"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... how easy a topic it is to dwell on the faults of departed greatness. By a revolution in the state, the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour. But steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. They will judge of human institutions ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... creed, or thought one unimportant, and was actuated by malignant hatred against Judaism and Christianity: Rousseau had a firm creed, and spoke with decency of the religion which he rejected. Voltaire was devoid of taste for ancient literature, witty under a mask, a selfish sycophant to the ancient political regime: Rousseau never denied the authorship of his writings, was democratic in tastes, and was the means of exciting a love for antiquity. Finally rejecting to a great degree the sensational philosophy; ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Conveying malicious and unfounded misrepresentations of America under the seal of official correspondence had indeed long been a favorite means of mending the fortunes of those decayed gentlemen and bankrupt politicians whose ambition it was to rise in office by playing the sycophant to some great man in England. Mr. Bernard had "played this game," and had been found out at it, as every one knew. But Mr. Bernard was no American; and it was scarcely to be imagined that Mr. Hutchinson, who boasted "that his Ancestors were ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... friend. By homely methods, this unerring diagnostician of the human soul had been reading him, liking him, and making him feel a heart-warming sympathy. The man who shrunk from lion-hunters, and who could return the churl's answer to the advances of sycophant and flatterer, enthusiastically poured out for the ungainly mountain boy all the rare quality and bouquet of his seasoned personal charm. It was a vintage distilled from experience and humanity. It had met the ancient requirement for the mellowing and perfecting of good Madeira, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... tremble under its terrors, or else turns him into a furious fanatic, who is at once cruel, intolerant, and inhuman: in a great number of states arbitrary power crushes him, obliges him to become a cringing sycophant, renders him completely vicious: in those despotic states the law rarely visits crime with punishment, except in those who are too feeble to oppose its course? or when it has become incapable of restraining the violent excesses to which a bad government gives birth. In short, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... short, they are, without willing it, centres of energy. Of what energy? Obviously, of the energy of love: the love of God manifested in them draws men to God. The man at whose disposal is unlimited force compels men to do his will; but he draws no one to him except the hypocrite and the sycophant who expect to gain something by their servility. The saint draws men, not to himself, but to God; for obviously it is not his power but God's power that is ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the Emperor's daughter; has put ill-will between him and the royal family. And if Briennius bears no longer the fame of a rational man, and the renown of a good leader, he is deprived of both by following the advice of this artful sycophant." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and a fop by name, Here moulders one whose bones some honour claim; No sycophant, although of Spanish race, And though no hound, a martyr to the chase. Ye pheasants, rabbits, leverets rejoice, Your haunts no longer echo to his voice; This record of his fate, exulting view— He died ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... the reconstruction of 1835, when it was necessary that the Whigs should conciliate the Mountain. He was a pretentious, underbred, half-educated man, fluent with all the commonplaces of middle-class ambition, which are humorously called democratic opinions, but at heart a sycophant of the aristocracy. He represented, however, a large and important constituency, and his promotion was at first looked upon as a masterpiece of management. The Mountain, who knew Jorrocks by heart, and felt that they had in their ranks men in every sense his superior, and that ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli |
