"Balderdash" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tremens that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."—A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling[A] as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer," rises to the lofty grandeur of the "Novum Organon,"—a sight that makes one who really ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... articles." The Squire apparently was not aware that the superlatively excellent Hollands, Geneva, and India-hand-kerchiefs were, the one the manufacture of Spital-fields, and the other the sophisticated balderdash known by the name of Maidstone gin. It is a fact, altho' not generally known, that at the different watering places every season, the venders of silk handkerchiefs manufactured in Spital-flelds, carry on a lucrative trade, by disposing ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "Balderdash! I have as much right as anybody to look at the record. I grant you the same right to look up my family and my friends and the status of my bank account and my credit rating and my service record. Grant it? Hell, I couldn't ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... to be said for Whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an authentic creature. He did not sit in a study and throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not by his poses, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... is easy for happy people to be good. All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my doctrine. A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one. What it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of the Seven Gables would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine, and Jane Eyre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance—the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... The marvellous peacemaker of Europe, the fire-engine who, as Hermann had said, was ready to put out all conflagrations, the fatuous mountebank who pretended to be a friend to England, who conducted his own balderdash which he called music, had changed his role and shown his black heart ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... reputation going. He's tried to increase the frequency, accuracy, and detail of his 'flashes' by studying up on the techniques used by other seers, and, as a result, he's managed to soak up enough mystic balderdash to fill ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett
... third a brow for laurels (of thistle I hope), another a square, military, heroic frame, another firmness in lips, another an unfathomed depth in the eye, etc., etc. Never I heard in Europe such balderdash. And the ladies—not the women and gentlewomen—are worse than the men in thus stupefying themselves and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Collected Works that many of us have read through more than once. Not all clever people have thought Lavengro and The Romany Rye to be thus great. A critic in the Athenaeum declared Lavengro when it was published in 1851 to be "balderdash," while a critic writing just fifty years afterwards and writing from Norfolk, alas! insisted that the author of this book "was absolutely wanting in the power of invention" that he (Borrow) could "only have drawn upon his memory," that ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... should for ever dine in Bounderby Hall, for ever lodge in Bounderby buildings, for ever attend a Bounderby chapel, for ever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, for ever be supported out of a Bounderby estate, and for ever nauseate all healthy stomachs, with a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster? Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the Coketown street, and this same precious will was to begin its long career of ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... very true. When I see the windbags, the carpet-baggers, the charlatans, the—the—the fools and ignoramuses who corrupt the multitude by their wealth, or seduce them by spouting balderdash to them, I cannot help thinking that an honest man with no humbug about him, who will talk straight common sense and take his stand on the solid ground of principle and public duty, must win his way with men ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... else of the same origin in the score, is impotent because there is no trace of Wagner's logical mind, either in the choice of material or its development. Phrases of real pith and moment are mixed with phrases of indescribable balderdash, yet these phrases recur with painful reiteration and with all the color tints which Puccini is able to scrape from a marvelously varied and garish orchestral palette. The most remarkable feature, the feature which shows the composer's constructive talent in its brightest aspect, is the fluency of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... an excellent dinner ready in the Pleissenburg Fortress yonder, [Fassmann, p. 410.]— but he compliments to a dreadful extent! Harangues and compliments in no end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash; repeating and again repeating, What a never-imagined honor it is; in particular saying three times over, How the Majesty of Saxony, King August, had he known, would have wished for wings to fly hither; and bowing to the very ground, "as if, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... owe to the objective method the progress that, from the times of Bacon and Galileo, has transformed the face of the world; social science must henceforth replace rhetoric, scholasticism and all balderdash of that kind; affirmations, a priori, and excommunications, by the rigorous scrutiny of facts: Unity of Method will ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... rather with balderdash, such as this, Mr. Buckram beguiled the few minutes necessary for removing the bandages, hiding the bottles, and stirring up the cripples about to be examined, and the heavy flap of the coach-house door announcing that all was ready, he forthwith led the way through ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... though. Women without children are always vapouring about their husbands, as if married life ought to be a garden of Eden. One woman, one man, and all the rest of the balderdash. I sot your Aunt Bridget on you before, gel, and I'll have to do it again I'm thinking. But go away now. If I'm to get better I must have rest. Nessy!" (calling) "I've a mort o' things to do and most everything is on my shoulders. Nessy! My medicine! Nessy! Nessy! Where in the world has ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... captivated by the balderdash, "there is, after all, colour in words. Don't you remember how delighted you were with the name of a little town we passed through on our way to Orleans—Romorantin? You were haunted by it and said it was like the purple note of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... not use such absurdly fine words. The Stranger's talk is sham, like the book he reads and the hair he wears, and the bank he sits on, and the diamond ring he makes play with—but, in the midst of the balderdash, there runs that reality of love, children, and forgiveness of wrong, which will be listened to wherever it is preached, and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... liked to stoop to. I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called —- bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the City, one evening,—upon Universal Peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. In a word, I do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: Much prurient ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson |
