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Sycophant   Listen
verb
Sycophant  v. t.  
1.
To inform against; hence, to calumniate. (Obs.) "Sycophanting and misnaming the work of his adversary."
2.
To play the sycophant toward; to flatter obsequiously.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books



... face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand Vannelle had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of course you think so,' Paul went on. 'You always think as I do. If you knew how I despise a sycophant! And yet—you're not bad looking. No, I'll be hanged if I can honestly say that you're bad looking. You've got nice hair, and plenty of it; and there's a weakness about your mouth and chin that goes to my heart. I hate firm people.—What? ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... it is our part not to dissemble the trueth in any place, we will not denie that holy sermons, about the time wherein this sycophant liued in Island, namely in the yere 1554, were seldomer in vse then they are at this day, namely, the darkenesse of popery being scarsely at that time dispelled. Which also is to be vnderstood concerning ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... "Of all kinds of fear," he says, "superstition is the most fatal to action and resource. He does not fear the sea who does not sail, nor war who does not serve, nor robbers who keeps at home, nor the sycophant who is poor, nor the envious if he is a private man, nor an earthquake if he lives in Gaul, nor thunder if he lives in AEthiopia; but he who fears the gods fears everything—earth, seas, air, sky, darkness, light, noises, silence, sleep. Slaves sleep and forget ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... an illustrative sniff, 'the late archdeacon must turn in his grave when those priests of Baal and Dagon burn incense at the morning service. Still, Bishop Pendle has his good points, although he is a time-server and a sycophant.' ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... reconstruction of 1835, when it was necessary that the Whigs should conciliate the Mountain. He was a pretentious, underbred, half-educated man, fluent with all the commonplaces of middle-class ambition, which are humorously called democratic opinions, but at heart a sycophant of the aristocracy. He represented, however, a large and important constituency, and his promotion was at first looked upon as a masterpiece of management. The Mountain, who knew Jorrocks by heart, and felt that they had in their ranks men in every sense his ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... poet through his whole life was, in the main, such as to excite great admiration in after generations. He was no sycophant in that age of fawning courtiers. He was simple and manly. He was always melancholy and cared little for the vanities of life. Though poor in early life, he cared but little about money. The king gave him a pension of two thousand ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... fine, upright, or noble but that he can put aside his rancour when he finds that there is more profit in fawning than in snarling; not so independent but that he can become a sycophant who writes panegyrics of Cesare and letters breathing devotion to the Pope, once he has realized that thus his interests will be better served. This is the man, remember, who dubbed Alexander a Jew and a Moor; ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... ask:—Were not these "old moral divines" the authors and compilers of the Homilies? If the Barrister does not know this, he is an ignorant man; if knowing it, he has yet never examined the Homilies, he is an unjust man; but if he have, he is a slanderer and a sycophant. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... solemnly to curse, or else pay an hundred drachmas himself; and this law was written in his first table, and, therefore, let none think it incredible, as some affirm, that the exportation of figs was once unlawful, and the informer against the delinquents called a sycophant. He made a law, also, concerning hurts and injuries from beasts, in which he commands the master of any dog that bit a man to deliver him up with a log about his neck, four and a half feet long; a happy device for men's security. The law concerning naturalizing strangers is of doubtful character; ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... you therefore whether he did it not." Thus the close slanderer argueth; and a weak or prejudiced person is thereby so caught, that he presently is ready thence to conclude the thing done. Again: "He doeth well," saith the sycophant, "it is true; but why, and to what end? Is it not, as most men do, out of ill design? may he not dissemble now? may he not recoil hereafter? have not others made as fair a show? yet we know what came of it." Thus do calumnious tongues pervert the judgments ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... no snobs among the Latin races, but there is a worse animal, the sycophant, descended directly from the dinner-tables of ancient Rome. In old-fashioned houses there are often several of them, headed invariably by the "giornale ambulante," the walking newspaper, whose business it is to pick ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... limb as of profiting by the chance that threw Cynthia in his way. Of course, a less scrupulous wooer might have devised a hundred plausible methods of revealing his identity—was not Mrs. Devar, marriage-broker and adroit sycophant, ready to hand and purchasable?—and there was small room for doubt that a girl's natural vanity would be fluttered into a blaze of romance by learning that her chauffeur was heir to an old and well-endowed peerage. But honor forbade, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... abandoned thee to thy native dunghill! No more shalt thou wheedle for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant, thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... eyes considered him almost sternly what time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did riot presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... most beautiful and touching examples of self-sacrifice which the annals of paganism afford. We are apt to judge of Antinous from the languid beauty of the statue of him in the Roman galleries, as simply the pampered sycophant of a court. But behind his sensual beauty and softness there was an unselfish devotion which the caresses of royalty and the favours of fortune could not spoil. When the oracle declared that the happiness of Hadrian, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... the music which she had sometimes heard. The little kitchen-maid on her promotion was standing at her mistress's side, quite delighted during the operation, and wagging her head up and down and crying, "Lor, Mum, 'tis bittiful"—just like a genteel sycophant in a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a somewhat constrained interchange of parting courtesies, the free Greek and the sycophant of a tyrant went on ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... likely to answer no good purpose, and as exhibiting an extraordinary degree of arrogance, by dictating to future parliaments, and prescribing to future ministers a mode of action to be adopted some thirty years hence. He remarked:—"None but a novice, a sycophant, a mere reptile of a minister, would allow this act to prevent him doing what, in his own judgment, circumstances might require at the time; and a change in the situation of the country might render that which is proper ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... by the contributions of his constituents. This mode is unobjectionable for such an honor will never be paid to mere subserviency: bodies of men do not care so much for the difference between one sycophant and another as to go to the expense of his maintenance in order to be flattered by that particular individual. Such a support will only be given in consideration of striking and impressive personal ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation in which a man of worth is required to spend above all ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... he called the 'History of Napoleon Bonaparte,' in which he plays the sycophant to all the legitimate crowned heads in Europe, whatever their crimes, vices, or miserable imbecilities, he, in his abhorrence of everything low which by its own vigour makes itself illustrious, calls Murat of the sabre the son of a pastry-cook, of a Marseilleise pastry-cook. It is a pity ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... wave of colour beat into her face. An instant before she had felt her act to be entirely admirable; now it flamed before her in a mental revelation that she was a sycophant who sought the reward of an assumed virtue. With the reward had come the knowledge—she had found both in Nicholas's eyes; and as she felt the thrust of self-abasement, she felt also that for the sake of that look she would have kissed a dozen Burrs ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow

... Mr. Worthington has come home, and because the two other members of the committee are dogs and cowards." Mr. Graves never minced matters when he began, and his voice shook with passion. "If Mr. Errol had examined you, and you had your certificate, it might have been different. Errol is not a sycophant. Worthington does ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... a sycophant hanging round White Hall! 'Twas sheer good luck and no merit of mine that got me the guardianship of Sue. Lord Middlesborough, her kinsman, wanted it; the Courts would have given her to him, but old Noll thought him too much of a 'gentleman,' whilst I—an ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold; The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they're cold. But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, for succor at ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... he was a vulgar parvenu, a sycophant, a snob—heaven knows what. All wrong! For the true reading of his character one has to go back to the day when he was a ragged boy and the liveried coachman of the "bad Lord Raa" lashed at his mother on the road, and he swore that when he was a man she should have a carriage of her ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... supplicating style of the slaves in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamations of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant to maintain a charge of poison or magic against the insolent creditor, who is seldom released from prison until he has signed a discharge of the whole debt. And these vices are mixed with a puerile superstition which disgraces their ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... French Government, the principal member of which was now Cardinal Fleury. It became the object of the Craftsman to hold Walpole up to contempt and derision, as the dupe of a French cardinal and the sycophant of a French Court. The example of the Craftsman was speedily followed by pamphleteers, caricaturists, satirists, and even ballad-mongers without end. London and the provinces were flooded with such literature. Walpole was described as "Sir Blue String," the blue string being a cheap ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... pagan sea-kong, Dudo, the great admirer of Northmen and the sycophant of the first Norman dukes in France, has left the following terrible character, on reading which in full we scarcely know whether the poem was written in reproach or praise. We translate from ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... character plays a principal part, I shall shortly make some further observations on it;) the flatterer or accommodating parasite, who, for the sake of a good meal, is ready to say or do any thing that may be required of him the sycophant, a man whose business it was to set quietly disposed people by the ears, and stir up law-suits, for the conduct of which he offered his services; the gasconading soldier, returned from foreign service, generally cowardly and simple, but who ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... depend; but, on the contrary, to cherish the growth of all the mean and ignoble propensities of human nature by accustoming him, so far as relates to this subject, to gain his ends by the arts of a sycophant, or ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... been nearly a month in Rasputin's service, Boris Stuermer, a well-known Court sycophant, with bristling hair and a sweeping goatee beard, was brought to the monk by Kouropatkine. Both were in uniform, and after ushering them into Rasputin's study I felt that some dark ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... of 'librarian,' and he now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne's guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be. Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... Hastings, the successor of Edward in her affections, was implicated with her, and his offence read from Paul's Cross. At Paul's Cross, newly restored by the bishop, the younger Kempe, and while the boy king was a prisoner in the palace hard by, that worthless sycophant, Dr. Ralph Shaw, the preacher (May 19, 1483), took for his text, "The multiplying brood of the ungodly shall not thrive, nor take deep rooting from bastard slips, nor lay any fast foundations" (Wisdom, iv. 3). His sermon went to prove ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... a topic it is to dwell on the faults of departed greatness. By a revolution in the state, the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour. But steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. They will judge of human institutions ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... in the way of private communion served well to sober and humble Sally in her own esteem. Outside the immediate field of her reverie she was now conscious of the words "sycophant" and "parasite" buzzing like mosquitoes about the head of some frantic wooer of sleep, elusive, pitiless, exasperating, making it just so much more difficult to concentrate upon this importunate problem ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... Serving for a laborer's lamp? Have the same mists another side, To be the appanage of pride, Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, His park where amber mornings break, And treacherously bright to show His planted isle where roses glow? O Day! and is your mightiness A sycophant to smug success? Will the sweet sky and ocean broad Be fine accomplices to fraud? O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray! Back, back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... was a tragic actor, who was attacked in the pseudo- Demosthenic Speech 'Against Theocrines'. Harpocration's description of him as a 'sycophant', or dishonest informer, may be merely an ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes

... cold-blooded—this criticism of one's wife; but I know that, however much of a sycophant I may have been in my younger days, my wife has outdone me since then. Presently we were both in the swim, swept off our feet by the current and carried down the river of success, willy-nilly, toward ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... companions, notwithstanding her manifest superiority. In their turn, they were eager to proclaim her merits; and, as Sister Frances and Mad. de Fleury administered justice with invariable impartiality, the hateful passions of envy and jealousy were never excited in this little society. No servile sycophant, no malicious detractor, could rob or defraud their little virtues ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth

... walked from one room to another all night, in the nature of a patrol; while my lord, who lay in the chamber above me, got out of bed and tripped to the window at the sound of every coach that chanced to pass through the street. H—, who was consummate in the arts of a sycophant, began to court my favour, by condoling my affliction, and assuring me, that the only method by which I could regain my liberty was a cheerful compliance with the humour of my lord. I was fully convinced of the truth of this observation; and, though my temper is altogether averse to dissimulation, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... valuable in part because he was frank and because in his sincere loyalty dwelt no taint of sycophant fawning. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... touched in sympathetic understanding; on the other, they were as far apart as the poles. No poor man, however civilised he may be, can range himself on the side of wealth, unless he is either a fortune hunter or a sycophant, and Leigh was neither. At the present moment he merely felt, with a sinking of spirit, the existence of an artificial barrier between them of which he had ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... mirth, See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools th' eternal jest: Thou who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece; Where wealth, unlov'd, without a mourner dy'd; And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride; Where ne'er was known the form of mock debate, Or seen a new-made mayor's unwieldy state; Where change of fav'rites made no change of laws, And senates heard before they judg'd a cause; How would'st thou shake at ...
— English Satires • Various

... like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... crime And shame, who hails not as the crown of Time That House wherein the all-envious world acclaims Such glory that the reflex of it shames All crowns bestowed of men for prose or rhyme. The serf, the cur, the sycophant is he Who feels no cringing motion twitch his knee When from a height too high for Shakespeare nods The wearer of a higher than Milton's crown. Stoop, Chaucer, stoop: Keats, Shelley, Burns, bow down: These have no part with you, ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... gained but by conformity in vice. Virtue can stand without assistance, and considers herself as very little obliged by countenance and approbation: but vice, spiritless and timorous, seeks the shelter of crowds, and support of confederacy. The sycophant, therefore, neglects the good qualities of his patron, and employs all his art on his weaknesses and follies, regales his reigning vanity, or stimulates ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... old peasant in shabby clothes, and with his look half-shy, half-sycophant, but vulgarly dressed in broadcloth and bright buttons, a tall hat on his head, and a crimson cravat round his neck. His face was flushed, and his eye flashing and insolent, so that O'Shea only feebly recognised him ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... idlers began to gather around, and listen to the altercation of words. None of them seemed disposed to interfere, although I saw that the mass were too much under the influence of Bully to say a word in our favor, while half a dozen sycophant curs boldly encouraged him in his course of aggression, and whispered to each other, that we should soon knuckle into "nuggets," when the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... nerve-center, known as the solar plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not sure whether there was any wife in the question; and in this case ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... and all such sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are Latin—with a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and fight because they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the grand old name of Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia, and worship fire, fish, and flattery—as you may have noticed. Geese belong indifferently to any race you like—they are cosmopolitans; and I've known here and there a person who, without distinction of nationality, was a duck. In ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... farmer's boots for "Stella." He hopes that O'Connor has returned in triumph to his friends. Tierney's vote in favour of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act does not surprise him, for he is vulgar and a sycophant. Hardy is too angry with Sheridan, whose chief offence is in going at all to the House of Commons. Sheridan surely does well in encouraging the people to resist an invasion. "I remain steady to my point—'no nation can be free but by its own efforts.' As for the French Directory ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... searched in one of the bedrooms. A police-matron was brought for this purpose. She was a dirty, cunning sycophant. The contact of her coarse hands was repulsive. Elisaveta felt uncomfortably unclean after she had passed through the policewoman's paws. Elena shivered with ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... fellow, I have already cautioned you not to be duped by appearances. A hanger on is a sort of sycophant, or toad-eater, and, in the coffee-houses and hotels of London, many such are to be found—men who can spin out a long yarn, tell a tough story, and tip you a rum chant—who invite themselves by a freedom of address ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... to be beaten by a woman, is it? And then you profess to think that we ought to be all housewives and cooks, and knitters of stockings, and sewers-on of our husbands' buttons; but what if we have no husbands, no buttons to sew? And is it not a little selfish, my dear male sycophant, to wish to keep us all to yourself? to attend upon the wants of the lords of creation, who often distinguish themselves so much in the ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson

... fellow, 'I can't get out, I can't get out—said the starling.' Ah, I am as bad as that dog Sterne, who preferred whining over 'a dead ass to relieving a living mother'—villain—hypocrite—slave—sycophant! but I am no better. Here I cannot stimulate myself to a speech for the sake of these unfortunates, and three words and half a smile of * * had she been here to urge it, (and urge it she infallibly would—at least she always pressed me on senatorial duties, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... mercy brewed bitter destruction, and the frightened rulers come back; Each comes in state with his train—hangman, priest, tax-gatherer, Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... toady. Of the same type, in appearance and characteristics, in this trait, lay the main difference in the two women: while Mrs. Pantin with her better intelligence was intensely selfish, Mrs. Toomey's dominant trait was a moral cowardice that made her a natural sycophant. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book about Mrs. Foat. He occupied the time in asking himself by what perversity of fate or of inclination such a charming creature was ranting upon platforms and living in Olive Chancellor's pocket, or how a ranter and sycophant could possibly be so engaging. And she was so disturbingly beautiful, too. This last fact was not less evident when she came down arranged for their walk. They left the house, and as they proceeded he remembered that he had asked himself earlier how he could do honour to such a combination of ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... Anglican church holds them, and I will allow her to be an ally of despotism; but you shall bring your proofs from her canons, articles, and liturgy, not from the servants of court-chaplains, or the flatteries of those who forget the priest in the sycophant. Wolves and worldlings creep into every church. The apostolic age had its Demas, and ours has its Williams. Remember it has its Andrews too. But since your principles of freedom will be best exemplified by your practice, I trust you will recollect the case of Jobson. He has ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... fate, did he but know it, brain is the lord, to fashion a palace fit for the soul to inhabit. Yet still, after centuries of stumbling, reason is no more than the furtive accomplice of habit and force. Force creates, habit perpetuates, reason the sycophant sanctions. And so he drifts, not up but down, and Nature watches in anguish, self-forbidden to intervene, unless it be to annihilate. If he is to drive, and drive straight, reason must seize the reins; and the art of her driving is the art of Politics. Of that art, the aim is perfection, the ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... A sycophant will everything admire; Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire; All is divine! there's not a word amiss! He shakes with joy and weeps with tenderness; He overpowers you ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... ill-will between him and the royal family. And if Briennius bears no longer the fame of a rational man, and the renown of a good leader, he is deprived of both by following the advice of this artful sycophant." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... doubt of it. The unwelcome truth has long been suppressed by interested parties who find their account in playing sycophant to that self-satisfied tyrant Modern Man; but to the impartial philosopher it is as plain as the nose upon an elephant's face that our ancestors ate one another. The custom of the Fiji Islanders, which is their only stock-in-trade, their only claim to notoriety, ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... his silence and sound the public warning, Aquila continues: "Thou holy man, answer and come to our assistance, defend the Word and name of Christ and His honor (which is the highest good on earth) against that virulent sycophant Agricola, who is an ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... I had been a fellow-victim of a deeply laid and most foul plot. That I had been purposely marked down with the aid of De Gex's accomplice and sycophant, Gaston Suzor, was made more than plain as ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux

... and manly strength. Thou art the precursor of destruction. Thou dost intoxicate, bewilder, and make mad the nations whom thou wouldst destroy. Thou dost lead to dazzle and delude to ruin. Avaunt, thou grand sycophant of the nineteenth century, thou vile usurper ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... governing man's attitude toward man, the Senor Don should have been the bully, and the youngster the cringing sycophant. For since their very odd meeting two weeks before, the tyrant had been in the power of the tyrannized. It began on Murguia's own boat, where Murguia was absolute. Any time after leaving Mobile he had ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... What else does enter? Hey? Am I to play the sycophant? Just try to kick me! You'll soon learn better. And laugh in my sleeve? Only no honest, fearless word! That is your peasant's philosophy. As long as they don't touch your pocket-book, you put up with anything. If you ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various



Words linked to "Sycophant" :   apple polisher, sycophantic, lackey, truckler, crawler, toady, sycophancy, groveler, ass-kisser, adulator, flatterer, groveller, fawner, bootlicker



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