeed grow seriously indignant. And German musicians now-a-days have good reason to be indignant if this miserable sham culture presumes to judge of the spirit and ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... suggestion of the Treasurer of Portugal, John Affonso de Alemquer, he decided on this African crusade instead. For the same strength and money might as well be spent in conquests from the Moslem as in sham-fights between Christians. So after reconnoitring the place, and lulling the suspicions of Aragon and Granada by a pretence of declaring war against the Count of Holland, King John gained the formal consent of his nobles at Torres Vedras, and set sail from Lisbon on St. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... greatest draw-backs to the pleasure of travelling in Asia is the being obliged, more or less, to make your way by bullying. It is true that your own lips are not soiled by the utterance of all the mean words that are spoken for you, and that you don’t even know of the sham threats, and the false promises, and the vainglorious boasts, put forth by your dragoman; but now and then there happens some incident of the sort which I have just been mentioning, which forces you to believe, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... wouldst know my name, whose day is done * With shifts of time and chances 'neath the sun, Know I am Shaddad's son, who ruled mankind * And o'er all earth upheld dominion! All stubborn peoples abject were to me; * And Sham to Cairo and to Adnanwone;[FN119] I reigned in glory conquering many kings; * And peoples feared my mischief every one. Yea, tribes and armies in my hand I saw; * The world all dreaded me, both friends and fone. When I took horse, I viewed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... dull day at the chancellery. His Excellency the American Ambassador was absent in Scotland, unveiling a bust to Bobby Burns, paid for by the numerous lovers of that poet in Pittsburg; the First Secretary was absent at Aldershot, observing a sham battle; the Military Attache was absent at the Crystal Palace, watching a foot-ball match; the Naval Attache was absent at the Duke of Deptford's, shooting pheasants; and at the Embassy, the Second Secretary, having lunched leisurely at the Artz, was now alone, but prepared ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... see Beautiful Sara appear at this instant, as it gave her an opportunity to inquire whether she had quite recovered from her swoon. Thereupon she plunged into lively chatter, in which she fully developed her sham gentility, mingled with real kindness of heart, and related with more prolixity than discretion the awful story of how she herself had almost fainted with horror when she, as innocent and inexperienced as could be, arrived in a canal boat at Amsterdam, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... exhausted him less than these sham freaks, but what seemed to him especially odious was the want of satisfaction left by the completed rape of these ghosts. Compared with their greedy tricks, the caresses of a woman only diffused a temperate pleasure, and ended ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... old gentleman, "why do you people dabble in matters you don't understand? Come here, Tweddle, and let me show you. Can't you see what a miserable sham the thing is—a cheap, tawdry imitation of the splendid classic type? Why, by merely exhibiting such a thing, you're ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... never been ill," the Baroness answered. "Her indisposition was a sham; forced on her by me, in her own interests. Her reputation is in peril; and you—you hateful Englishman—are the cause ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... His venison too, a guinea makes your own: He bought at thousands, what with better wit You purchase as you want, and bit by bit; Now, or long since, what difference will be found? You pay a penny, and he paid a pound. Heathcote himself, and such large-acred men, Lords of fat E'sham, or of Lincoln fen, Buy every stick of wood that lends them heat, Buy every pullet they afford to eat. Yet these are wights, who fondly call their own Half that the Devil o'erlooks from Lincoln town. The laws of God, as well as of the land, Abhor, a perpetuity should ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... handkerchief was found in his bureau the night of the robbery. Where is the handkerchief now? He burned it! He found a note on a card from her hidden in the handkerchief she had given Hatton to replace in the drawer. Where is the card? He burned it! He 'purposely destroyed all evidence against her.' A sham Quixote! Who found her handkerchief in his bureau? Who saw the burning? Who put the handkerchief in the drawer? Who told him of her confession? Who heard her beg that you should be delayed in your ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... must forgive me," I interrupted, "but you are overlooking facts. The fall over the cliff was premeditated, the sprained foot was a sham, the whole affair was clearly planned in order that he might be left alone in my room. Besides, there is ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pursued the other, 'the best thing about Alma is that she appreciates my wife. She has really a great admiration for Sibyl; no sham about it, I'm sure. I don't pretend to know much about women, but I fancy that kind of thing isn't common—real friendship and admiration between them. People always ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... dew from his friendly eyes; he will jump about; he will beat the ground [with ecstasy]. As those who mourn at funerals for pay, do and say more than those that are afflicted from their hearts; so the sham admirer is more moved than he that praises with sincerity. Certain kings are said to ply with frequent bumpers, and by wine make trial of a man whom they are sedulous to know whether he be worthy of their friendship or not. Thus, if you compose verses, let ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... adolescence in both sexes, more especially in girls, will be marvelled at, and many of the evils from which we suffer will cease to exist because the fatal and costly economy of the practical man is dismissed as a delusion and a sham, and it is perceived that whether for the saving of life or for the saving of money, adolescence must ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and filthy Trull, quite sham'd him out of any thoughts of Vertue; and therefore that he might the better please ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... partly right? If the tone of the uncultivated American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the faith in human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is there a politician among us daring enough ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... be enrichment, as in the case where a wooden spire built upon a stone tower is taken down to be replaced by honest work. It would be an enrichment if in St. George's Chapel, the central shrine of British royalty, the sham insignia now overhanging the stalls of the knights of the garter were to give room to genuine armor. Not merely then by addition, but possibly, in some instances, by both subtraction and substitution, we may find the "Prayer-book as ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... in spite of their teeth, got seventy-five head of volunteer labour on board, of whom not more than a dozen died of injuries. He had a hand, besides, in the amiable pleasantry which cost the life of Patteson; and when the sham bishop landed, prayed, and gave his benediction to the natives, Bostock, arrayed in a female chemise out of the trade-room, had stood at his right hand and boomed amens. This, when he was sure he was among good fellows, was his favourite yarn. "Two hundred head of labour for a hatful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cataclysm destroyed all Scott's other work, we should still have in this not merely an admirable monument of literature, but the picture of a character not inhumanly flawless, yet almost superhumanly noble; of the good man struggling against adversity, not, indeed, with a sham pretence of stoicism, but with that real fortitude of which stoicism is too often merely a caricature and a simulation. It is impossible not to recur to the Marmion passage already quoted as one reads the account of the successive misfortunes, the successive expedients resorted to, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... it; there is no intentional licentiousness; on the contrary, there are the most desperate attempts to live up to a New Morality by no means entirely of the Wiggins kind. But there is an absence of humour which is perfectly devastating: and there is a presence of the most disastrous atmosphere of sham sentiment, sham morality, sham almost everything, that can be imagined. It was hinted in the last volume that Madame de Stael's lover, Benjamin Constant, shows in one way the Nemesis of Sensibility; so does she herself in another. But the difference! In Adolphe a coal from the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... it, like a true-born Englishman," he said cheerily. "How does that song go? I forget. There, never mind. I won't act like a sham, even if I am where there's so much Dutch courage. Now, ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... orthodoxy of similar work in the nineteenth. Benassis no doubt plays Providence in a manner and with a success which it is rarely given to mortal man to achieve; but we do not feel either the approach to sham, or the more than approach to gush, with which similar handling on the part of Dickens too often affects some of us. The sin and the punishment of the Doctor, the thoroughly human figures of Genestas and the rest, save the situation from this and other drawbacks. We ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Bettina's sickness was the result of her nocturnal employment, or of the fright which she must have felt at my meeting with Cordiani. At all events, I determined to postpone my revenge until the return of her brother, although I had not the slightest suspicion that her illness was all sham, for I did not give her credit for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize and respect.... They have an earnest purpose, born of conviction that their ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... instinct of man should be that you cannot do it. But lose sight of these Divine Things; lose the sense that perceives them, their essential universality, their inevitable universality;—and where are you? What are you to do about the inner life?—Why, for lack of reality, you shall take a sham: you shall hatch up some formula of words; or better still, take the formula already hatched that comes handiest; call it your creed or confession of faith; fix your belief on that, as supreme and infallible, the sure and certain key to the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and live under canvas for several weeks. During this encampment the cadets were given a taste of real military life, with strenuous drills and marches, target and bayonet practice, and usually ending with a thrilling sham battle. ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... they refuse to be driven out of our community and be deprived of the privilege of British citizenship? The thing is impossible. All your talk about details, the union of hearts and the rest of it, is a sham. This is a reality. It is a rock, and on that rock this Bill will ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... illustrative of the good humour of the Emperor (who, she says, is an angel), and of the free and frank reception he gives to strangers. In the midst of some splendid military fetes, which terminated with a sham siege by 50,000 of his guards the last day, word was brought him that two strange-looking men had presented themselves at the lines, and requested to be allowed to see what was going on. They said they were English, had come from Scotland on purpose to see the Russian ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... a fool," said Adrian, turning sullen; "yes, I see now that I have been a fool to trust in you and your sham arts, but I am not fool enough to give evidence against my own people in any of your courts. What I have said I said never thinking that ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Wittleworth, magnificently. "Am I a man of ordinary common sense? Have I lived to attain my present stature without growing wiser with every day of life I lived? Of what avail are my judgment, my knowledge, and my experience, if I cannot penetrate a sham so transparent as this? What makes me think so? Does a man of wealth and influence leave his own child among strangers, in a foreign land, for ten years? No! I ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... /sham-bol'ik link/ /n./ A Unix symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in your ending up in some completely unexpected part of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... very ambitious that he should make a name in the world, and wanted him to get into the very highest circles. Oh, what a mistake people make about these highest circles. Society is false; it is a sham. She was deceived like a good many more votaries of fashion and hunters after wealth at the present time. She thought it was beneath her son to go down and associate with those young men who hadn't much money. She tried to get him away from them, but they had more influence ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... with threats that made her blood run cold; for she was only a woman, sir, and alone, except for me, a child as could do nothing in the way of help. With a last horrid threat on his lips the fellow turned towards the settle—there was a pistol hid in the clothes of the sham baby we found out afterwards—when he was stopped by something as come soft and noiseless out of the corner beyond and got right in his way. I see what it was after a minute. Between him and the settle where the pistol was lying there was ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... girl's low voice lifted itself belligerently. "What do you think she is? Imitation? Why, she's the one REAL thing in this whole sham world! I guess you've never met anybody who knew her or you wouldn't keep gulping out idiotic things like that! I guess if you ever talked with her even a minute you'd understand how real she is. She has the crispest—the sincerest way of speaking. Though of course it's not a bit like other people's ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... what he is, regardless of what other men think of him. The man who is indicted and executed as a rebel, often afterward has the word "Savior" carved on his tomb; and sometimes men who are hailed as saviors in their day are afterward found to be sham saviors—to wit, charlatans. Conservation is a plan of Nature. To keep the good is to conserve. A Conservative is a man who puts on the brakes when he thinks Progress is going to land Civilization in the ditch and ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... attempted. He thought hym self a God ouer nature, all landes and Seas to giue place to hym, and puffed with pride, he forgatte hymself: his power was terrible, his harte fainte, whereupon his enteryng into Grece was not so dreaded, as his flight fro[m] thence was sham[-] full, mocked and scorned at, for all his power he was driuen backe from the lande, by Leonides king of the Lacedemoni- ans, he hauing but a small nomber of men, before his second battaile fought on the Sea: he sente fower thousande armed men, to spoile the riche and sumpteous temple ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... the Fondege family had been raised to such affluence that they must have asked themselves if it were possible they had ever known the agonies of that life of false appearances and sham luxury which is a thousand times worse than an existence of abject poverty. "Is it possible that I am deceived?" Marguerite said to herself, on retiring to her room that evening. For it surprised her that ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... girls, dressed in gipsy costume, who ran one on each side of the carriage, begging that the kind gentleman would give them sixpence, as they were poor strangers who had taken nothing all day. Mr. Howitt, who had made a special study of the gipsy tribe, perceived in an instant that these were only sham Romanys. He paid no attention to their pleading, but observed that he hoped they would enjoy their frolic, and only wished that he were as rich as they. Subsequently, he discovered that the mock-gipsies, who had been ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the Knight should have returned so soon. She took the bowl from its gold wrapping, expecting it to make the room full of light, but it did not shine at all, so she knew that it was a sham thing and not the true bowl of Buddha. She returned it at once and refused to see him. The Knight threw the bowl away and returned to his home in despair. He gave up now all hopes ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... would be a pleasant pastime to sit on Patty's veranda and talk, become, and act like one of the young people. He was growing old; his youth must be renewed soon, or he would lose it utterly. This young man had been surfeited with noise and light, with the sham and glitter of hotels, clubs and restaurants. He was not to the manner born; thus he could easily see how palpably false life is in a great city. To those who have lived in the abnormal glamour of city life, absolute quiet is a kind ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... When the sham quarrel came to an end—which it did soon as he who commenced it saw it should—the knot of spectators it had drawn around dispersed, leaving things as before. But not as before felt Rivas and Kearney. Very different now the thoughts stirring within them, both trying to ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... that fresh ardor and energy which is sneered at in the familiar proverb, "A new broom sweeps clean," Felix swept away at the misery, and the ignorance, and the vice of his degraded district. He was not going to spare himself; it should be no sham fight with him. The place was his first battlefield; and it had a strong attraction ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... two nights he contented himself with merely describing and exaggerating the chief dramatic incident of the Audience, but the third night he added illustration to description. He throned the barber in his own high chair to represent the sham King; then he told how the Court watched the Maid with intense interest and suppressed merriment, expecting to see her fooled by the deception and get herself swept permanently out of credit by the storm of scornful laughter which would follow. He worked this scene ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... vision weirdly wrought were seen: For on that shifting background each one saw His own reflection and recoiled in awe; Saw himself there, a bright light shining through him, Not as he thought himself, but as men knew him. Before this sudden and revealing sense Each rag of sham, each tatter of pretence Withered and vanished, as dissolved in air, And left the shuddering human creature bare. But when they turned and looked upon a friend They saw a sight that all but made amend: For they beheld him as a radiant spirit Indued with virtue and surpassing merit, Not ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... sickly pretence that she is only driving beautiful horses, or listening to music, or entertaining her friends. I suppose a Society woman has as much right to advertise her personality as a politician or a manufacturer of pills; all I object to is the sham of it, the everlasting twaddle about her love of privacy. Take Mrs. Winnie Duval, for instance. You would think to hear her that her one ideal in life was to be a simple shepherdess and to raise flowers; but, as a matter of fact, she keeps a scrap-album, ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... after the Wealth you imagine me to possess; if I were poor, you would not even offer me your hand, let alone make such efforts to obtain it. I see through all your devices, base miscreant, including your sham repentance, which deserves the descent of God's just indignation upon your guilty head, ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... Powers lay dormant under the spell of the new doctrine of non-intervention, the King of Piedmont vigorously pursued his career of spoliation. Having accepted a sham plebiscitum, he annexed, by a formal decree of 18th March, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Parma and Modena, and that portion of the Papal States known as the Legations, to his ancient kingdom of Sardinia ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... could obtain a hearing. He spoke with great vigour and fluency. He denounced the letter as an outrage which should be proclaimed from one end of Europe to the other; that it was not their town, or their club, or themselves had been insulted, but Ireland! that this mock-lord (cheers)—this sham viscount—(greater cheers)—this Brummagem peer, whose nobility their native courtesy and natural urbanity had so long deigned to accept as real, should now be taught that his pretensions only existed on sufferance, and had no claim beyond the polite condescension of men whom it was no stretch of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor supernumeraries and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thought so," exclaimed Adair. "Tell them that they shall be set free, and that they need no longer sham being sailors, which one can tell with half an ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... the States army come before the city than a Spanish captain observed—"We shall now have a droll siege—cousins on the outside, cousins on the inside. There will be a sham fight or two, and then the cousins will make it up, and arrange ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... other way. In the first place the Pawnees were quite certain to perceive the sham, and, in case they were deceived, they were likely to tomahawk Otto so as to end the annoyance. These two considerations kept him plodding along with the party, which, fortunately for him, ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... not this daring and heroic uncle of mine, while bravely upbearing his gorgeous silken banner (a gift of the beautiful and all-accomplished ladies of Seaport) in a well-contested sham fight, receive, from the accidental discharge of a field-piece, an honorable and soldier-like wound, and of which he ever after boasted louder, and took more pride in, than the bravest veteran in Grant's gallant army of the scars and injuries received at the siege of Vicksburg? And no wonder at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... pretty frocks and hats expressed a love of dressing prettily, which was honest and genuine enough, while the unhappy effects about him could spring only from a hollow vanity far lower than a woman's wish to be charming. It was not an innate impulse which produced them, but a sham ambition, implanted from without, and artificially stimulated by the false and fleeting mood of the time. They must really hamper the growth of aesthetic knowledge among people who were not destitute of ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... street hearing these answers replied, "Confined in his bed, is he?—In the jail, it should be, as many will be along of him. Ill, is he, Sir Ulick?—Sham sickness, may be—all his life a sham." All these and innumerable other taunts and imprecations, with which the poor people vented their rage, Ormond heard as he made his ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... will cost them very little effort, for sinners who are washed clean with such delightful celerity are not likely to be in love with "erroneous doctrines" that declare the Pope's dispensing power a sham, and sternly tell men that the consequences of action, whether good or bad, are inevitable. We very much doubt, however, if "erroneous doctrines" will disappear through the prayers of the pilgrims or the curses of the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Cedros Salse, the results of an explosion which had happened only two months before, and of which they give a drawing. A surface two hundred feet round had been upheaved fifteen feet, throwing the trees in every direction; and the sham earthquake had shaken the ground for two hundred or three hundred yards round, till the natives fancied that their huts were going ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... but that he was looking forward to his glass of whiskey-and-water between the acts. No, he didn't impose on me one bit. I didn't believe in Sardanapalus for a moment, even before I had the privilege of seeing and hearing him as Mr Buskin in his dressing-room. The entire business was a sham." ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... was an intensely ambitious man and without physical fear. He was always in perfect training and early acquired the art of warfare of the Indian type. It is told of him that when he was about ten years old, he engaged with other boys in a sham battle on the shore of a lake near St. Paul. Both sides were encamped at a little distance from one another, and the rule was that the enemy must be surprised, otherwise the attack would be considered a failure. One must come within ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... State rules and inspectors on the part of the investigators is, I think, well founded; they would probably mean either stupid interference or become a sham. But the public demand for regulation rests on a perfectly sound ethical principle, the denial of which by the scientists speaks ill for either their moral sense or their political ability. So long as the physiologists disclaim ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... of a frozen dream, Whirling bit of tinsel on the troubled spray, 'Tis not your hair's dead roses (your sunless, scentless roses) 'Tis not your sham sad poses That tell your hollow day— The glass is at my lips, but the wine is far away, The music's in my throat, but my soul no song discloses, The laughter's on my tongue, but ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... his shrewd eyes sparkling with excitement, "I'll do it in fine style. Ask no questions. I've got a plan. I'll have another breakdown, not a sham one, this time. I'll have you two well covered up in the wagon box, and you can lie there until some one comes ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... charged that the attitude of the Socialists toward "tainted wealth" was all a sham. What had happened was simply that the German members of the local were getting German money, and making it "Socialist money" by the simple device of passing it through their consecrated hands. As this had been hinted by Norwood in the local, the German comrades now charged that Norwood ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... advance, on the left of the dock, were the stalls reserved during the sham trial for the counsel for the defence. As yet they were only occupied by the junior advocates, Sir Colman O'Loghlen and John O'Hagan. The benches at the right of the dock, and nearer to the bench, reserved for the Attorney-General and his retainers, were vacant. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... enemy's trenches; or where the Belgians have fixed barbed-wire entanglements to stop the rush of the charging German troops? Just to think that here we are really watching a battle that isn't like one of the sham rights they have every summer at home. It's ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... Empfindsamkeit, die sich auf eine kleinliche alberne, vernunftlose und lcherliche Weise, also da ussert, wo sie nicht hingehrte." Campe goes yet further in his distinctions and invents the monstrous word, "Empfindsamlichkeit" for the sentimentality which is superficial, affected, sham (geheuchelte). Campe's newly coined word was never accepted, and in spite of his own efforts and those of others to honor the word "Empfindsamkeit" and restrict it to the commendable exercise of human sympathy, the opposite process was victorious and "Empfindsamkeit," ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... work was performed under conditions approximating to actual warfare. Both offensive and defensive tactics were employed, including lively sham battles with grenades, bayonets, and trench mortars. For bayonet practice dummies were constructed and the men were taught the six most vital points of attack. The troops were entertained by stories telling how the French decorated and painted their ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... of the Birds is "the everlasting allegory of foolish sham and flimsy ambition." It was aimed particularly at the ambitious Sicilian schemes of Alcibiades; for at the time the play appeared, the Athenian army was before Syracuse, and elated by good news daily arriving, the Athenians were ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... whist-table towards the fireplace with an action a la Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... No part I take in party fray, With tropes from Billingsgate's slang-whanging Tartars, I fear no Pope—and let great Ernest play At Fox and Goose with Fox's Martyrs! I own I laugh at over-righteous men, I own I shake my sides at ranters, And treat sham Abr'am saints with wicked banters, I even own, that there are times—but then It's when I 've got my wine—I ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... which doubtless will not tend directly towards their emancipation, because they will be claimed without due knowledge of the one thing necessary to claim, EQUALITY OF CONDITION; but which indirectly will help to break up our rotten sham society, while that claim for equality of condition will be made constantly and with growing loudness till it MUST be listened to, and then at last it will only be a step over the border and the civilized world will be socialized; and, looking back on ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... constitutional system, intended to amuse the colonists, served no other end than to irritate and exasperate men who had penetration enough to detect the mockery, and whose self-respect made them abhor the sham."[218] ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice, for Maud smiled. Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham, the overshading, the overtone. It was this which had given poise and penetration to her own work and made her of worth to the world. The serious critic, with the sense of humour and the power of expression, must inevitably command the world's ear. And so it was that she ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... horrible. If at least there were any grounds for them, it would be something to get hold of, to cling to. Now there are only shadows that hide themselves in the bushes, and stick out their heads and grin; it is like fighting with the air, or firing blank cartridges in a sham fight. A fatal reality would have called forth resistance, stirred life and soul to action; but now my thoughts dissolve into air, and my brain grinds a void until it is on fire.—Put a pillow under my head, and throw something over me, I am cold. I ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... voice of success. Still, she could not keep her secret. She tried to be calm and indifferent, but it was a palpable sham. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser |
