"Clannish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their own within their barony independent of the regular government of the province. The Germans were also extremely sectional. They clung with better success to their own language, customs, and literature. The Scotch-Irish were so clannish that they had ideas of founding a separate province on the Susquehanna. Even the Church of England people were so aloof and partisan that, though they lived about Philadelphia among the Quakers, they were extremely hostile to the Quaker ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... for a young woman to marry. Paradoxically enough, it would seem that women have less and less knowledge of the world as they have contrived to see more of it; that as they have become more emancipated in liberty of action they have become more clannish in thought; and that as the range of their opportunities has widened and their interests have multiplied, their concern with the most elemental female instinct, their preoccupation with their immemorial business of the chase, has but intensified. By word of mouth the modern woman tells ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... with their possibilities, probably forming their deepest absorptions. It remains only to be said that, passionately attached to the customs, the habits of thought of their forefathers, the Highlanders of the Lake Megantic region are intensely clannish. Splendidly generous, they would suffer death rather than betray the man who had eaten of their salt. Eminently law-abiding, they would not stretch out a hand to deprive of freedom one who had thrown ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... proposed to sell part of Kintail, they offered to buy in the land for him, that it might not pass from the family. One son was then living, and there was no immediate prospect of the succession expiring; but, in deference to their clannish prejudice or affection, the sale of any portion of the estate was deferred for about two years. The blow came at last. Lord Seaforth was involved in West India plantations, which were mismanaged, and he was forced to dispose of part of the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... the monarchic powers of this period in common were not so successful as in the rest of Europe. The kings of the house of Stuart, who had themselves proceeded from the ranks of the nobility, never succeeded in reducing the powerful lords to real obedience. The clannish national feeling, closely bordering on the old Keltic principle, procured the nobles at all times numerous and devoted followers: they fought out their feuds among themselves, and then combined anew in free confederacies. They held fast to the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... lies buried. Had he succumbed at his natal Macchia, this would have been done; but death overtook him in the alien parish of San Demetrio, and his remains were mingled with those of its poorest citizens. A microcosmic illustration of that clannish spirit of Albania which he had spent a lifetime in endeavouring to ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... do stick together!" he said. "Talk about men being clannish! I believe," he chuckled, "from the way Miss Thompson is blushing, that she's got a very best beau! I believe that she was out with ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... him with a leaden kind of gaze. "Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?" she said, with slow bluntness. Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: "I don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were doing it—but I mean outside, in ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Presiding Judge, an Assistant Judge, and a "Substitut." The latter, in small towns, is the substitute for the Procureur de la Republique, or Public Prosecutor. The legal profession in France is far more "clannish" than with us, for lawyers have always played a great part in the history of France. The so-called "Parlements" (not to be confounded with our Parliament) had had, up to the time of the French Revolution, very large powers indeed. They were originally Supreme Courts ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... afraid of the negro as he stands alone, but what I dread is that in some closely-contested election ambitious men will use him to hold the balance of power and make him an element of danger. He is ignorant, poor, and clannish, and they may impact him as their ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... of the Slavs, the Poles who come here are commonly poor, and of the peasant class; about one third of them are illiterate. They are clannish, and clash with the Lithuanians and other races. Lovers of liberty, they clash also with the Catholic authorities, going so far even as organized rebellion to obtain control of their church properties and freedom ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... Yankee warfare. When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted, the Irish brigade was called upon. But, ordinarily, they were regarded, as a party of mad fellows, more ornamental than useful, and entirely too clannish and factious to be entrusted with power. Meagher himself seemed to be less erratic than his subordinates; for he had married a New York lady, and had learned, by observation, the superiority of the pelfish, plodding native before his own fitful, impracticable ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... should be a real live animal of this description on the ground, he will be almost certain to have neighbours—some half-dozen of his own kidney—living at greater or less distances around him. They are not usually of a clannish disposition; but, in a matter of this kind, they will be as unanimous in their sympathies, and antipathies too, as they would about the butchering of a bear. Turn one of them out by force—either legal or otherwise—and it would be like bringing ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Lester's wife, without hesitation. "I may as well be very frank with you, and say that I feared you might take this information in quite another spirit. Of course you know to begin with that the Kane family is very clannish. Mrs. Kane, your—ah—your husband's mother, was a very proud and rather distant woman, and his sisters and brothers are rather set in their notions as to what constitute proper family connections. They ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... six years Scott held himself to Scottish history, giving us in nine remarkable novels the whole of Scotland, its heroism, its superb faith and enthusiasm, and especially its clannish loyalty to its hereditary chiefs; giving us also all parties and characters, from Covenanters to Royalists, and from kings to beggars. After reading these nine volumes we know Scotland and Scotchmen as we can know them in no other way. In 1819 he turned abruptly from Scotland, and in Ivanhoe, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and rivalries, and animosities of the Scotch, however, still slept, he said, in their ashes, and might easily be roused. Their hereditary feeling for names was still great. It was not always safe to have even the game of foot-ball between villages, the old clannish spirit was too apt to break out. The Scotch, he said, were more revengeful than the English; they carried their resentments longer, and would sometimes lay them by for years, but would be sure to gratify them in ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... was still avoided after dark. We may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the vampire spares none. And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not of aristocratic birth. His people were Cornish, of an old and respected Cornish family, but quite unknown in the great world. They were very clannish, were quite satisfied with their position in their own county, were too simple and too well-bred to share any of the vulgar instincts and aspirations of the climber. Comfortably off, they had no aching desire to be richer than they were, to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Foreigners, as a rule, were not liked by shipmasters, and their British shipmates in the fo'c'stle resented their presence. One reason of this was that they would always "ship" at a lower rate of wage than Englishmen, and were clannish. I have known of captains of favourite clipper passenger ships, trading between London and the colonies, declining to ship a foreigner, even an English-speaking Dane or Scandinavian, who make good sailor-men, and ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... are never at peace with each other; and now there is a feud that can not be healed between England and Ireland. In some of the mountain regions of the Southern States, where the people yet retain the clannish temper of their Scotch and Irish ancestors, there are neighborhood enmities that go down from father to son, from generation to generation; and that issue in such fist fights, brawls, and mobs, as sometimes to tax the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... too radical in politics, and a little too liberal, as it is called, in a matter of much greater consequence; but a superior people, on the whole. They will give you a warm reception, will the Scotch. Your name will insure that; and they are clannish; and another warm reception will, I assure you, await you here, when, returning, you ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... early as July. That is, of course, if the matter of who's to go where had not already been settled the Thanksgiving before. In some families the last rite of each Thanksgiving feast is to discuss this question and settle it then and there for the following year. Conservative and clannish families who live far enough apart so that little quarrels can not be born among them to upset this fixed yearly programme ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... No. 1: "Sociable, scheming, secretive; poor judge of men; lacking seriously in executive ability; decidedly a 'one-man-job' man; does not plan ahead; clannish, narrow-minded; very low intelligence for a foreman. Any organization he builds will be close-mouthed, unreliable, and selfish in structure. Because of the technical knowledge of the business which he has gained, and which can be gained only by long experience, he should do good work in ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... people of Boston and Charleston, between the Knickerbockers of New York and the Creoles of New Orleans. A Scotchman was to the South a comprehensive name for a greedy, beggarly adventurer, knavish and money-loving to the last degree, full of absurd pride of pedigree, clannish and cold-blooded, vindictive as a Corsican, and treacherous as a modern Greek. An Englishman was to the North a bullying, arrogant coward,—purse-proud, yet cringing to rank,—without loyalty and without sentiment,—given over to mere material interests, not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... interesting bird is a clannish fellow. He has lost the ordinary sparrow habit and has come to like to live in crowded groups. Seclusion is not at all to his taste, and if there are only a few sparrows in the neighborhood those few will most certainly be found living ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... clannish as ever," cried the General. "Scotland has changed so much in the last half century that the Highlanders might have ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... thoroughly know the people he had to deal with or he would have made allowance for their clannish devotion to each other's interests. Every one recognized him as a public enemy, and however politely he might be treated public sympathy was on the side of his opponents. He might flatter himself that he was keeping ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... endeavored to cultivate the purity of their mother tongue the while they enriched it; this, above all, was the ambition of the various "Linguistic Societies." Their activity, though soon deprived of a wide usefulness by pedantry and a clannish spirit, prepared the way for great feats of linguistic reorganization. Through Christian Wolff a philosophic terminology was systematically created; from Pietism were received new mediums of expression for intimate conditions of the soul; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... patient and a clannish people; their love for one another is stronger than that of any civilized people I know. If this were not so, I believe there would have been tribes of cannibals among them. White people have been known ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... who forgot to write profusive thanks for the half-a-crown they gave you when you first went to school. You can always tell the man or woman who live among their relatives. They possess no individuality, no "vision"; they are narrow, self-centred, pompous, clannish—with that clannishness which means only complete self-satisfaction with the clan. They take their mental and moral "cue" from the oldest generation among them. The younger members are, metaphorically speaking, patted on the head and told ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... a very affectionate and devoted household, clannish to a degree, and undemonstrative, as mountaineers often are. The deep well of their love did not foam and ripple like a brook, but the water was always there, to draw upon at will. "The shallows murmur, but the deeps are dumb." It was so in the ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... acknowledgment of any human being's right to live in any land on earth. She had tried first by peaceful means to secure these ends, but failing here and driven on by the lash of her own necessity, Japan had come to feel that force alone could break the clannish resistance of the Anglo-Saxon, who having gone into the four corners of the earth and forced upon the world his language, commerce and customs, now refused to receive ideas ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... faith fled to India for safety, and the Parsees of to-day are the descendants of these refugees. For generations they have made education a feature, have always helped each other, and been extremely clannish, although preserving toward people of other religions a respectful attitude. Their creed, claimed to have descended from the Hebrew prophet Daniel, is expressed in three precepts of two words each: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Orthodox Parsees wear ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of this characteristic are frequent. Not a cabinet is formed, but the question of its make-up is discussed from the clannish standpoint. Even though it is now thirty years since the centralizing policy was entered upon and clan distinctions were effectually broken down, yet clan suspicion and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... most of it—the substance—is English. The Irish are hard workers, but generally spendthrifts, though there are some excellent exceptions. The Irish hold together in religion, politics, and drink. The Scotch are not so numerous as the Irish, but somehow they have a knack of getting on. They are not clannish like the Irish. Each hangs by his own hook. Then there are the Germans, who are pretty numerous, a very respectable body of men, with a sprinkling of Italians and Swiss. The Germans keep up their old country fashions, hold ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... the regions beyond Jordan, and its ruler was a person of such influence that it was not considered prudent to leave him too well provided with funds. By thus obliterating the old tribal boundaries, Solomon doubtless hoped to destroy, or at any rate greatly weaken, that clannish spirit which showed itself with such alarming violence at the time of the revolt of Sheba, and to weld into a single homogeneous mass the various Hebrew and Canaanitish elements of which the people of Israel ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... indication of their character. They were exceedingly skilful with both axe and rifle, were expert backwoodsmen, but without physical strength, very childish and ignorant, vindictive, narrow, and so extremely clannish and tenacious of their own opinions that they were always an exasperating element to be reckoned with, in any public matter. We saw also a compact little group of dark small men, with bright eyes and quick ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... his throat, and the throat of Sim Caley, with cigars. He had been glad to return to the familiar, casual cigarettes, the generous bag of Green Goose for five cents; Sim had reverted to his haggled plug. He had no desire to build a pretentious dwelling—his instinct, his clannish spirit, was too closely bound up in the house of his father and grandfather to derive any ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Brandeis family came to Winnebago five years before, these people had waited, cautiously, and investigated, and then had called. They were of a type to be found in every small town; prosperous, conservative, constructive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their city cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile neighbors, living well, spending their money freely, taking a vast pride in the education of their children. But here was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting out to earn ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber |
