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More "Quibble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... during the ten years in which I represented her claims to the Allen estate; but her principles were immovable as the hills. Once, I shall never forget the incident—I pressed her to adopt a certain course of procedure, involving a law quibble, in order to get possession of the property. She looked at me for a moment or two, with a flushing face. Then her countenance grew serene, almost heavenly, and she gave me this memorable reply—'Mr. Wallingford, I have a richer estate than this in expectancy, and cannot mar the title.' And she has ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... measure, how in short, they tear the bill to rags, laugh its powers to scorn, and hold its authors in high derision. The Belfast men do not discuss the bill, do not examine it clause by clause, do not quibble over the purport of this or the probable effect of that, do not ask how the customs are to be collected, or who is to pay for this, that, or the other. They descend to no details, enter into no particulars, point out no minor fallacies, argue no questions of the ultimate effect of any one section ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... quibble about words," said he. "Would it be impertinent to ask your business—and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his tones if anything is some low-sperited. "I takes it," he says, when he's able to command his feelin's, "that you declines them proffers with your winchester at the time when made." But the lady dismisses this as a quibble, an' merely sayin' that she won't be paltered with no farther, orders Oscar an' the Bible sharp who's ridin' inside to assemble by the edge of the trail. The Bible sharp attempts to lay the foundations of fresh objections by askin' Oscar does he do this of his own free will; ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... resort to no chicanery. If I did think that the safety of the commonwealth required that we should violate the Treaty of Union, I would violate it openly, and defend my conduct on the ground of necessity. It may, in an extreme case, be our duty to break our compacts. It never can be our duty to quibble them away. What I say is that the Treaty of Union, construed, not with the subtlety of a pettifogger, but according to the spirit, binds us to pass this bill or ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... most historians of philosophy have been metaphysicians; they have concerned themselves far less with what the ancient thinkers really knew than with what they thought. A chance using of a verbal quibble, an esoteric phrase, the expression of a vague mysticism—these would suffice to call forth reams of exposition. It has been the favorite pastime of historians to weave their own anachronistic theories ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sit here and quibble; you're too clever altogether," I said, and I got up and wondered in which direction there was most to do, but Nina stood up, too, and put her ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... attempt to juggle with the quibble of 'Revolution or Evolution,'—or to meet the contention of some of those under consideration that it is not Revolution that is wanted. 'You cannot change the world and yet not change the world.' Revolution ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... growling now and then as he read of some new quibble devised by the attorneys for the defense. As softly and as surreptitiously as it begins to rain on a cloudy day, she was crying. He turned again with ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from those days to these—invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de la Greve—the place of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the guarantee would have saved. It was for their interest that the guarantee should not be given. It was withdrawn. The faith of England—till then regarded as something sacred—was violated; and the answer was a criticism on a phrase—a quibble upon the construction of a sentence, which all the world for six months had read one way. The secret history of this wretched transaction I do not seek to penetrate. Enough is written upon stock-books and in the records of courts in Canada ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... contrasting with "hate." As for really caring, beyond a liking for Brook Johnstone, she was sure that it was impossible. But the liking was strong. She exploded her difficulty at last with the bomb of a splendidly youthful quibble. She said to herself that she undoubtedly hated him and despised him, and that he was certainly the very lowest of living men for treating Lady Fan so badly—besides being a black sinner, a point which had less weight. ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... center attention upon the quibble and then said: "My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United States take Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England did I finally succeed. There may be within the sound of my voice some who have knowledge of sheep culture. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble poor and barren as it ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... 1,010 armed rebels in Eibar (Guipuzcoa), 210 betook themselves to San Sebastian, when they suspected the approach of the Royal forces, and the 800 remaining gave up to General Lizarraga their rifles, all of the Remington system." There is no quibble about the latter statement. The Carlists had easier ways of procuring arms than by running cargoes from England. But is there not something inimitable in the epithet "rebels"? There can be no question but that everyone is a rebel in romantic Spain—in the opinion of somebody else. The ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... gave him such delight that he was content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, of propriety, and even of truth; a quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... radiant, happy man, the cheeriest, sunniest nature that ever dwelt in human body, with a sympathy that went out to everybody and everything—children, animals, the old, the feeble, the fallen—a man too big to be jealous, too noble to quibble, a man so manly that he would accept guilt rather than impute it to another. If he had been possessed of less love he would have been a stronger man. The generous nature lies open and unprotected—through its guilelessness it allows concrete rascality to come close ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... that the reason which he had given for disbelief was untenable, and he was too straightforward to quibble ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... said. "Put the whole thing on the expense account. You don't think I'm going to quibble about a few dollars, ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... are fateful. We must fight; and no longer over trifles; we cannot now break each other's heads over a quibble, or believe that the whole world hangs on the question whether the instant of death is the last minute of this life or the first of the next. No—what now remains to be decided is whether the old gods shall be victorious, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... great truth about it—and that therefore Mr. Stephens's declaration amounts substantially to saying that slavery was to be the corner stone of his new Government; and so your assertion, that 'he has made no such declaration,' is a paltry verbal quibble, unworthy of a sensible ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... all a quibble about a word,' said Alaric. 'What is good? David was a man after God's own heart, and a great man too, and yet he did things which, were I to do, I should be too base to live. Look at Jacob—how did he achieve the tremendous rights of patriarchal primogeniture? ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... BLACKBOROUGH. That's a quibble. [Poor HORSHAM gasps.] I'm not going to pretend either now or in a month's time that I think Trebell anything but a most dangerous acquisition to the party. I pay you a compliment in that, Trebell. Now, Horsham proposes that we should go to the ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... this organisation. The law has too wide a mesh to deal with the terror which this man exercises. Such men are the only justification of lynch law, the quick, sharp justice which is administered without subtlety and without quibble." ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... our flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... parson's cant, the lawyer's sophistry, Lord's quibble, critic's jest, all end in thee, All rest in peace at last, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... objections what was known as the Homestead Bill. On that occasion Senator Johnson of Tennessee said, 'This idea about poor foreigners somehow or other bewilders and haunts the imagination of a great many. I am constrained to say that I look upon this objection to the bill as a mere quibble on the part of the President, as being hard pressed for some excuse in withholding his approval of the measure. His allusion to foreigners in this connection looks to me more like the ad captandum of the mere politician ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... it would be done. They saw enough to convince them that it was not done. They saw an unarmed man shot down and instantly killed in one of the most frequented streets of the city while endeavoring to escape from his pursuer. They saw the forms of trial applied in this clear case, and after every quibble and perversion of law which ingenuity could devise had been tried, the lame and impotent conclusion arrived at of a verdict of manslaughter, and a sentence for a short period to the State Prison. They saw a gambler, while quietly conversing with the United States Marshal in the doorway ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... courtier, and being thereby placed too much in the radiance of the king's presence; or, perhaps, an allusion to the proverb, "Out of Heaven's blessing, into the warm sun:" but it is not unlikely that a quibble is meant between ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... trio nobly bore The brunt of all this legal war. But short their friendship as 'twas rare. Whom blood had join'd—and small the wonder!— The force of interest drove asunder; And, as is wont in such affairs, Ambition, envy, were co-heirs. In parcelling their sire's estate, They quarrel, quibble, litigate, Each aiming to supplant the other. The judge, by turns, condemns each brother. Their creditors make new assault, Some pleading error, some default. The sunder'd brothers disagree; For counsel one, have counsels three. All lose their wealth; and now their sorrows Bring ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... As to your quibble about Paul and Apollos, whether they, or others, were the persons, though I am satisfied you are out, yet it weakeneth not my argument; for if they were blame worthy for dividing, though about the highest fundamental ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... quibbling or punning—but I think this is call'd punning—Is this Gentlemans humour—if so, being a Soldier, I don't see it calls his sense in question at all—but now pray let's see, how our Critick manages a quibble, with a blunder tack'd to the Tail on't, in the page before, there, in the aforesaid Play, Celidea in a ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... art a boy, why standest thou in fear of sin or the doing of things forbidden, seeing that thou art not yet come to years of canonical responsibility; and the offences of a child incur neither punishment nor reproof? Verily, thou hast committed thyself to a quibble for the sake of contention, and it is thy duty to bow before a proposal of fruition, so henceforward cease from denial and coyness, for the commandment of Allah is a decree foreordained:[FN337] indeed, I have more reason than thou to fear falling and by sin to be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Blondet, "this seems to me to be a mere trifle, a quibble.—Suppose you had the money, I ought perhaps to have waited until I had your authorization; but I, Comte d'Esgrignon, was pressed for money, so I—— Come, come, your prosecution is a piece of revengeful spite. Forgery is defined by ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... reputation, discovered the sheer futility of his attempt to make and keep together a government, and when it once more fell to the Conservatives to take office, Macdonald saved himself and his colleagues the trouble of standing for re-election by a most shameful constitutional quibble. According to a recent act, if a member of Legislative Council or Assembly "shall resign his office, and within one month after his resignation, accept any other of the said offices (enumerated above), he shall not vacate his seat in the said Assembly or Council."[22] ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... own exertions when assisting Sulla in the liberation of Italy; while Agesilaus obtained the throne in defiance of both human and divine laws, for he declared Leotychides to be a bastard, although his brother had publicly recognised him as his own son, and he also by a quibble evaded the oracle about a ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... of doing right is very painful; especially so because most women who are under this strain do not really care about doing right at all. I have seen a woman quibble and talk and worry about what she believed to be a matter of right and wrong in a few cents, and then neglect for months to pay a poor man a certain large amount of money which he had honestly earned, and which she ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... men do. Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer. He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more. What would he do, whether or not? Act as if I was— shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own way—if you'll excuse my mentioning anything ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Homer Crawford. "I'm not here to quibble with self-confessed malcontents. I've been sent to represent the State Department, to report to them, and, above all, to do what I can to prevent your activities from redounding to the further advantage of the Soviet Complex. I assume you can ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... (including with it the natural death of Jesus Christ as a substitute for the eternal death or damnation of all mankind,) it is impertinently representing the Creator as coming off, or revoking the sentence, by a pun or a quibble upon the word death. That manufacturer of, quibbles, St. Paul, if he wrote the books that bear his name, has helped this quibble on by making another quibble upon the word Adam. He makes there to be two Adams; the one ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... The only quibble we have about the way Cassell's laid out the book is the amazing amount of inconsistency in the hyphenation, but we believe we have detected most of the instances, and put ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... regarded with peculiar horror. I did not take exception to the Times' article of June 19th on this case. It was mild and courteous in tone, and the view taken of the XIV. Amendment plea seems to me the only sound one. I certainly do not want to get into your political preserves by any quibble or dodge. I want my right there freely granted and guaranteed, and will be politely treated when I come, or I won't stay. The promised land of justice and equality is not to be reached by a short cut. I fear we have ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... or quibble. To clinch, or to clinch the nail; to confirm an improbable story by another: as, A man swore he drove a tenpenny nail through the moon; a bystander said it was true, for he was on the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... better to take your chances with even an inferior melody maker who is as much interested as you are in a final success. And when you have found a composer, do not quibble about changing your words to fit his music. And don't fear to ask him to change his melody, wherever constant work on the song proves that a change is necessary. It is only by ceaselessly working over both words and melody that a song is turned into ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's invention—a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the river-lilies that drift yonder—how white they are, how their leaves enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with them! Well, are they not better off ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the lace about her throat in disorder; at the window, his back turned to her, he flung over his shoulder: "Look here—you can go. I won't hold you any longer. I suppose your uncle can fix it up; some damned legal quibble will get you out of ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... down, considering whether her oath, never to "say a word" to Prince Dolor about himself, would be broken if she were to take a pencil and write what was to be told. A mere quibble—a mean, miserable quibble. But then she was a miserable woman, more to be pitied ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... the judge. The latter spoke. "The exception was conclusive; the prisoner must be discharged." I could not conceive it possible. What were truth, equity, morality—Nothing? And was murder innocence, if a quibble made it so? The jailer approached the monster, and whispered into his ear that he was now at liberty. He held down his head stupidly to receive the words, and he drew it back again, incredulous and astounded. Oh, what a secret he had learned for future government and conduct! What a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... light. And sure enough, when we had passed out of the Gulf Stream and the sea had smoothed itself out, I made a speedy and satisfactory recovery; but if it had been seasickness I should have confessed it in a minute. I have no patience with those who quibble and equivocate in regard to their having ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... to right as an old horse to leap a fence, but I had the wit to see that my only hope lay in a bold front. At any rate, a clean death in battle was better than burning, and my despair was too deep to let me quibble about the manner ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... should say yes without a quibble," replied Fenton, "but your air is so serious that I do not dare run the risk; so I will merely answer,—I would like to do you a ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... it was proven that it was a game of chance. Judge and counsel said that would be an easy matter, and forthwith called Deacons Job, Peters, Burke, and Johnson, and Dominies Wirt and Miggles, to testify; and they unanimously and with strong feeling put down the legal quibble of Sturgis by pronouncing that old sledge ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot. If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you perceive—the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're naturally ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... your memorial to the Senate, as they say Sir Harry Wotton was forced to do for St. James's, when those aquatic republicans had quarrelled with Paul the Fifth, and James the First thought the best way in the world to broach a schism was by beginning it with a quibble. I have had some Protestant hopes too of a civil war in France, between the King and his clergy: but it is a dull age, and people don't set about cutting one another's throats with any spirit! Robbing is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... as fair Prize, and as if she belonged to French Subjects, according to a commission he had for that purpose; tho', one would think, after what he had already done, that he need not have recourse to a quibble to give his ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or are ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... assassinating Governor Steunenberg of Idaho. Their leaders, Moyer and Haywood, were anarchists like themselves, and although they professed contempt for law, as soon as they were arrested and brought up for trial, they clutched at every quibble of the law, as drowning men clutch at straws to save them; and, be it said to the glory or shame of the law, it furnished enough quibbles, not only to save them from the gallows, but to let them loose again on society with the legal whitewash "not guilty" ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... will take advantage of me and of every quibble against me;" and there at last she began to break down; "but if there is justice in heaven or earth my child shall have it, though you and all were ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... homesick children, longed still for the old home town. Austin was firm, nevertheless, in his decision to stay by what he had found. "We have friends here who make us welcome. We need not feel that we are utterly strangers. I have a good job and it would be foolishness for me to look farther. Let us not quibble any more. If we are going to make a home for the children, let us get at it," he said in ending the contention. "If you girls wish to go on down home, or anywhere else, visiting, do it now before we start in. I want you to be satisfied, ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... miserable quibble was not a lie! My lip curled, I turned my back without a word, and drove home to my Mount Street flat in a new fury of savage scorn. Not a lie, indeed! It was the one that is half a truth, the meanest lie of all, and the very last to which I could ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... no doubt. Some day the cunning old scoundrel, when he can squeeze no more interest out of us, will find a legal quibble and ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... walked right off with the money to Edmund Lambert, of Barton-on-the-Heath, to redeem his mortgage, and reinstate himself as owner of Asbies, free to grant a lease or sale on his own terms. But through a quibble, which "was not in the bond," Edmund Lambert refused to accept this until certain other debts were also paid. Thereby he gained the shelter of time, which "was in the bond," and put Shakespeare at ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... object to his removal because, forsooth, some portion of earth from my land clingeth to his hoofs. So blood is included in the word 'flesh' where 'twere impossible to deliver the flesh without some blood. As for that quibble of nor more nor less, why, 'tis the debtor's place to deliver his promise. If he himself cut off too much, he injures himself, if too little he hath not ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... brought Mary home from Wolf Cove, my sister and the doctor and I went that night by my sister's wish to distinguish the welcome, so that, in all our harbour, there might be no quibble or continuing suspicion; and we found the maid cutting her father's hair in the kitchen (for she was a clever hand with the scissors and comb), as though nothing had occurred—Skipper Tommy Lovejoy meanwhile with spirit engaging ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... only if you're going to push things to the point of taking advantage of a quibble like that, your chance of happiness is more or less slim! So three years ago Carleton proved that he hadn't cared a whoop about the legal or religious aspects of the case, and left Ted. And now Ted can't see herself, at twenty-seven, tied to another ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... mingled with apparent efforts to deceive his audience. He had not the audacious originality of Luther. He never went to the length of braving Alexander by burning his bulls and by denying the authority of popes in general. Not daring to break all connection with the Holy See, he was driven to quibble about the distinction between the office and the man, assuming a hazardous attitude of obedience to the Church whose head and chief he daily outraged. At the same time he took no pains to enlist the sympathies of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... lessons,—tied to coming here three times a week to teach me literature." Hedwig smiled a strange icy smile, and sat down by the window. Nino was still utterly astonished, but he would not allow the baroness's quibble ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical murder, intended against towns and multitudes." As if they had not revolted already! Their pretext seems to mean that they do not want to alter the sovereign authority, a quibble which they issued for several months, long after it was obviously false. They also wrote to the nobles, to the French officers in the Regent's service, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... make a Challenge to any Person of common Sense and Reason—that is not wilfully bent on ill Nature, and will in spight of Sense wrest a double Entendre from every thing, lying upon the Catch for a Jest or a Quibble, like a Rook for a Cully; but any unprejudic'd Person that knows not the Author, to read any of my Comedys and compare 'em with others of this Age, and if they find one Word that can offend the chastest Ear, I will submit to all their ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... in your way, when it is in order, and let society quibble. How is the world to be made any better, if each one goes on in the old way for ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... instead of the work itself; to shelter behind a false quirk of law instead of nestling in the eternal heart of the unchangeable and righteous Father, who is merciful in that he renders to every man according to his work, and compels their obedience, nor admits judicial quibble or subterfuge. God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very uttermost of truth, but not a hair's-breadth beyond it; he is his true father, and will have his child true ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Queer stranga. Quell trankviligi. Quench (extinguish) estingi. Quench (thirst) kvietigi. Querulous malkontenta. Query demando. Query cxu? Quest sercxo. Quest informigxo. Question demando. Question demandi. Question (doubt) dubi. Questionable duba. Quibble cxikani. Quick (adj.) rapida. Quick (adv.) rapide. Quick (living) viva. Quicken vivigi. Quicken rapidigi. Quicksilver hidrargo. Quiescence ripozo, kvieteco. Quiet kvieta. Quiet kvietigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a couple of hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered odds of two to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble 5 arose concerning the phrase "break out." O'Brien contended it was Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to "break it out" from a dead standstill. Matthewson insisted that the phrase included breaking the runners from the frozen grip of the snow. A majority of ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... by men who would plough a lengthy furrow straight from end to end. Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there, in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds. I wonder, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had signed away, he knew not what, until it went ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... an ethical monotheism? The answer is that it is not an "ism" at all, despite the last syllable in its name. It is a living soul or consciousness; it is the soul or consciousness of the Jewish people. We are not interested in names, and we should not quibble about terms; it is reality that we are after. We want to know what is involved in being a Jew and living a Jewish life. The main reason for our finding fault with the usual presentation of Judaism is that it does not enlighten or inspire us. If the term Judaism does not ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... give me a ream of paper: we'll have a kingdom of gold for't: A quibble. REALM was frequently written ream; and frequently (as the following passages shew), even when the former spelling was given, the ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... That the Lord Wilmot hath been dead five weeks, but the Cavaliers concealed his death. (Remember this!) That Sir John Urrey[332] is dead and buried at Oxford. (He died the same day with the Lord Wilmot.) That the Cavaliers, before they have done, will HURREY all men into misery. (This quibble hath been six times printed, and nobody would take notice of it; now let's hear of it no more!) That all the Cavaliers which Sir William Waller took prisoners (besides 500) tooke the National Covenant. (Yes, all he took (besides 500) tooke the Covenant.) That 2000 Irish Rebels landed ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... object of Howe to tempt the American general to quit this position; and having failed in various expedients, on the 19th of June he ordered his main body to retire to Amboy. This succeeded. Washington abandoned what had cost him so much trouble to create, and advanced to Quibble Town. The mass of the British troops now moved back by different routes, in order to get on the American general's flank and rear, and by intervening between him and the hills, to force him to a conflict on open ground. Lord ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Prince of so great a province, you will not set yourself up any more haughtily. You will quibble no longer concerning tithes and tolls with Casimir ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... engineering shall be shared equally among the Members of the United Nations', but the Soviet delegation wanted to change that to 'any advances in space travel'. We only beat them out by a verbal quibble; we insisted that the word 'space', as used, could apply equally to the space between continents or cities or, for that matter, between any two points. By the time we got through arguing, the UN had given up on the Soviet amendment, and the agreement ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with me may trade; Let me not quibble o'er the price; But may I, once the bargain's made, With courage meet the sacrifice. If happiness for ages long My little term of life can buy, God, for my country make me strong; To-morrow ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... a paper at his elbow, and as he read it his face changed, but by no means cleared. "Hum—ha!" he muttered, "it seems you have some fancy status here—political trick, I suppose—some quibble about Habshiabad lying outside Granthistan. But it's all one. If you ain't under my command, you don't get mentioned in my despatches—see? Eh, how ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... "Do not quibble, sir," said the Rector sternly. "Do you receive any financial support from any source whatever in ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... Clopton is a falcon clapping his wings, and rising from a tun; and I verily believe the rose clapt on to be the miserable quibble intended."] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... "Don't quibble!" warned Dunbar, thrusting out a finger at him. "This is not a matter of a loss of license; ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... "Then don't quibble. Lease at any price. If a show of cash is necessary, let me know. Now I think you'd better start. Good ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... "That's an old quibble," said Irving. "The alternative for running is not running. Therefore when he's not ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... firmly. "If I write the letter I abide by it. I will not quibble with my conscience. Edward! I will not marry—I will go and live near you, and come to you whenever I may—and give up my life to you if you are sent to prison; my mother and I will go, if need be—I do not know yet what I can ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... this perfervid article, give an instructive clue. A mere quibble had arisen between the Central Powers and Russia. The former immediately adopted an arrogant, even threatening, attitude which thoughtful Germans condemned. Russia's willingness to submit the question to an arbitration ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... green complexion of the bilious. They do not live under the sky, they avoid the light. Hidden in their cellars, they pore over treaties, cite newspaper articles, grow pale over maps, measure angles, quibble over texts or traces of frontiers." "The Pangerman is a propagandist and a revivalist." "But," M. Bourdon adds, "when he shouts we must not think we hear in his tones the reverberations of the German soul." The organs of ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... What effect had secession had upon the States guilty of it; was it or was it not an act of state suicide? This question was warmly debated in Congress and out. Although ridiculed in some quarters as a mere metaphysical quibble, it lay at the bottom of men's political thinking on reconstruction, and their views of the proper answer to ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... "I am not master of language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know what I meant, and I will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Mr. Campbell, heartily. "And now to come to the material, or (to make a quibble) to the immaterial. I have here a little packet which contains four things." He tugged it, as he spoke, and with some great difficulty, from the skirt pocket of his coat. "Of these four things, the first is your legal due: the little pickle ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perchance serve to make you think yourself better than others, quibble over texts, wear sour looks, domineer over others' consciences or give your own over to bondage; stifle your scruples, follow religious forms for fashion or gain, do good in the hope of escaping future punishment?—oh, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... than Pope's Essay. It is true, again, that Pope's reasoning is intrinsically feeble. He was no metaphysician, and confined himself to putting together incoherent scraps of different systems. Some of his arguments strike us as simply childish, as, for example, the quibble derived ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... been loyal, have I not? Juste ciel!" Rising, he walked about the great room, his hands clasped behind him. "My conduct was magnificent, was it not? Don't quibble with words, Brigit. In plain language, I was a scoundrel, a beast, and now I am trying to behave—not like a gentleman, but like a decent man. And why you won't let ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... type of man, not overbalanced and erratic, without quirk or quibble of temperament. He was efficient, but not brilliant. His was a general all-round efficiency. He was efficient at the law; he was efficient at college; he was efficient as a sailor; he was efficient in the matter of pride, when that pride was no more than the pride of a forecastle hand, at twelve ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... whoever, at that time, read earnestly "The Spirit of the Laws" was as sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson's young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery paradox must have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... dint of talking of eternity she might perpetuate his love in this world and the next. For her own sake, it must be believed that no man had touched her heart, or her conduct would be inexcusable. She was young; the time when men and women feel that they cannot afford to lose time or to quibble over their joys was still far off. She, no doubt, was on the verge not of first love, but of her first experience of the bliss of love. And from inexperience, for want of the painful lessons which would have taught her to value the treasure ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... justice in the disposal. Doubtless there was no such intention, but the truth seems to be that the glamour of the newer fame of Faraday has dazzled a little the eyes of the rulers of the institution of the present generation. But that, after all, is a small matter about which to quibble. There is glory enough for all in the Royal Institution, and the disposal of busts and portraits is unworthy to be mentioned in connection with the lasting fame of the great men who are here in question. It would matter little if ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... certain, he diagnosed as green, or maybe blue, or possibly grey. Not that it mattered, for he had a catholic taste in feminine eyes. So long as they were large and bright, as were the specimens under his immediate notice, he was not the man to quibble about a point of colour. Her nose was small, and on the very tip of it there was a tiny freckle. Her mouth was nice and wide, her chin soft and round. She was just about the height which every girl ought to be. Her figure was trim, her feet tiny, and she wore ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... the matches were being dropped, did not like to join in the discussion. It was too difficult for him. He could not even quibble. If he spoke, he should simply make himself a fool. He preferred to listen, and to watch the tobacco-smoke stealing out past the window-seat into the tranquil October air. He could see the court too, and the college cat teasing the college tortoise, and the kitchen-men ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... "A quibble, when all is said." He stepped to Lionel's side, and looked down at the pale handsome face over which the dark shadows of death were already creeping. "If he would but speak in the interests of this justice that is to do! If we might but have the evidence ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Europe—are professedly Roman Catholic. The influence of the priesthood, however, owing to various causes, seems to be on the wane, and a habit of abandoning all religious thought is much on the increase. But the realization that our people never attack any Church, or quibble about details of creed and ceremonial, has won their way to the hearts of many, and there can be no doubt that we have a great future amongst these peoples. In Peru the law does not allow any persons not of the Romish Church to offer prayer ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... defilement that comes first from within, has risen to a radiance of essential innocence ineffably beyond that whose form stood white in Faber's imagination. For I see and understand a little how God, giving righteousness, makes pure of sin, and that verily—by no theological quibble of imputation, by no play with words, by no shutting of the eyes, no oblivion, willful or irresistible, but by very fact of cleansing, so that the consciousness of the sinner becomes glistering as the raiment ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... (quibble), cypress (or cyprus) being a transparent material, and when black used ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... said the same of writers too if he had pleased.] "In the lowest form he places those whom he calls Les Petits Esprits, such things as our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit, and prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant expression. These are mob readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But though they made the greatest appearance in the field, and cried the loudest, the best of it is they are but ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... replies, which rather contain highly respectable but perfectly irrelevant commonplaces than definite proposals. Most Socialists will answer the plain question of confiscation or no confiscation with a quibble or a conundrum, as the following examples will show: "One view of Socialism is that it is a scheme of confiscation of property from one class to give it to another class—that Socialists are Dick Turpins made respectable by using Acts of Parliament instead of pistols. Now ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Johnson says:—'A quibble is intended between as the conditional particle, and ass the beast of burthen.' On this note Steevens remarked:—'Shakespeare has so many quibbles of his own to answer for, that there are those who think it hard he should be charged with others which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, King John is an intellectual form in which a number of people with ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... criticism, as there was perhaps no example of in the English language. Towards the conclusion, he has, I think, successfully defended him from the neglect of what are called the unities. The observation, that a quibble was the Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it, is more pointed than just. Shakspeare cannot be said to have lost the world; for his fame has not only embraced the circle of his own country, but is continually spreading ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... advised, by the legal advisers of the Crown, that the Natives' Land Bill would be class legislation of a kind that would never be allowed by His Majesty's Government. The originators of the Bill, however, were determined so to circumvent the constitutional quibble raised by the legal advisers as to seal our doom; and by adroitly manipulating its legal phrases, it seems that it was recasted in such a manner as to give it a semblance of a paper restriction on European encroachment on native rights. But class legislation the Act is, for whereas in his travels ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... brunt of all this legal war. But short their friendship as 'twas rare. Whom blood had join'd—and small the wonder!— The force of interest drove asunder; And, as is wont in such affairs, Ambition, envy, were co-heirs. In parcelling their sire's estate, They quarrel, quibble, litigate, Each aiming to supplant the other. The judge, by turns, condemns each brother. Their creditors make new assault, Some pleading error, some default. The sunder'd brothers disagree; For counsel one, have counsels ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... very well spared? It is a reproach to any Christian establishment if every man cannot claim the benefit of it who can say that he believes in the religion of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New Testament. You say the terms are so general that even Deists would quibble and insinuate themselves. I answer that all the articles which are subscribed at present by no means exclude Deists who will prevaricate; and upon this scheme you would at least exclude ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... classes (he might have said the same of writers, too, if he had pleased). In the lowest form he places those whom he calls les petits esprits—such things as are our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit; prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant expression. These are mob-readers. If Virgil and Martial steed for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But though they make the greatest appearance in the field, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... proposed measure, how in short, they tear the bill to rags, laugh its powers to scorn, and hold its authors in high derision. The Belfast men do not discuss the bill, do not examine it clause by clause, do not quibble over the purport of this or the probable effect of that, do not ask how the customs are to be collected, or who is to pay for this, that, or the other. They descend to no details, enter into no particulars, point out no minor fallacies, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... not attempt any quibble. The circumstances under which these articles were found place them sufficiently in your possession. What have you to ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... of the Thames. How the foul fiend can it interest the peasants and mechanics in the Strand, to know that the Earl of Huntinglen is sitting down to dinner? But my father looks our way—we must not be late for the grace, or we shall be in DIS-grace, if you will forgive a quibble which would have made his Majesty laugh. You will find us all of a piece, and, having been accustomed to eat in saucers abroad, I am ashamed you should witness our larded capons, our mountains of beef, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... an answer to that question? Nay, though in His boundless mercy He give you a thousand years to search, and spread before you all the books of science and sociology in which you were wont to find excuses for sin, what will it avail you? Will a scoff, or a quibble over a doubtful passage, serve your turn? No. You cannot scoff whilst your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth for fear, and there will be no passage doubtful in all the Scriptures on that ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... says there is a quibble here with asses as beasts of charge or burden. It is probable enough, seeing, as Malone tells us, that in Warwickshire, as did Dr. Johnson himself, they pronounce as hard. In Aberdeenshire the sound of the s varies ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... openness to the truth, an eager willingness to believe it simply, and to act upon it, that suggests the way they did in the Book of Acts. In our home-lands of America and Great Britain and Germany there seems to be either indifference, or an atmosphere of quibble and criticism. With questions and doubts naturalistic explanations are sought that do away with much of the ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... sense than the genuine words he delivered in the minute he did subscribe and swear. That which induced him to this, he says, was, "They gave it in his own meaning, and so far was his mind deceived, that by a quibble and nice distinction they thought that the word might bear, That this was not a disowning of that nor no declaration that ever he saw (save one of their pretending) nor that neither but in so far, or if so be; which different expressions he was taught to confound by scholastic notions infused into ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... there was a rule preventing their amending it at the time, they could pass that, and then, Chase's amendment being merged, put it in the shape they wanted. They did not choose to do so, but they went into a quibble with Chase to get him to add what they knew he would not add, and because he would not, they stand upon that flimsy pretext for voting down what they argued was the meaning and intent of their own bill. They left ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... do not see any difference between reading a book in manuscript or in print. I don't pretend to quibble on a point like that. After looking at it, I felt that it was desirable I should read the whole. You may remember, Hester, that I showed you my Modern Dissent. If I did not make restrictions, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... weeks, but the Cavaliers concealed his death. (Remember this!) That Sir John Urrey[332] is dead and buried at Oxford. (He died the same day with the Lord Wilmot.) That the Cavaliers, before they have done, will HURREY all men into misery. (This quibble hath been six times printed, and nobody would take notice of it; now let's hear of it no more!) That all the Cavaliers which Sir William Waller took prisoners (besides 500) tooke the National Covenant. (Yes, all he took (besides 500) tooke the Covenant.) That 2000 Irish Rebels ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... speeches are wanted, great guns like to have the fire to themselves. Neither did he split upon the opposite rock of "promising young men," who stick to "the business of the house" like leeches, and quibble on details; in return for which labour they are generally voted bores, who can never do anything remarkable. But he spoke frequently, shortly, courageously, and with a strong dash of good-humoured personality. He was the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sinister comedians to entertain me. And I, what can I call myself—pure reason? No, a disgusting title. Rather, Unreason, since I am after all the Indifferent One. But all this is a quibble inspired by modesty. I am God. I am that which men have worshipped—the aloof one, the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... stranger who was at the inn called the "City of Rome" wished to see him. He went at once to the place with no misgivings, but on his arrival there found the devil, who had come to claim the fulfillment of the contract. Provoked at the quibble, he resolved to employ a ruse himself, and just as the devil was about to take possession of him he seized the infant child of the innkeeper from its cradle and held it up before him, its innocence being a sure ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... great a province, you will not set yourself up any more haughtily. You will quibble no longer concerning tithes and tolls ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... approving in principle of the establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared that the new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now justly quibble at ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... paper, growling now and then as he read of some new quibble devised by the attorneys for the defense. As softly and as surreptitiously as it begins to rain on a cloudy day, she was crying. He turned again ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Electorial ambassadors, and lengthy, tedious negotiations commenced. The deliberations seemed endless. Did the ambassadors believe their task to be nearing completion, the other side had always a fresh plea, a new quibble; and the winter was far advanced before these unfortunate envoys declared that ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... all right as regards material and build. She would have been more comfortable if they had been "high-necked" shoes, and, in that case, the yarn hosiery would not have troubled him, but that is a minor detail. The quibble comes at the belt, and knowing that Margaret was an artist, we must be sure that Mr. Smith was mistaken. It may have been one of the woven cotton belts, not more than two inches wide, which, for a dizzy moment, were ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... short as it is, the faults seem not to be very few. Why part should be Latin, and part English, it is not easy to discover. In the Latin the opposition of immortalis and mortalis, is a mere sound, or a mere quibble; he is not immortal in any sense contrary to that in which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... of Johnston's claim on which was founded this malignant clique in Richmond was the merest quibble about the date of his commission to the rank of full general. Because its date was later than that of Robert E. Lee he felt ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... obviated by the admission. But it is still maintained that the Bay of Fundy is not a part of the Atlantic Ocean because it happens to be named in reference to the St. Croix in the same article of the treaty. To show the extent to which such an argument, founded on a mere verbal quibble, may be carried, let it be supposed that at some future period two nations on the continent of North America shall agree on a boundary in the following terms: By a line drawn through the Mississippi ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... saved. It was for their interest that the guarantee should not be given. It was withdrawn. The faith of England—till then regarded as something sacred—was violated; and the answer was a criticism on a phrase—a quibble upon the construction of a sentence, which all the world for six months had read one way. The secret history of this wretched transaction I do not seek to penetrate. Enough is written upon stock-books and in the records of courts in Canada to give ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... hopeless despair. The major was too enthusiastic to quibble over how the knowledge was gained. It was there in overflowing abundance. That was enough. Besides, his nephew's word was his bond. He would as soon ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... would persuade you only that banter, pun, and quibble are the properties of light men and shallow capacities; that genuine humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Contemptuousness is not incompatible with them: worthless is that man who feels no ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... in Essex, in the year 1738, that three horses (and no more than three) started for a L10 plate, and they were all three distanced the first heat, according to the common rules in horse-racing, without any quibble or equivocation; and the following was the solution:—The first horse ran on the inside of the post; the second wanted weight; and the third ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... have exercised the commentators we have but scant concern. Following Aristotle, most historians of philosophy have been metaphysicians; they have concerned themselves far less with what the ancient thinkers really knew than with what they thought. A chance using of a verbal quibble, an esoteric phrase, the expression of a vague mysticism—these would suffice to call forth reams of exposition. It has been the favorite pastime of historians to weave their own anachronistic theories upon the scanty woof of the half-remembered thoughts of the ancient ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... mind," I put in, "detective divination is merely minute observation. But why do we quibble over words and definitions when there is much work to be done? When is the formal inquest to ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... crowds of purchasers streaming in and out of Cannock and Co.'s store, from late in the morning till early in the evening. I use the last words advisedly, for the people of the West seem to have accepted Charles Lamb's humorous quibble in good faith. If they begin work later than any other civilized people, they assuredly leave off earlier. But until evening sets in there is a torrent of customers pouring in over the way, and wooing the eye from the contemplation of the Shannon at the Thomond Bridge. Of the groggeries ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... And here comes the quibble of the sophist, who singles out instances of law violated in civilized communities, and holds them up as the criterion by which to judge civilization, and triumphantly exclaims, Lo! the fruits of civilization—of that civilization which arrogates to itself the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... and an oracle was sent, at Marcus Aurelius' request, by Alexander to the Roman army on the Danube during the war with the Marcomanni, declaring that victory would follow on the throwing of two lions alive into the river. The result was a great disaster, and Alexander had recourse to the old quibble of the Delphic oracle to Croesus for an explanation. Lucian's own close investigations into Alexander's methods of fraud led to a serious attempt on his life. The whole account gives a graphic description of the inner ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... succeeded in having the proprietary lands taxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors attempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxed at the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble of course raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined by classes which had never before supported them, and now forming a large majority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolish the proprietorship and put the colony under the rule of the King. In the proposal ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... forgotten the Southampton Tavern. We for some time took C—— for a lawyer, from a certain arguteness of voice and slenderness of neck, and from his having a quibble and a laugh at himself always ready. On inquiry, however, he was found to be a patent-medicine seller, and having leisure in his apprenticeship, and a forwardness of parts, he had taken to study Blackstone and the Statutes ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Cleghorn promptly declared that in the sense of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated grew the debate, that finally the grimy excavators climbed to the upper air and appealed to Mayhew, who promptly denied the quibble, deciding that stones and pots were not interchangeable. The diversion drew attention from the great perforated disc itself, and as the sullen Cleghorn let the exultant Webb down upon the ancient pots, it lay badly bestowed near the curb on the crumbling ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... enough to center attention upon the quibble and then said: "My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United States take Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England did I finally succeed. There may be within the sound of my voice some who have knowledge of sheep culture. They ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... it was impossible to keep steady at home; and he quite readily admitted that he had not introduced himself to Zack under his real name. But at this point his communicativeness stopped. He did not quibble, or prevaricate; he just bluntly and simply declared that he would tell nothing more than he ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... I should say yes without a quibble," replied Fenton, "but your air is so serious that I do not dare run the risk; so I will merely answer,—I would like to do you a favor ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... meant "like"—it was a general term, well contrasting with "hate." As for really caring, beyond a liking for Brook Johnstone, she was sure that it was impossible. But the liking was strong. She exploded her difficulty at last with the bomb of a splendidly youthful quibble. She said to herself that she undoubtedly hated him and despised him, and that he was certainly the very lowest of living men for treating Lady Fan so badly—besides being a black sinner, a point which had ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really great humour which, once or twice in a generation at best, illuminates and elevates our literature. It is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as "funny." Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... fundamental, chief, or great doctrines of their holy religion. Down on all such quibbling! Others have objected to the words 'substantially correct,' as meaning anything or nothing, at pleasure. This, like the other objection, is a quibble. None can err here, unless it be wilfully.... The amount of the whole is, 'In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.' This is as far as the General Synod has gone or could go; but it does not interfere with the liberty of the District ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... Geoffry's Chronicle; Men whose historical superiority Is always greatest at a miracle. But Saint Augustine has the great priority, Who bids all men believe the impossible, Because 'tis so. Who nibble, scribble, quibble, he Quiets at once ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Steunenberg of Idaho. Their leaders, Moyer and Haywood, were anarchists like themselves, and although they professed contempt for law, as soon as they were arrested and brought up for trial, they clutched at every quibble of the law, as drowning men clutch at straws to save them; and, be it said to the glory or shame of the law, it furnished enough quibbles, not only to save them from the gallows, but to let them loose again on society with the legal whitewash "not ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... give up home, religion, friends—on the ten thousandth part of a chance that you might some day care for him. I did not believe he had even so much chance as that; but he had always thought me his friend, and he trusted me. Was it a quibble that kept me from betraying him? I don't know what honor is among women; but no man could have done it. I confess to my shame that I went to your house that night longing to betray him. And then suppose your mother sent ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... opportunities, as they come, and the main road of the task is marked out; shock is minimized, if not eliminated, mutual confidence is engendered, and a priceless reward may be won. But if at that first question we falter, quibble, blush, lie, jest, or repel, we have entered the wrong road which leads eternally astray. Let no question ever be either ignored or neglected, least of all repelled. It is the golden opportunity for parent, teacher, or friend. To guarantee against the child seeking promiscuous and irresponsible ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... them, and they may hear that from them they blush at from a Woman—But I make a Challenge to any Person of common Sense and Reason—that is not wilfully bent on ill Nature, and will in spight of Sense wrest a double Entendre from every thing, lying upon the Catch for a Jest or a Quibble, like a Rook for a Cully; but any unprejudic'd Person that knows not the Author, to read any of my Comedys and compare 'em with others of this Age, and if they find one Word that can offend the chastest Ear, I will submit to all their peevish Cavills; but Right or Wrong they must ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... refutation of it. To discern its fallaciousness, requires not acuteness of understanding, so much as a little common honesty. "There is indeed no surer mark of a false and hollow heart, than a disposition thus to quibble away the clear injunctions of duty and conscience[81]:" It is the wretched resource of a disingenuous mind, endeavouring to escape from convictions before which it cannot stand, and to evade obligations which ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... became one of the best women in the world; but there are some other things that might be said of her. But I'll not argue; I'll not insist. Since you think I'm wrong, I'll take your own word for it, Derek. Just tell me once, tell me without quibble and on your honor as my cousin and a gentleman, that you believe Diane to be—what I've supposed her to be hitherto, and what you know very well I mean, and I'll ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... pun or quibble. To clinch, or to clinch the nail; to confirm an improbable story by another: as, A man swore he drove a tenpenny nail through the moon; a bystander said it was true, for he was on the other side and ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the protection of society, somebody shall be punished when a crime has been committed.' Though English lawyers are too apt to set off 'an unreasonable hardship against an unreasonable indulgence,' 'to trump one quibble by another, and to suppose that they cannot be wrong in practice because they are ostentatiously indifferent to theory,' the temper of the law is, in the main, 'noble and generous.' 'No spectacle,' he says, 'can be better fitted ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... silence, reasons which we thought quite justifiable. But they don't hold good if we are to be brought into conflict with the police. Mr. Duclos told me this morning that if we were driven to speak we must do so with complete honesty and without quibble. What do you ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... have. Please, please don't quibble. And hidden things are so dangerous. It isn't as if I would not understand. You ought to give me credit for a little knowledge of human nature. I knew perfectly well that when you married me—you would think of Mary. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... better take care of ourselves and the boys, Charlie," said Uncle Aleck, cheerily. "It's pretty mean for Uncle Sam to leave the settlers to take care of themselves and the post at this critical time, I know; but we can't afford to quibble about that now. Safety is the first consideration. What does Younkins say?" he ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... your way, when it is in order, and let society quibble. How is the world to be made any better, if each one goes on in the old way ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... under the shadow of her hat, and he could not be certain, he diagnosed as green, or maybe blue, or possibly grey. Not that it mattered, for he had a catholic taste in feminine eyes. So long as they were large and bright, as were the specimens under his immediate notice, he was not the man to quibble about a point of colour. Her nose was small, and on the very tip of it there was a tiny freckle. Her mouth was nice and wide, her chin soft and round. She was just about the height which every girl ought to be. Her figure was ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... the way, pray take great care of your teeth, and keep them extremely clean. I have likewise sent you the Greek roots, lately translated into English from the French of the Port Royal. Inform yourself what the Port Royal is. To conclude with a quibble: I hope you will not only feed upon these Greek roots, but likewise digest them ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the truth I told you, though a quibble, I own. The miniature never was mine, tho' 't ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... applied its enginery to those very parts of our citadel which we would be most likely to defend the longest. Had it contented itself with the mere discussion of minor points, with here and there a quibble about a miracle or a prophecy, we could excuse many of its vagaries on the score of enthusiasm. But its premiss was, "We will accept nothing between the two lids of this Book if our Reason cannot fathom it." Hence, all truth, every book of the Bible, even the sacraments of the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... am certain that a quibble, and a carwhichit, for a play or a sermon, will not banish her from your ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Nevertheless, there was a necessity for postponing the trial, on account of a material evidence, who, though he wavered, was not yet quite brought over; and the attorney found means to put off the decision from term to term, until there was no quibble left for further delay. While this suit was depending, our hero continued to move in his usual sphere; nor did the report of his situation at all operate to his disadvantage in the polite world; on the contrary, it added a fresh plume to his character, in the eyes of all those ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... themselves brought within the cognizance of one or other of its plainest rules. In such cases we have witnessed a sharpness and activity of intellect claiming almost our admiration. What contrivance of deception and artful evasion. What dexterity of quibble, and captious objection, and petty sophistry. What vigilance to observe how the plea in justification or excuse takes effect, and, if they perceive it does not succeed, what address in sliding into a different one. What quickness to avail themselves of any mistake, or apparent concession, in the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... mother," he cried, exasperated. "Don't quibble. Let's get down to facts. Does your bringing her here mean ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for 'there has not been any life in the child.' Do not attempt to evade, even to man, a crime which cannot be hidden from the All-seeing. The poor mother has not herself felt the life of the child perhaps, but that is a quibble only of the laws of man, founded indeed upon the view, now universally recognized as incorrect, that the child's life began when its movements were first strong enough to be perceptible. There is, in fact, no moment after conception when it can be said ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... was a Chine-ponim, or droll, having that inextinguishable sense of humor which has made the saints of the Jewish Church human, has lit up dry technical Talmudic, discussions with flashes of freakish fun, with pun and jest and merry quibble, and has helped the race to survive (pace Dr. Wallace) by dint of a humorous acquiescence in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Homestead Bill. On that occasion Senator Johnson of Tennessee said, 'This idea about poor foreigners somehow or other bewilders and haunts the imagination of a great many. I am constrained to say that I look upon this objection to the bill as a mere quibble on the part of the President, as being hard pressed for some excuse in withholding his approval of the measure. His allusion to foreigners in this connection looks to me more like the ad captandum of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to think that other men do. Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer. He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more. What would he do, whether or not? Act as if I was— shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own way—if you'll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Madison became converts to Livingston's faith. Madison wrote at once that in view of these developments no proposal to exchange Louisiana for the Floridas should be entertained; the President declared himself satisfied that "our right to the Perdido is substantial and can be opposed by a quibble on form only"; and John Randolph, duly coached by the Administration, flatly declared in the House of Representatives that "We have not only obtained the command of the mouth of the Mississippi, but ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... crown, his lawyers asserting that, according to the Salic law, 'no part of the heritage of Salic land can fall to a woman,' and that therefore no woman could rule in France. As a matter of fact this was a mere quibble of the lawyers. The Salic law had been the law of the Salian Franks in the fifth century, and had to do with the inheritance of estates, not with the inheritance of the throne of France, which was not at that time in existence. The quibble, however, was ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... of this perfervid article, give an instructive clue. A mere quibble had arisen between the Central Powers and Russia. The former immediately adopted an arrogant, even threatening, attitude which thoughtful Germans condemned. Russia's willingness to submit the question to an arbitration conference consisting of four neutral ambassadors ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough removed from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting—an article. In articulo mortis, thought I; but it is something hard—and the quibble, wretched as it was, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... "I did not assert that I am Liber, but that I am Philocrates." In consequence of the idiom of the Latin language, his answer (non equidem me Liberam, sed Philocratem esse aio) will admit of another quibble, and may be read as meaning, "I did not say that I am a free man, but that Philocrates is." This maybe readily seen by the Latin scholar, but is not so easily explained ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... a person who was either very clever or very foolish (I have never quite determined which) claimed to have solved it in only one straight line, because, as she said, "I have taken care to make all the others crooked!" Who could have anticipated such a quibble? ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As Shakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of the professional wit. He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine sayings ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... see it! But, you fool, you seemed to go out of your way. You insulted him about the merest quibble—in my house!" ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... to content themselves with sending shorthand writers to Norwich to report the case fully for the benefit of their circle of readers, whose appetite for a legal quibble ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... to sit here and quibble; you're too clever altogether," I said, and I got up and wondered in which direction there was most to do, but Nina stood up, too, and put her ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... notched metal slips from a slender finger, she contemplated them: and laughed ruefully. What qualms of conscience in a burglar self-confessed! She was there for a purpose, a recognized, nefarious purpose. Granted. Then why quibble?... She would not quibble. She would be firm, resolute, determined, cold-blooded, unmindful of all kindness and courtesy and.... She would use them, accomplish her purpose, and have done, finally and for ever, with the whole ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... by his opponents for alleged undue exercise of arbitrary authority. The Supreme Court, established on the Mexican model, was reproached with seeking to overstep the limits of its functions. Every legal quibble was adjusted by a dilatory process, impracticable in a colony yet in its infancy, where summary justice was indispensable for the maintenance of order imperfectly understood by the masses. But the fault lay less with the justices than with the constitution of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Bantam, ducking his poll. "Noa!" he repeated in a lower note; and then, while a sombre grin betokening idiotic enjoyment of his profound casuistical quibble worked at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thing he has to say, and it detracts little from the cardinal importance of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement in contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... if he had pleased.] "In the lowest form he places those whom he calls Les Petits Esprits, such things as our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit, and prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant expression. These are mob readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But though they made the greatest appearance in the field, and cried the loudest, the best of it is they are but a sort ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... not so bad as your fears have represented him; it is true that he is Bury'd, altho' he is not dead; to understand this quibble you must know that he is at Bury St. Edmunds, relaxing, after the fatigues of lecturing and Londonizing. The little Rickmaness, whom you enquire after so kindly, thrives and grows apace; she is already a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... The Duke fired and missed, and then Winchelsea fired in the air. He immediately pulled out of his pocket the paper which has since appeared, but in which the word 'apology' was omitted. The Duke read it and said it would not do. Lord Falmouth said he was not come there to quibble about words, and that he was ready to make the apology in whatever terms would be satisfactory, and the word 'apology' was inserted on the ground. The Duke then touched his hat, said 'Good morning, my Lords,' mounted his horse, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... having seen Chyd. I had no right to do so, for I knew that he was now an additional distress. But the next morning when Guinea and I were alone at the breakfast table she asked me if I had not met him down the road—said that she had seen him crossing the meadows with his dogs. I began to quibble and she spoke up spiritedly: "Oh, you shouldn't hesitate to tell me. It ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... casual aggregation, an incoherent accumulation with no unity whatsoever outside the unity of the personality regarding it. All science and most modern religious systems presuppose the former, and to believe the former is, to any one not too anxious to quibble, to believe in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of the future, like many of the saner men of to-day, having so formulated their fundamental belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... truth in this. Undoubtedly, Galileo's letters to Castelli and the grand duchess, in which he attempted to show that his astronomical doctrines were not opposed to Scripture, gave a new stir to religious bigotry. For a considerable time, then, this quibble served its purpose; even a hundred and fifty years after Galileo's condemnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du Pan, in his wish to gain ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... had a pretty easy time in slavery days. They was good to us. Besides I was a house niggah." (Those who have been "house niggahs" never quibble at the word slave or negro. A subtle social distinction brewed in the black race to separate house servants from field hands as far as wealthy planters from "poor white trash.".) "Once I heard a man say of my mother, 'You could put on a white boiled shirt and lie flat down ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... day. Nevertheless, in so far as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe the other ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... he didn't write it. Sir William declares—a mere quibble! He has it from several people that Barrington was at Tallyn two days before the article appeared, and that he spoke to one or two friends next day of an 'important' conversation with Marsham, and of the first-hand information he had got ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exclaimed Matilde. "Do not use such phrases to me. They mean nothing. For some wretched quibble of your miserable conscience—as you still have the assumption to call it—you will ruin us in ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... win: the less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail: it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest. All this is now "too late to mend:" but I do hope that if ever I go to Engelfield Castle, Sir Richard will be kindly and genial to his far-off cousin, who (but for some legal quibble unknown) ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... George was always weak and wayward, and he did, in his great passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny it officially seems to me to have been utterly inevitable. His denial did her not the faintest damage, as I have pointed out. It was, so to speak, an official quibble, rendered necessary by the circumstances of the case. Not to have denied the marriage in the House of Commons would have meant ruin to both of them. As months passed, more serious difficulties awaited the unhappily wedded pair. What boots it to repeat the story of the Princes ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... was a quibble, of course, but the Maynard children were surprised at themselves that they hadn't ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... it. Four unprotected girls could be taken in guarded litters to the sea- coast and shipped to Ireland or to Cadiz, Valencia, Alexandria or Morocco with no difficulty whatever unless some one got wind of the fact. As for the Irish King, a man who had the sort of record he had, was not likely to quibble over the means used by Biterres in getting himself a bride. And before the captives within the castle could reach even the nearest of their friends and bring help, the whole troop would have left ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Verstigan also gives it the same translation, as originating from Leod, Lud, or Luyd, which, he says, means "folk or people." [23] Therefore St. Leger seems to signify a folk, a gathering, a legion or "crew" of saints, a holy crowd or crew,—which may have been the quibble extorted by Spenser's "alchemy of wit" from the "upbringing" of Elizabeth Nagle, his wife. He calls her with marked emphasis his "sweet Saint," his "sovereign Saint"; and in the "Epithalamion" the temple-gates are called ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... right is very painful; especially so because most women who are under this strain do not really care about doing right at all. I have seen a woman quibble and talk and worry about what she believed to be a matter of right and wrong in a few cents, and then neglect for months to pay a poor man a certain large amount of money which he had honestly earned, and which ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... to quibble. Tell me: until you were attracted to this young man—attracted, no doubt, because he was so unlike the European of your long experience—had you deviated from the conclusion, arrived at many years before, that you had had enough of love—of sex—to satisfy any woman? You ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "will you sit here now and quibble over what you think in your wisdom is possible or not. Get outside those doors—there's an open park beyond—and I'll knock your technicalities ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... their Queen in France, that they have revolted solely because of "this cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical murder, intended against towns and multitudes." As if they had not revolted already! Their pretext seems to mean that they do not want to alter the sovereign authority, a quibble which they issued for several months, long after it was obviously false. They also wrote to the nobles, to the French officers in the Regent's service, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... applied for her little bill. Egidia, now no longer a widow, but lawful wife of Mr. Bunting, repudiated the debt; she was widow no longer, she had become the property of another man; the debt, she pleaded, was buried in her first husband's grave. That little quibble was soon overruled. But there were often cases which were by no means so easily disposed of. Robert Bokenham was lord of the manor of Tibenham, and Robert Tate was one of his tenants. Tate died; then Bokenham died. Bokenham's son was only nine years old, and no guardian had been ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... snubbed in the salon or public meeting by the private interests of half a million of the most illiberal and ignorant conservatives in existence. Henceforth the North must rule. 'Must' is a hard nut, but Southern teeth must crack it, whether they will or no. We may shuffle and quibble, but to this it must come. Every day of the war renders it more certain. The farm must encroach on the plantation, the rural nobility give place to the higher nobility of intelligence; social culture based on mudsills ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... by whatever process, on account of religious opinions, was an act of clemency. The Netherlanders were, however, to be persuaded into this belief. The draft of the new edict was ostentatiously called the "Moderatie," or the "Moderation." It was very natural, therefore, that the common people, by a quibble, which is the same in Flemish as in English, should call the proposed "Moderation" the "Murderation." The rough mother-wit of the people had already characterized and annihilated the project, while dull formalists were carrying it through ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lennox, Darnley's elder brother. Her father had died in 1576, soon after her birth. About 1588 she had come up to London to be presented to Elizabeth, and on that occasion had amused Raleigh with her gay accomplishments. The legal quibble on which her claim was founded was the fact that she was born in England, whereas James as a Scotchman was supposed to be excluded. Arabella was no pretender; her descent from Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII., was complete, and if James had ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... (Remember this!) That Sir John Urrey[332] is dead and buried at Oxford. (He died the same day with the Lord Wilmot.) That the Cavaliers, before they have done, will HURREY all men into misery. (This quibble hath been six times printed, and nobody would take notice of it; now let's hear of it no more!) That all the Cavaliers which Sir William Waller took prisoners (besides 500) tooke the National Covenant. (Yes, all he took (besides 500) tooke ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... fell out with each other over just such a questionable enterprise as had wrecked a partnership a hundred years ago. I can see him now as he came hurrying into our office that day full of the plan for his great scheme—just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... is of any historical value, it only shows the ignorance of the representatives of France in yielding their pretensions on so poor a quibble. Neither Henry V., nor any other English sovereign before him, had laid claim to the title of "Monarch of Ireland." The indolence or ignorance of modern writers has led them, it is true, to adopt the whole series of the Plantagenet Kings as sovereigns of Ireland—to ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... does the custom known as the jus primae noctis. Dr. Karl Schmidt has tried very hard to prove that such a "right" to the bride never existed. But no one can read his treatises without noting that his argument rests on a mere quibble, the word jus. There may have been no codified law or "right" allowing kings, bishops, chiefs, landlords, medicine men, and priests to claim brides first, but that the privilege existed in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... so—But suppose quibbling or punning—but I think this is call'd punning—Is this Gentlemans humour—if so, being a Soldier, I don't see it calls his sense in question at all—but now pray let's see, how our Critick manages a quibble, with a blunder tack'd to the Tail on't, in the page before, there, in the aforesaid Play, Celidea in a ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... have saved. It was for their interest that the guarantee should not be given. It was withdrawn. The faith of England—till then regarded as something sacred—was violated; and the answer was a criticism on a phrase—a quibble upon the construction of a sentence, which all the world for six months had read one way. The secret history of this wretched transaction I do not seek to penetrate. Enough is written upon stock-books ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... may say that she is his lawful purchase. I asked six pounds for her, and he gave me six pounds." "Six flints you mean," said I; "no, no, the law is not quite so bad as that either; I know something about her, and am sure that she will never sanction such a quibble. At all events, I'll ride after the fellow." Thereupon turning the horse round, I put him to his very best trot; I rode nearly a mile without obtaining a glimpse of the fellow, and was becoming apprehensive that he had escaped me by turning down some by-path, two or three of which I had ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... itself; to shelter behind a false quirk of law instead of nestling in the eternal heart of the unchangeable and righteous Father, who is merciful in that he renders to every man according to his work, and compels their obedience, nor admits judicial quibble or subterfuge. God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very uttermost of truth, but not a hair's-breadth beyond it; he is his true father, and will have his child true as his son Jesus Christ is true. He will impute ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... somehow. We seldom meet a legislator who pretends to deny that strict adherence to our own principles would place both sexes in precisely equal positions before law and constitution, as well as in school and society. But each has his special quibble to apply, showing that in this case we must abandon all the general maxims to which we have pledged ourselves, and hold only by precedent. Nay, he construes even precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... as it is, the faults seem not to be very few. Why part should be Latin, and part English, it is not easy to discover. In the Latin the opposition of immortalis and mortalis, is a mere sound, or a mere quibble; he is not immortal in any sense contrary to that in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... enough. There are too many others behind them waiting to get their noses in the trough. Go into your respective wards and districts and organize meetings. Call your particular alderman before you. Don't let him evade you or quibble or stand on his rights as a private citizen or a public officer. Threaten—don't cajole. Soft or kind words won't go with that type of man. Threaten, and when you have managed to extract a promise be on hand with ropes to see that ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... your quibble about Paul and Apollos, whether they, or others, were the persons, though I am satisfied you are out, yet it weakeneth not my argument; for if they were blame worthy for dividing, though about the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the thorough-going type of man, not overbalanced and erratic, without quirk or quibble of temperament. He was efficient, but not brilliant. His was a general all-round efficiency. He was efficient at the law; he was efficient at college; he was efficient as a sailor; he was efficient ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... Tot brought Mary home from Wolf Cove, my sister and the doctor and I went that night by my sister's wish to distinguish the welcome, so that, in all our harbour, there might be no quibble or continuing suspicion; and we found the maid cutting her father's hair in the kitchen (for she was a clever hand with the scissors and comb), as though nothing had occurred—Skipper Tommy Lovejoy meanwhile with spirit ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... birth. Then Philip V. seized the crown, his lawyers asserting that, according to the Salic law, 'no part of the heritage of Salic land can fall to a woman,' and that therefore no woman could rule in France. As a matter of fact this was a mere quibble of the lawyers. The Salic law had been the law of the Salian Franks in the fifth century, and had to do with the inheritance of estates, not with the inheritance of the throne of France, which was not at that time in ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... The Greeks tried to quibble about differences in currency, but he furnished them with such explanations that they retired without a murmur. The Negroes demanded white shells such as are used for trading in the interior of Africa, but when he offered to send to Carthage for them ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... classes of Southern Europe—are professedly Roman Catholic. The influence of the priesthood, however, owing to various causes, seems to be on the wane, and a habit of abandoning all religious thought is much on the increase. But the realization that our people never attack any Church, or quibble about details of creed and ceremonial, has won their way to the hearts of many, and there can be no doubt that we have a great future amongst these peoples. In Peru the law does not allow any persons not of the Romish Church to offer prayer in public places, but when it was ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... say that I look upon this objection to the bill as a mere quibble on the part of the President, and as being hard-pressed for some excuse in withholding his approval of the measure; and his allusion to foreigners in this connection looks to me more like the ad captandum of the mere politician or demagogue, than a grave and sound reason to be offered by ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... responsibility rested upon Congress. The sad fate of a family from his own State, which had moved to California, had brought home to him the full measure of his responsibility. He was not disposed to quibble over points of law, while American citizens in California were exposed to the outrages of desperadoes, and of deserters from our own army ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... quite justifiable. But they don't hold good if we are to be brought into conflict with the police. Mr. Duclos told me this morning that if we were driven to speak we must do so with complete honesty and without quibble. What ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... sets for heresy his traps Of verbal quirk and quibble, And weeds the garden of the Lord ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and it is daily becoming more apparent, that the people, so soon as they find that secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to be juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... breath, whilst every eye was fixed upon the judge. The latter spoke. "The exception was conclusive; the prisoner must be discharged." I could not conceive it possible. What were truth, equity, morality—Nothing? And was murder innocence, if a quibble made it so? The jailer approached the monster, and whispered into his ear that he was now at liberty. He held down his head stupidly to receive the words, and he drew it back again, incredulous and astounded. Oh, what a secret he had learned for future government and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... by the parrying of a thousand witticisms. We have seen S——, a remarkably intelligent boy of nine years old, stand with the most puzzled face imaginable, considering for a long half hour the common quibble of "There was a carpenter who made a door; he made it too large; he cut it and cut it, and he cut it too little; he cut it again, and it fitted." S—— showed very little satisfaction, when he at length discovered the double meaning ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands were then, incredible as it now seems, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Quench (thirst) kvietigi. Querulous malkontenta. Query demando. Query cxu? Quest sercxo. Quest informigxo. Question demando. Question demandi. Question (doubt) dubi. Questionable duba. Quibble cxikani. Quick (adj.) rapida. Quick (adv.) rapide. Quick (living) viva. Quicken vivigi. Quicken rapidigi. Quicksilver hidrargo. Quiescence ripozo, kvieteco. Quiet kvieta. Quiet kvietigi. Quietude trankvileco. Quill plumo. Quilt litkovrilo. Quintal centfunto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... two barrels, one of single and one of double ale, besides three bottles of brandy. My baron-bailie and doer, Mr. Duncan Macwheeble, is the fourth on our list. There is a question, owing to the incertitude of ancient orthography, whether he belongs to the clan of Wheedle or of Quibble, but both have produced ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we have just said, he willingly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... lines of this perfervid article, give an instructive clue. A mere quibble had arisen between the Central Powers and Russia. The former immediately adopted an arrogant, even threatening, attitude which thoughtful Germans condemned. Russia's willingness to submit the question to an arbitration conference consisting ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... task of "waging neutrality," and it will be told in its proper place. But already it is apparent to what extent these two men served the great cause of English-speaking civilization. Neither would quibble or uphold an argument which he thought unjust, even though his nation might gain in a material sense, and neither would pitch the discussion in any other key than forbearance and mutual accommodation and courtliness. For both ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated grew the debate, that finally the grimy excavators climbed to the upper air and appealed to Mayhew, who promptly denied the quibble, deciding that stones and pots were not interchangeable. The diversion drew attention from the great perforated disc itself, and as the sullen Cleghorn let the exultant Webb down upon the ancient pots, it lay badly bestowed near the curb on the crumbling slope of a rubbish heap. And now Cleghorn ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... among the Romans, a boastful Thraso. But his love degenerates into lewdness; and his jests are insupportably low and illiberal, and fit only for "the dregs of Romulus" to use and to hear; he has furnished examples of every species of true and false wit, even down to a quibble and a pun. Plautus lived in an age when the Romans were but just emerging into politeness; and I cannot forbear thinking, that if he had been reserved for the age of Augustus, he would have produced more perfect plays than even ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... on these United States without a good cause," he declared vehemently, "I'd fight for my country—" Uncle Dyke didn't quibble his words. "That is to say if Uncle Sam would take me. Me and my sword!" Again he faltered, adding reflectively, "But after all the Bible is the better weapon. With it I ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... deserve that I should say yes without a quibble," replied Fenton, "but your air is so serious that I do not dare run the risk; so I will merely answer,—I would like to do you a favor if ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... slips from a slender finger, she contemplated them: and laughed ruefully. What qualms of conscience in a burglar self-confessed! She was there for a purpose, a recognized, nefarious purpose. Granted. Then why quibble?... She would not quibble. She would be firm, resolute, determined, cold-blooded, unmindful of all kindness and courtesy and.... She would use them, accomplish her purpose, and have done, finally and for ever, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from those days to these—invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de la Greve—the place of execution for the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... and not of France merely, but of the "rights of man." They could not or would not comprehend any wisdom in moderation, any prudence in delay. It is curious to see how party animosity blinded even the best of them. The objection to the word "neutrality" was a mere quibble; for the proclamation called upon all good citizens to maintain at their peril that state which, in all dictionaries, neutrality is defined to be. Mr. Jefferson, in instructing as secretary of state the American ministers abroad as to the attitude assumed by the ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... which reaches us the KAISER is now beginning to quibble. He has pointed out that, when he said he would eat his Christmas dinner at Buckingham Palace, he ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... fever, who is? I looked at it in that light. And sure enough, when we had passed out of the Gulf Stream and the sea had smoothed itself out, I made a speedy and satisfactory recovery; but if it had been seasickness I should have confessed it in a minute. I have no patience with those who quibble and equivocate in regard to ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the Turk, "we will not quibble about words. The fact remains, Mr. Brett, that you have needlessly thrust yourself into an enterprise of such a desperate character that all interlopers can be dealt with only ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... presenting a paper at his elbow, and as he read it his face changed, but by no means cleared. "Hum—ha!" he muttered, "it seems you have some fancy status here—political trick, I suppose—some quibble about Habshiabad lying outside Granthistan. But it's all one. If you ain't under my command, you don't get mentioned in my despatches—see? Eh, how ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... humiliated at the fact. She had intended to sacrifice herself upon the altar of her duty and to make herself the wedded wife of a man whom she disliked, and now on the first opportunity she had thrown up the contract on a quibble—a point of law as it were. Nature had been too strong for her, as it often is for people with deep feelings; she could not do it, no, not to save Honham from the hammer. When she had promised that she would engage ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... and looked squarely into the priest's eyes. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, quibble, cant—nothing but fearless truth ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the case. If any blame attaches to him, it must arise either from his endeavour to force Coke to a favourable decision, in which he was in all probability prompted by a feeling, not uncommon with him, that a matter of state policy was in danger of being sacrificed to some senseless legal quibble or precedent, or from his advice to the king that a rumour should be set afloat which was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may picture him with drawn sword—a sword tempered in inquisitorial fires—standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend it with ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... less often, have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's invention—a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the river-lilies that drift yonder—how white they are, how their leaves enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live painfully ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Kingsley; and whoever, at that time, read earnestly "The Spirit of the Laws" was as sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson's young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of the Stuart school dealt with a people filled with patriotic concern for their country. It is the dealing of a small man. If he can escape the charge of deliberate falsehood, it is only, on demurrer, by the plea of a contemptible quibble. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... the want of intellectual qualifications; and he imagines that all admire who applaud, and that all who laugh are pleased. He therefore returns every day to the charge with increase of courage, though not of strength, and practises all the tricks by which wit is counterfeited. He lays trains for a quibble; he contrives blunders for his footman; he adapts old stories to present characters; he mistakes the question, that he may return a smart answer; he anticipates the argument, that he may plausibly object; when he has nothing to reply, he repeats the last words of his antagonist, then says, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... course "love" meant "like"—it was a general term, well contrasting with "hate." As for really caring, beyond a liking for Brook Johnstone, she was sure that it was impossible. But the liking was strong. She exploded her difficulty at last with the bomb of a splendidly youthful quibble. She said to herself that she undoubtedly hated him and despised him, and that he was certainly the very lowest of living men for treating Lady Fan so badly—besides being a black sinner, a point which had less ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... was now an additional distress. But the next morning when Guinea and I were alone at the breakfast table she asked me if I had not met him down the road—said that she had seen him crossing the meadows with his dogs. I began to quibble and she spoke up spiritedly: "Oh, you shouldn't hesitate to tell me. It amounts ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... CREON Go, quibble with thy reason. If thou fail'st To find these malefactors, thou shalt own The wages of ill-gotten gains ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... was with Judge Bramber and a convicted prisoner. He would give the man the full benefit of every quibble of the law till he was convicted. He would be severe on witnesses, harsh to the police, apparently a very friend to the man standing at the bar,—till the time came for him to array the evidence before the jury. Then he was ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the genuine words he delivered in the minute he did subscribe and swear. That which induced him to this, he says, was, "They gave it in his own meaning, and so far was his mind deceived, that by a quibble and nice distinction they thought that the word might bear, That this was not a disowning of that nor no declaration that ever he saw (save one of their pretending) nor that neither but in so far, or if so be; which different expressions he was taught to confound ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... he cried, exasperated. "Don't quibble. Let's get down to facts. Does your bringing her here mean ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rest, Solomon was a Chine-ponim, or droll, having that inextinguishable sense of humor which has made the saints of the Jewish Church human, has lit up dry technical Talmudic, discussions with flashes of freakish fun, with pun and jest and merry quibble, and has helped the race to survive (pace Dr. Wallace) by dint of a ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... five sinister comedians to entertain me. And I, what can I call myself—pure reason? No, a disgusting title. Rather, Unreason, since I am after all the Indifferent One. But all this is a quibble inspired by modesty. I am God. I am that which men have worshipped—the aloof one, the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... not need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured. And this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without reserve or quibble. Of course we may be mistaken. What is taken for knowledge—for fact and truth—at a given time may not be such. But everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our intercourse with one another and nature is what, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and ready, he was not eloquent; and he knew that on great occasions, when great speeches are wanted, great guns like to have the fire to themselves. Neither did he split upon the opposite rock of "promising young men," who stick to "the business of the house" like leeches, and quibble on details; in return for which labour they are generally voted bores, who can never do anything remarkable. But he spoke frequently, shortly, courageously, and with a strong dash of good-humoured personality. He was the man whom a minister could get to say something which ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... leave of your senses?" I demanded, assuming an indignation I did not feel. "Dr. Pettit was saying nothing to me that could possibly interest you." I felt a little twinge of conscience at the fib, but I had too much at stake to hesitate over a quibble. "As for casting sheep's eyes, as you so elegantly express it, you've been doing so much of it yourself that I suppose it is natural for you to accuse other ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... no time to quibble or to fool; To argue over who was wrong, who right; To measure fealty with a worn foot-rule; To ask: "Shall we keep still or shall we fight?" The Clock of Fate has struck; the hour is here; War is upon us now—not far away; One question only rises, clarion clear: "How may I serve ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... for a name, while the light of the lamps burnt thin and the outer dawn came in, a ghost, the last at the feast or the first, to sit within with the two that remained to quibble in flowers and ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... to make and keep together a government, and when it once more fell to the Conservatives to take office, Macdonald saved himself and his colleagues the trouble of standing for re-election by a most shameful constitutional quibble. According to a recent act, if a member of Legislative Council or Assembly "shall resign his office, and within one month after his resignation, accept any other of the said offices (enumerated above), he shall not vacate his seat in the said Assembly or Council."[22] ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, King John is an intellectual form in which ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... very much better to take your chances with even an inferior melody maker who is as much interested as you are in a final success. And when you have found a composer, do not quibble about changing your words to fit his music. And don't fear to ask him to change his melody, wherever constant work on the song proves that a change is necessary. It is only by ceaselessly working over both words and melody that a song is ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really great humour which, once or twice in a generation at best, illuminates and elevates our literature. It is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as "funny." Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... way, when it is in order, and let society quibble. How is the world to be made any better, if each one goes on in the old way ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... of his wife's property at Snitterfield, John Shakespeare seems to have walked right off with the money to Edmund Lambert, of Barton-on-the-Heath, to redeem his mortgage, and reinstate himself as owner of Asbies, free to grant a lease or sale on his own terms. But through a quibble, which "was not in the bond," Edmund Lambert refused to accept this until certain other debts were also paid. Thereby he gained the shelter of time, which "was in the bond," and put Shakespeare at a legal disadvantage, though it is evident from the ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... her own sake, it must be believed that no man had touched her heart, or her conduct would be inexcusable. She was young; the time when men and women feel that they cannot afford to lose time or to quibble over their joys was still far off. She, no doubt, was on the verge not of first love, but of her first experience of the bliss of love. And from inexperience, for want of the painful lessons which would have taught her to value the treasure poured out at her feet, she was playing with ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... hath the witness in himself." I suddenly realized that that had been made true to me. I have the witness in my own heart that Christ is the Son of God, my Saviour! That His Presence is on earth and manifest to me at many times. No seeming variance of science, no quibble of the intellect, can ever disturb this faith on which my soul rests. It is more than a conviction; it is a perfect satisfaction! I KNOW! I may not be able to explain all mysteries, but I can never doubt again, because I know. The more I meet with modern ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... in height only—they will one day come out and desolate the world. As Lord Mayor's Day is just approaching, perhaps some of the visiters of Gog and Magog on that occasion may decide this matter. It is almost akin to our nursery quibble of the giants hearing the clock strike, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... that in view of these developments no proposal to exchange Louisiana for the Floridas should be entertained; the President declared himself satisfied that "our right to the Perdido is substantial and can be opposed by a quibble on form only"; and John Randolph, duly coached by the Administration, flatly declared in the House of Representatives that "We have not only obtained the command of the mouth of the Mississippi, but of the Mobile, with its widely extended ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... doctrines of our faith, and applied its enginery to those very parts of our citadel which we would be most likely to defend the longest. Had it contented itself with the mere discussion of minor points, with here and there a quibble about a miracle or a prophecy, we could excuse many of its vagaries on the score of enthusiasm. But its premiss was, "We will accept nothing between the two lids of this Book if our Reason cannot fathom it." Hence, all truth, every book of the Bible, even the sacraments of the church, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... or impossible, but merely because no one had ever thought of doing it before. A sufficiently inane story, and by no means certainly true; but there is enough character in this little feat, ponderous, deliberate, pompous, ostentatious, and at bottom a trick and deceitful quibble, to make it accord with the grandiloquent public manner of Columbus, and to make it easily believable of one who chose to show himself in his speech and writings so much more meanly and pretentiously than he showed himself in the true acts and ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... "An execrable race, these Pangermans!" "They have the yellow skin, the dry mouth, the green complexion of the bilious. They do not live under the sky, they avoid the light. Hidden in their cellars, they pore over treaties, cite newspaper articles, grow pale over maps, measure angles, quibble over texts or traces of frontiers." "The Pangerman is a propagandist and a revivalist." "But," M. Bourdon adds, "when he shouts we must not think we hear in his tones the reverberations of the German soul." The organs of the party seemed few and unimportant. The ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... action, the only quibble being the long and rather similar names the Malagasy people who appear in the story have. This makes it sometimes rather hard to make ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... James's. "Well, well—you quibble. I dare say Urquhart has fifteen thousand a year, and even you will know that I ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... asleep will be stirring, giving vent to outrageous ideas, championing incredulous banalities, prostrating themselves before imbecile superstitions. Tomorrow they will rise and begin forthwith to lie, quibble, cheat, steal, fourflush and kill, each and all inspired by the solacing monomania that every one of their words and gestures is a credible variant of perfection. Yes, tomorrow they will be as ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... liberation of Italy; while Agesilaus obtained the throne in defiance of both human and divine laws, for he declared Leotychides to be a bastard, although his brother had publicly recognised him as his own son, and he also by a quibble evaded the oracle about ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... transplanted Saxon England freed from the dross of Norman rule and feudal aristocracy. Liberty and law are henceforth to work out the destinies of men. And who contemplating the manner of men and whence they derived their faith, their hopes and fears, can quibble about the aims and purposes of the founders of this Republic? The fathers did not borrow their political ideals from the juriscounsuls of Rome; not from the free democracy of Greece; nor did they fuse into their system the feudal aristocratic ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... [The Annual Report of the Examiners in Physiology under the Science and Art Department, which, being still an Examiner he had to sign.] and have nothing to suggest except a quibble at page 4. If you take a stick in your hand you may feel lots of things and determine their form, etc., with the other end of it, but surely the stick is properly said to be insensible. Ditto with the teeth. I feel very well ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... cheeriest, sunniest nature that ever dwelt in human body, with a sympathy that went out to everybody and everything—children, animals, the old, the feeble, the fallen—a man too big to be jealous, too noble to quibble, a man so manly that he would accept guilt rather than impute it to another. If he had been possessed of less love he would have been a stronger man. The generous nature lies open and unprotected—through ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... gift; if you don't want it, I will take it back": and he accepted it with bows and smiles, and allowed the weary priests to continue their intonings. But Bobadilla is the one place in southern Spain where money is never jingled upon marble. There is no time between trains to quibble over minor matters; and a "Sevillan dollar" accepted from one passenger is blithely handed to another who is traveling in the opposite direction. I discovered this fact on the occasion of my first visit to this ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... power of criticism, as there was perhaps no example of in the English language. Towards the conclusion, he has, I think, successfully defended him from the neglect of what are called the unities. The observation, that a quibble was the Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it, is more pointed than just. Shakspeare cannot be said to have lost the world; for his fame has not only embraced the circle of his own country, but is continually ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... at once elevate the American question to a higher region, to represent it to Europe in its true, holy character, as a question of right, freedom, and humanity. Then it will be impossible for England to quibble about technicalities of the international laws; then we can beat England with her own arms and words, as England in 1824, &c., recognized the Greeks as belligerents, on the plea of aiding freedom and humanity. The Southern insurrection is a movement similar to that of the Neapolitan ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... enough to convince them that it was not done. They saw an unarmed man shot down and instantly killed in one of the most frequented streets of the city while endeavoring to escape from his pursuer. They saw the forms of trial applied in this clear case, and after every quibble and perversion of law which ingenuity could devise had been tried, the lame and impotent conclusion arrived at of a verdict of manslaughter, and a sentence for a short period to the State Prison. They saw a gambler, while quietly conversing with the ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... only possible and complete one. We should always bear in mind that the world is alive, and changing, and moving. It goes on to disclose a new phase, or to add a new truth. The subtlest logic of old is a mere quibble of nowadays. The miracles of yesterday are the commonplaces of to-day. Now theories are formed, new discoveries are made, only to give their places to newer theories are discoveries. New ideals realized or new desires satisfied ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... turn to quibble. Tell me: until you were attracted to this young man—attracted, no doubt, because he was so unlike the European of your long experience—had you deviated from the conclusion, arrived at many years before, that you had had ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "Liber" was also a name of Bacchus, Tyndarus quibbles, and says, "I did not assert that I am Liber, but that I am Philocrates." In consequence of the idiom of the Latin language, his answer (non equidem me Liberam, sed Philocratem esse aio) will admit of another quibble, and may be read as meaning, "I did not say that I am a free man, but that Philocrates is." This maybe readily seen by the Latin scholar, but is not so easily explained ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... that Parisian one, for a libel which he never wrote, because he would not betray his cowardly contributor. He had twice pleaded his own cause, without help of attorney, and showed himself as practised in every law-quibble and practical cheat as if he had been a regularly ordained priest of the blue-bag; and each time, when hunted at last into a corner, had turned valiantly to bay, with wild witty Irish eloquence, "worthy," as the press say of poor misguided Mitchell, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... in rocket engineering shall be shared equally among the Members of the United Nations', but the Soviet delegation wanted to change that to 'any advances in space travel'. We only beat them out by a verbal quibble; we insisted that the word 'space', as used, could apply equally to the space between continents or cities or, for that matter, between any two points. By the time we got through arguing, the UN had ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... at which I sit writing the crowds of purchasers streaming in and out of Cannock and Co.'s store, from late in the morning till early in the evening. I use the last words advisedly, for the people of the West seem to have accepted Charles Lamb's humorous quibble in good faith. If they begin work later than any other civilized people, they assuredly leave off earlier. But until evening sets in there is a torrent of customers pouring in over the way, and ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... Convention have excited such indignation. For the French, by so acting, could not deem themselves breaking an engagement; no doubt they looked upon themselves as injured,—that the failure in good faith was on the part of the British; and that it was in the lawlessness of power, and by a mere quibble, that this construction was afterwards put upon ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... upon such as would not live according to that higher law, upon those who persisted in the use of oaths and vows, the lesser and evidently just requirement of strict fidelity to the terms of self-assumed obligations was to be enforced, without unrighteous quibble or ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... and blondness, go down the room side by side. Of what had she been guilty? she asked herself. Why should she have anything to hide? Yet she was honest enough to face the fact and accept, without quibble, that she had something to hide. And her cheeks burned at the thought that she was ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Monmouth Geoffry's Chronicle; Men whose historical superiority Is always greatest at a miracle. But Saint Augustine has the great priority, Who bids all men believe the impossible, Because 'tis so. Who nibble, scribble, quibble, he Quiets at once ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... I put in, "detective divination is merely minute observation. But why do we quibble over words and definitions when there is much work to be done? When is the formal inquest to be held, ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... processes of the law are inadequate to trap this organisation. The law has too wide a mesh to deal with the terror which this man exercises. Such men are the only justification of lynch law, the quick, sharp justice which is administered without subtlety and without quibble." ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... having the proprietary lands taxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors attempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxed at the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble of course raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined by classes which had never before supported them, and now forming a large majority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolish the proprietorship ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... marriage as his chiefest courtier, and being thereby placed too much in the radiance of the king's presence; or, perhaps, an allusion to the proverb, "Out of Heaven's blessing, into the warm sun:" but it is not unlikely that a quibble is meant between son ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... I do not see any difference between reading a book in manuscript or in print. I don't pretend to quibble on a point like that. After looking at it, I felt that it was desirable I should read the whole. You may remember, Hester, that I showed you my Modern Dissent. If I did not make restrictions, why ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Shylocks. Neither supplications nor tears had power to move them, and though they sometimes relented, it was invariably for reasons of policy and in the best interests of the service. Men clearly shown to be protected they released. They could not go back upon their word unless some lucky quibble rendered it possible to traverse the obligation with honour. Unprotected subjects who were clearly unfit to eat the king's victuals they ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... husband's honor by the discharge of his just debt, though paid out of her own wealth ten times over. It is evident that she would rather owe the safety of Antonio to any thing rather than the legal quibble with which her cousin Bellario has armed her, and which she reserves as a last resource. Thus all the speeches addressed to Shylock in the first instance, are either direct or indirect experiments on his temper and feelings. She must be understood from the beginning ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... and brute force, maximum of intelligent self-control and kindly adaptation. Mere codes of rules, whether at home or at school, set the children at work, with all their sharp, unregenerate little wits, to pick flaws, draw distinctions, and quibble on interpretations. They become abominably shrewd in a degrading, casuistical strict-constructionism. In spite of everything, the little, cunning, irresponsible, non-moral beings will be successfully appealing to the letter of the law against the spirit, and warping ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... many,—and, we fear, a daily increasing number of persons,—who, admitting Inspiration in terms, yet so mutilate the notion of it, that their admission becomes a practical lie. "St. Paul was inspired, no doubt. So was Shakspeare." He who says this, intending no quibble, declares that in his belief St. Paul was not ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... not the audacious originality of Luther. He never went to the length of braving Alexander by burning his bulls and by denying the authority of popes in general. Not daring to break all connection with the Holy See, he was driven to quibble about the distinction between the office and the man, assuming a hazardous attitude of obedience to the Church whose head and chief he daily outraged. At the same time he took no pains to enlist the sympathies of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... July, 1859, while approving in principle of the establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared that the new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now justly quibble at a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... appearance of truth in this. Undoubtedly, Galileo's letters to Castelli and the grand duchess, in which he attempted to show that his astronomical doctrines were not opposed to Scripture, gave a new stir to religious bigotry. For a considerable time, then, this quibble served its purpose; even a hundred and fifty years after Galileo's condemnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du Pan, in his wish to gain favour from ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... was, that he would seize the Ship as fair Prize, and as if she belonged to French Subjects, according to a commission he had for that purpose; tho', one would think, after what he had already done, that he need not have recourse to a quibble to give ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... United States, in which it was declared that the only conditions upon which peace could be made was the full and final relinquishment by Algiers of all claim to tribute in the future, and the guarantee that American commerce would not be molested. The captain, like all Orientals, began to quibble to gain time, asking that the commissioners should land and conduct the negotiations on shore. Decatur replied that they must be negotiated on board the Guerriere and ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... conversation, it would appear that the passages omitted were not very material to the point under discussion? Again, considering that the manner in which the so-called "contracts" with slaves are concluded is notorious, is it not rather begging the question and falling back on a legal quibble to say that there would "be no reason for insisting on the repatriation (of a British subject) if he were working under a contract which could not be shown to be illegal"? Can it be expected, moreover, that Sir Eyre Crowe's ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... had meant her playful retort as a mere light-hearted quibble. It annoyed her, a young person of much consequence, to have her ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... Catholic, an unconditional oath of allegiance, giving vague promises, that perhaps at some future time he would promulgate a decree of toleration, but declaring that he was not bound to do so, on the miserable quibble that, as he had received from Rhodolph a hereditary title, he was not bound to grant any thing but ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear. It was not altogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith had been grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children, joint-heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quite decided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the crucifixion than before: and with respect to the second explanation, (including with it the natural death of Jesus Christ as a substitute for the eternal death or damnation of all mankind,) it is impertinently representing the Creator as coming off, or revoking the sentence, by a pun or a quibble upon the word death. That manufacturer of, quibbles, St. Paul, if he wrote the books that bear his name, has helped this quibble on by making another quibble upon the word Adam. He makes there to be two Adams; the one who sins in fact, and suffers by proxy; ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... evidently inspired by Paul's quibble, "If the dead rise not from the grave, then is our religion vain." Lincoln once referred to this kind of reasoning by saying, "I object to the assumption that my ambition is to have my son marry a negress, simply because I am struggling ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... themselves the knowledge of the foundation of all men's lives and properties, they have reduced all mankind into the most abject and servile dependence. We are tenants at the will of these gentlemen for everything; and a metaphysical quibble is to decide whether the greatest villain breathing shall meet his deserts, or escape with impunity, or whether the best man in the society shall not be reduced to the lowest and most despicable condition it affords. In a word, my lord, the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... served the government faithfully and zealously, as a soldier; he advanced money for them upon some foreign station; but the government was ungrateful and ungenerous to him, and in consequence of some quibble, they have refused to repay him what he advanced on their account. He complained and remonstrated, he became importunate for justice, he was considered troublesome, and for complaining they have sent him to prison, under the suspension of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... arranged to take place within a week of Captain Paget's expressly declared wish. It was to be solemnised at a church near Knightsbridge, and again at a Catholic chapel in the neighbourhood of Sloane-street; by which double ceremonial a knot would be tied that no legal quibble could hereafter loosen. Charlotte was just sufficiently recovered to obtain permission to be present at the ceremonial, after some little exercise of her persuasive powers with the medical practitioner to whose care Dr. Jedd had committed her ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... parents, was treated with great asperity. Having been told by the father that he was to expect no money from him, the doctor went home and wrote the following note to him: "John Donne, Anne Donne, undone." This quibble had the desired effect, and the distressed couple were restored ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... home town. Austin was firm, nevertheless, in his decision to stay by what he had found. "We have friends here who make us welcome. We need not feel that we are utterly strangers. I have a good job and it would be foolishness for me to look farther. Let us not quibble any more. If we are going to make a home for the children, let us get at it," he said in ending the contention. "If you girls wish to go on down home, or anywhere else, visiting, do it now before we start in. I want you to be satisfied, but I can ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... shipped to Ireland or to Cadiz, Valencia, Alexandria or Morocco with no difficulty whatever unless some one got wind of the fact. As for the Irish King, a man who had the sort of record he had, was not likely to quibble over the means used by Biterres in getting himself a bride. And before the captives within the castle could reach even the nearest of their friends and bring help, the whole troop ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... The answer is that it is not an "ism" at all, despite the last syllable in its name. It is a living soul or consciousness; it is the soul or consciousness of the Jewish people. We are not interested in names, and we should not quibble about terms; it is reality that we are after. We want to know what is involved in being a Jew and living a Jewish life. The main reason for our finding fault with the usual presentation of Judaism is that it does not enlighten or inspire us. If the term Judaism does not ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Hegel's quibble with this word other exemplifies the same fallacy. All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical. That is, 'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing A, secundum quid (as other than B, etc.), is predicated simpliciter, and made to identify the A in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... can satisfy yourself with such a quibble! But I wonder that you can tell me—any ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... My duties are secret. My very honor forbids me to divulge it. I dare not openly acknowledge an acquaintance with you, with your sister. It rests with you that we meet again, for my sake, for your own sake, for your sister's sake. I cannot lose you for a mere quibble." ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... promised. As, if I sell a calf, I may not object to his removal because, forsooth, some portion of earth from my land clingeth to his hoofs. So blood is included in the word 'flesh' where 'twere impossible to deliver the flesh without some blood. As for that quibble of nor more nor less, why, 'tis the debtor's place to deliver his promise. If he himself cut off too much, he injures himself, if too little he hath not made good ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Classes. [He might have said the same of Writers too, if he had pleased.] In the lowest Form he places those whom he calls Les Petits Esprits, such thingsas are our Upper-Gallery Audience in a Play-house; who like nothing but the Husk and Rind of Wit, prefer a Quibble, a Conceit, an Epigram, before solid Sense and elegant Expression: These are Mob Readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for Parliament-Men, we know already who would carry it. But though they make the greatest Appearance in the Field, and cry the loudest, the best on't is they are but a sort ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... follows: Fairfax's scruple proved to be that both they and the Scots had joined in the Solemn League and Covenant, and that, therefore, until Scotland assumed the offensive, there was no cause for an invasion. Cromwell's retort, after a preliminary quibble, was practical enough. "War is inevitable. Is it better to have it in the bowels of another's country or in one's own? In one or other it must be." Fairfax's scruple, however, withstood this battery, though it was strongly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... felt; but its truth is admitted. Those who knew anything of the subject are "the so-called men of science," whose three P's were assailed; prestige, pride, and prejudice: this the author tries to effect for himself with three Q's; quibble, quirk, and quiddity. He explains that the Scribes and Pharisees would not hear Jesus, and that the lordly bishop of Rome will not cast his tiara and keys at the feet of the "humble presbyter" who now plays the part of pope in Scotland. I do not know whom he means: but ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... young Jones, "it wouldn't take me long to decide. You see, from me you get twenty thousand dollars clean. Otherwise, the place goes to him." He nodded toward Hardy. "And you get nothing. It's mighty plain—as plain as the nose on your face. I'm a plain man, and I don't quibble. I've made you a direct offer. Nothing ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... American general to quit this position; and having failed in various expedients, on the 19th of June he ordered his main body to retire to Amboy. This succeeded. Washington abandoned what had cost him so much trouble to create, and advanced to Quibble Town. The mass of the British troops now moved back by different routes, in order to get on the American general's flank and rear, and by intervening between him and the hills, to force him to a conflict on open ground. Lord Cornwallis led the van, and he had not marched far before ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of destruction would strongly impel them to, without counting the temptation of dollars,—and this only because they had been taught that Sunday was a day of rest and worship, wherein no man should catch fish, and knew no theological quibble or mercantile close-sailing by which to weather on God's command. It sounds little to us who have not been tempted, or, if tempted, have gracefully succumbed, on the plea that other people do so too; but how many stock-speculators ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... in the Strand, to know that the Earl of Huntinglen is sitting down to dinner? But my father looks our way—we must not be late for the grace, or we shall be in DIS-grace, if you will forgive a quibble which would have made his Majesty laugh. You will find us all of a piece, and, having been accustomed to eat in saucers abroad, I am ashamed you should witness our larded capons, our mountains ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... death with me may trade; Let me not quibble o'er the price; But may I, once the bargain's made, With courage meet the sacrifice. If happiness for ages long My little term of life can buy, God, for my country make me strong; To-morrow let me ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot. If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you perceive—the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're naturally ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that time, read earnestly "The Spirit of the Laws" was as sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson's young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery paradox must have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... protection, and an oracle was sent, at Marcus Aurelius' request, by Alexander to the Roman army on the Danube during the war with the Marcomanni, declaring that victory would follow on the throwing of two lions alive into the river. The result was a great disaster, and Alexander had recourse to the old quibble of the Delphic oracle to Croesus for an explanation. Lucian's own close investigations into Alexander's methods of fraud led to a serious attempt on his life. The whole account gives a graphic description of the inner working of one among the many new oracles that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... assisting Sulla in the liberation of Italy; while Agesilaus obtained the throne in defiance of both human and divine laws, for he declared Leotychides to be a bastard, although his brother had publicly recognised him as his own son, and he also by a quibble evaded the oracle about a ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... his head in hopeless despair. The major was too enthusiastic to quibble over how the knowledge was gained. It was there in overflowing abundance. That was enough. Besides, his nephew's word was his bond. He would as soon think ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... spun back to Homer Crawford. "I'm not here to quibble with self-confessed malcontents. I've been sent to represent the State Department, to report to them, and, above all, to do what I can to prevent your activities from redounding to the further advantage of the Soviet Complex. I assume you ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... peasants and mechanics in the Strand, to know that the Earl of Huntinglen is sitting down to dinner? But my father looks our way—we must not be late for the grace, or we shall be in DIS-grace, if you will forgive a quibble which would have made his Majesty laugh. You will find us all of a piece, and, having been accustomed to eat in saucers abroad, I am ashamed you should witness our larded capons, our mountains of beef, and oceans of brewis, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... that and sank back into his favorite position with arms folded, staring straight before him. This girl was too handsome to quibble with. Her newly discovered cheerfulness disturbed him. He had known in abundance women of courage, women of skill in dissimulation, but he remembered that when they were both beautiful and clever it was the part of wisdom ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... fatal volume and found a page which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear. It was not altogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith had been grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children, joint-heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quite decided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice. As Memory ceased to read Conscience again thrust aside her mantle, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now justly quibble at a deficiency ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... case. If any blame attaches to him, it must arise either from his endeavour to force Coke to a favourable decision, in which he was in all probability prompted by a feeling, not uncommon with him, that a matter of state policy was in danger of being sacrificed to some senseless legal quibble or precedent, or from his advice to the king that a rumour should be set afloat which was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... draft, makes mention of the States, as States, no less than seventy times; and of these seventy times, only three times in the way of prohibition of the exercise of a power. In fact, it is full of statehood. Leave out all mention of the States—I make no mere verbal point or quibble, but mean the States in their separate, several, distinct capacity—and what would remain would be of less account than the play of the Prince of Denmark with the part ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... inspired by Paul's quibble, "If the dead rise not from the grave, then is our religion vain." Lincoln once referred to this kind of reasoning by saying, "I object to the assumption that my ambition is to have my son marry a negress, simply because I am struggling for emancipation." Mrs. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... murder, you say, for 'there has not been any life in the child.' Do not attempt to evade, even to man, a crime which cannot be hidden from the All-seeing. The poor mother has not herself felt the life of the child perhaps, but that is a quibble only of the laws of man, founded indeed upon the view, now universally recognized as incorrect, that the child's life began when its movements were first strong enough to be perceptible. There is, in fact, no moment after conception when it can be said that ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... girl, don't dare to quibble! You are going nowhere, and you know it. Nobody has invited you for Christmas Day; that's why you were crying just now—because you had nowhere to go. And you would have gone away this morning, and said nothing, and sat alone in your rooms... I call ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from those days to these—invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de la Greve—the place of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... a fancy to add to the cost of the roads as much more as the guarantee would have saved. It was for their interest that the guarantee should not be given. It was withdrawn. The faith of England—till then regarded as something sacred—was violated; and the answer was a criticism on a phrase—a quibble upon the construction of a sentence, which all the world for six months had read one way. The secret history of this wretched transaction I do not seek to penetrate. Enough is written upon stock-books and in the records of courts in Canada to give us the proportions of that {120} scheme ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... take care of ourselves and the boys, Charlie," said Uncle Aleck, cheerily. "It's pretty mean for Uncle Sam to leave the settlers to take care of themselves and the post at this critical time, I know; but we can't afford to quibble about that now. Safety is the first consideration. What does Younkins ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... within ten years from date, and be given away by him within one month's time after his acquisition of the same. Lawyer Means, without objection, filed carefully all Basset's precautionary conditions; then he proceeded to make it clearly evident, with no danger of quibble, that "in case the said Jerome Edwards should comply with all the said conditions, the said Doctor Seth Prescott and Simon Basset, Esquire, of Upham Corners, do covenant and engage by these presents to remise, release, give, and forever ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... would have him. The meaning of this was, that he would seize the ship as fair prize, and as if she had belonged to French subjects, according to a commission he had for that purpose; though, one would think, after what he had already done, that he need not have recourse to a quibble to give his ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... laughed at the law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering law-breakers from those days to these,—invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de Greve,—the place of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... supplications nor tears had power to move them, and though they sometimes relented, it was invariably for reasons of policy and in the best interests of the service. Men clearly shown to be protected they released. They could not go back upon their word unless some lucky quibble rendered it possible to traverse the obligation with honour. Unprotected subjects who were clearly unfit to eat the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... he shall lack no burns] A quibble between barns, repositories of corn, and bairns, the old word ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... of human breath, whilst every eye was fixed upon the judge. The latter spoke. "The exception was conclusive; the prisoner must be discharged." I could not conceive it possible. What were truth, equity, morality—Nothing? And was murder innocence, if a quibble made it so? The jailer approached the monster, and whispered into his ear that he was now at liberty. He held down his head stupidly to receive the words, and he drew it back again, incredulous and astounded. Oh, what a secret he had learned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Catholic. The influence of the priesthood, however, owing to various causes, seems to be on the wane, and a habit of abandoning all religious thought is much on the increase. But the realization that our people never attack any Church, or quibble about details of creed and ceremonial, has won their way to the hearts of many, and there can be no doubt that we have a great future amongst these peoples. In Peru the law does not allow any persons not of the Romish Church ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... that that is a quibble," said Mr. Brooke, dryly. "A talent for music does not confine itself solely to the piano. I presume that you have been told that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his church. He demanded of all the lords, Protestant as well as Catholic, an unconditional oath of allegiance, giving vague promises, that perhaps at some future time he would promulgate a decree of toleration, but declaring that he was not bound to do so, on the miserable quibble that, as he had received from Rhodolph a hereditary title, he was not bound to grant any thing but what ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... payment within thirty days after the appointed term, and total deprivation if he persisted in his opposition six months after his excommunication. When he got himself fairly installed as abbot he declined to pay the stipulated pension to the Cardinal of St. Mark's, and made some legal quibble the ground of his neglect. Trouble followed, and since this, the appointment of its first commendator, the rights of the abbey began to be invaded. Abbot George Shaw (1472-1498) endeavoured to guard the monastery against encroachments; he built ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe the ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... himself to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may picture him with drawn sword—a sword tempered in inquisitorial fires—standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... really had only one elective term, so that the third term custom did not apply to me; and I wished to repudiate this suggestion. I believed then (and I believe now) the third term custom or tradition to be wholesome, and, therefore, I was determined to regard its substance, refusing to quibble over the words usually employed to express it. On the other hand, I did not wish simply and specifically to say that I would not be a candidate for the nomination in 1908, because if I had specified the year when I would not be a candidate, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... waiting? Have I ever pressed my claim till I knew I could make you comfortable and happy? But why do I cringe and beg like this?" he added, setting his teeth hard with the pain of disappointment. "If you really loved me you could not quibble about the thing you call duty." And he strode back and forth, refusing to take in ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... God hath the witness in himself." I suddenly realized that that had been made true to me. I have the witness in my own heart that Christ is the Son of God, my Saviour! That His Presence is on earth and manifest to me at many times. No seeming variance of science, no quibble of the intellect, can ever disturb this faith on which my soul rests. It is more than a conviction; it is a perfect satisfaction! I KNOW! I may not be able to explain all mysteries, but I can never doubt again, because I know. The more I meet ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... next? The idea. He was not to be so completely silly. She didn't propose to have the responsibility of his catching pneumonia just for the sake of a quibble. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while. Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... not here attempt to juggle with the quibble of 'Revolution or Evolution,'—or to meet the contention of some of those under consideration that it is not Revolution that is wanted. 'You cannot change the world and yet not change the world.' Revolution is the means of, not the alternative to, Evolution. I simply state ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... it is a small thing. People privileged to receive Punch's Almanack through the post will not quibble over a half-penny. But it is evident that a system which embodies an arrangement that needs only to be stated to have its ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... Lord Wilmot hath been dead five weeks, but the Cavaliers concealed his death. (Remember this!) That Sir John Urrey[332] is dead and buried at Oxford. (He died the same day with the Lord Wilmot.) That the Cavaliers, before they have done, will HURREY all men into misery. (This quibble hath been six times printed, and nobody would take notice of it; now let's hear of it no more!) That all the Cavaliers which Sir William Waller took prisoners (besides 500) tooke the National Covenant. (Yes, all he took (besides 500) tooke the Covenant.) ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... he did, in his great passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny it officially seems to me to have been utterly inevitable. His denial did her not the faintest damage, as I have pointed out. It was, so to speak, an official quibble, rendered necessary by the circumstances of the case. Not to have denied the marriage in the House of Commons would have meant ruin to both of them. As months passed, more serious difficulties awaited the unhappily wedded pair. What boots it to repeat the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... eloquent; and he knew that on great occasions, when great speeches are wanted, great guns like to have the fire to themselves. Neither did he split upon the opposite rock of "promising young men," who stick to "the business of the house" like leeches, and quibble on details; in return for which labour they are generally voted bores, who can never do anything remarkable. But he spoke frequently, shortly, courageously, and with a strong dash of good-humoured personality. He was the man whom a minister ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to the merchant, entraps him into pledging a pound of his flesh as surety for the loan. Bassanio marries Portia, but misfortune overtakes Antonio, he forfeits his bond, and his life is only saved by a quibble devised by Portia. ...
— 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.
... Stuart school dealt with a people filled with patriotic concern for their country. It is the dealing of a small man. If he can escape the charge of deliberate falsehood, it is only, on demurrer, by the plea of a contemptible quibble. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Matilde. "Do not use such phrases to me. They mean nothing. For some wretched quibble of your miserable conscience—as you still have the assumption to call it—you will ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... kingdom, while such as some of you who are the natural children of the kingdom, are shut out, because when they hear they receive, and submit, and obey, while you stand outside and hold on to your idols, and reason, and quibble, and reject! My dear friends, let me persuade you to trample under foot that idol, to tear down that refuge of lies, and to come to God honestly, and say, "Lord, here I am, to be a servant, to be nothing, to do anything, to suffer anything. I know I shall be ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... time to quibble over church discipline? If you believed in her you would save her at ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... admission. But it is still maintained that the Bay of Fundy is not a part of the Atlantic Ocean because it happens to be named in reference to the St. Croix in the same article of the treaty. To show the extent to which such an argument, founded on a mere verbal quibble, may be carried, let it be supposed that at some future period two nations on the continent of North America shall agree on a boundary in the following terms: By a line drawn through the Mississippi from its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico to its source; ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... all laughed! It was a quibble, of course, but the Maynard children were surprised at themselves that they hadn't ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... comedians to entertain me. And I, what can I call myself—pure reason? No, a disgusting title. Rather, Unreason, since I am after all the Indifferent One. But all this is a quibble inspired by modesty. I am God. I am that which men have worshipped—the aloof one, the pitiless and ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... wounded after an encounter in the environs of Paris, often came in contact with the Germans. The report was, of course, limited to the statement that Bazaine was negotiating a surrender, not that he had actually capitulated. The Government's denial of it can only be described as a quibble—of the kind to which at times even British Governments stoop when faced by inconvenient questions in the House of Commons—and, as we shall soon see, the gentlemen of the National Defence spent a tres mauvais ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... want of intellectual qualifications; and he imagines that all admire who applaud, and that all who laugh are pleased. He therefore returns every day to the charge with increase of courage, though not of strength, and practises all the tricks by which wit is counterfeited. He lays trains for a quibble; he contrives blunders for his footman; he adapts old stories to present characters; he mistakes the question, that he may return a smart answer; he anticipates the argument, that he may plausibly object; when he has nothing to reply, he repeats the last words of his antagonist, then says, "your ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... endeavouring to deceive him in the spirit of what he said, but that as regarded the letter, the young man was endeavouring to adhere to some fact for the salvation of his conscience as a Christian. If Anton Trendellsohn could but find out in what lay the quibble, the discovery might be very serviceable to him. "It could have been managed—could it?" he said, speaking very slowly. "Between you ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... every man cannot claim the benefit of it who can say that he believes in the religion of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New Testament. You say the terms are so general that even Deists would quibble and insinuate themselves. I answer that all the articles which are subscribed at present by no means exclude Deists who will prevaricate; and upon this scheme you would at least exclude fewer ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... fearful responsibility rested upon Congress. The sad fate of a family from his own State, which had moved to California, had brought home to him the full measure of his responsibility. He was not disposed to quibble over points of law, while American citizens in California were exposed to the outrages of desperadoes, and of deserters from our own ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... gifts of clothing which the Labrador Needlework Guild and other friends send us could never be used at all as love would wish, unless the Strathcona were available to enlarge the area reached. In spite of all this, those who would quibble over trifles claim that she is the only craft on record that rolls at dry-dock! Her functions are certainly varied, but perhaps the oddest which I have ever been asked to perform was an incident which I have often told. One day, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... interest in outer interpretations of light and movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Morley, the free-thinker, was a member of the House of commons, having taken the regulation oath and been accepted without quibble. Morley constantly used his influence with Labouchere in Bradlaugh's behalf, but for five years he was blocked ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... for a libel which he never wrote, because he would not betray his cowardly contributor. He had twice pleaded his own cause, without help of attorney, and showed himself as practised in every law-quibble and practical cheat as if he had been a regularly ordained priest of the blue-bag; and each time, when hunted at last into a corner, had turned valiantly to bay, with wild witty Irish eloquence, "worthy," as the press say of poor misguided Mitchell, "of a better cause." ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... "this cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical murder, intended against towns and multitudes." As if they had not revolted already! Their pretext seems to mean that they do not want to alter the sovereign authority, a quibble which they issued for several months, long after it was obviously false. They also wrote to the nobles, to the French officers in the Regent's service, and ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... amazed and offended, her hair ruffled, the lace about her throat in disorder; at the window, his back turned to her, he flung over his shoulder: "Look here—you can go. I won't hold you any longer. I suppose your uncle can fix it up; some damned legal quibble will get you out of it. I—I'll ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... Paris, had to tell them about the Peace Conference, the prospects of hanging the EX-KAISER, and so forth, but received little information, save that the Government shared the popular desire that no legal quibble should prevent the arch-criminal being brought to justice. Members were a little comforted, however, by the announcement that a Committee of the Cabinet is already considering the whole question of Peace-celebrations. While Mr. LLOYD GEORGE is engaged (if the image is permitted) in fighting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... an unarmed man shot down and instantly killed in one of the most frequented streets of the city while endeavoring to escape from his pursuer. They saw the forms of trial applied in this clear case, and after every quibble and perversion of law which ingenuity could devise had been tried, the lame and impotent conclusion arrived at of a verdict of manslaughter, and a sentence for a short period to the State Prison. They saw a ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... been the greatest fool in the world, Dunham," he said. "I have let a quixotic quibble keep me from speaking when I ought ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... congregation, and thus added another knot to the complicated string of his delinquencies. He was discovered. There was not a man aware of the circumstances of the case who was not satisfied of his guilt; but a legal quibble saved him, and he was sent into the world again, branded with the solemn reprimand of the judge who tried him for his life, and who bade him seek existence honestly—compelled to labour, as he would be, in a humbler sphere of life ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... acquired. It is impossible to conceive of any other category. But it is frequently hard to say in which class a given character falls. Worse still, many persons do not even distinguish the two categories accurately—a confusion made easier by the quibble that all characters must be acquired, since the organism starts from a single cell, which possesses practically none of the traits of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... vendor's shares would play a part in the game. Ah! I see I've hit the mark! That was the way of it!—And now here, Thorpe! Let all that's been said be bye-gones! I don't want any verbal triumph over you. You don't want to wrong me—and yourself too—by sticking to this quibble about vendor's shares. You intended to be deuced good to me—and what have I done that you should round on me now? I haven't bothered you before. I came today only because things are particularly ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... you will take advantage of me and of every quibble against me;" and there at last she began to break down; "but if there is justice in heaven or earth my child shall have it, though you and ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not like to admit the fact, and paused a moment before answering; but he was too truthful to quibble. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... of course, only if you're going to push things to the point of taking advantage of a quibble like that, your chance of happiness is more or less slim! So three years ago Carleton proved that he hadn't cared a whoop about the legal or religious aspects of the case, and left Ted. And now Ted can't see herself, at twenty-seven, tied ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... here and quibble; you're too clever altogether," I said, and I got up and wondered in which direction there was most to do, but Nina stood up, too, and put her hand through ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... thy children, even for him who died in his sins. Thou mayest have long to wait for him—but he will be found. It may be, thou thyself wilt one day be sent to seek him and find him. Rest thy hope on no excuse thy love would make for him, neither upon any quibble theological or sacerdotal; hope on in him who created him, and who loves him more than thou. God will excuse him better than thou, and his uncovenanted mercy is larger than that of his ministers. Shall not ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... names, but simply provided for future mischiefs. He had proved all his assertions, and much more: and would the reflecting and honest people of England believe, that in buying up poor voters, in debauching, poor constituencies, and afterwards shielding themselves by a contemptible quibble, and buying off the consequences, the conduct of members was either honourable to themselves, or beneficial to their constituents? He believed the people would say the chief criminal was the briber; the rich man who went down with money in his pocket to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... reduced to make out any title to the crown, that he catched even at a quibble. In the act of attainder passed after his accession, he calls himself nephew of Henry the Sixth. He was so, but it was by his father, who was not of the blood royal. Catharine of Valois, after bearing Henry the Sixth, married Owen Tudor, and had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... done, he protested, that it might not be constructed to any other sense than the genuine words he delivered in the minute he did subscribe and swear. That which induced him to this, he says, was, "They gave it in his own meaning, and so far was his mind deceived, that by a quibble and nice distinction they thought that the word might bear, That this was not a disowning of that nor no declaration that ever he saw (save one of their pretending) nor that neither but in so far, or if so be; which different expressions he was taught to confound by scholastic notions ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... certain that a quibble, and a carwhichit, for a play or a sermon, will not banish her from your ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... jumped on these United States without a good cause," he declared vehemently, "I'd fight for my country—" Uncle Dyke didn't quibble his words. "That is to say if Uncle Sam would take me. Me and my sword!" Again he faltered, adding reflectively, "But after all the Bible is the better weapon. With it I can conquer ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... vulgar sentiment, without regard to the idiosyncrasies of the negro, were caught up, jumbled together into rhyme, and, rendered into the lingo presumed to be genuine, were ready for the stage. The wit of the performance was made to consist in quibble and equivoke, and in the misuse of language, after the fashion, but without the refinement, of Mrs. Partington. The character of the music underwent a change. Original airs were composed from time to time, but the songs were more generally adaptations of tunes in vogue among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of the People." Verstigan also gives it the same translation, as originating from Leod, Lud, or Luyd, which, he says, means "folk or people." [23] Therefore St. Leger seems to signify a folk, a gathering, a legion or "crew" of saints, a holy crowd or crew,—which may have been the quibble extorted by Spenser's "alchemy of wit" from the "upbringing" of Elizabeth Nagle, his wife. He calls her with marked emphasis his "sweet Saint," his "sovereign Saint"; and in the "Epithalamion" the temple-gates are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the decay of Religion, and of a due reverence of the Holy Scriptures, nothing has more occasioned it than the ridiculous and idle discourses that are uttered out of pulpits. For when the Gallants of the world do observe how the Ministers themselves do jingle, quibble, and play the fool with the Texts: no wonder, if they, who are so inclinable to Atheism, do not only deride and despise the Priests; but droll upon the Bible! and make a mock of all ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... apply your own principle. Turin, with its houses, belongs to the Turinese; therefore the Turinese have the right to divide or unite the houses of Turin, or drive out their possessors, as seems good in their own sight." The gross disingenuousness, the palpable quibble in this argument, need no exposure. Logically, however, the argument is rather above the usual range. X then proceeds to frighten S with the old bugbears;—the impossibility of real union between the Italian races; ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... "I won't quibble with you, Hermia," he said in a moment. "You've paid me a pretty compliment by coming with me out here. But I'm not going to let it blind my judgment. You were hopelessly bored—back there. You've admitted it. You felt ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... simultaneous act of suicide recommended under certain conditions by Novalis. When, however, it is thus positively asserted to be impossible that human life should be happy, the assertion, if not something like a verbal quibble, is at least an exaggeration. If by happiness be meant a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments, or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... most endeared doctrines of our faith, and applied its enginery to those very parts of our citadel which we would be most likely to defend the longest. Had it contented itself with the mere discussion of minor points, with here and there a quibble about a miracle or a prophecy, we could excuse many of its vagaries on the score of enthusiasm. But its premiss was, "We will accept nothing between the two lids of this Book if our Reason cannot fathom it." Hence, all truth, every book of the Bible, even the sacraments of the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... difficult or impossible, but merely because no one had ever thought of doing it before. A sufficiently inane story, and by no means certainly true; but there is enough character in this little feat, ponderous, deliberate, pompous, ostentatious, and at bottom a trick and deceitful quibble, to make it accord with the grandiloquent public manner of Columbus, and to make it easily believable of one who chose to show himself in his speech and writings so much more meanly and pretentiously than he showed himself in the true acts and ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... that I should say yes without a quibble," replied Fenton, "but your air is so serious that I do not dare run the risk; so I will merely answer,—I would like to do you ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... isn't Elizabeth's week-day work, and that teaching her is not exactly doing my own pleasure; but I won't creep out of the argument by a quibble. The question is, What is keeping the Sabbath day 'holy?' I say—and I stick to my opinion—that it is by making it a day of worship, a rest day—a cheerful and happy day—and by doing as much good in it as we can. And therefore I mean to teach ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... of Clopton is a falcon clapping his wings, and rising from a tun; and I verily believe the rose clapt on to be the miserable quibble intended."] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... hangs useless from one's hand. Tomorrow these people who are now asleep will be stirring, giving vent to outrageous ideas, championing incredulous banalities, prostrating themselves before imbecile superstitions. Tomorrow they will rise and begin forthwith to lie, quibble, cheat, steal, fourflush and kill, each and all inspired by the solacing monomania that every one of their words and gestures is a credible variant of perfection. Yes, tomorrow they will be as ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... pretty fellow, witty fellow, light fellow, bright fellow, bad fellow, mad fellow, and the like. Called by some women who once loved him Lapinello, Lappinaccio, little Lappo. Called now in God as a good religious should be, Lappentarius, from a sweet saint myself discovered—or invented; need we quibble?—in an ancient manuscript. And it is my merry purpose now, in a time when I, that am no longer merry, look back upon days and hours and weeks and months and years that were very merry indeed, propose to set down something of my own jolly ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... deliver her husband's friend, and to maintain her husband's honor by the discharge of his just debt, though paid out of her own wealth ten times over. It is evident that she would rather owe the safety of Antonio to any thing rather than the legal quibble with which her cousin Bellario has armed her, and which she reserves as a last resource. Thus all the speeches addressed to Shylock in the first instance, are either direct or indirect experiments on his temper ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the "fewest possible straight lines," and a person who was either very clever or very foolish (I have never quite determined which) claimed to have solved it in only one straight line, because, as she said, "I have taken care to make all the others crooked!" Who could have anticipated such a quibble? ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... protection of society, somebody shall be punished when a crime has been committed.' Though English lawyers are too apt to set off 'an unreasonable hardship against an unreasonable indulgence,' 'to trump one quibble by another, and to suppose that they cannot be wrong in practice because they are ostentatiously indifferent to theory,' the temper of the law is, in the main, 'noble and generous.' 'No spectacle,' he says, 'can be better fitted ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Mr. Seward to at once elevate the American question to a higher region, to represent it to Europe in its true, holy character, as a question of right, freedom, and humanity. Then it will be impossible for England to quibble about technicalities of the international laws; then we can beat England with her own arms and words, as England in 1824, &c., recognized the Greeks as belligerents, on the plea of aiding freedom ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... habit of questioning every thing whenever a quibble can be raised—should continue to advance, where is the law, which, after fighting its way through both houses of the legislature, and, perhaps, escaping the veto, may not be eventually contested and ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... there are many,—and, we fear, a daily increasing number of persons,—who, admitting Inspiration in terms, yet so mutilate the notion of it, that their admission becomes a practical lie. "St. Paul was inspired, no doubt. So was Shakspeare." He who says this, intending no quibble, declares that in his belief St. Paul was not inspired ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... actually at the end of his resources went for nothing; he held the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,—like the store of guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted with his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity, whence—and not without ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... his blow and hits where he did not aim. He has a foolish sleight of wit that catches at words only and lets the sense go, like the young thief in the farce that took a purse, but gave the owner his money back again. He is so well versed in all cases of quibble, that he knows when there will be a blot upon a word as soon as it is out. He packs his quibbles like a stock of cards; let him but shuffle, and cut where you will, he will be sure to have it. He ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... all took an oath to him, that they would assemble at the command of the consul, and would not depart without his permission. We therefore publish an order that all of you, who have sworn, attend to-morrow under arms at the Lake Regillus." The tribunes then began to quibble, and wanted to absolve the people from their obligation, asserting that Quinctius was a private person at the time when they were bound by the oath. But that disregard of the gods, which possesses the present generation, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... in my face. 'How so?' it queried. 'You used to quibble me upon my dull wits; must I now return the compliment? Ha! There's blood on your hands. Blood! I will lick it up.' And with a mocking grin ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... Lick-my-loof himself, out for his morning walk! His irritable cantankerous nature would have been annoyed at sight of anyone treating his gate with such disrespect, but when he saw who it was that thus made nothing of it—clearing it with as much contempt as a lawyer would a quibble not his own—his displeasure grew to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... tones if anything is some low-sperited. "I takes it," he says, when he's able to command his feelin's, "that you declines them proffers with your winchester at the time when made." But the lady dismisses this as a quibble, an' merely sayin' that she won't be paltered with no farther, orders Oscar an' the Bible sharp who's ridin' inside to assemble by the edge of the trail. The Bible sharp attempts to lay the foundations of fresh objections by askin' Oscar ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... been whetted by provocation to a keen edge for war. They understood the meaning of "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," if the landsmen did not. There were strapping sailors in every deep-water port to follow the fife and drum of the recruiting squad. The militia might quibble about "rights," but all the sailors asked was the weather gage of a British man-of-war. They had no patience with such spokesmen as Josiah Quincy, who said that Massachusetts would not go to war to contest the right of Great Britain to search American vessels for British ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail: it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest. All this is now "too late to mend:" but I do hope that if ever I go to Engelfield Castle, Sir Richard will be kindly and genial to his far-off cousin, who (but for some legal quibble unknown) might have ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... shoe pinches!' He'll say that I want moral courage, and strength of character, and power of endurance, and it's all true; but I'm sure I ought not to remain here, if I have nothing better to put forward than a quibble: so, Nelly, we shall have to leave ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... this our dilemma." And the Dreamer answered, "I hear." So they told him with quibble and chatter.... And it seemed to him all no matter Like the croaking of frogs in ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... to me to be a mere trifle, a quibble.—Suppose you had the money, I ought perhaps to have waited until I had your authorization; but I, Comte d'Esgrignon, was pressed for money, so I—— Come, come, your prosecution is a piece of revengeful spite. Forgery is defined by the law as an attempt to obtain any ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... all";[1137] but upon such as would not live according to that higher law, upon those who persisted in the use of oaths and vows, the lesser and evidently just requirement of strict fidelity to the terms of self-assumed obligations was to be enforced, without unrighteous quibble or inequitable discrimination. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... frankness that he had been sent to sea, as a wild boy whom it was impossible to keep steady at home; and he quite readily admitted that he had not introduced himself to Zack under his real name. But at this point his communicativeness stopped. He did not quibble, or prevaricate; he just bluntly and simply declared that he would tell nothing more than he ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... consternation by the report of Drake's incredible captures; for their own merchant fleet was just then off for Spain. They waited on the Council, who soothed them with the assurance that Drake's voyage was a purely private venture so far as prizes were concerned. With this diplomatic quibble they were forced to ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... what was known as the Homestead Bill. On that occasion Senator Johnson of Tennessee said, 'This idea about poor foreigners somehow or other bewilders and haunts the imagination of a great many. I am constrained to say that I look upon this objection to the bill as a mere quibble on the part of the President, as being hard pressed for some excuse in withholding his approval of the measure. His allusion to foreigners in this connection looks to me more like the ad captandum of the mere ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... bottles of brandy. [7] My Baron-Bailie and doer, Mr. Duncan Macwheeble, is the fourth on our list. There is a question, owing to the incertitude of ancient orthography, whether he belongs to the clan of Wheedle or of Quibble, but both have produced persons eminent in ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... a mere quibble—a legal quibble. Well, there is no doubt that you would make a very ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... GENTLEMAN. Do not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands were then, incredible as it now seems, the centre of the British Empire. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... There are too many others behind them waiting to get their noses in the trough. Go into your respective wards and districts and organize meetings. Call your particular alderman before you. Don't let him evade you or quibble or stand on his rights as a private citizen or a public officer. Threaten—don't cajole. Soft or kind words won't go with that type of man. Threaten, and when you have managed to extract a promise be on hand with ropes to see that he keeps his word. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... perfervid article, give an instructive clue. A mere quibble had arisen between the Central Powers and Russia. The former immediately adopted an arrogant, even threatening, attitude which thoughtful Germans condemned. Russia's willingness to submit the question to an arbitration conference ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
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