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More "Namby-pamby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... give a wonderful shock, I suppose, to many namby-pamby Christians to whom the title "Mighty to Save" conveys no ideas of reality, to be told that nine or ten converted murderers were partaking with them the Holy Communion of Jesus! But the Lord who reads the heart, and weighs every motive and circumstance, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... brood over those unforgotten years in which she had wandered over the face of the earth with her father and Valentine Hawkehurst. The few elder girls remaining at the Lodge thought Miss Paget unsociable because she preferred a lonely corner in the gardens and some battered old book of namby-pamby stories to the delights of their society, and criticised her very severely as they walked listlessly to and fro upon the lawn with big garden-hats, and arms ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... this namby-pamby stuff," he had once been quoted as saying; "if you got enemies, don't tease 'em—show 'em who's running things. Blackjack 'em, if you ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... moment can I pretend that it was. Patience and industry dignified it; a certain rough jollity, a large amount of good temper and natural kindness, kept it from being foul; but of the namby-pamby or soft-headed sentiment which many writers have persuaded us to attribute to old-English cottage life I think I have not in twenty years met with a single trace. In fact, there are no people so likely to make ridicule of that sort of thing as my labouring-class neighbours have always been. They ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... climb the Alps on roller-skates, you see! But as for the Archdeacon, pooh! I'm no windy aboot your 'Sisters' and 'Settlements' and sic like, but if there had been society papers in the Lord's time, Simon the Pharisee would have been a namby-pamby critic compared to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... kind of criticism to which he introduced his readers created a sensation by reason of its very novelty. His brilliant, but withering critiques were more eagerly looked for than the most thrilling of his stories, and though the little, namby-pamby authors whom the gleaming sword mowed down by tens were his and the Messenger's enemies for life, the interested readers that were gathered in by hundreds were loud in their praise of the progressiveness of the magazine and the genius of the man ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... namby-pamby stuff," he had once been quoted as saying; "if you got enemies, don't tease 'em—show 'em who's running things. Blackjack ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... more obvious; when Mr. W. ceases to please, it is by "abandoning" his mind to the most commonplace ideas, at the same time clothing them in language not simple, but puerile. What will any reader or auditor, out of the nursery, say to such namby-pamby as "Lines written at the Foot of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... under the sun. So engrossed was Dreda in trying to keep other writers to the mark, that it was not until ten day's of the allotted fourteen had passed by that she set to work to think out her own contribution. It was to be a story, of course—not a stupid, amateury, namby-pamby story, such as you could read in other school magazines, but something striking and original, that would make everyone talk and wonder, and lie awake at night. So far so good; but when the time for writing it arrived ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Warrington soon learned how to shake hands in the manner of a candidate,—to take the whole hand and squeeze it soundly. The coal-heaver whose hand the dramatist grasped thereupon returned to his friends with the report that the candidate had a good grip, that there was nothing namby-pamby about him, for all his dude clothes. It is the gift of Heaven to win friends and keep them, and Warrington possessed this gift. His good-humored smile, his ready persiflage, his ease in all environments, and his common sense—these were his bucklers. He spoke in dingy halls, ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-dozen couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow, at the same time bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said dart, however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as yet it was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la Valliere as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she solemnizes her betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization before the registrar being quite out ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... blight. They have stirred the sky, whilst the little white pale-livered untempted clouds floated on the zephyrs—they've brought rain that made the earth glad, they've cleared the air in the very fall of their lightnin'. The lightnin' came—the fall—but give 'em credit fur the other. The little namby-pamby, white livered, zephyr clouds that is so divine an' useless, might float forever an' not even make a shadow to hide ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... precocious singing bird—does not appear: but we suspect the former, for this sonnet is immediately followed by "A Pastoral Ballad!" calling upon some Celia unknown to "pity his tears and complaint," &c., in the usual namby-pamby style of these compositions. To any one who considers the smart, espiegle, highly artificial style of "Tom Moore's" after compositions, his "Pastoral Ballad" will be what Coleridge called his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... this world, so mixed is it with lust and hatred and jealousy. True, there is love, but it is not that one. 'T is the loves filial and paternal, and friendship, better than all the loves the rhymesters hang with their namby-pamby. The love between the sexes—'t is a game wherein the weaker loses, and then— voe victis! ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... again that she thought nothing of Mr. Furnival's alleged handsomeness. She considered him a namby-pamby. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... wormy and obituary joys of La Comedie de la Mort. The little book came out, inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years later, in Blackwood's Magazine, a tardy review. He styled it "an ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press," far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, 'ladies have nothing to ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately." Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance," and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her confidence—if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in spite of his fancy clothes and her assumption that he was a namby-pamby weakling. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... me and the girls, but he does it with a bad enough grace. He's dreadfully tired of Miss Rae; and, to tell you the truth, Mae, she is rather namby-pamby—very different from Miss Hopkins, and then, besides, he had so set his heart on going with ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... of our colony. He is almost as great a pasha among the ladies as Bulbul. They crowd in flocks to see him at Saint Waltheof's, where the immense height of his forehead, the rigid asceticism of his surplice, the twang with which he intones the service, and the namby-pamby mysticism of his sermons, have turned all the dear girls' heads for some time past. While we were having a rubber at Mrs. Chauntry's, whose daughters are following the new mode, I heard the following talk (which made me revoke by ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one old gentleman is his parrot, and another chatters incessantly about his pupils. Some of the singers—the serious order of singers—are as namby-pamby off the stage as they are on it, unless revelling in "sweet sounds;" they are too fond of humming tunes, solfaing, and rehearsing graces in society; they have plenty to sing, but nothing to say for themselves; they chime the quarters ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... Verus was in all respects a model boy. Not the namby-pamby model that all human boys detest, but a right-minded, right-mannered, healthy, wealthy, and wise young Roman of the second century of the Christian era. At that time (for the world was not yet Christianized) there flourished ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... thinking," he said; "that I am too neat and tidy—too namby-pamby to do anything in this country. That my boots are too narrow in the toe, my hair too short and my face too clean. I cannot help it. It is the fault of the individual you saw outside—Joseph. He insists on a strict observance ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... readers of the Lucky Series know that none of the books are namby-pamby—there is in all of them the true strain of things worthwhile. Honor, faith and courage hold ...
— Ted Marsh on an Important Mission • Elmer Sherwood
... "progressed" from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek protection of the consuls of other countries from the spirit that made our flag respected in every land and honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism" whenever an American manifests a love of country or professes a national ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... subject of much speculation among them, and opinions widely differed concerning his character. Some called him a "prig" and declared that he was "stuck up" and conceited. Others said he was a "namby-pamby" without brains or wit. But there were a few who had occasionally talked with the boy, who understood him better, and hinted that he might develop into ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... sufferings and sorrows are such that we feel they are, after all, leading to happiness; and we are not made to dwell upon pictures of unnecessary misery or unavailing misfortune. Let it not be supposed, however, that we are speaking of a namby-pamby tale of the luxuries and successes of what is called "high life," for this book has nothing of that character. We mean only to point out, as far as we may, without entering upon the story itself, that it tells of pleasant people, in pleasant circumstances, among whom it is a pleasure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... out as though let loose from a long bondage. "Ernestine—no one but a man can quite see that. What is a man without a man's work? What is there for him to do but sit around in namby-pamby fashion and be fussed over and coddled and cheered up! Lord"—he threw away her hands and turned his face from her—"I'd ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... The true way to uphold the honor of the Senate was to have none but honorable men in its body. If this Senator had yielded to temptation and had offered a bribe, he was a soiled man and ought to be instantly expelled; therefore he wanted the Senator tried, and not in the usual namby-pamby way, but in good earnest. He wanted to know the truth of this matter. For himself, he believed that the guilt of Senator Dilworthy was established beyond the shadow of a doubt; and he considered that in trifling with his case and shirking it the Senate was ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... to annihilate Murphy with an indignant repetition of the provoking question put to him, threw as much of defiance as he could in his namby-pamby manner, and exclaimed, "I ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... obvious; when Mr. W. ceases to please, it is by "abandoning" his mind to the most commonplace ideas, at the same time clothing them in language not simple, but puerile. What will any reader or auditor, out of the nursery, say to such namby-pamby as "Lines written at ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... incorrect to do so as to thank a judge for a favourable verdict): what you have said has pleased me extremely. I am the more pleased, as I would rather have been well attacked than have been handled in the namby-pamby, old-woman style of the cautious Oxford Professor. (404/5. This no doubt refers to Professor Phillips' "Life on the Earth," 1860, a book founded on the author's "Rede Lecture," given before the University of Cambridge. Reference to this work ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Mort. The little book came out, inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years later, in Blackwood's Magazine, a tardy review. He styled it "an ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press," far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the flames. The "remainder," ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... measures and at the burdens that must be borne—none but those who lived through all these troubles could count half of them. If such came now, would the body of the nation strive to stand against them, or fall in the dust, and be kicked and trampled, sputtering namby-pamby? Britannia now is always wrong, in the opinion of her wisest sons, if she dares to defend herself even against weak enemies; what then would her crime be if she buckled her corselet against the world! To prostitute their mother is ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... all respects a model boy. Not the namby-pamby model that all human boys detest, but a right-minded, right-mannered, healthy, wealthy, and wise young Roman of the second century of the Christian era. At that time (for the world was not yet Christianized) ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... will go with me and the girls, but he does it with a bad enough grace. He's dreadfully tired of Miss Rae; and, to tell you the truth, Mae, she is rather namby-pamby—very different from Miss Hopkins, and then, besides, he had so set his heart on ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, 'ladies have nothing ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... was in Boston in 1862, I published by Putnam in New York a book entitled "Sunshine in Thought," which had, however, been written long before. It was all directed against the namby-pamby pessimism, "lost Edens and buried Lenores," and similar weak rubbish, which had then begun to manifest itself in literature, and which I foresaw was in future to become a great curse, as it has indeed done. Only five hundred copies of ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... to do. Mr Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... speak of any other subject under the sun. So engrossed was Dreda in trying to keep other writers to the mark, that it was not until ten day's of the allotted fourteen had passed by that she set to work to think out her own contribution. It was to be a story, of course—not a stupid, amateury, namby-pamby story, such as you could read in other school magazines, but something striking and original, that would make everyone talk and wonder, and lie awake at night. So far so good; but when the time for writing it arrived it was astonishingly difficult to hit upon ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... it pleased the gout to take The reverend Croly from the stage, Or Southey, for our quiet's sake, Or Mr. Fletcher, Cupid's sage, Or, damme! namby-pamby Poole,— Or any other ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Maybe they're eating each other up! Yesterday she asked if he was a 'wildcat' and I told her 'yes.' Maybe, maybe—Oh! Why did you make us walk in front, namby-pamby so, Papa dear? If we'd been with them we'd know what they are doing and what has happened. Oh! dear! If I hadn't been in front I'd have been behind!" she complained. Nor was she greatly pleased by the laugh which ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... enough to meet the lavishment of domestic expenditure; opium-using women—about four hundred thousand of them in the United States—who will have the drug, though it should cause the eternal damnation of the whole household; heartless and overbearing, and namby-pamby and unreasonable women, yet married—married perhaps to good men! These are the women who build the low club-houses, where the husbands and sons go because they can't stand it at home. On this sea of matrimony, where so many have been wrecked, am I ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... care-free, in tattered dresses, barefooted and dusty, walking and driving the loose cattle. Too many excursions and pleasure jaunts had reduced their horses to skeletons before the real trials of the journey had fairly begun. But the women of '52 and '53 were not of the namby-pamby sort. When the trials came they were brave and faced privations and dangers with the same fortitude as ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... by, we have a piece of namby-pamby 'to the Small Celandine,' which we should almost have taken for a professed imitation of one of Mr Philip's prettyisms. Here is a page ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... but she didn't hev sperit enough to suit my idees. She was kind o' lackadaisical and namby-pamby, 'n' when her young man sarsed her she didn't seem to hev nothin' to say for herself. I must say 'twas a heathenish kind of a play anyway, 'n' I ain't surprised that Uncle 'Bijah got sot agin it. The language wa'n't sech as I'd ben brought up ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... almost as great a pasha among the ladies as Bulbul. They crowd in flocks to see him at Saint Waltheof's, where the immense height of his forehead, the rigid asceticism of his surplice, the twang with which he intones the service, and the namby-pamby mysticism of his sermons, have turned all the dear girls' heads for some time past. While we were having a rubber at Mrs. Chauntry's, whose daughters are following the new mode, I heard the following talk (which made ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
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