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Reactionary   /riˈækʃənˌɛri/   Listen
Reactionary

noun
(pl. reactionaries)
1.
An extreme conservative; an opponent of progress or liberalism.  Synonyms: extreme right-winger, ultraconservative.






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"Reactionary" Quotes from Famous Books



... idea when I was at the hospital. At a hospital, of course, bodies do count tremendously. But in my day more than now because we were in the reactionary stage from blood-letting, incantations and so on. I remember how Biology came to me with a sense of crystal precision and inevitability ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... British Government. The idea was mistaken, as the recall of these leaders, or at least of one of them, was due to the fact that the British Government was of opinion that the war was practically over. Again, they were relieved of the inconvenient and harassing presence of Kruger, the dour, reactionary old farmer, who had brought on the war and had now left his country to its fate; who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since he had set out on the Great Trek of 1836; and whose mind ran in a channel so shallow that it could almost be heard rippling ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... forgotten so soon. It was a heterogeneous crowd forsooth! made up in great part of the curious, the idle, the indifferent, and in great part, too, of the Bonapartist enthusiasts and malcontents who had groaned under the reactionary tyranny of the Restoration—of malcontents, too, of no enthusiasm, who were ready to welcome any change which might bring them to prominence or to fortune. With here and there a sprinkling of hot-headed revolutionaries, cursing ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... occasion was to be the opening of the new post-office, when Hong Yung-sik would give an official banquet to which all must come. During the dinner, the detached palace was to be set on fire, a call was to be raised that the King was in danger, and the reactionary Ministers were to be killed as they rushed to his help. Two of the students were appointed sentries, two were to set fire to the palace, one group was to wait at the Golden Gate for other members of the Government who tried to escape that way. Four young ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... was insisted upon. In the ideal justice, it makes no difference whether the crime committed is against oppression or against liberty. In the latter case, punishment assumes the form of a liberal revolt; in the former, it appears reactionary. This is why Galds, holding the balance even, with the impartiality which is the root of his character, seems in Brbara to advocate a static philosophy, whereas in most of his work he is the liberal whom ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... Sylla's followers, and that, young and unknown as he was, his insignificance might protect him, however far he ventured. But he had taken the Senate's side. From first to last he had approved of the reactionary constitution, and had only condemned the ruthless methods by which it had been established. He never sought the popularity of a demagogue, or appealed to popular passions, or attempted to create a prejudice against ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... theretofore, were taken and held to tribute—she began to dream of world empire, the first society in history to conceive this unattainable ideal. Certain influences and events, however, would defer awhile any attempt to realize the dream. Changes of dynasty took place, thanks partly to reactionary forces at home and more to the praetorian basis on which the kingdom now reposed, and only one of his house succeeded Tiglath Pileser. But the set-back was of brief duration. In the year 722 another victorious general thrust himself on to the throne and, under the famous name of Sargon, ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... afraid, my dear George, that you are animated by a somewhat reactionary bias in favour of feudalism, which in your own best interests you would do well to curb. It is enough to say that some of the peers supported the House of Commons, and the majority were too timid to make any stand against the numbers and violence of the other House. Nowadays, thanks to the wide ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various

... hearing of any living thing. I refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too—had a colt every year—but in her affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has a large ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... popularity of Burke when his predictions with regard to the French Revolution were realized. During all the years that have intervened since reconstruction days, the conservative has had as a resource for leadership his harking back to those days. The demagogue and the reactionary — enemies of the children of light — have always been able to inflame the populace with appeals to the memories and issues of the past. Such men have forgot nothing and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... pertained to the office since 1825. The sequestered estates of American citizens, which had been the cause of long and fruitless correspondence, were ordered to be restored to their owners. All these liberal steps were taken in the face of a violent opposition directed by the reactionary slaveholders of Havana, who are vainly striving to stay the march of ideas which has terminated slavery in Christendom, Cuba only excepted. Unhappily, however, this baneful influence has thus far succeeded in defeating the efforts of all liberal-minded men in Spain to abolish slavery ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson

... other stars famous in the story of exploration, such as Dante shows in the first canto of his Purgatorio. But the geographical doctrines of Islam, compounded from the Hebrew Pentateuch and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy, had a more immediate and reactionary effect on knowledge. The symmetrical Greek divisions of land into seven zones or climates; and of the world's surface,[10] into three parts water and one part terra firma; the Indian fourfold arrangement ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil, and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... and of Shaftesbury that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize—an empire resting not on violence, but on justice ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... thought, the intellectual development, and consequent capacity of the people for self-government, not only offers no encouragement to effort, but actually discourages all striving, and blunts the appetites of the searchers for truth. It fossilizes the people, retards the march of intellect by its reactionary force, and rolls backward the wheels of all progress, till the nation becomes a community of dull, contented plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in inaction. Such we find ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... profoundly on exegetical points from a veteran Professor of Latin, Rhetoric, and Greek.[36] This was Leon de Castro, a man of considerable but unassimilated learning, an astute wire-puller and incorrigible reactionary whose name figures in the bibliographies as the author of a series of commentaries on Isaiah—a performance which has not been widely read since its tardy first appearance in 1571. The delay in publishing this work, and the contemporary neglect of it, were ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

... Already a reactionary policy is being enacted in several countries where for years the State-School was the only one to share in the public treasury. In Holland, the Parliament of June, 1920, by a vote of 72 against 3, passed a new school-law which recognizes and subsidizes all separate primary, ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... case was brought before him where the accused, a person not perhaps of altogether blameless life, was clearly not guilty of any indictable offence. The accused, however, a former prefet, appointed by a government now become very unpopular, and known as a reactionary and an aristocrat, was pursued by the animosity of the whole democratic population of the town and province. The president, in the face of openly expressed hostility in court, acquitted him. In the evening the president remarked, not without a touch of humour: "There, that serves them right for ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... to know, then, that the renderings of the New York Rendering Company are likely to be reactionary as well as suicidal, (perhaps suetcidal might be a better word here,) in their results. Their "offence is rank," and has reached the nose of authority, for we find it stated that "Mayor HALL has already made complaint ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various

... themselves. Later on, the methods of the inquisitorial communities possibly made Tories out of some who were the victims of their attentions. The outbreak of armed rebellion must have shocked many into a reactionary attitude. It was of these that a Whig satirist ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... niece came down (uninvited), very energetic, and very kind in using the last few days of her holidays in nursing a disagreeable reactionary relation. She dominated the nurse, who was much meeker than nurses usually are, and quite quelled her poor aunt, too weak to protest even at attacks on the monarchy. But Henrietta was much happier when the niece's holidays came to an ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor

... Austrian State, where the German element, after the separation of Galicia, would be in a very unsafe position, confronted by powerful tendencies that easily might gain the upper hand should a relatively small number of the Germans, whether from social-democratic, political-reactionary or doctrinary reasons, separate from the other German parties. The establishment of the new Polish element as a third factor with Austria-Hungary in our constitutional organism would represent an element so unsafe, and would be combined with such risks for the further development ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... of things. In accordance with tradition and the logic of things, Ionic speculation was developed before the Doric. The Eleatic school followed from the two former, although its development was contemporary with the more perfect stage of these, and its influence upon them was to some extent reactionary. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... This reactionary movement was greatly aided by the personal character of George III, for he, being despotic as well as superstitious, was equally anxious to extend the prerogative and strengthen the church. Every liberal sentiment, everything ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... attempt to establish society on the basis of the freedom of labour, which we call the Commune of Paris of 1871. Whatever mistakes or imprudences were made in this attempt, and all wars blossom thick with such mistakes, I will leave the reactionary enemies of the people's cause to put forward: the immediate and obvious result was the slaughter of thousands of brave and honest revolutionists at the hands of the respectable classes, the loss in fact of an army for the popular cause: but we may ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... with this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, is the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... other people as he suggests frequently in this story, Cooper believed that the promise of the July Revolution was betrayed, and that the new government of King Louis Philippe proved little better than the old reactionary one of King Charles X; in this he shared the views of his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolution, who as head of the French National Guard had been one of the leaders of ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... said Maggie, with calm decision. And she believed it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a sense of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... leader, Egerton Ryerson, had quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to carry out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of Lord John Russell's reactionary resolutions convinced a section of the Reform party, in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal to force was ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... the surgeon laid a hand on the shoulder of his brother affectionately. "Upon my soul, dear Prosper, you almost persuade me to be reactionary and mediaeval." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays," and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... Holland, and the lesser German States to join her in the war against liberty. The designs of the monarchs against Poland were notorious; and it was clear that a vast conspiracy was being hatched against the free States of the Continent. Would not England, then, endeavour to stop the formation of this reactionary league? ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... the working-class itself can emancipate labor, as in relation to it all other classes are only a reactionary mass. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... therefore, stretching through all parts of the South, forming an important element in the population of every village and county which threatened at one time with its passive resistance to overturn the whole scheme of the rebellion, stands now exposed to the full influence of the reactionary tide which has now begun to set back toward the Union. The change may not be at once, but the same motive which led the Union man of Tennessee to return to loyalty, will prove equally effective with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... keenness. "Let me tell you something,'' he writes (Conversations with Eckermann. Vol. 1). "All periods considered regressive or transitional are subjective. Conversely all progressive periods look outward. The whole of contemporary civilization is reactionary, because subjective.... The thing of importance is everywhere the individual who is trying to show off his lordliness. Nowhere is any mentionable effort to be found that subordinates itself ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... A reactionary sentiment of our day is to make an idol of the great figure-head of Puritanism. We had lately (April 25, 1899) a celebration of the Tercentenary of Cromwell; in the place of his birth he has been ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... Roosevelt had made it unfashionable to admit that you were conservative. You wished it to be understood that you were open-minded—"forward looking," as Mr. Wilson, who turned reactionary at the test, called it; that you were broad, sympathetic, free from mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our very best reactionaries of to-day all used to call themselves progressive. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... and chocolate are very nutritious, and are free from the reactionary influences of tea and coffee. Let us count the cost of these beverages, and see which is ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson

... a resolute determination that was final, he ended the debate in his own mind between futilely reactionary sentiment and hopeful, constructive, ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... Factions with differing creeds raised revolts in various sections of the country until, in February, 1913, Madero was overthrown by one of these groups, led by Felix Diaz and General Victoriano Huerta, and representing a reactionary tendency. Madero and his vice president Pino Suarez were killed, it was believed by order of Huerta, and on the 27th of February, in the City of Mexico, Huerta was proclaimed President. Don Venustiano Carranza, Governor of the State of Coahuila, straightway denied the constitutionality ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... medieval forms of patronage to more enlightened and perfected methods. Among the leading statesmen of Russia were men, such as the Minister of Public Instruction, Sergius Uvarov, who were well acquainted with Western European ways and fully aware of the fact that the reactionary governments of Austria and Prussia had invented several contrivances for handling the Jewish problem which might be usefully applied in their own country. Though anxious to avoid all contact with the "rotten West," and being in constant fear of European political movements, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what she said and did. What they heard allayed their worst fears. She still smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled, and the old laugh came ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of Orne, which had long been burdened with mortgages; and, in 1807, he married Henriette Le Chantre de la Chanterie, with the concurrence of the Royalists, whose "pet" he was. He pretended to take part in the reactionary revolutionary movement of the West in 1809, implicated his wife in the matter, compromised her, ruined her, and then disappeared. Returning in secrecy to his country, under the assumed name of Lemarchand, he aided the authorities in getting ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... in which this disputation at Marburg was conducted with the previous character of the contest, in which the one party had denounced their opponents as diabolical fanatics, and the other as reactionary Papists and worshippers of 'a god made of bread,' it will be evident that some results of importance at least had been attained by the discussion itself and the mode in which it had been held. The tone here, from first to last, was more courteous, nay, even friendly in comparison. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... would have availed nothing; but appeals—downright tearful appeals from mamma, husky, hand-gripping appeals from papa—that is what has made escape impossible. A huge act of unselfishness has been compelled; a lifetime of reactionary egotism is inevitable and legitimate. I was wrong when I said Malim was typical. He has to the good an ingenuity which assists naturally in the solution of the problem of self and circumstance. A year or two ago chance brought him in contact ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... been enacted in Austria. Even the German Emperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for securing in a few square miles of Italian ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... new political association was formed at Baden and Carlsruhe, under the auspices of Baron van Edelsheim, police minister of the Elector, under the title of Die Rosenkrietzer. This society was called into existence by a reactionary dread of that republicanism in politics, and atheism in morals, which seemed at that time to prey upon the vitals of European society. The society soon spread, and had its affiliations in various parts of Germany, giving such uneasiness to Buonaparte, to the accomplishment of whose ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various

... man has the courage to resist this reactionary tendency, to stand steadily on the height he has reached and put out his foot in search of yet another step, why should he not find it? There is nothing to make one suppose the pathway to end at a certain point, except that tradition which has declared it is so, and which ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... in the days of Canning was certainly not translated into action in its full sense. 'Promises made to the ear were broken to the hope,' was said by a reactionary Viceroy. Military expenditure has grown enormously since the ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... party of reform, and was strong in a deep fervor of religious conviction widely diffused among people and clergy, and extending to the highest places of the nobility and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the conservative or reactionary party, strong in the vis inertiae, and in the king's pig-headed prejudices and his monstrous conceit of theological ability and supremacy in the church; strong also in a considerable adhesion and zealous cooeperation from among his nominees, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... of the Whole, but got no further. The next year Cuthbert introduced a similar bill with the same result, and again in 1803. The reason for the failure of these attempts was that any legislation on slavery would in view of the decisions of the courts be reactionary and change for the worse the condition of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... Chairman had declared himself a Georgian, but that was not enough. The worst enemies of Free Verse were to be found in that camp. In technique and even in thought there was little to choose between many so-called Georgians and the most effete and reactionary Victorians. He alluded to the War poets, or rather the "Duration" poets, most of whom were already back-numbers. Between these and the Post-war poets, the true super-Georgians or paulo-post-Georgians, it was necessary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... were wholly unexpected by them. But whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[163] ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... metaphorically speaking, been tied to his caudal appendage. Every large business office has its Skinner—a queer combination of decency, honesty, brains and brutality, a worshiper at the shrine of Mammon in the temple of the great god Business, a reactionary Republican, treasurer of his church and eventually a total loss from diabetes, brought on by lack of exercise ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... these assumptions is summed up in the now current phrase about the "masses" and the "classes". We all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, i.e., thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. The Radical calls his opponent Tory and reactionary. The wicked Tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the House of Lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against every attempt at a juster distribution; ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... white men in the state who opposed any reactionary step unless it were of general application. They were conscientious men, who had learned the ten commandments and wished to do right; but this class was a small minority, and their objections were soon silenced by the all-powerful race argument. Selfishness is the most constant of ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... the earth, the spiritual would die out of him.... There is a celestial something within us, that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from ruin.'" But the revolt against death, and then the reactionary meditation upon it, and final reverence for it, must, from the circumstances of his youngest years, have been very early familiar to Hawthorne; and in the course of these meditations, the conception of deathlessness must often have floated before ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... evolved. The whole national legislation seemed to be directed toward material improvements, to the exclusion of every thing that could elevate the soul or inspire the masses with patriotic sentiments. The government of Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... memory. The mood of attachment grew and continued when the statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... a reactionary," he would say. "I'm for the good old things of life. Things that mean something." And even this definition of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... great danger to the Republic is Christian superstition. It is the Church, her priests and her devotees, that furnish the real strength of every reactionary movement. That consummate charlatan, General Boulanger, took to going to church and cultivating orthodoxy when at the height of his aspiration for power. Happily he was defeated by the men of light and leading. Happily, too, the ablest and most trusted ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... not be that this reactionary movement rather expresses a fear of education than a serious doubt of its power? We must remember that conditions are peculiar in the South, and, in some quarters, there exists a not unnatural apprehension that Negro supremacy may prevail. To avert this political catastrophe, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... more successfully than his predecessors not to set the population against him and to preserve the loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolute certainty that any large success on his part would bring crowding to his banner the same crowd of stupid reactionary officers who brought to nothing any mild desire for moderation that may have been felt by General Denikin. If the area he controls increases, his power of control over his subordinates will decrease, and the forces that led to Denikin's collapse ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... empire, released its civil and military officials from their oath of allegiance to the imperial crown, and formed arrangements for an independent government of its own. Count Tisza, formerly premier of Hungary, and the most reactionary of Hungarian statesmen, was assassinated toward the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... learning and the life of the class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals go to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of reactionary sentiment, especially among the higher schools where ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... sequel to some political disturbance in far-off Shanghai. It had not occurred to her that a hapless woman had been done to death merely as a warning to her father of the fate in store for him and his if he did not yield to the demand of the reactionary party in China, and deliver over to their vengeance some hundreds of the leading men in that ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... that her tenacity in adhering to it would have been proof against any ordeal whether of persecution or persuasion. This trait was not more strikingly illustrated by the strength and fervency of her Whiggism amid the reactionary tide produced by the excesses of the French Revolution than by the circumstances of her marriage. The only child of a small landed proprietor in Yorkshire, she had no lack of opportunities for gratifying ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... role, off the stage, with regard to that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... steadfast face, Responding 'Ay' in many tongues; and lo! Manhood and Faith and Self and Love and Woe And Art and Brotherhood and Learning go Rearward the files of dead, and softly say Their saintly 'Ay', and softly pass away By airy exits of that ample day. Now fall the chill reactionary snows Of man's defect, and every wind that blows Keeps back the Spring of Freedom's perfect Rose. Now naked feet with crimson fleck the ways, And Heaven is stained with flags that mutinies raise, And ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and sincere mind ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... losing the respect and incurring the dangerous opposition of its people. Indeed, throughout the negotiations Prince Kung and his advisers have had to contend against a powerful anti-foreign party in the court and the nation. Strong fears were entertained more than once that the reactionary element would get the upper hand. Some idea of Prince Kung's difficulties may be conceived when we read that one morning the walls of Peking were found covered with placards bitterly denouncing the policy of the government, and calling upon all good ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples—for the most part so gallant, so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable—by the passing tantrums of ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... misfortunes Austria assumed a kindly mien towards her Slavs. In the manifesto of July 15, 1859, which made public the treaty of peace, the Emperor promised "immediate modifications in the laws and in the administration." Bach, the German reactionary, was succeeded by Goluchowski, and in April 1861 Ivan Mazurani['c] became the Croat Chancellor at Vienna, with educational, legal and religious affairs included in the sphere of his office. The incorporation with Dalmatia was not granted then, but was promised. A letter was, however, sent to Mamula, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... one come near enough to see that the light is gone out of his eyes, and the will departed from the hand that still clutches the sceptre. All through Paul's life he was dogged and tormented by this controversy. There was a deep gulf between the churches he planted and this reactionary section of the Christian community. Its emissaries were continually following in his footsteps. As he bitterly reproaches them, they entered upon another man's line of things made ready to their hand, not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... universally, no. At least, not yet. But things are moving that way; and our reactionary government is helping the movement—that, and the letter they ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... working for either a separate peace with Germany or the utter military defeat of Russia in the war. In this object Rasputin and his allies nearly succeeded. It was to avert this that practically all the social elements, both liberal and reactionary, united with the revolutionists ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... perhaps the most dangerous pitfall to be avoided is the use of drugs. It is not too much to say that they never should be used at all for cases of pure sleeplessness, for with time their power to bring sleep gradually becomes exhausted, and then the patient finds himself worse off than before, for the reactionary effect of the drugs leaves him with exhausted nerves and a weakened will. All the strengthening, moral effect which can be gained from overcoming sleeplessness in wholesome ways is lost by a recourse to drugs, and character is ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call

... couldn't get her to say why for a long time, but at last it came out. Some one, that idiotic Englishwoman, I suppose, had put it into the dear girl's head that it was her duty not to ally herself with 'a reactionary' (I think that was the word) and in this case that meant poor harmless me. I argued till I must have been blue in the face, but I couldn't get her to give in: she says now that she thought she would make me give in. And so it had to stay, but ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase

... existence of its own Sovereign power. Several times during the political history of France in the nineteenth century, the popular will has expressed itself in a manner adverse to popular political institutions. Assemblies have been elected by universal suffrage, whose tendencies have been reactionary and undemocratic, and who have been supported in this reactionary policy by an effective public opinion. Or the French people have by means of a plebiscite delegated their Sovereign power to an Imperial dictator, whose whole political system was based on a deep suspicion ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... of Kentuckians, many of them descendants of slave owners, are prone to be reactionary in their attitude towards those who toil, this is reflected in low wages and inferior working conditions, a condition which affects both white and black labor alike, in many sections of the state. (Bibliography: Rev. John R. Cox (colored) ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... righteousness, left among men. Any organisation that became big enough to influence the polls became complex enough to be undermined, broken up, or bought outright by capable rich men. Socialistic and Popular, Reactionary and Purity Parties were all at last mere Stock Exchange counters, selling their principles to pay for their electioneering. And the great concern of the rich was naturally to keep property intact, the board clear for the game of trade. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... voters as expressed in the last election," met with approval on every side. The "Anti-Revolutionary" lion lay down with the "Christian-Historical" lamb; the "Liberal" bear and the "Clerical" cow fed together; and the sucking "Social-Democrat" laid his hand on the "Reactionary" adder's den. It was idyllic. Real progress ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... Federal government, far from being a war of principle, was merely a war of policy," and "that from this point of view much might be said for the South."(9) In fact, these hasty Europeans had found a definite ground for complaining that the American war was a reactionary influence. The concentration of American cruisers in the Southern blockade gave the African slave trade its last lease of life. With no American war-ship among the West Indies, the American flag became the safeguard of the slaver. Englishmen ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... reason that whatever Metanoia, or new orientation, is to be brought about must be on the part of individuals. There is no hope for large numbers acting together, or for any kind of group-impulse. Group-impulse among Caucasians is nearly always frightened, conservative, reactionary, or derisive of the forward step. There is hardly an exception to this in the whole history of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... for anything but agreement or reactionary argument from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very horrid. Her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... Smollett together set the pace for the Novel of blended incident and character: both were, as sturdy realists, reactionary from the sentimental analysis of Richardson and express an instinct contrary to the self-conscious pathos of a Sterne or the idyllic romanticism of a Goldsmith. Both were directly of influence upon the Novel's growth in the nineteenth century: Fielding especially ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... freedom of the Press, turned journalist and brought out a gazette. The famous National Assembly opened on May 5, 1789. He then entered on a career of immense political energy, beginning by issuing a stirring and eloquent "Address to the French People." This was especially a reply to a reactionary protest on the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... Pattison drops a good many expressions about his Anglo-Catholic days that betray something like vindictiveness—which is certainly not philosophical, whatever else it was. But his intellectual faculties were too strong to let him feed on the poison of a reactionary antipathy to a deserted faith. Puseyism, as he says, dropped away from him for lack of nutrition of the religious brain,—which perhaps at the best was more like an artificial limb than a natural organ in a man of Pattison's ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... all of them the favourites of the Empress Dowager, placed in positions of influence and kept in office by her, all of them working for progress and reform, and yet she has been constantly spoken of by European writers as a reactionary. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as we shall see. Nevertheless she kept some of the great conservative officials in office either as viceroys or Grand Secretaries that she might be able to hear both sides ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... to his instructors with passionate self-abandon. He took orders, and remained on at Oxford—being a fellow of his college—working earnestly for the cause he had so at heart. Eventually he became a member of the select band of disciples that dwelt, uncomfortably, supported by visions of reactionary reform at once austere and beneficent, in the range of disused stable ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... that time saw in the constitution only a cage whose bars prevented them from dealing a decisive blow, but whatever they could reach through the openings they tore and injured as far as lay in their power. The words "reactionary" and "liberal" had become catch terms which severed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... positive realization. Keep them sacred. Let them become the ideals of your life. Make them glow with the fires of your energies. They spell success and victory. They will crown your life, if you will breathe your life into them. Let your ambition make you irrepressible. Avoid reactionary influences. Keep away from dull, ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress, he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... English discontent or disappointment is reactionary opposition. Reaction, or the attempt of one party in a state to reverse a fundamental policy deliberately adopted by the nation, is one of the worst among the offspring of revolution, and is almost, though not entirely, unknown to the history of England. Yet there is more than one reason why ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... the weight of the crown has pressed upon him, he has been the tool of others. He did not desire the brutalities in Finland, he did not approve of the iniquities of the Jewish pogroms, but his hand was too weak to stop the fury of the reactionary party. Why would he not permit Austria to pacify her southern frontier? It was inconceivable that Austria should calmly see her heir apparent murdered. How could she? All the nationalities under her rule realized the impossibility ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... himself of his hatred of the rich as individuals. He has to learn that Rockefeller, just as much as he himself, is a product of economic conditions. After he once thoroughly learns this there will be no danger of his being a Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... foreign country but often against certain parts of his own country—loyal to the interests which he believes a section of his own nation properly represents. The German students have fought for their Fatherland; they have also fought for the liberal sentiments of their own land against reactionary movements, as in 1848. In the American Civil War no brighter record is to be found than is embodied in the tablets in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, or in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. But the collegian possesses the international sense, and possesses ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy's day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... Church, the bulwark of steady habits in Massachusetts, was similarly voted down. Webster, like Randolph, of Virginia, and Rhett, of South Carolina, urged that property should rule in every well-ordered community, and what Webster, Randolph, and Rhett urged, their respective States adopted. Even more reactionary was little Rhode Island, where privilege and inequality were as firmly intrenched as anywhere else in the country. The suffrage was limited to freeholders and representation was denied the majority of the people. The ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... turned from Egypt to summarize the information, afforded by recent discoveries, upon the history of Western Asia under the kings of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, we noted that the Asiatic empire of Egypt was regained by the reactionary kings of the XIXth Dynasty, after its temporary loss owing to the vagaries of Akhunaten. Palestine remained Egyptian throughout the period of the judges until the foundation of the kingdom of Judah. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... world-agony, will prevail over the old order which dominated the nations of Europe, and the old philosophy of political and social governance will be challenged and perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are thwarted by reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to its old-fashioned discipline under their authority, there will be anarchy reaching to the heights of terror in more countries than those where anarchy now prevails. If by ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... 1868.) He shows that migration, i.e. change of locality, implies new environmental conditions (never mind whether these be new stimuli to variation, or only acting as their selectors or censors), and moreover secures separation from the original stock and thus eliminates or lessens the reactionary dangers of panmixia. Darwin accepted Wagner's theory as "advantageous." Through the heated polemics of the more ardent selectionists Wagner's theory came to grow into an alternative instead of a help to the theory of selectional evolution. Separation is now rightly ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... from his books into an unaccustomed game of ball in the cold March air. He had taken off his jacket and had got very hot with his unwonted exertions. A reactionary chill followed. Benjamin had a slight cold, which being ignored, developed rapidly into a heavy one, still without inducing the energetic lad to ask to be put upon the sick list. Was not the publishing day of Our Own ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... I had supposed. Certainly there had been much progress, but it had been nearly all on the old lines. Everywhere I perceived continuity and evolution; nowhere could I discover radical changes and new departures. In the central and local administration the reactionary policy of the latter half of Alexander II.'s reign had been steadily maintained; the revolutionary movement had waxed and waned, but its aims were essentially the same as of old; the Church had remained in its usual ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... by now was thoroughly active. Reactionary energy rushed in upon him to sharpen all his faculties. There was nothing left of the joyous throbbing in his veins which thoughts of his tryst with Dorothy had engendered. He felt like the wrathful dupe ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele

... faced with the fact that while Ireland has been waiting for Home Rule we have taken the first great step in granting Home Rule to India. Surely this is a fact that presents a new challenge to the reactionary Unionist of the United Kingdom. Does he really contend that Ireland is incapable of receiving the same liberties as we are granting to India? Or will he make the wicked and dangerous suggestion that we are only conceding these things to India by force from ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... Landsmannschaften. It originated at Jena, under the patronage of the grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, and rapidly spread, the Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft being established in 1818. The loud political idealism of the Burschen excited the fears of the reactionary powers, which culminated after the murder of Kotzebue (q.v.) by Karl Sand in 1819, a crime inspired by a secret society among the Burschen known as the Blacks (Schwarzen). The repressive policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees (q.v.) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... in a reactionary burst of hysteria, the North enfranchised the Ethiopian. In a similar sentimental explosion of dementia, some sixty years later, the United States wept violently over the immemorial wrongs perpetrated upon the restless sex, ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... enterprise means death for Christianity as certainly as it does for any other vital movement. Stagnation, not change, is Christianity's most deadly enemy, for this is a progressive world, and in a progressive world no doom is more certain than that which awaits whatever is belated, obscurantist and reactionary. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... be alleged that he has at least served the reactionary party. I much doubt it. What internal factions has he suppressed? Secret societies have swarmed in Rome during his reign. What remonstrances from without has he silenced? Europe continues to complain unanimously, and day by day lifts up its voice ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics," yawned Pyotr Dmitritch—"the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use of an expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... win his independence. Charles Martel had left a young son, Grippo, whose legitimacy had been disputed, but who was not slow to set up pretensions and to commence intriguing against his brothers. Everywhere there burst out that reactionary movement which arises against grand and difficult works when the strong hand that undertook them is no longer by to maintain them; but this movement was of short duration and to little purpose. Brought up in the school and in the fear of their father, his two sons, Pepin and Carloman, were ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... in dealing with data, and indeed forms a constitutive element of such subjective criterion. It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian worthy of the name and know his own business. There exist liberal and reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist, and spiritualist historians. Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Can it be said that Thucydides and Polybius, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... sages; immersion in the thoughts of the Brahmans; the severities of life of the monks of the "Virtuous Order"; the vengeance of the eternally wandering warriors, the Olets, with their Khans, Batur Hun Taigi and Gushi; the proud bequests of Jenghiz and Kublai Khan; the clerical reactionary psychology of the Lamas; the mystery of Tibetan kings beginning from Srong-Tsang Gampo; and the mercilessness of the Yellow Sect of Paspa. All the hazy history of Asia, of Mongolia, Pamir, Himalayas, Mesopotamia, Persia and China, surrounds the Living God ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... inspiration could have been secured—secured, observe, against gradual changes in language and against the reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in that case, what barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat what? None is conceivable, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... wonder at this constantly recurring phrase "getting something for nothing", as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed to us gratis. Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson

... compared to those corpses and that silence. R. and I were half-dead with horror. A man was passing us; hearing one of my exclamations, he came up to me, took my hand, and said: "You are a republican; and I was what is called a friend of order, a reactionary, but one must be forsaken of God, not to execrate this horrible orgy. France is dishonoured." And he ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... what was at that time the most progressive of all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once "reactionary" views. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... never grown obsolete, it is entitled to all the more respect for that reason. Both the labor interests and the "special interests" resent excessively the recent tendency of intelligent judges to look at precedent and history. Mr. Debs will tell you that such matters are aristocratic and reactionary; Mr. Rockefeller, or his lawyer, that they are both visionary and obsolete. Yet a statute may only represent the sudden will of a small body of mediocre intelligence on a new subject (or an old one) which they have never studied. ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... religious and anti-foreign fanaticism in China which rapidly assumed alarming proportions. A sect or society known as the Boxers, founded in 1899 originally as a patriotic and ultra-conservative body, rapidly developed into a reactionary and anti-foreign, and especially anti-Christian organisation. Outrages were committed all over the country, and the perpetrators shielded by the authorities, who, while professing peace, encouraged the movement. Thousands of native Christians ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... estimate the worth and the significance of the doctrine of Liberty by considering the line of thought and observation which led to it. To begin with, it is in Mr. Mill's hands something quite different from the same doctrine as preached by the French revolutionary school; indeed one might even call it reactionary, in respect of the French theory of a hundred years back. It reposes on no principle of abstract right, but, like the rest of its author's opinions, on principles of utility and experience. Dr. Arnold used to divide reformers into two classes, popular and ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... from that time on nothing more was heard of Friedrich Schlegel's radicalism. He came to hold opinions which were for the most part the exact opposite of those he had held in his youth. The vociferous friend of individual liberty became a reactionary champion of authority. Of course he grew ashamed of Lucinda and excluded it from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... perhaps to make banners, and many of the electric lights were not burning, probably because of the shortage in electricity. I got my luggage upstairs to a very pleasant room on the fourth floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... the appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Old as they are, none of the present incumbents were then sitting on the bench. But their worthy forerunners were equally reactionary. They found no constitutional grounds for reversal! Of course not, even though the right of free speech and assembly had been trampled underfoot at the Haymarket Square, the right to a fair trial ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio

... was to make the ship sail; its construction was subordinated to its work; it was fashioned in this or that way according to the materials on hand; a beginning was made by examining these materials, and trying to estimate their rigidity, weight, and strength.—All this is reactionary; the age of Reason has come and the Assembly is too enlightened to drag on in a rut. In conformity with the fashion of the time it works by deduction, after the method of Rousseau, according to an abstract notion of right, of the State and of the social compact.[2126] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... gifts, was dressed in a fashionable hat and an enormous black velvet mantle, and plied us with numerous questions regarding the Queen, her family, and her government. She lives on the hill among her dependents, exerts great influence, and has done good service in resisting the reactionary tendencies of her brother-in-law Masupha, a dogged ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... of the reactionary section of the Boers, finally became the President. The rival of Mr. Kruger was Mr. Joubert, otherwise known as "Slim Piet," on account of his wily ways, and between them from that day up to the present time considerable jealousy existed. They were always of one accord, however, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart . . . "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the 'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... and in sport is the evil rampant. Take as an example the reactionary custom of dividing the Tripos Honours List into three classes. Can you imagine anything more inducive to competition? Worse, it is a direct invitation to the worker—often, I am proud to say, unheeded—to exceed the one-hour-day for which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... he had gained by his unaided observations and his silent deductions. These had been logical; for, on the whole, his knowledge was accurate. It was at least what he might have termed a good working knowledge. He had calculated on a passionate reactionary impulse on Gertrude's part, consequent on Severn's simulated offence. He knew that, in a generous woman, such an impulse, if left to itself, would not go very far. But on this point it was that his policy bore. He would not leave it to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... years of its existence there is little development to record. In 1882 King Otto's principality presented much the same melancholy spectacle as it did in 1833, when he landed in Nauplia Bay, except that Otto himself had left the scene. His Bavarian staff belonged to that reactionary generation that followed the overthrow of Napoleon in Europe, and attempted, heedless of Kapodistrias' fiasco, to impose on Greece the bureaucracy of the ancien regime. The Bavarians' work was entirely ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it a resultant ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... This reactionary powder (taken so largely by the human race I am inclined to regard it as the Universal Medicine once sought for in Laboratories) is capable of being made up in another form for birthday use. Anybody's long-lost brother will do ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... novelists with a sophisticated air, who never meant anything to me. The theatre also obsessed him, a malady which I have never suffered, and he was a devotee of the poet, Zorrilla, in which respect I was unable to share his enthusiasm, nor can I do so today. Finally, he was a political reactionary, while I am ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... and Modernists than Evolutionists. Religious people are apt to be afraid of the new world; they doubt the possibility of eliminating war, poverty and injustice—customs as deeply rooted in the social world as belief in Jesus is in the religious world. If the chief reactionary bulwark of the past is abandoned, there will be greater possibility ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd

... our papers are subsidized by the government itself, as is so often the case with the semi-official organs of Europe. Nor are any of our papers directly in the pay of foreign governments, though the espousal of the infamous reactionary regime in Russia by some of them is at least open to suspicion. The danger of manufactured public opinion in this country comes not from governments. Even the political parties are losing the allegiance of the press. The days when the Republican organs told the people ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt

... was he that wrote the Standard Oil side of the story, after having abused Standard Oil for years in the pseudo-muck-raking magazines. He made them come up to his price, that was all. He's the star writer on Cartwright's, now, since that magazine changed its policy and became subsidizedly reactionary. I know him—a thoroughly dishonest man. Truly am I Ali Baba, and truly I wonder why I ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... Lutheranism was not at first the Catholic church but the party of Catholic reform. The schism rent the French evangelicals before it seriously affected the church. Some of them followed the new light and others were forced back into a reactionary attitude. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... dissent does not necessarily last indefinitely, though it may continue for years. As soon as some check has been put upon the rising tide of feeling, and a reaction is evident, those who before had been silent begin to voice their reactionary feeling, while those who shortly before had been in the ascendant begin to take their turn of silent dissent. Thus the waves are accentuated, both in their rise and in their relapse, by the abdicating proclivity ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... liberties, university freedom, and liberalism in government and religion. The governments in this Alliance redirected and restricted the people's schools, as much as could be done, to make them conform in purpose to their reactionary ideas. In consequence, the development of popular education in Germany, as well as in France and other continental lands, was for a time checked. The great start obtained by Prussia and the German ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... you?' said her friend, excessively distressed at the inferior position, but his depression only inspired her with a reactionary spirit ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Accession of Edward VI Cranmer's Church reforms: open communion; abolition of the Mass; new English liturgy Marriage among the clergy; the Forty-two Articles Accession of Mary Persecution of the Reformers Reactionary measures Arrest, weakness, and recantation of Cranmer His noble death; his character Death of Mary Accession of Elizabeth, and return of exiles to England The Elizabethan Age Conservative reforms and conciliatory measures ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... had been abolished. Of this, Lima had been the head-quarters in South America from the day of its first institution. Here a similar stern and merciless procedure to that in other parts of the world was carried on. Indeed, the capital of the senior Viceroy was in every way the most reactionary spot in South America. In 1812, when it became known that the Cortes of Spain had abolished the Inquisition, a number of Peruvians entered the premises of the Holy office in order to inspect them. According to one who took part in it, the ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... states of Germany. Liebig of Munich, Ranke of Berlin, Sybel of Bonn, Ewald of Goettingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Doellinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them stirring men ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... reactionary sentiment toward him had set in, and there were those fair-minded enough, although with their little all at stake, to admit that he had acted with reasonable prudence, and that it was only an unlucky chance which had sent the panic through the herds ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... the other hand, we have a different kind of reformer who never calls himself one. He is singularly like the radical reformer. The radical has had no experience and does not want it. The other class of reformer has had plenty of experience but it does him no good. I refer to the reactionary—who will be surprised to find himself put in exactly the same class as the Bolshevist. He wants to go back to some previous condition, not because it was the best condition, but because he thinks he knows about ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... the human intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human interests too universal and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's modern conqueror, then impotent in action, but most efficient in remembrance, although isolated on his prison-rock. Foresti's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... knows what a lot of reactionary warlords tell her," said Aubrey. "This man I was talking with at the Crillon—I wish I could tell you his name—heard it directly from...Well, you know who." He turned to Henslowe, who smiled knowingly. "There's a mission in Russia at this minute ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... in 1814, Savoy, Genoa and Nice were assigned to Piedmont. This was not popular in Genoa which, hitherto a Republic, was now handed over to Victor Emmanuel I, a reactionary of the most extreme type. The old privileges of the Church and nobility were restored to them. The Jesuits were allowed to overrun the country and were given the control of education, and in the army ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... conditions and limitations It works. We are quite entitled to assume that the end of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness resisting the power of light. But in these conjectures we must surely come to the conclusion that the ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... no question about it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned to her, or all whom she was ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... not overlook the effect of the proprietary family on the proprietor himself. He, too, has been held back somewhat by this reactionary force. In the process of becoming human we must learn to recognize justice, freedom, human rights; we must learn self-control and to think of others; have minds that grow and broaden rationally; we must learn the broad mutual interservice and unbounded ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... powerfully; a reactionary swell helped him too much, and next moment the three men went, heads, hands, and brushes, plunging ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targe, who issued a circular commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... and dear to Cobden, is tempered by judicious professions of loyalty to a king who rules in accordance with the law. At one time Cowper was inclined to regard the government of George III as a repetition of that of Charles I, absolutist in the State and reactionary in the Church; but the progress of revolutionary opinions evidently increased his loyalty, as it did that of many other Whigs, to the good Tory king. We shall presently see, however, that the views of the French Revolution, itself expressed in his letters are wonderfully rational, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... the monarchy was not in any way promoted by this Government, but had its origin in what seems to have been a reactionary and revolutionary policy on the part of Queen Liliuokalani, which put in serious peril not only the large and preponderating interests of the United States in the islands, but all foreign interests, and, indeed, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... expressionless mask of the British domestic de race. I saw with dismay that if I hadn't known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a reactionary, gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion, the religion of his "place," like a foreign lady sur le retour. I divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening—he had become a mere waiter, had ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... Eastern and Western Empires.] Other emperors were as fanatical in their Iconoclastic (or image-breaking) prejudices as Leo, and their extravagance excited a reaction in the other extreme in the Western empire. [Sidenote: Reactionary decrees in the West.] In A.D. 786, a Council, which was held at Nicaea, not only protested against the violent fanaticism of the East, but sanctioned the veneration of images and pictures to an extent which we find it hard to justify, and which was, in fact, deemed unjustifiable ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt

... To think alike as to men and measures? Impossible! Even for our great party! There is not a reactionary among us. All Democrats are Progressives. But it is inevitably human that we shall not all agree that in a single highway is found the only road to progress, or each make the same man of all our ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... of September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... him almost rapturously, and his beautiful wife was the queen of a resplendent season. But politics seemed to have passed him by. The New Toryism of those youthful years was not very new Toryism now. Sidney Blenheim was a settled reactionary and a recognised celebrity. There was a New Toryism, with its new cave of strenuous, impetuous young men, and they, if they thought of Sir Rupert Langley at all, thought of him as old-fashioned, the hero or victim of a piece of ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... admitted that, excepting occasional attacks of insatiable longing for True Sympathy, chiefly produced by over-eating of pickles and slate-pencils to avert excessive plumpness, she could generally take pie twice without experiencing a subsequent reactionary tendency to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various



Words linked to "Reactionary" :   conservativist, ultraconservative, right, conservative, bourbon, reactionist, Colonel Blimp, reaction, blimp



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