"Hairsplitting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... support of Cobb's arguments: "Indeed, sir, I hope he will be ruled." But all Cobb's friendly reasonings and expostulations were ineffectual to bend Bunyan's sturdy will. He would yield to no-one in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law. But, he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, "one to obey actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to lie down and suffer ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean," meant according to the American reading a watershed which was a marshy plateau, and according to the British version a range of hills to the south which involved some keen hairsplitting as to the rivers they divided. The intentions of the parties to the original treaty were probably much as the Americans contended. From the standpoint of neighborly adjustment and the relative need for the land in question, ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton |
