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Sham   Listen
verb
Sham  v. i.  To make false pretenses; to deceive; to feign; to impose. "Wondering... whether those who lectured him were such fools as they professed to be, or were only shamming."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books



... Roy, the youngest son of Rob Roy Macgregor, desired to marry. She would not accept him, so leaving Balquidder, the home of the Macgregors, accompanied by his three brothers and five other men, he went to Edinbellie and carried her off to Rowardennan, where a sham form of marriage was gone through. But the romantic lover paid dearly for his exploit, as it was for robbing this family of their daughter that Rob forfeited his life on the scaffold at Edinburgh on February 16th, 1754, Jean Kay having died at ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... and the real. The rightful pill and the cork ball are placed together on the floor of the jar. Will the Spider be able to know the one that belongs to her? The fool is incapable of doing so. She makes a wild rush and seizes haphazard at one time her property, at another my sham product. Whatever is first touched becomes a good capture and is forthwith ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... no longer had any particular claims to friendship. The last time he had heard Vanne's whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property of the old seigneur. The two had come out of the melee with bruised heads, and Vanne with a bullet in his calf. But soon afterwards came Christine's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... and the sunsets and the desire to exchange the sham of my 'art' for the truth of something real," said Brian. "It's everything. It's the studio here and things like—like the shotgun. I hate the brilliant, disorderly hand-to-mouth sort of Bohemia, Kenny, in which ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... seized power and declared himself president in a November 1965 coup. He subsequently changed his name - to MOBUTU Sese Seko - as well as that of the country - to Zaire. MOBUTU retained his position for 32 years through several subsequent sham elections as well as through the use of brutal force. Ethnic strife and civil war, touched off by a massive inflow of refugees in 1994 from fighting in Rwanda and Burundi, led in May 1997 to the toppling of the MOBUTU regime by a rebellion led ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the confidence trick, in which the rustic is beguiled by the honest stranger into trusting him. This trick was practised three hundred years ago. Or there is the ring-dropping trick, it is as old as the hills. Or there is the sham sailor—now very rarely met with. When we have another war he will come to the front again. We have still the cheating gambler, but he has always been with us. In King Charles the Second's time he was called a Ruffler, a Huff, or a Shabbaroon. The woman who now begs along ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... eight piebald ponies rise up on end in horror—was a power which raised them greatly in the eyes of all law-abiding people; it suggested an unknown potency for mischief far more ominous than had discovery and conviction followed. And so, while squibs and crackers were being thrown at them and sham bombs hurled into their meetings to show how greatly the law-abiding people of Jingalo disapproved of them for incurring such suspicion—politically, the unjustly suspected ones moved a little nearer to ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... far?" asked Cesarine, keeping her eyes in play but little rewarded by her scrutiny of the sham Marseillais who devoured, like an old campaigner, never sure of the next meal, or of Rebecca who superintended the table in her ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... men, 240 Lords of fat Ev'sham, or of Lincoln fen, Buy every stick of wood that lends them heat, Buy every pullet they afford to eat. Yet these are wights who fondly call their own Half that the devil o'erlooks from Lincoln town. The laws of God, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... his time as a soldier. At this very moment, it almost seems as though I could hear the jingling of the officers' swords as they move along the streets. The regiments are drilled every day, and I don't know how often the soldiers have sham battles." ...
— Bertha • Mary Hazelton Wade

... speaking to H.O. that evening it never came off, because H.O. was ill in bed, not sham, you know, but real, send-for-the-doctor ill. The doctor said it was fever from chill and excitement, but I think myself it was very likely the things he ate at lunch, and the shaking up, and then the bread and cheese, and the beer ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... in most of the things she said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he remembering the fact that she was a result of city ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and Phyl were the only ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... for herself. She did so, after an hour had passed; which length of time, to her that never had any business whatever in her innocent life, seemed sufficient to settle the business of the old world and the new. Had Pietro Diaz (as Catalina now called herself) been really a Peter, and not a sham Peter, what a vision of loveliness would have rushed upon his sensibilities as the door opened! Do not expect me to describe her, for which, however, there are materials extant, sleeping in archives, where they have slept for two hundred and twenty years. It is enough that she ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... dinners, cannot be too much deprecated. Such associations of the sexes have a strong tendency to develop prematurely the distinctive peculiarities of the sexes. This is well evidenced by the fact that on such occasions one of the most common and popular entertainments is sham marriages. Parents greatly err in encouraging or allowing their children to engage in amusements of so dangerous a character. They are productive of no good, and are almost without exception productive of positive and ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... little or none issued out; vast Prizes taken from the Enemy, and then taken away again at home by Friends; Ships sav'd on the Sea, and sunk in the Prize Offices; Merchants escaping from Enemies at Sea, and be Pirated by Sham Embargoes, Counterfeit Claims, Confiscations, &c a-shoar: There we saw Turkey-Fleets taken into Convoys, and Guarded to the very Mouth of the Enemy, and then abandon'd for their better Security: Here we saw Mons. Pouchartrain shutting ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe

... Hampden; that, with dauntless breast, The base invaders of his rights withstood," was surprised in his own house by major Weymies, who tore him away from his shrieking wife and children, marched him up to Cheraw court-house, and after exposing him to the insults of a sham trial, had him condemned and hung! The only charge ever exhibited against him was, that he had shot across Black river at one ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... the beginning," Rachael asserted eagerly. "You know it, and I know it- -everyone does. You're not happy, and I'm wretched. I'm sick of excuses, and pretending, and prevaricating. There isn't a thing in the world we feel alike about; our life has become an absolute sham. It isn't as if I could have any real influence over you—you go your way, and do as you please, and I take the consequences. I realize now that every word I say jars on you. Why, sometimes when you come into a room and ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... and sordid when stripped of the elaborate courtesy and sham politeness that marks their dealings with the outside world. Their courtesy, what is it? This thin veneer of politeness is like their polished lacquer that covers the crumbling wood within. But we have a proverb, "Even a monkey falls"; and some distant day the Western ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper

... to New-York to lecture upon Ethnology. He has the "gift" of talking, and is said to have been popular as a demonstrator in anatomy; but we think it will be best for him to remain a while longer in England; the sham science of which his last book is a specimen is no longer, we believe, profitable in this country. The last Princeton Review says of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... the horrid part of it. I can't get rid of it. Mamma says I am a foolish child. I could tell her of other people more foolish than I am. I can see the difference between sham ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... can't puzzle it out, sir, unless there's some other Amphitryon to manage your business, no matter if you are away, and to do your job for you when you have gone. I tell you what, that sham Sosia was monstrous surprising, but this second Amphitryon is ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... Socialism. I do not say it as a sneer, but, on the contrary, as a compliment; a compliment to their political instinct and public spirit. I admit it may be called an exaggeration; but there really is a sort of sham Socialism that the modern politicians may quite possibly agree to set up; if they do succeed in setting it up, the battle ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... you saved some of us from losing more in the way of valuables," smiled the medical man grimly. "For one, I'm ashamed of myself. A man who has been practising medicine more than twenty years should know too much to be taken in by sham fits on the part of a thief who plays his trick in order to rob a crowd ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock

... Yerba. "He only wanted to bore me with his stupid, formal, sham-parental talk. Because he's my official guardian he thinks it necessary to assume this manner towards me when we meet, and treats me as if I were something between his stepdaughter and an almshouse orphan or a police board. It's perfectly ridiculous, for it's only put on while ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... at all, but merely schools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existing stage primarily great gymnasiums—very good things, too, in their way, against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest and most industrious boys ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... much like a bomb. I think you must be one of the supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. Now, Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want somebody who would stand up to ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... the instinct of battle, which, like Job's steed, "when it heareth the trumpet, saith: 'ha, ha'; that smelleth the battle afar off, the encouraging of the captains, the shouting of the army." Military trappings are no longer looked upon as stage furniture, good only for Fourth-of-July parades and sham manoeuvers. War with us has become a stern reality, and promises to continue such, for people do not yield up willingly their independence, even to a world-power with a providential "destiny" to fulfil. And since war is slaughter, it might be apropos to ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... acquaintances I made—people knew how my father had died: and showed that they knew it. Not so much by shunning or staring at me (vile as human nature is, there were not many who did that), as by insulting me with over-acted sympathy, and elaborate anxiety to sham entire ignorance of my father's fate. The gallows-brand was on my forehead; but they were too benevolently blind to see it. The gallows-infamy was my inheritance; but they were too resolutely generous to discover it! This was hard to bear. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... in this great drama, he followed the boulevards as far as the Porte Saint Martin, and having arrived there, turned to the left, and was in the midst of the horse market: it was there, it will be remembered, that the twelve or fifteen sham peasants enlisted by Roquefinette waited the orders of their captain. But, as the deceased had said, no sign pointed out to the eye of the stranger who were the men, clothed like the rest, and scarcely known to each other. D'Harmental, therefore, sought ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... acted as a rude disenchantment, and the beautiful church, to which Mrs. Arnot had returned every Sabbath morning with increasing pleasure, became as repulsive as it had been sacred and attractive. To her sincere and earnest spirit anything in the nature of a sham was peculiarly offensive; and what, she often asked herself, could be more un-Christlike than this service which had been ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... the people all of the time." P. T. was an able judge of the public, and it is just this inability to fool all of the people all of the time that accounts for the sudden disappearance from the public eye of some one who only fooled all of the people for a little while. That person was a sham, a bluff, a gamester. He, or she, as the case may be, ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D

... materially to the amusement of the spectators. This was the Hobby-horse. The hue of this, spirited charger was a pinkish white, and his housings were of crimson cloth hanging to the ground, so as to conceal the rider's real legs, though a pair of sham ones dangled at the side. His bit was of gold, and his bridle red morocco leather, while his rider was very sumptuously arrayed in a purple mantle, bordered with gold, with a rich cap of the same regal hue on his head, encircled with gold, and having ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... best to keep things lively, and a few days after Webb's departure said: "I've heard that there is to be a sham battle at West Point this afternoon. Suppose we go and ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... offering was divided and eaten there before the god. This feast was annual, and frequently about the month of May. In some places it passed off quietly; in others it was associated with games, sham-fights, night-dances, etc., and lasted for days. In time of war special feasts were ordered by the priests. Of the offerings on war occasions women and children were forbidden to partake, as it was not their province to go to battle. They supposed ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... to accompany him, on the next day but one, to Wormwood Scrubs, where there was to be a grand review, in honour of some foreign prince or other, of two or three regiments of light cavalry, with horse-artillery and rockets. It was to conclude with a sham fight, and which he thought would interest Auguste as a military man, and especially one who had commenced his service in the hussars, though he had been subsequently transferred ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... required to found his knowledge upon that of the largest possible number of experts and not to judge or discuss any matter which requires especial information without having first consulted an expert with regard to it. Only the sham knows everything; the trained man understands how little the mind of any individual may grasp, and how many must coperate in order to explain the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... Roland, he had said nothing because he wished to reserve for himself the satisfaction of pursuing the assassins and sham ghosts of the Chartreuse when the time came. He now arrived with full power to put that design into execution, firmly resolved not to return to the First Consul until it was accomplished. Besides, it was one of those adventures he was ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... one's grandfather was a Revolutionary notability, and other antecedents of a piece—but men are all alike at heart, only the worldly ones wear flimsy masks, you know, and pretend to adore intellect and ugliness, when beauty is the only thing they care for—all a sham, my dear, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... before or after the conflict, by certain males, and thus unconsciously prefer them. In the case of Tetrao umbellus, a good observer (23. 'Land and Water,' July 25, 1868, p. 14.) goes so far as to believe that the battles of the male "are all a sham, performed to show themselves to the greatest advantage before the admiring females who assemble around; for I have never been able to find a maimed hero, and seldom more than a broken feather." I shall have to recur to this subject, but I may here add that with the Tetrao cupido of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... task, Raskolnikoff inserted his finger in a small crevice in the floor under his couch, and brought out the pledge with which he had been careful to provide himself. This pledge was, however, only a sham—a thin smooth piece of wood about the size and thickness of a silver cigarette case, which he had found in a yard adjoining a carpenter's shop, and a thin piece of iron of about the same size, which he had picked up in the street. He fastened the two together firmly with thread, then proceeded ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... that the best security for the rights of democracy is the establishment of a republic in Germany. A real republic, not a sham one. This is the one definite, concrete fact which would make the world ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell

... for Germany, she knew very well what she was about in backing up Austria-Hungary in this matter.... Servian concessions were all a sham. Servia proved that she well knew that they were insufficient to satisfy the legitimate demands of Austria-Hungary by the fact that before making her offer she had ordered mobilization and retirement of Government ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... "But that was only sham courage. I was morally a coward, and could not possibly face the evil spirit of detraction. Therefore, the morning found me feverish in body and faint in spirit. I kept out of sight of my boarders, except Mr. Seabrook, who looked into the kitchen with a sympathizing ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... story, and some pretty good comedy. It is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar-candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost - there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Pastoureau came sailing to the rescue with arms like a flail. She only washed Harry's face the day he went away; nor ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather when the gentleman in black came for the boy, and pretended to cry; but Harry thought it was only a sham, and sprung quite delighted upon the horse upon which the lackey helped him. This lackey was a Frenchman; his name was Blaise. The child could talk to him in his own language perfectly well. He knew it better than English, ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... date. Johnson's division between the shams and the realities deserves all respect in both cases, but in both cases he puts many things on the wrong side of the dividing line. His hearty contempt for sham pastorals and sham love-poetry will be probably shared by modern readers. 'Who will hear of sheep and goats and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... asceticism.—Asceticism looks like temperance. People who practice it often pride themselves upon it. But it is a hollow sham. And it has done much to bring discredit upon temperance, for which it tries to pass. What then is the difference between temperance and asceticism? Both control appetite. Both are opposed to intemperance. But they differ in the ends ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... third-rate French style—inferior mahogany and cheap gilding, bare floors with gaudy little rugs lying about here and there, tables with flaming tapestry covers, chairs cushioned with red velvet of the commonest kind, sham tortoiseshell clock and candelabra on the dining-room chimney-piece, alabaster clock and candelabra in the drawing-room. There was nothing home-like or comfortable in the house to atone for the smallness of the rooms, which seemed mere cells to Ida after the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... told me. Then I took out two or three texts as clear as glass, and I tried to do what they bid me do. But I don't know how it was, masters and men, all alike cared no more for minding those texts, than I did for th' Lord Mayor of London; so I grew to think it must be a sham put upon poor ignorant folk, women, and ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... attempted. He thought hym self a God ouer nature, all landes and Seas to giue place to hym, and puffed with pride, he forgatte hymself: his power was terrible, his harte fainte, whereupon his enteryng into Grece was not so dreaded, as his flight fro[m] thence was sham[-] full, mocked and scorned at, for all his power he was driuen backe from the lande, by Leonides king of the Lacedemoni- ans, he hauing but a small nomber of men, before his second battaile fought on the Sea: he sente fower thousande armed men, to spoile the riche and sumpteous temple of Apollo, ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde

... appointed:—Dividing his troops into three columns, Sir Edward directed that General Keane, at the head of the 95th, the light companies of the 21st, 4th, and 44th, together with the two black corps, should make a demonstration, or sham attack, upon the right; that General Gibbs, with the 4th, 21st, 44th, and 93rd, should force the enemy's left, whilst General Lambert, with the 7th and 43rd, remained in reserve, ready to act as circumstances might require. But in storming an entrenched position, something more ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... managed: the man who is the confederate goes out with some noted woman of the town, and if she fall into any broil, he is to be at a proper distance, ready to come into her assistance, and by making a sham quarrel, give her an opportunity of getting off, perhaps after she has dived for a watch or a purse of guineas, and was in danger of being caught in the very act. This proved a very successful employment to Mr. Wild for a time. Moll and he, therefore, resolved to set up together, and for ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... numbered. This is the top of page 5 in his 49,874th letter. I am not sure if I received all the remaining 49,873 letters in the seven years. To meet him and to work for him was to me a great treat. I put up with his eccentricities—real ones, not sham like mine.—I put up with a great deal of boredom, for he was a bore at times, and I worked over seven years with his illustrations, in which the actual working hours would not have occupied me more ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... that in case any of the slaves were sick, he could give it to them without sending for the physician; but he always kept a good look out that they did not sham sickness. When any of them excited his suspicions, he would make them take the medicine in his presence, and would give them a rap on the top of the head, to make them swallow it. A man once came to him, of whom he said he ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... leader and his great coadjutor Wendell Phillips over a resolution introduced by the latter, condemning the Government and declaring its readiness "to sacrifice the interest and honor of the North to secure a sham peace." Garrison objected to the severity of this charge. He believed that there was but one party at the North of which it was true, and that was the party of Copperheads. He endeavored, therefore, to modify the harshness of the resolution by giving it a more moderate tone. But the anti-Lincoln ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... Germany, by trade a Tailor, he is about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches in stature, well made, middling long black hair, speaks English tolerably well, he was formerly a servant to a German Hessian officer, one Mr. Seiffort, Lieutenant in Capt. Schoels regiment, has very much the art and behaviour of a sham beau and has a variety of cloaths, viz. a Maroon Coat, a brown ditto, lined with light blue silk, the one had Gold the other Silver Buttons, a brown Great Coat and a variety of Waistcoats and Breeches: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... you and that table! Even the table was not what you said it was. It was not an unpainted pine table with four straight legs. It was a table of dark polished wood, and it stood on a single post with feet. There was nothing there that you said was there. Everything was a sham and a delusion; every word you spoke was untrue. And yet everybody in that theatre, excepting you and me, saw all the things that you said were on the stage. I know they saw them all, for I was with the people, and heard them, and saw them, and at times I fairly felt the thrill of enthusiasm ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton

... man undoubtedly realized that this was anything but a sham now, he never once ceased grinding away at his machine. Long experience in these lines had convinced him of the great value of a stirring scene like this; and besides, his services were hardly needed ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler

... colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared setting, and it set not over the ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... an old church in a large town ten miles from here to-day with Sergeant Hodge. There were the usual tinsel things and red baize and sham flowers. Sergeant Hodge much impressed. He said after we emerged: "You know, sir, it's very fine indeed. It puts me in mind of a bazaar." This was in all good faith, and was intended as a great compliment to the church! We are having lots of rain, which is bad ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... power to discern a sham, or a false pretense, exceeded that of any other man of his time, promptly responded: "I strongly suspect your information will prove groundless; nevertheless, I thank you for communicating it to me." He said ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... profess fineness or luxury, but should show itself for what it is: for my part I decidedly prefer the cheaper papers that are used for the journals, so far as appearance is concerned, to the thick, smooth, sham-fine papers on which respectable books are printed, and the worst of these are those which imitate the structure of ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris

... I think you will spare me the manifestation of your pity. Miss Jane was the only link that united us in any degree, and now we are asunder and adrift. You see at least I am honest, and since I have not your confidence, I decline your compassion and espionage, and refuse to accept a sham friendship,—to trust myself upon a gossamer web that stretches across a dismal gulf of gloom, and wretchedness, and endless altercation. When I am in one continent, and you are in another, we shall be better ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... on purity of communion. For two whole years he allowed no dispensation of the Lord's Supper, because he did not deem the professing Christians to be living consistently. Here was a crowning proof of his hatred of all sham and false pretense, and his intense love of solid, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... generous to the instrument than the owner, for he really poured about half a pint of beer down its throat: he then drank its health, and finished by "bottling up the music," absolutely cramming a cork into the trumpet. Now Andy, having no idea the trumpeter made a sham of the action, made a vigorous plunge of a goodly cork into the throat of the instrument, and, in so doing, the cork went further than he intended: he tried to withdraw it, but his clumsy fingers, instead of extracting, only drove it in deeper—he became alarmed—and, seizing a fork, strove with ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... surrounded by his trusted servants, cried, "Woe is me! who am left as a traveller amongst strangers, and who have no longer relatives to lend me support in the day of adversity!" Thus do the most shameless take pleasure in exhibiting sham sorrow ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... best, That would take off the test, And made a sham speech to attempt it; But being true blue, When he found 'twould not do, Swore, damn him, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... man I seem. My health will not be good for the next few weeks, I'm sure of that. But I'll be a model workman, neat and conscientious with just a suspicion of dash where dash is needed. He knows the real thing when he sees it, and there's not a fellow living more alive to shams. I won't be a sham. I'll be it. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... poverty could induce to sell it for money, but from the point of view to which you have brought me this morning I am inclined to think that the fellows who sold their votes had a far clearer idea of the sham of our so-called popular government, as limited to the class of functions I have described, than any of the rest of us did, and that if they were wrong it was, as you suggest, in asking too high ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... set herself to talk about him, and a great deal of good she said of him, but mixed with it abundance of sham praises, as the prudence he showed in never falling in love, and how wise he was to make the affair of women and love an amusement instead of a serious business: "It is not," added she, "that he is not suspected to have a very uncommon passion for the ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette

... ideal official dealing with the ideal citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker, being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then? How could one face a regime in which the everlasting taskmaster ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... Ouessant, voit la mort. Nothing can be done towards working the mines of Midian until this den of thieves is cleared out. It is an asylum for every murderer and bandit who can make his way there—a centre of turbulence which spreads trouble all around it. Under the sham rule of miserable Shm (Syria), with its Turkish Wlis, men like the late Rshid Pasha, matters can only wax worse. Subject to Egypt, the people will learn discipline and cease to torment ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with us the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens," etc.,—wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... the power of the Crown, and won. As a result, for good or evil, Parliament really is stronger than the Crown to-day. The power of the mass of the people to control Parliament has been given as far as mere legislation could give it. We all know that it is a sham. And if you ask what it is that makes the difference of reality between the two cases, it is this: that men killed and were killed for the one thing and not ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... of trumpets! It wasn't true, all that, or their parade of vice either, all humbug, from end to end, their amorous conquests, their orgies, their escapades, like their ostrich-feathers, that long, or their sham diamonds, that big, and bouquets large enough to fill a cab. But they were decent-hearted girls, all the same: that Lily, what a kiddie, thought Jimmy, feeling quite comforted, quite glad on ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... spectators. In the centre Caesar erected an obelisk one hundred and thirty-two feet high, brought from Egypt. The seats were arranged as in the theatre. Six kinds of games were celebrated: 1st, chariot racing; 2d, a sham-fight between young men on horseback; 3d, a sham-fight between infantry and cavalry; 4th, athletic sports of all kinds; 5th, fights with wild beasts, such as lions, boars, etc.; 6th, sea fights. Water was let into the canal ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... with her head buried in Aunt Cordelia's new bolster sham; for how could she confess to Hattie and to Rosalie that it was a ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin

... chosen precisely on account of its obscurity, which meant seclusion. Were he to ply his trade in the light of day, the Muslim zealots of the city would speedily tear him in pieces as an idol-maker. "Though some of them make pictures also," he explained, "not here but in Esh-Sham and other places. They quote in excuse some fetwah of the learned. I have no appeal; for did I quote their fetwah they would call it blasphemy." The room, he said, possessed advantages for health as well as privacy. Its window gave upon the market of the ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... there is no real Church. The Government is made up of directly self-interested speculators and financiers rather than diplomatists,—the Church, for which our forefathers fought, is yielding to the bribery of Rome. It is a time of Sham,—sham politics, and sham religion! We have fallen upon evil days,—and unless the people rise, as it is to be hoped to God they will, serious danger threatens the glory and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... my audience; and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... said before that the works of the flesh are manifest. But idolatry puts on such a good front and acts so spiritual that the sham of it is recognized only ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... in the movements of all persons in the room; speaking, not in a whisper, but in a low and gentle voice; walking carefully, not in a silk dress nor in creaky shoes, but not on tiptoe, for there is a fussy sham quietness which disturbs the sick far more ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.

... has ever met,' and is as heart-whole as I am! Ha, ha! That is the basis of the religion of love of which poets are the high-priests. Each worshipper knows that his own love is either a transient passion or a sham copied from his favorite poem; but he believes honestly in the love of others for him. Ho, ho! Is it not a silly ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... mouths, like so many sucking lambs? It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is whether we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring, probably on a more extended scale and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... This sort of sham made Harrietta sick. She, whose very art was that of pretending, hated pretense, affectation, "coy stuff." This was, perhaps, unfortunate. Your Fatigued Financier prefers the comedy form in which a spade is not only called a spade but a slab of iron for digging up dirt. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... appeared devoid of every grace and beauty, and deformed by all that is coarse, brutal, sordid, and grovelling. Even that grace, almost a virtue, which has its name from courts, seems not to exist in them in a genuine form; and instead of it we find only a hollow, glittering sham, which has but an outward semblance to real courtesy, and which itself even is produced only on occasions more or less public and for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed. Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks in church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may stand for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for some months from pain in the right arm and ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Vogelschiesser, is going on; it began last Sunday and ends next Sunday. About half a mile from the town there is a very large meadow by the river, where a small town of booths, tents, &c., is erected, and where shooting at targets with wooden darts, sham railway-trains and riding-horses, confectionery of every kind, beer of every name, strength, and colour, pipes, cigars, toys, gambling, organ-grinding, fiddling, dancing, &c., goes on incessantly. The great attraction, however, is ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... events of the momentous year were the representatives of the centralizing principle. But the effective centralizing principle was not represented by the Emperor, for he stood for what was after all largely a sham centralism, because it was a centralism on a scale for which the Germanic world was not ripe. Princes and margraves were destined to be bearers of the territorial centralization, the only real one to which the German peoples were to ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... a.m. on the morning of 22nd July, a large number of officers assembled at the Abbassieh ranges to watch the result of the experiments of the sham bombardment. Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Grenfell and staff, Major-General Lyttelton, and many others were present. It was arranged that the new 5-inch howitzer battery, with the "Lyddite" or high explosive shells, was to make ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... while ago would be as if he had not been. She wept for him, and yet at the same time wept because she could not weep more for him, because the place which knew him had already begun to know him no more, and because of the sham affliction with which they were all supplementing the true. It was she who shed the truest tears, but it was she also who rebelled most at the make-believe which convention forced upon her; and the usual sense of hopeless exasperation was strong in her mind. After a while she threw ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... was real enough, after all. There was no sham in Mary Lou's faint, after the funeral, and Virginia, drooping about the desolate house, looked shockingly pinched and thin. There was a family council in a day or two, and it was at this time that Susan meant ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... never write another line unless you wish it, and then you may write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are going right away from this howling cockpit, and never need set foot in it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free—free! Do you hear, you tired hack? Too tired to prick your ears, eh? Ah, well, wait till you've ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... the Saturday afternoon she went to an "At Home" at the Barracks, where she was lionised in a quiet way. She attended a cricket match—she was an advocate of all games, and believed they were excellent civilising agencies—and also witnessed a sham fight, where the "enemy" dressed themselves up as "savage warriors" and attacked the Barrack Hill. She was much impressed, and kept saying to her old friend the Hon. Horace Bedwell, the Provincial Commissioner, "That's just splendid. Look how the officers lead them." ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... road to practical business so good as practice. You read of clerks being educated by sham forms of business. You might as well read of men gambling with counterfeit money. Business men want clerks who have been private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain. When a man starts in as captain he is likely to get discharged as private. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... where image-worship has been abolished. Do you know that Moses is considered by the Church as no better than a heretic, and though, for particular reasons, it has been obliged to adopt his writings, the adoption was merely a sham one, as it never paid the slightest attention to them? No, no, the Church was never led by Moses, nor by one mightier than he, whose doctrine it has equally nullified—I allude to Krishna in his second avatar; the Church, it is true, governs in his name, but not unfrequently ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... once you call'd Your Saviour in Distress, You in his first Request deny'd, And then his Royal Patience try'd With a canting sham Address. ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... except the one thats to hang ye, theres no need of singing out, as if ye was hailing a deaf man on a topgallant yard. May-hap you think youve got my true name in your sheep skin; but what British sailor finds it worth while to sail in these seas, without a sham on his stern, in case of need, dye see. If you call me Penguillan, you calls me by the name of the man on whose hand, dye see, I hove into daylight; and he was a gentleman ; and thats more than my worst enemy will say of any of the family ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... fall of Fort Fisher the Rebels retired to Fort Anderson, and offered a desperate resistance to our army and fleet. Owing to the shallowness of the water the latter could not come into close enough range to do effective work. Then the happy idea of this sham monitor suggested itself to some one. It was prepared, and one morning before daybreak it was sent floating in on the tide. The other monitors opened up a heavy fire from their position. The Rebels manned their guns and replied vigorously, by concentrating a terrible ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... than individuals can thrive, expand and develop their best faculties unless their lives are based upon freedom and justice. Not freedom to exploit a weaker person or people, not justice before the law which is a mockery and a sham, but freedom for each to live his own life in his own way, and justice to all in the shape of equal opportunity to the earth ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... highest number of electoral votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person predestined ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... Excise, corroborated the above evidence, and stated, that the sham-coffee seized at the defendant's house was shown to Mr. Joseph Hubbard, grocer, and tea and coffee dealer, in High-street, ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum

... could, without a cent in my pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones. A pretty thorough dip, too—it was just five years before the Duprez expedition came ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... wherever they stopped, always home lovers and home builders, loyal to their own people, instinctive clan leaders and clan followers. A sturdy, honest, covenant-keeping, God-fearing, fighting people, above all things they hated sham and pretence. They never boasted of their families, though some of them might have quartered the royal arms of Scotland on ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... board, which he professed to have forgotten to take out of the dug-out. "That sort of lumber don't count for much in these parts," remarked Ben, suspiciously, and his intending companion retired, feeling that, though a limb of the law, he was a miserable sham. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... troubling you again?" he said. "How absurd! Are you going to cheat the poor creatures you attend with sham medicines?" ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... stop that, I think we'll stop that! I, don't care how many there are. I'll get the two Bradleys to tell me all they know about drilling, to-morrow morning, and we'll drill these Opekians, and have sham battles, and attacks, and repulses, until I make a lot of wild, howling Zulus out of them. And when the Hillmen come down to pay their quarterly visit, they'll go back again on a run. At least some of them will," he added, ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... cannot be the ground of the right of society to govern. Assume the parental right to be perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, it is no right to govern where no such relation exists. Nothing true, real, solid in government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a "sham." The statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms to the realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable. The presumptions or assumptions of law or politics ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... Bertram did not care in the least what anybody thought of her. She was in no sense of the word a sham. She was well-born, well-educated, respectably married, and fairly well-off. The people in Northbury considered her rich. She always spoke of herself as poor. In reality she was neither rich nor poor. She had an income of something like twelve hundred a year, and on that ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade

... the revolt is against the purity of standards and the integrity of business morals. Who can question that this is pre-eminently the age of the sham and the counterfeit? Science is prostituted to deceive the public by cloaking the increasing deterioration in quality of merchandise. The blatant medium of advertising has become so mendacious as to ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... Berg's house would seem very plain; but to one capable of distinguishing the difference, the evidence of mind and taste, instead of mere money, is seen on every side. Simplicity and beauty are united as far as possible. Everything is the best of its kind and devoid of veneer and sham. There is no lavish and vulgar profusion, and there is a harmony of color and decoration that makes every room a picture in itself. Moreover, the house does not grow suddenly shabby after you leave those parts which are seen by visitors. It is all genuine and high-toned, like the people ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... saturated in moonshine and tears. Chopin did not altogether escape the artistic vices of his generation. As a man he was a bit of poseur—the little whisker grown on one side of his face, the side which he turned to his audience, is a note of foppery—but was ever a detester of the sham-artistic. He was sincere, and his survival, when nearly all of Mendelssohn, much of Schumann and half of Berlioz have suffered an eclipse, is proof positive of his vitality. The fruit of his experimentings in tonality we see in the whole latter-day school ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... good of being chief then? I don't ask you to make the old woman civil, but I think you might keep her from insulting your friends! I begin to think your chiefdom a sham!" ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... her, and try to convert her also. Peter was then in a bad dilemma; he had to insist that Rosie should keep his conversion a secret. But Rosie became indignant, she set her lips and declared that a conversion that had to be kept secret was no conversion at all, it was simply a low sham, and Peter Gudge was a coward, and she was sick of him! So poor Peter went away, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair

... have undertaken to protect our citizens from proper treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... But the day will come when you will see and hear. Then woe to those who base their strength on ignorance and fanaticism; woe to those who govern through falsehood, and work in the night, thinking that all sleep! When the sun's light shows the sham of all these phantoms, there will be a frightful reaction; all this strength conserved for centuries, all this poison distilled drop by drop, all these sighs strangled, will find the light and the air. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... watching Fred Badger, and listening to what he had to say from time to time. Apparently Fred was as indignant as any of them, and so far as Jack could tell there was not a particle of sham about his fervent denunciation of the evil deed contemplated by those strangers anxious to beat the Chester people, who wagered with them, ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton

... When a man is tired of life, I suppose it is time for him to die. I've lost heart, and death is over me. Death is close to me, and I know I have got to end. But think of all the hopes I had only a little time ago, the sense of fine beginnings!... It was all a sham. There were no beginnings.... We're just ants in ant-hill cities, in a world that doesn't matter; that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn't even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells



Words linked to "Sham" :   beguiler, pseud, postiche, bull, deceiver, talk through one's hat, belie, Potemkin village, pseudo, feint, play possum, feign, simulate, act, put on, misrepresent, false, play, affect, Tarabulus Ash-Sham, fake, imitation, shammer, fake book, impostor, assumed, imposter, fictitious, faker, fictive, pillow sham



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