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Apologist   /əpˈɑlədʒəst/   Listen
Apologist

noun
1.
A person who argues to defend or justify some policy or institution.  Synonyms: justifier, vindicator.






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"Apologist" Quotes from Famous Books



... who is a natural apologist, pleads that the Irish gentry have the most beautiful gardens in the world and the greatest natural taste in gardening, and there must be some reason why the lower classes are so different in this respect. May it not be due ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... hoped) the special work of the Mission became the means of exciting unusual interest in the work of the Church generally. It was a great opportunity, a great privilege in the crowded meetings to tell people face to face their duties, to stand up as the apologist of the despised Australian black, and the Chinese ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... infallible records untrustworthy in one regard, he began to question their veracity at other points. Being of a critical frame of mind, he took the records rather more literally than a sympathetic, allegorical apologist would have done, although it cannot be said that he used much historical insight. After having studied the sacred texts for purposes of writing or having translated other men's studies on Moses, David, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing

... way to all. Property holders, whose property was to be greatly benefited, fought the railroad company with unusual spirit and persistence. But the railroad came, nevertheless, and needs no advocate or apologist to-day. There is no one now living here who would ask its removal, any more than he would ask the removal of ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... minor classics of our language. And at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... he saw the advance of the German army through Belgium in 1914, and in this book he describes the combined resistance to their last great effort before defeat. The accident, if we may so call it, to the Fifth Army has had nowhere a more eloquent apologist. "They were like ants; they were like flies," he says of the Germans; "they left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground seemed as though it were covered with a grey carpet." There are interesting strictures in the later chapters on some of the quaint semi-official delegations ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... capitalists how to get rich at the cost of, or at least in total disregard of, the welfare of their fellow-citizens? I noticed too that quite a common subtitle used for these so-called works on political economy was the phrase 'The Science of Wealth.' Now what could an apologist of private capitalism and the profit system possibly have to say about the science of wealth? The A B C of any science of wealth production is the necessity of co-ordination and concert of effort; whereas competition, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... civil war within the soul: Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier Makes humble compact, plays the supple part Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist For ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... America; but he will make his savages speak the language of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions born on the banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Chateaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break it in Rene. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his eloquence in the "Vicaire Savoyard;" Chateaubriand surrounds the Roman creed with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... words of Rousseau himself ("Rousseau juge de Jan-Jacques," third dialogue, p 193): From whence may the painter and apologist of nature, now so disfigured and so calumniated, derive his model if ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism. While Italian prelates have found an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however extravagantly, that there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias and Machiavels, Stuarts and Fletchers, have surely a right to a fair ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... animated debate hitherto known in the history of parliament. Vane drew a most unfavourable portrait of the king, and represented all his promises and professions as hollow and insincere; Fiennes became for the first time the royal apologist, and refuted the charges brought by his fellow commissioner; and Prynne, the celebrated adversary of Laud, seemed to forget his antipathy to the court, that he might lash the presumption and perfidy of the army. The debate continued by successive ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... meet him. "The dawn was in it!" he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse her. It had been all his fault, or—here the inner apologist, that is always quick to console, interposed—not quite exactly his fault. How was he to have known? A remembrance of Cousin Dick's undeciphered letters came to him; even the inner apologist hung his head. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... one at least of the guests is pretty sure to take the part of devil's advocate, and to exercise his forensic skill in showing how easily interchangeable are the names of virtue and iniquity, crime and well-doing. September massacres then find, not their apologist, but their eulogist. Noyades of Carrier, fusilades of Collot d'Herbois, are cited as examples very suitable for imitation in adequate emergencies. Prussia's seizure, on behalf of Germany, of Schleswig and Holstein, on pretence of their being not ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... apologist when she demands a place—and a prominent place—in any scheme of education worthy of the name. Leave out the Physiological sciences from your curriculum, and you launch the student into the world, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Not its most enthusiastic apologist would call Black Rock a religious community, but it possessed in a marked degree that eminent Christian virtue of tolerance. All creeds, all shades of religious opinion, were allowed, and it was generally conceded that one was as good as another. ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor

... agreed to march; and the whole procession set forwards for Booby-hall, where they arrived in a few hours without anything remarkable happening on the road, unless it was a curious dialogue between the parson and the steward: which, to use the language of a late Apologist, a pattern to all biographers, "waits for the reader in the ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... taken none," replied his lordship; "but I must teach you to understand me. Whatever my son's conduct may be, one thing is evident, that you are his apologist; now, as a moral man, anxious for the happiness of your child, I tell you that you ought to have exchanged positions with me; it is you who, when about to intrust your daughter to him for life, ought to have investigated his ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... John Gurney, of Earlham, Norfolk, and Catherine Bell, daughter of Daniel Bell, merchant in London. Mrs. Bell was a descendant of the ancient family of the Barclays of Ury in Kincardineshire, and granddaughter of Robert Barclay, the well-known apologist of ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... edition Schiller expressed himself very contemptuously with regard to the stage, declaring that he had essayed a dramatized story and not a stage-play. He would not advise that his work be put upon the boards; for the rabble of the theater would not understand him, would take him for an apologist of vice, and so forth. There seems no good reason to doubt the essential sincerity of these expressions, though their author quickly changed his tune when the staging of 'The Robbers' became a practical question. In the heat of authorship, however, he had aimed at a literary rather than ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... them to the detriment of the Uitlanders; and he thought the time had come to realise his programme of February 17th, 1881, formulated by Dr. Reitz at the end of his official pamphlet,[4] "Africa for the Africanders from the Zambesi to Simon's Bay." We have seen what view, according to his apologist, "the man of war and politics" takes of his relations with the natives; we shall now see how he regards his ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... jealously upheld—everyone of these rights. To do this work, will require that the writer of this history shall have been identified with this command during its existence—he must have been a soldier. Again, he must be a man who acts up to his convictions; no toady nor any apologist is desired. If he was a Confederate soldier from principle, say so, and apologize to no one for the fact. If he loved his State and the Southland and wished their independence, say so, and "forget not the field where ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... truth from the falsehood in this dramatic monologue has not been Browning's intention, and it need not be ours. It may be repeated that Browning is no apologist for Louis Napoleon: he simply calls him to the front, and, standing aside, allows him to speak for himself.[46] In his speech under these circumstances we find just as much truth entangled with just as much sophistry as we might reasonably ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... years, and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced by the Council of Arles in 314, and a modern Church apologist insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the sway of the Church—Justinian, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... Andrews was chiefly enabled to preserve his purity in the midst of such great temptations. I shall only add that this character of male chastity, though doubtless as desirable and becoming in one part of the human species as in the other, is almost the only virtue which the great apologist hath not given himself for the sake of giving the example to ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... remark or two about his visit to America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities. He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared that if ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... Can heavenly Mercy dwell with earthly Zeal? For times of fire and faggot let them hope! Times dear alike to puritan or Pope. As pious Calvin saw Servetus blaze, So would new sects on newer victims gaze. E'en now the songs of Solyma begin; Faith cants, perplexed apologist of Sin! 380 While the Lord's servant chastens whom he loves, And Simeon kicks, [40] where ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... because of the actual knowledge we possess, but always the appeal to weakness and ignorance. From this point of view the colloquial "God only knows!" expresses the appeal to ignorance even more clearly than the elaborate argument of the sophisticated apologist. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... The Marrow of Tradition, has given a faithful portrayal of these disgraceful events, the Wellington of the story being Wilmington. Perhaps the best commentary on those who thus sought power was afforded by their apologist, a Presbyterian minister and editor, A.J. McKelway, who on this occasion and others wrote articles in the Independent and the Outlook justifying the proceedings. Said he: "It is difficult to speak of the Red Shirts without a smile. They victimized the Negroes with a huge ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... was not a full atonement for sin—that there is no future resurrection, and other gross errors. The Quakers, who were afterwards united to form the Society of Friends, from the first denied all those errors. Their earliest apologist, Barclay, in his theses on the Scriptures, says, 'They are the doctrines of Christ, held forth in precious declarations, spoken and written by the movings of God's Spirit.' Whoever it was that asserted the heresies, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... dissimilar. 'Rationalisation' and 'Spiritualisation' are in some directions similar. The general spread of philanthropic sentiment, which found its formula in the Rights of Man, fell in with the Quaker hatred of war and slavery. Voltaire heartily admires Barclay, the Quaker apologist. It is, therefore, not surprising to find the names of the deists, Franklin and Paine, associated with Quakers in this movement. Franklin was an early president of the new association, and Paine wrote an article to support the early agitation.[124] Paine ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... one apologist, "does not betoken a man of genius, but German candour shines on his brow." Strange candour, scarcely recognizable if you take the word in its common and proper sense. It must be taken, as was then the practice in Germany, through translations of Rousseau, in the equivocal and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... daughter, and her father, of whom we shall give some account later, adored her. In addition to all this, her nurse, who acted as housekeeper in the house, was at the same time the accomplice and the apologist of her pranks, for the truth is she loved her like the apple of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... altitude; second, the security of his pockets from attacks behind; and third, the pretence, should any Goth to whom he is known, observe him enjoying the scene, that he is just about to enter the house, and has merely been detained there by accident. Excellent apologist!—how ridiculous!—Excessive delicacy, avaunt! give me a glorious laugh, and "throw (affectation) to the dogs; I'll have none of it." Now the farce begins: up starts the immortal hero himself, and makes his bow; a ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... and this is too often overlooked. Where does he tempt one to stray from duty? Where, even indirectly, does he give pernicious advice? Whom has he led to evil ways? Does he ever inspire feelings that breed misconduct and vice, or is he ever the apologist of these? Many poets and romance writers, under cover of a fastidious style, without one coarse expression, have been really and actively hurtful; and of that it is impossible to accuse Rabelais. Women in particular quickly revolt from him, and turn away repulsed at once by the archaic form ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... in the full current of success at Byzantium, the Vandal Stilicho was enjoying an uninterrupted course of prosperity in the somewhat less stifling air of Italy. The poet Claudian, who acted as a sort of poet-laureate to Honorius, was really an apologist for Stilicho, who patronized and paid him. Almost every public poem he produced is an extravagant panegyric on that general, and we cannot but suspect that many of his utterances were direct manifestoes suggested by his patron. In the panegyric in honor of the third consulate of Honorius (396), ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... The apologist of the status quo is of all things the most pitiful. If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... passages given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes a supernatural Causer of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... to guide the pen of every transcriber to infallible accuracy, and to prevent his ever deviating into any casual error! Such miraculous intervention, we need not say, has never been pleaded for by any apologist of Christianity; has certainly never been promised; and, if it had,—since we see, as a matter of fact, that the promise has never been fulfilled,—the whole of Christianity would fall to the ground. But then, from a large induction, we know that the limits within which ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table: Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of brutal pleasures has become a devotee of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... in the development of Luther's religious ideas was a debate on the general question of papal supremacy, held at Leipzig in 1519, between himself and an eminent Catholic apologist, Johann Eck. Eck skillfully forced Luther to admit that certain views of his, especially those concerning man's direct relation with God, without the mediation of the Church, were the same as those which John Hus had held a century earlier and which had been condemned both by the pope and by the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... Greek female converts, natives of Corinth, and that the command to cover the head and to keep silent in public was warranted, both because veiling the head and face was a Grecian custom, and because the women of Corinth were of notoriously bad character. In support of this theory our modern apologist quotes the testimony of numerous writers of antiquity who denounced Corinthian profligacy. But, setting aside the fact that the men of Corinth must always have been, at least, as bad as the women, and that a sorry case would be made out for Paul, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... meanness, blurring the fair character of his best acts. The generous doings of the President were too notorious not to be admitted, but generally a sinister or selfish motive is insinuated. His courtesy was unpleasing, while extreme coarseness met with a ready apologist. In the several Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there does not appear the slightest ground upon which to found a charge of meanness of character: it is inconceivable how such should have ever been insinuated, while Northcote's "Life" of him was in existence, and Northcote must have known ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... could not accept the dogmas of Christianity, he had imbibed its true spirit," meaning the spirit of Christ Himself. "The cult of the Asiatic life" is the latest definition of Christianity given by a recent apologist of Hinduism, one of a small company of Europeans in India officering the Hindu revival. Crossing India again and going south, we find the late Dr. John Murdoch, of Madras, an eminent observer, adding his testimony regarding the homage ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... crimes,—even as the bulletins of Napoleon were set forth to show his victories in the most favorable light. Caesar's fame rests on his victories and successes as a statesman rather than on his merits as an historian,—even as Louis Napoleon will live in history for his deeds rather than as the apologist of his great usurping prototype. Caesar's "Commentaries" resemble the history of Herodotus more than any other Latin production, at least in style; they are simple and unaffected, precise and elegant, plain ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... profession, renders him constitutionally cautious. His acquaintance with the vicissitudes of fortune, as they have been exemplified in the lives of individuals, and with the severe afflictions that have 'tried the reins' of many, known only to himself, makes him an indulgent and charitable apologist of the aberrations of others. He has an impregnable good humor that never falls below the level of thoughtfulness ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... is a thing so difficult, impossible, and far beyond Hercules labours to be performed; let them be rude, stupid, ignorant, incult, lapis super lapidem sedeat, and as the [600]apologist will, resp. tussi, et graveolentia laboret, mundus vitio, let them be barbarous as they are, let them [601]tyrannise, epicurise, oppress, luxuriate, consume themselves with factions, superstitions, lawsuits, wars and contentions, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... spoke of the abuse and injustice done to the Bible by those who make it the shelter and apologist for all the wrong, vileness, and sneaking meanness that the world bears up; and closed with a testimony against the cowardice of those time-serving ministers who allow their manhood to be suffocated by a white ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... conscience. Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there falls into the same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... earlier play. Instead of the turbulent and intriguing noble we see a "true tenth worthy," who realizes that without accompanying virtues "greatness is a shade, a bubble," and who drinks in from the lips of Clermont doctrines "of stability and freedom." To such an extent does Chapman turn apologist for Guise that in a well-known passage (II, i, 205 ff.) he goes out of his way to declare that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was "hainous" only "to a brutish sense, But not a manly reason," and to argue that the blame lay not with "religious Guise," ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not Indra, but Trita, says the Brahmana apologetically, slew the three-headed son of Tvashtri. "Indra assuredly was free from that sin, for he is a god," says the Indian apologist.(3) Yet sins which to us appear far more monstrous than the peccadillo of killing a three-headed Brahman are attributed freely ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... A Catholic apologist fails in his duty to-day if he writes merely to edify the faithful. Granting that the history of the Inquisition will reveal things we never dreamed of, our prejudices must not prevent an honest facing of the ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... Lieutenant Butler's apologists and accept the view that he was the victim of a deliberate plot on the part of his too-genial host at Regoa. That is a misconception easily explained. This host's name happened to be Souza, and the apologist in question has very rashly leapt at the conclusion that he was a member of that notoriously intriguing family, of which the chief members were the Principal Souza, of the Council of Regency at Lisbon, and the Chevalier Souza, Portuguese minister to the Court of St. James's. Unacquainted with ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... about this reasoning devil as he spoke thus; his crest rose, his breast expanded. That animation which a noble thought gives to generous hearts kindled in the face of the apologist for the darkest and basest of human crimes. Lucretia shuddered; but her gloomy imagination was spelled; there was an ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... this great episode, truly the turning point in American history, without pausing for a glance at the character of Seward. The subject is elusive. His ablest biographer* plainly is so constantly on guard not to appear an apologist that he ends by reducing his portrait to a mere outline, wavering across a background of political details. The most recent study of Seward** surely reveals between the lines the doubtfulness of the author about ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... making apologies," he began, with rather less grace than becomes an apologist; but it was more than ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung

... who makes an original study of American literature will not be a mere apologist for it. He will marvel at the greatness of the moral lesson, at the fidelity of the presentation of the thought which has molded this nation, and at the peculiar aptness which its great authors have displayed in ministering to the special needs and aspirations of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... attacking the principle of the Reformation, the passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent apologist of Barnevelt and ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... mention the tavern, an omission which 'is accounted for by noting that "Boswell's acquaintance with Johnson began when Johnson was an old man, and when he had given up the house in Gough Square, and Goldsmith had long departed from Wine Office Court. At the best," this apologist adds, "Boswell only knew Johnson's life in widely separated sections." As appeal cannot, then, be made to Boswell it is made to others. The most important of these witnesses is a Cyrus Jay, who, in a book of reminiscences published in 1868, claimed to have frequented the Cheshire ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... despised, abandoned and disowned: he has no domestic consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues, but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and bad: "The devils," says Sir Thomas Brown, "do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies; nor can the society of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... probable this was merely a precaution against signals; for it is quite apparent, if he desired, to torment his captives, France has places better adapted to the object than even the donjon of Vincennes. I am not his apologist, however; for, while I shall not go quite as far as the Englishman who maintained, in a laboured treatise, that Napoleon was the beast of the Revelations, I believe he was anything but ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... apologist of robbers and assassins, has neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself, he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... that it is competent to the Christian apologist to return this answer, I do not think that it is the only answer which the objection is capable of receiving. The two following cautions, founded, I apprehend, in the most reasonable distinctions, will exclude ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... herself the champion of the mythical explanation and collected a great deal of evidence that makes it hard to accept the story as a fact Tarbell, I, Chap. XI. Still later a very sane memoirist, Henry B. Rankin, who knew Lincoln, and is not at all an apologist, takes the same view. His most effective argument is that such an event could not have occurred in the little country town of Springfield without becoming at the time the common property of all the gossips. The evidence is bewildering. I find myself unable to accept the disappointed wedding guests ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... Constitution, this pupil of the school of Filmer advanced the startling doctrine that the Lords and Commons of England derive their existence and authority from the King, and that the Kingly government could go on, in all its functions, without them. This pitiful paradox found an apologist in Mr. Windham, whose chivalry in the new cause he had espoused left Mr. Pitt himself at a wondering distance behind. His speeches in defence of Reeves, (which are among the proofs that remain of that want of equipoise observable in his fine, rather than solid, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... their arguments and modes of expression, it was calculated to make them ridiculous especially in the eyes of the university students. Against an attack of this kind serious arguments were unavailing, and, unfortunately, there was no apologist of theology capable of producing a reply couched in a strain similar to that of the /Epistolae/. Gratius himself did undertake the task in his /Lamentationes obscurorum virorum/, but without success, and undoubtedly in the eyes ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires. We might ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... should be remembered, that from being an anti-sacerdotal journal it has become a priests' paper and the organ of priests; from being an opponent of the executive, it has become the organ and the apologist of the executive in the person of M. L. N. Buonaparte, and the useful instrument, it is said, of M. Achille Fould. Every body knows, says M. Texier, with abundant malice prepense, that Dr. Veron, the chief editor of the Constitutionnel, has declared that France may henceforth place ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... than the spiritual effects of the Divine power revealed in the incarnation of the Son of God. Theologians arose to controvert it and to develop the theological decisions of the Council; chief among them was Leontius of Byzantium, a philosophic apologist of real {87} eminence, whose work was taken up later and ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... afternoon with friends of his to Nik[vs]i['c] and approvingly looked on while they destroyed the building and the whole machinery of Montenegro's weekly newspaper, which had departed from the paths of adulation—well, I see that his apologist, a certain Mr. A. Devine,[66] says that "in 1908 political passions resulted in the extinction of the organ of the political Opposition, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... declining in his own lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws, had taken the place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides exhibited the last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato saw the friend and apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct; the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There was no 'second or third' to Aeschylus and Sophocles ...
— The Republic • Plato

... blush, old man,' he said, 'with that long gray beard of thine, and thy back bent with years, to stand there the apologist of crime? If ingratitude and heartlessness are to be defended, and numbered among the virtues, the reign of Arimanes has indeed begun. Such is not the lesson, Jew, thy sacred books have taught thee. But a truce with this! Thy last words this morning ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... junctions are the most unpopular places in the world that they have been singled out for praise in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW. Poor places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—surely they have waited over-long for an apologist.... But first of all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these points of punctuation ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... people. Although the Supreme Judges hold for life, there is at once precedent, necessity, and law for such a change in the present system as will in a short time make it a fearless interpreter of republican institutions, instead of the defender and apologist of treason." ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham

... that I have not the strength of character to swim, almost alone, against the social current. So I partake of the occasional snort and to that extent stand a self-admitted apologist for an offense which no true reductionist ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret loving. Jude the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... he had something that interested him. Charlie was sidling up unseen by the orator. There was a little nip followed by a sharp exclamation, and the thread of the discourse was broken! The relieved poet now had the floor as an apologist for his discourteous parrot. ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... and the instinct-doctrines of Bergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologist for supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the method of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been introducing into European ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... seek examples from relatively recent times, we may find them in the annals of many of the pacifist sects of our own day. Robert Barclay, the Quaker apologist of the late seventeenth century, stated the position which the members of the Society of Friends so often put to ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin

... very bad example to the warring Powers, and when protests are made in this country concerning the low proportion of the war's costs that is being met out of taxation it is easy for the official apologist to answer, "See how much more we are doing than Germany." It is easy, but it is not a good answer. Germany had no financial prestige to maintain; the money that Germany is raising for financing the war is raised almost entirely ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... whitewashing. extenuation; palliation, palliative; softening, mitigation. reply, defense; recrimination &c 938. apology, gloss, varnish; plea &c. 617; salvo; excuse, extenuating circumstances; allowance, allowance to be made; locus paenitentiae[Lat]. apologist, vindicator, justifier; defendant &c. 938. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... friend, or other news is had of him, Laura flies out in her usual tirades against the world, the horrid wicked selfish world, which spoils everybody who comes near it. What has Clive done, in vain his apologist asks, that an old friend should be so angry ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... his doubts. Sometimes I fancy that it was this difference in the two men that lay at the bottom of the unfortunate antagonism between Owen and Huxley. There is in Owen's writing, where he is not purely scientific, a touch of the apologist. He cannot quite make up his mind to follow evolution to its logical conclusions. Where he is forced to do so, it is to him like signing the death warrant of his dearest friend. It must not be forgotten that Owen was born more than twenty years before Huxley; and great as was ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... just alluded to Scott was the inventor. It is founded on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Stuart family, of which Scott was the zealous defender and apologist, doing all that in his power lay to represent the members of it as noble, chivalrous, high-minded, unfortunate princes; though, perhaps, of all the royal families that ever existed upon earth, this family was the worst. It was unfortunate ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how some of them—or some part of some of them—found their way at length to such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... who did not consider that the political claims referred to in the oath were the true principles of the Papacy, declared that the brief was spurious; but after some time it was confirmed in all due form, and an address appeared from the pen of the most eminent apologist of the See of Rome, Cardinal Bellarmin, in which he reminded the archpriest that the general apostolical authority of the Pope could not be impugned even in a single iota of the subtleties of dogma: how ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... stain than that which comes from blood,—for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... natural domestic affections, must, for the most part, afford the greatest good of which they are capable. To the evils which sometimes attend their matrimonial connections, arising from their looser morality, slaves, for obvious reasons, are comparatively insensible. I am no apologist of vice, nor would I extenuate the conduct of the profligate and unfeeling, who would violate the sanctity of even these engagements, and occasion the pain which such violations no doubt do often inflict. Yet such ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... message of your own darling—perhaps the handwriting also. Thousands of modest, honest seekers of truth have done these things. But the Pharisees who talk of heaven and then fly from its approach have "religiously shunned" them; that is the way they express it, and you are their apologist. But what is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth: but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartufe; turning ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... with her husband, Grace Fitzpiers deliberated on many things. Should she inform her father before going out that the estrangement of herself and Edgar was not so complete as he had imagined, and deemed desirable for her happiness? If she did so she must in some measure become the apologist of her husband, and she was not prepared to ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... a determined stand, and at length triumphed over a Catholic faction, which was ruling his queen; and this at the risk and menace of a war with France. Yet this firmness too has been denied him, even by his apologist Hume: that historian, on his preconceived system, imagined that every action of Charles originated in the Duke of Buckingham, and that the duke pursued his personal quarrel with Richelieu, and taking advantage of these domestic quarrels, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek literature, our younger students take no interest ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... Buddha lived five hundred years before Christ, and that the Buddhist religion was in its prime two hundred years before Christ, the Christian apologist replies that, for all that, the Buddhist Scriptures are of comparatively late date. Let us ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... Thus Boileau, in the guise of invective, eulogizes Louis XIV. Russian ladies unite in their persons great acquirements, combined with amiability and strict morality; also a species of Oriental charm which so much captivated Madame de Stael." It will occur to most that the apologist of the Russian fair "doth protest too much." The poet in all probability wrote the offending stanza in a fit of Byronic "spleen," as he would most likely himself have called it. Indeed, since Byron, poets of his school seem to assume this virtue ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... time, in a word, the more personal and historical the apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and sting the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... Sandoria is a snug little place, and the new frame court-house a credit to the county, only why did they build a town where you can't see the mountains? Then the Sandorians reply that from the slight elevation west of the town there is a view of the Peak itself,—neither critic nor apologist taking into consideration how rarely men and women ascend their little hills to contemplate ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... Wrotham,' pursued the apologist. 'Did I tell you, Moxey, that I had taken rooms down there, to be able to spend a day or two near my friends the Jacoxes occasionally? On the way here, I looked in at Staple Inn, but Earwaker is away somewhere. What an odd thing that people will go off without letting one know! It's such common ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... Henry must have a male heir is so absolutely conclusive in the judgment of Henry's great apologist that he feels it necessary to offer excuses for the womanly weakness which blinded Katharine to her obvious duty. It may also have appealed with considerable force to a statesman who regarded all pledges and bonds as being in the last resort dissoluble on grounds of national expediency. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... Jerusalem temple, and to prove that Jehovah "was not with Israel" (II Chron. 25:7), which was represented in his day by the hated Samaritans. The hatred engendered by the Samaritan feud explains many of the peculiarities of the Chronicler. He was, in fact, an apologist rather than a historian. Thus post-exilic institutions, as, for example, the temple song service with its guilds of singers, are projected backward even to the days of David, and the events of early Hebrew history are constantly glorified. The numbers found in the ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... all the same to you, sir apologist of the modern world, I should like to pause here and ask you frankly: Do you not feel yourself more contemporary with all the dead who slumber within these walls than with a radical elector or a free-mason deputy? Do you not feel that if these martyrs had not come to pray beneath ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... regret that all must feel that his promising career was prematurely cut short by the hand of death, should not blind us to the fact that, in spite of a manifest attempt to write judicially, he must be regarded as an apologist for Disraeli. In respect, indeed, to one point—which, however, is, in my opinion, one of great importance—he threw up the case for his client. The facts of this ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... "I know a white apologist for the Japanese who in a million pamphlets and from a thousand rostrums has cried that it is false that Japanese women labor in the fields," Farrel told his guests. "You have seen a thousand of them laboring in this valley. Hundreds of them carry babies on their ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... man-companion whose well-being may be brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car on ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... one day of the week when Paradise needed no apologist. For on Thursdays the stage arrived from Tellurium, bringing the mail and, now and then, a passenger, and always a whiff of the outside world. No resident of Paradise Park would willingly have missed the arrival of the stage; and on this occasion ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... given in explanation of its use are for the most part merely paraphrases of the traditional meanings that in the course of history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist nor the priestly apologist will, as a rule, admit that he does not know why such ritual acts as pouring out water or burning incense are performed, and that they are wholly inexplicable and meaningless to him. Nor will they confess that the real inspiration to perform such rites is the fact ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... makes the following candid and judicious comment: "The design of the law of Maryland was to protect freedom of conscience; and some years after it had been confirmed the apologist of Lord Baltimore could assert that his government had never given disturbance to any person in Maryland for matter of religion; that the colonists enjoyed freedom of conscience, not less than freedom of person and estate, as amply as ever any people ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... of his great speeches is to see at once that he has the infinite advantage of the rest in being the strenuous and faith-inspired champion of aristocracy and government by privilege—not the mere defender and apologist for it. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... oligoi de kai en allois ethnesin, hos ton proton theon Simona homologountes, ekeinon kai proskunousin] (besides the account in the Philos and Orig. c. Cels i. 57; VI. 11). The positive statement of Justin that Simon came even to Rome (under Claudius) can hardly be refuted from the account of the Apologist himself, and therefore not at all ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... transportation to New Holland. Look at him now pouring the thundering strains of his eloquence, upon crowded audiences in Great Britain, and see in this a triumphant vindication of his character. And have the slaveholder, and his obsequious apologist, gained any thing by all their violence and falsehood? No! for the stone which struck Goliath of Gath, had already been thrown from the sling. The giant of slavery who had so proudly defied the armies of the living God, had received his death-blow before ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... the better-than-thou woman realize the apologist claim of Lecky that "though she may be the supreme type of vice, she is also the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, happy homes would be polluted, unnatural and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... who was enlisted as a soldier shall at once return to his command by the way of Fort Scott unless otherwise ordered by competent authority...." [Indian Office Land Files, Southern Superintendency, 1855-1870, C 1933]. Coffin, as usual, appeared as an apologist for the Indians and attempted to exonerate Opoeth-le-yo-ho-la from all blame [Letter to Dole, December 3, 1862, Ibid.]. He called the aged chief, "that noble old Roman of the Indians," and the chief himself protested against the injustice ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,—there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead—Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... the spread of Islam, "its rattling quiver and its glittering sword," with the silent progress of Christianity, our apologist, after dwelling on the teaching and the miracles of the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... revolutionary or nothing, revolutionary "in the most approved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it not long ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of English aspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowed representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... at the impertinent solicitation of the driver, he will unquestionably curse you." "The telegraph operator grabs your message and eyes you as if you were a pickpocket." Now, Mr. PUNCHINELLO does not offer himself as an apologist for the abusive and obstreperous hackman, but he wishes to say that in the course of his active and eventful career he has had various conferences with those servants of the sidewalk, and he has never yet been unquestionably cursed ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various

... of the Christian to anything but his creed. Let professors of Christianity be convicted of gross criminality, and lo its apologists say such professors are not Christian. Let fanatical Christians commit excesses which admit not of open justification, and the apologist of Christianity coolly assures us such conduct is mere rust on the body of his religion—moss which grows on ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell

... loyalty" (to British interests), "and there being no desire on the part of the Government to annex the State of Perak, his appointment was the wisest course that, under the circumstances, could be pursued." This is all that the greatest apologist for British proceedings in ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might write books ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... inventing new claims and additional titles, "it is not pretended to be now told what additional titles they made" - an admission which largely discounts and disposes of the other charges made by Macleod's apologist. And, notwithstanding all his disadvantages and difficulties, Neil made another effort "towards obtaining justice to himself and his family"; and to that end, in 1679 and 1680, he commenced a new process against Seaforth and all others "whom he knew to have or pretended to have" claims against ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie



Words linked to "Apologist" :   advocator, advocate, proponent, vindicator, apology, exponent



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