"Vituperative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... threatening hundreds at your gates; when you curse your boatman, he complains to your consul; the dragomans afflict you with strange wild notions about honesty; a government order prevents you from using vituperative language to the "natives" in general; and the very donkey-boys are becoming cognizant of the right of man to remain unbastinadoed. Still the old leaven remains behind; here, as elsewhere in "morning-land," you cannot hold your own without ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... described in the House of Commons as a useless institution. In Mr. HEALY'S opinion, "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," like the other who lived in a shoe, has too many children, and her attempt to get 190 of them exempted from military service moved him in a moment of "vituperative irrelevance," as Mr. PRINGLE subsequently described it, to say the rudest things about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... money bills should be passed. He, however, rejoiced greatly that this earliest opportunity had been afforded to him of explaining the intentions of the Government with which he had the honour of being connected. In answer to this there arose a perfect torrent of almost vituperative antagonism from the opposite side of the House. Did the Right Honourable gentleman dare to say that the question had been ventilated in the country, when it had never been broached by him or any of his followers till after the general election had been completed? Was it not ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... plain intimation that it was no longer wanted there. Perhaps it sheds more light than I had at first imagined on the mental state of the persons who use it when they wish to arraign the conditions of "modern life." A vituperative epithet is capable of making a big show. "Artificialities" is a sufficiently scornful word, but when you add "petty" you somehow give the quietus to the pretensions of modern life. Modern life had better hide its diminished head, after that. Modern life is settled and done for—in ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... persecuted its adherents. Proud of his theological acquirements, he appeared, in 1522, as an author against Luther, in a book in defense of the Seven Sacraments, for which he received from the Pope the title of Defender of the Faith. The vituperative character of Luther's answer confirmed him in his hatred of the new doctrine. "When God," said the blunt Saxon reformer, "wants a fool, he turns a king ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... bitter opposition and that British governmental and public opinion had long dreaded a servile insurrection—even of late taking its cue from Seward's own prophecies—the cool reception given by the Government, the vehement and vituperative explosions of the press do not seem so surprising. "This Emancipation Proclamation," wrote Stuart on September 23, "seems a brutum fulmen[922]." One of the President's motives, he thought, was to affect public opinion in England. "But there is no pretext of humanity about ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Elizabethan assumption that there should be similarities between satire and its supposed etymological forebears—the satyrs, legendary half men, half goats of ancient Greece. Believing that the Roman satirists Persius and Juvenal had imitated the uncouth manners and vituperative diction of the satyrs, Elizabethan satirists likewise strove to be as rough, harsh, and licentious as possible.[6] Despite the objections to the satire-satyr etymology stated by Isaac Casaubon,[7] scurrilous satire, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Brigham welded to his own forms. He was able to assume consistently an appearance of uncouth ignorance in order to retain his hold over his uncultivated flock. He delivered vituperative, even obscene sermons, which may still be read in his collected works. But he was able also on occasions, as when addressing agents of the Federal Government or other outsiders whom he wished to impress, to write direct and dignified English. He was resourceful in obtaining ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... but been, among one's resources, a little patience and practical candor, instead of all that vituperative eloquence and power of tragi-comic description! Nay, in that case, this wretched street-riot hubbub need not have been at all. Truly M. de Voltaire had a talent for speech, but lamentably wanted that of silence!—We have now only the sad duty of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... was little more than half the age of Broussais, in the full prime and vigor of manhood at thirty-seven years. He was a rapid, fluent, fervid, and imaginative speaker, pleasing in aspect and manner,—a strong contrast to the harsh, vituperative old man who had just preceded him. His Clinique Medicale is still valuable as a collection of cases, and his researches on the blood, conducted in association with Gavarret, contributed new and valuable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in the doorway, she heard a woman's common vituperative voice crying from the darkness of the ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... foreign tongues was pretty much limited to those vituperative epithets which are first and oftenest heard in every language. He rode down to the edge of the water, and proceeded loudly to anathamatize his opponents in Portuguese, Spanish and French successively. Having exhausted his ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... he said decisively, realizing that the discussion was in danger of becoming a vituperative, schoolboy argument. "You have insisted on being considered as a man. Consistency would demand that you talk like a man, and like a man listen to man-talk. And listen you shall. It is not your fault ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... late war thousands of mouths filled with vituperative wrath against the colored race were silenced as in the presence of the heroic deeds of "the despised race," and since the war the obloquy of the Negro's enemies has been turned into the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... but little else, of the old Indian National Congress. It does not lack funds, for Mr. Gandhi professes to have gathered in the crore of rupees which he asked for within the appointed twelvemonth. It controls a large part of the Indian Press, though mostly of the less reputable type, more vituperative and mendacious, in spite of all Indian Press laws, than anything conceived of in this country where there are no Press laws. Mr. Gandhi himself goes on preaching "Non-co-operation" with unabated conviction ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... character of which I have at some length, but yet imperfectly, set forth.' Finally, 'In fact, it means nothing, and is the most incongruous combination of words and ideas that ever attained respectable usage in any civilized language.' These be 'prave 'ords'; and it seems a pity that so much sterling vituperative ammunition should be expended in vain. And that it is so expended thinks Mr. White himself; for, though passing sentence in the spirit of a Jeffreys, he is not really on the judgment-seat, but on the lowest hassock of despair. As concerns ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... but he was reputed to be a good natured man and, by the standards of the time, his twitting of Collier—whom he accused of having a better nose for smut than a clergyman should have—is not conspicuously vituperative. Even his attack on the political character of the notorious Non-Juror is bitter without being really scurrilous. But like his betters Congreve and Vanbrugh, D'Urfey both missed the opportunity to grapple with the real issues of the controversy and misjudged ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet |
