"Doctrinaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... taken Colville up, being all in the Republican family; whichever it was, it was a mortification for Colville which his pride could not brook. He stood disgraced before the community not only as a theorist and unpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what was worse, he could not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad faith; his conscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money was found, and a printer bought up with it to start a paper in opposition to the Democrat-Republican. Then Colville contemptuously ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... he will have time enough afterwards to introduce his "grand thoughts" into the army. Two things, says Thiers, impose upon Frenchmen—military glory and profound silence. Trochu has the first to win, and he apparently scorns the latter. He is a species of military doctrinaire, and he finds it difficult to avoid lecturing soldiers or civilians at least once a day. I was looking at him the other day, and I never saw calm, serene, self-complacency more clearly depicted upon the human countenance. Failure or success will find ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... on free government in a complex, industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... desire there was a strong love of fame, and great ambition. He wrote a book upon the elections, and the king created a new department for him—that of director-general of the communes and departments. He made use of his position to extend his influence. He became chief of the doctrinaire school, which included many eminent men of that time, and acquired great political power. It occupied a kind of middle ground between the ancien regime and pure liberalism. There came a reaction, and Guizot again took to his pen, leaving office ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... age he dwelt amid his fancies. He was truly a man of the world among men of letters and a man of letters among men of the world. A philosopher pure and simple—a lover of books, of pictures, of all things beautiful and elevating—he yet attained great riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion for affairs he was able to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the yearning to be of service to the State which ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as 'one of the dissolvents of the age—as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.' She was no doctrinaire. 'One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to give the meat before you give the hunger.' She was delighted at a letter of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no results; you have results ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... form with, pedantic rigor. He was as far as possible from a one-sided worship of the Greeks. His reference to his 'strict form' hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot, fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the narrow opening between the upper and the lower knife of the guillotine. His coat is blue: so is his waistcoat; and his nether garments are of a severe drab brown. It is impossible to imagine that any man who assumes such garments could be otherwise than a severe and sanguinary doctrinaire, anxious for his neighbours' blood. The genial smile with which the House of Commons has become familiar has invalidated the Tory estimate of Mr. Morley, but it was that memorable Thursday that completed the transformation of judgment. No man could be a lover of the guillotine who could ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... from his usual political reserve, as he witnessed these games in honor of a deity to whom he so habitually did practical homage, for it was seldom that this elaborate functionary, who might be termed quite a doctrinaire in his way, composed his senses in sleep, without having pretty effectually steeped them in the liquor of the neighboring hills; a habit that was of far more general use among men of his class in that age than in this of ours, which seems so eminently ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter—a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... a young Doctrinaire. He had belonged to that generation of children whom nothing astonishes and nothing amuses; who go, without the slightest excitement, to see anything to which they are taken and who come back again ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt |
