"Gullible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Blighty widely advertises these cookers as a necessity for the men in the trenches. Gullible people buy them, ship them to the Tommies, who, immediately upon receipt of same throw them over the parapet. Sometimes a Tommy falls for the Ad., and uses the cooker in a dugout to the disgust and discomfort of the ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... often repeated that properly made books are not extremely costly. A modern book offered at a fancy price means either a very small edition, an extravagant binding, or what is more likely, a gullible public. But most books that appeal to the booklover are not excessive in price. Never before was so much money spent in making books attractive—for the publisher always has half an eye on the booklover—and while much of this money is wasted, not all is laid out in vain. Our age is ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... simply show the goods; but clerks were expected and instructed to use persuasion, to expatiate on quality and beauty, and to take less than they first asked. The cost price was marked with secret characters; the selling price was variable. The more you could get out of a gullible customer, the better; and he who could get the most was the smartest clerk. A thrifty purchaser would beat down the price little by little, the sharp clerk yielding with many protestations until a last offer was made, when, with feigned hesitation, the clerk ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... tribute to her cleverness as an actress, but it was not a tribute to his intelligence as a man, that he should have been taken in by it. Always, he told himself, he was being taken in by some woman. After the lesson he had had, he ought to have learned wisdom, but it seemed that he was as gullible as ever. And it was this romantic folly of his which vexed him now; not the fact that a simple child over whose fate he had sentimentalized, was a rich and popular stage-dancer. Miss Ray was probably a good enough young woman according to her lights, and it was ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... turned his gaze outward, he knew that these were not the spur of human energy. In striving restlessly to get plunder and power and joy, men wove the mysterious web of life for ends no human mind could know. Carson built his rickety companies and played his knavish tricks upon the gullible public, of whom Webber was one. Brome Porter rooted here and there in the industrial world, and fattened himself upon all spoils. These had to be; they were the tools of the hour. But indifferent alike to them and to Webber, the affairs of men ebbed and flowed in ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... William II. They go on saying the same old things. In different words they ask: "Isn't the young Emperor amusing?" (tis' a great word with us French people), and before long, they will be appealing to the gullible weaklings among us by suggesting "After all, why shouldn't he give us back Alsace-Lorraine?" And thus are being sown the seeds of ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... tobacco; artless and gullible in the extreme. He was building a new house, and came to Subtle "the alchemist" to know on which side to set the shop door, how to dispose the shelves so as to ensure most luck, on what days he might trust his customers, and when ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... illuminism and metaphysics,[5112] speculative inventions of the brain or of a contagious overexcitement of the nervous system, all these illusions of gullible men, are basically unhealthy, and, in general, anti-social. Nevertheless, since they are part of human nature, let us accept them like so many streams tumbling down a slope, but on condition that they remain in their own beds and that they have many but ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... interests that you should return to Bhutan. A more gullible agent would be preferable. Therefore, unless you implicitly obey my instructions, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... once more, and, difficult as it appears to the intelligence of honest and commonplace folk, he went forth to prosper and live luxuriously—so gullible is the world, so ready and eager to be cheated and deceived. Sir Edward Lytton has somewhere declared that a single number of the 'Times' newspaper, taken at random, would be the very best and most complete picture of our daily life—the fullest ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... actually have been is open to doubt; it has often been asserted that he was a Liberal, or even a Radical; and, if we are to believe Robert Owen, he was a necessitarian Socialist. His relations with Owen—the shrewd, gullible, high-minded, wrong-headed, illustrious and preposterous father of Socialism and Co-operation—were curious and characteristic. He talked of visiting the Mills at New Lanark, he did, in fact, preside at one of Owen's public ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... more land for the individual, which they dangled before the eyes of the most ignorant classes. Some of the electors who supported them were prosperous farmers unable to resist the idea of a still larger farm; but the majority of their adherents were as ignorant as they were gullible. Yet one should remember that for most of them this was practically their first experience of an election: the constituencies which had formerly been in Austria-Hungary had always seen the booths under the supervision of the police, while the Macedonian voter (three Communists ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... an adventurer named Stefan Mali sprang himself upon the land. He claimed to be the murdered Peter III. of Russia, and easily imposed himself upon the gullible Montenegrin. But he had the interests of Montenegro sincerely at heart, and proved an excellent ruler. His imposture was exposed by Catherine II., but owing to the weakness of the Petrovic heir, the people ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... a door and motioned Barrent inside. Barrent paused, thinking about the stories he had heard of gullible citizens falling into mutant hands. Then he half-drew his needlebeam ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... gullible individual, but neither was he unimaginative. He was scientist enough to know that "the impossibilities of to-day are the accomplishments of to-morrow." So while not convinced that the note was a serious communication, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... trend of the character of the city and its people. There were the same busy mechanics, barbers, traders, wayside cooks, traveling fortune-tellers, and lusty coolies; the wag doctor, the bane of the gullible, was there to drive his iniquitous living; now and then the scene's monotony was disturbed by the presence of the chair and the retinue of a city mandarin. Yet with all the hurry and din, the hurrying and the scurrying in doing and driving for ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... reputation of being the wealthiest in Ionia, was quite cleared out. No sooner was this the case, than Chariclea abandoned Dinias, and went off in pursuit of a certain golden youth of Crete, irresistible as he, and not less gullible. Deserted alike by her and by his parasites (who followed the chase of the fortunate Cretan), Dinias presented himself before Agathocles, who had long been aware of his friend's situation. He swallowed his first feelings ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... to Van Rensburg seemed to have found ample corroboration in the cabled newspaper accounts of the rapid advance of the armies of General Von Kluck through Belgium towards Paris, and in the minds of such gullible patriots as the South African Boers this telegraphic war news acted like ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... dividends. Thus the farmer might find himself without his railroad stock, with a mortgage on his land which he had incurred in order to buy the stock, with an increased burden of taxation because his township had also been gullible enough to buy stock, and with a railroad whose excessive rates allowed him but a narrow margin of profit ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... singular compensations in which nature seems now and then to make a struggle to adjust the average of human characteristics with something approaching fairness, Snaffle was hardly less gullible than he was skilful in ensnaring others. He was continually making a fortune by launching some bogus stock or other, but it seemed always to be fated that he should lose it again in some equally wild scheme started by a brother sharper. Perhaps between ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... is a gullible fool," said he gently. "And the world always laughs at, not with, a fool. Alas, my dear sister, it's a very deep pool we're in." He leaned closer and allowed a quaint, half-bantering, wholly diffident smile to cross his face. "I—I'm afraid that you are the only ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... that swindles still happen in the City, but their number is trivial compared with the volume of the public's money that is handled and invested. It is only in the by-ways of finance and in the gutters of City journalism that the traps are laid for the greedy and gullible public, and if the public walks in, it has itself to blame. A genuine investor who wants security and a safe return on his money can always get it. Unfortunately the investor is almost always at the same time a speculator, and is apt to forget the distinction; ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... people are abnormally so. It may be, as McDougall suggests, that they have so large an amount of submission or negative self-feeling in their make-up that they believe anything, just because some one else says it is true. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge that makes us gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between them. The psychologists ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... office. The good man himself was probably in bed. An orderly invited us to write our names in block capitals, insisting severely on the block capitals, in a large book. Then—he must have recognised that we were new boys and gullible—he said that we ought to report ourselves to some one else called ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... knock and volunteered for the Secret Service. They sent him over here. The fellow must have no end of pluck, for, as I dare say you know, they let him down from the observation car of a Zeppelin. He finds his way here all right, makes his silly little bargain with our dear but gullible womenkind, and sets himself to watch—to watch me, mind. The whole affair is too ridiculously transparent. For a time he can't bring himself even to touch my papers here, although, as it happens, they wouldn't have done him the least bit of good. ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the break of day at least he might have eased Phelan's mind on that score and informed him that something ominously like a patrol wagon was rounding the corner at that moment. And if the art collector had not been so keenly amused at his facile conquest of the gullible bluecoat his alert ears might have warned him to say something entirely ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie |
