"Lost cause" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these men; at least we need not blame them overmuch. To say that they acted as they did is to say that they were human, were narrow-minded, and were the apostles of a lost cause. But they could not know this; they had no experience of the past to guide them; the conditions under which they found themselves were novel, and had to be met for the first time. Conduct which was excusable then would be unpardonable now, in the light of all this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... errand. Then he took the fan from her hand and informed her of the messenger's arrival. His voice sounded strangely, and as she looked up at him she saw his face working with emotion. She cast down her eyes quickly. She could not tell why. All at once she felt that this quiet, maimed veteran of a lost cause was not to her as other men. Perhaps her heart was made soft by the strange occurrences of the few hours she had passed beneath his mother's roof. However that may be, she was suddenly conscious of a feeling she had never known before. Her cheeks burned as she listened ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... laid waste the country and destroyed the churches, and made many widows and orphans; all the land was in terror for the harm thus wrought upon them. The knights who came thither saw the folk as they fled with all their goods and their foodstuff, they deemed theirs was a lost cause. They met many folk, men women and children who would flee the land; they drave their cattle before them and were laden with their goods; some were ahorse, some afoot, 'twas the best they might do to ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... old champion of a lost cause was no more. Two days before his death "he went to his laboratory"—but, finding his weakness too great, with difficulty returned to his room. Loyal to his science to ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... he has invited it. I am a man in despair, the fugitive of a lost cause. That man holds the keys of escape. And, besides, between him and me there is ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... wrongfulness of the American position, is occasionally raised among us by those who see the great obligations to the mother country under which the colonies lay, and who recall the needless hardships suffered by the wretched Tories, the martyrs of a lost cause. Doubtless wrongs were inflicted in the course of the struggle, and the great expenditures of England were in large part unrequited. But it must be remembered that the world had not yet reached the point where the losers in a war were gently treated, and that no amount of financial obligation will ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... genuine qualities, while it constantly called on him for the exercise of the very qualities which he had least at hand. Nature had never meant him for a conspirator, or even for a subtle political intriguer; nor, indeed, had Nature ever intended him to be the adherent of a lost cause. All that could have made a position like his tolerable to a man of his peculiar capacity would have been faith in the cause—that faith which would have {117} prevented him from seeing any but its noble and exalted qualities, and would have made him forget himself ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... eulogy on the immaculate character, the political importance and the profound learning of that venerable septuagenarian who still had strength to battle consistently and nobly for the lost cause of his youth. An exordium of this nature was the regular procedure. That was how "the Chief" did things. And as he spoke, Rafael's eyes turned anxiously upon the clock. He wanted to be long, very long. If he did not talk for an hour and a half or two hours he would feel disgraced. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... I pitied him more, for he was always quick to lose his temper, and made a personal matter of each lost cause. Raines's young barrister had for once put aside his unslaked and Welling passion for alibis and insanity, had forsworn gymnastics and fireworks, and worked soberly for his client. Mercifully the hot weather was yet young, and there had been no flagrant cases of barrack-shootings ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... that old friend of the cardinal's whom Mignon and Barre, as we have said, had impressed so favourably. Memin saw in the arrival of Laubardemont a special intimation that it was the will of Heaven that the seemingly lost cause of those in whom he took such a warm interest should ultimately triumph. He presented Mignon and all his friends to M. Laubardemont, who received them with much cordiality. They talked of the mother superior, who was a relation, as we have seen, of M. de Laubardemont, and exaggerated the insult ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... returned to Paris with her niece, and occasionally I spent an hour at her house, where she treated me with much kindness; only she would insist that I was a silly fellow not to abandon a lost cause. ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... in Sicily and Italy goes on. It must go on, and will go on, until the Italian people realize the futility of continuing to fight in a lost cause—a cause to which the people of Italy never gave ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... herself. Sentiment? Why, man, he's chock full of it. He's the sort that, when he hears of this coming scrap in Krovitch, will throw himself body and soul into it, as his forbears have done from Marston Moor to date, just because it's likely to be a lost cause. He's always for the under dog—and I honor him for it. I'm willing to bet he'll go to Krovitch when ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... followed as profitably as that of the great statesmen. Providence dealt with them very differently. The one was struck down by a mortal wound before his task was well begun; his life, to all human seeming, was given in vain, and his name will ever be associated with the mournful memories of a lost cause and a vanished army. The other, ere he fell beneath the assassin's stroke, had seen the abundant fruits of his mighty labours; his sun set in a cloudless sky. And yet the resemblance between them is ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... at her and her chintz peonies as she put the curl gently away from her medallion and proceeded: "But never did I think of myself in those dark weary days of the long ago. I thought of my country and the Lost Cause." They stared at her, fascinated. "Yes, m'm," whispered they, quite humbly. "Now," said Mrs. Brewton, "what is more sacred than an American mother's love? Therefore let her not shame it with anger and strife. ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... once more every thought vanished from her mind save the one which had sustained her through the extraordinary measures she had taken to secure herself this opportunity of presenting her lost cause to the judgment of the only man from ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... Southern Confederacy." He was rather sceptical about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of social coherence. It creates loyalty. But it may teach loyalty to antiquated observances or a dwarfed system of truth. Have you ever seen believers rallying around a lost cause in religion? Yet these relics were once a live issue, and full of thrilling ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... "vacant chair" was standing; Till the only free retainers Were the women and the children; Till the crippled and the aged Were the guardians of the homesteads. * * * * * How the shadows of the picture Darken o'er the southern landscape! How the "Lost Cause" sheds a gloaming On the erst illumed horizon! All about the stricken region Hangs the doom of vanquished power; All throughout the conquered country Sounds the knell of fruitless bloodshed. Mothers mourn their ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... look upon a maimed soldier of the "Lost Cause," who fought manfully for the cause which he deemed to be right, without being drawn towards him with I may say brotherly love, commingled with the profoundest respect. And I beg space in your valuable columns ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... because it was reported that he had really killed some men, and loved some women. They found such a combination irresistible, when coupled with an appearance both vigorous and gallant. The son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and mounted on a lost cause, he had been riding through the world ever since he was eighteen, without once getting out of the saddle. The secret of this endurance lay perhaps in his unconsciousness that he was in the saddle at all. It was as much his natural seat as office stools ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and the only man who brought any honesty to this war.[39] To these forces, still only three legions and no match for the Vitellians, Caecina addressed his letters. He criticized their rash attempt to sustain a lost cause, and at the same time praised the courage of the German army in the highest terms. His allusions to Vitellius were few and casual, and he refrained from insulting Vespasian. In fact he used no language calculated either to seduce or to terrorize ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the war ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... of his steadfastness, his unselfishness, his goodness to his soldiers, and the base ingratitude and wickedness with which his countrymen treated him, more than ever do we instinctively long that the lost cause had proved the winning one, and again and again we have to remind ourselves of the terrible evil it would have been to the world if Carthage had overcome Rome. For Carthage was possessed of almost every bad quality which could work ill ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... earthly life. As Caesar was stricken low, was not the long contest for possession of the people over, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, speak out, and give itself to him, the Pope? He had begun experiments with France, forsaking the lost cause of the monarchy and recognising the Republic which he hoped might prove strong and victorious, for in spite of everything France remained the eldest daughter of the Church, the only Catholic nation which yet possessed sufficient strength to restore the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... his eyes had grown narrow from the habit of the long sun-smitten trails. He was black-bearded, barely of middle stature, a parsimonious man when it came to using words. When he was a boy fighting under the banner of the Lost Cause he sickened, and his colonel sent him home, where he did his recuperating as a lieutenant of the Texas rangers fighting Comanche Indians ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... boys opened their bowels, and mothers slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing through Japanese history a river of suicides' blood[17] having its springs in the devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a lost cause as represented by the feudal superior. Shigemori, the son of the prime minister Kiyomori, who protected the emperor even against his own father, is a model of that Japanese kun-shin which placed fidelity to the sovereign above ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... not so mad as to declare Jacobite now? It's a lost cause, boy. There's not a thing in it but noble hole-and-corner work and not a ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Wey that once washed them. On an October day, the Surrey hills standing round about in shadowy distances, the silence of two centuries is scarcely broken by the rustle of leaves dropping on their own deep carpet, and the very spirit of a lost cause dwells here, slowly dying. The house stands backed by a steep wooded hill, beyond which corn-fields 'clothe the wold and meet the sky;' the mansion is a grey, two-storied parallelogram flanked by square towers of only slighter elevation; their projecting bays surmounted by open-work cornices of leafy ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... talked with them, trying to keep them from being discouraged, for the times were evil, and the days were very gloomy. The impeachment had failed. State after State in the North had voted against enfranchising the colored man in their midst. The spirit of the lost cause revived, murders multiplied. The Ku Klux spread terror and death around. Every item of Northern meanness to the colored people in their midst was a message of hope to the rebel element of the South, which had only changed. ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... the worldly-wise monarch would have retained his crown as their champion. But these well-laid plans went all agley. Prince Mirko died and King Nikita was deposed. For a time he resided at a hotel, a few houses from me, and I passed him now and again as he was on his way to plead his lost cause before the distinguished ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Confederate side, we find here, too, four supremely able commanders, the first of whom, Robert E. Lee, is believed by many to be the greatest in our country's history. No doubt some of the renown which attaches to Lee's name is due to his desperate championship of a lost cause, and to the love which the people of the South bore, and still bear, him because of his singularly sweet and unselfish character. But, sentiment aside, and looking at him only as a soldier, he must be given a place in the front rank of our greatest captains. There are not ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... been wandering from Newfoundland to Boston and Quebec seeking aid, but a lost cause has few friends, and if La Tour turned pirate on Boston boats, he probably thought he was justified in paying off the score of Boston's bargain with Charnisay. Later he turned trader with the Indians from Hudson Bay, and found friends in Quebec. Word of his wrongs reached ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... who fought for the Lost Cause ever cherished anything more vividly than those hours between midnight and the next noon when they marched at the double quick across hill and valley and forest to the relief of their great commander. There was little need for the officers to urge them on, and at sunrise the rolling of the cannon ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... brought under notice by Mr. Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause: ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes. His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that there in Rome ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Europe from time to time, landing here and there on the British Coast—until when finally defeated at "Culloden Moor," 1746, this wraith of the House of Stuart disappears—dying obscurely in Rome; and "Wha'll be King but Charlie," and "Over the Water to Charlie," linger only as the echo of a lost cause. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... throughout the campaign. The next evening the suffrage forces held a grand rally in Metropolitan Temple. Every seat in that fine auditorium was occupied and the aisles were crowded. It was not a meeting of the adherents of a lost cause, but of one which had suffered only temporary defeat. Miss Anthony presided and was given a true California ovation and, as her voice rang out with all its old-time vigor, there was not one in that vast audience but hoped she might return to lead ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... officer tells of the deadly homesickness of these poor men. They would gather in groups of two dozen or so and mourn that they would never again see their native land. They died, a score at a time, of no other disease than sickness for their homes. They could have no pride in trying to save a lost cause. Burgoyne was surrounded and, on the 17th of October, he was obliged ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... nationality; the other, half a century later, presented the stern issue in a concrete form, and at last the complete unification of a community—whether for better or for worse is no matter—was hammered by iron and cemented in blood. It is there now; an established fact. Secession is a lost cause; and, whether for good or for ill, the United States exists, and will continue to exist, a unified World Power. Sovereignty now rests at Washington, and neither in Columbia for South Carolina nor in Boston for Massachusetts. The State exists only as an integral portion of the United ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... by Parliament. No party in our country can claim the monopoly of loyalty to conviction attested by self-sacrifice. In England, non-jurors and dissenters; in Scotland, Episcopalians, Covenanters, and Free Churchmen; in Ireland, Roman Catholics, have "gone out," or stayed out, for some lost cause. In Oxford, Royalists, from Heads to Servitors, stood by their colours manfully. It is uncertain how many submitted, how many were expelled. The estimates vary from Clarendon's statement that almost all the Heads and Fellows of Colleges were ejected, "scarce one submitting," ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... politics; the farewell to mirth; the Restoration, and Milton's attitude; the lost paradise of the early poems; Milton's Puritanism; his melancholy; the political and public preoccupations of the later poems; the drama of Milton's life; his egotism explained; an illustration from Lycidas; the lost cause; ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... he was a South Carolina lawyer, and not a carpet-bagger. Such credentials were unimpeachable, and the passengers found him a very agreeable traveling companion. Apparently sound on the subject of negroes, Yankees, and the righteousness of the lost cause, he yet discussed these themes in a lofty and impersonal manner that gave his words greater weight than if he had seemed warped by a personal grievance. His attitude, in fact, piqued the curiosity of one or two of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... he would be welcome wherever he found her. That was the worst of it to Clay, for he knew that men did not follow women from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly greeting. Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit Carson was his hero. He thought of the poverty of those days poverty so mean and hopeless that it was almost something to feel shame for; of the days that followed when, an orphan and without a home, ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... I could be sternly just. At my feet the little brook babbled in the night, while the camp noises slowly died away. Meantime, intent on my purpose, I tried to arrange in my mind what I would say or how plead a lost cause. I have often thus pre-arranged the mode of saying what some serious occasion made needful. I always get ready, but when the time comes I am apt to say things altogether different, and to find, too, that the wisdom of the minute is apt to be the ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... gone and Oxford is the home of one more lost cause. The gods (of the gallery) may be with the winners, but it is the losing side that still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... table and speak to you of things which are at the other end of the world from Landis and the other girl. It is because I have to keep my hands gripped hard to control myself. Because, though I have given up hope, I would follow a forlorn chance, a lost cause, and tell you again and again that ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... a lost cause, if cause it was, scarcely ever knew what it was to draw a free breath. When they were not fighting, they were marching, often on bare feet, and of the two they did not know which they preferred. They were always hungry; they went into battles on empty stomachs, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... on a Wabash train the other day. His life has been one of adventure. Previous to the war he graduated at Oxford, in Butler county, in the same class with the gallant Joe Battle, who, with his brother, fell beside their father at Shiloh, while fighting under the flag of the Lost Cause. After graduating he went to Hamilton and read law with Judge Clark, who acquired some notoriety at Hamilton by his advocacy of the right of secession in 1860-61. When the war begun, Hasseltino determined to risk his fortunes with the Confederacy. He started South under the pretext of escorting ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... man," remarked Jose thoughtfully. "He'll spend the last drop of blood in his body to keep this country for Spain. He's Loyalist and Royalist to the core. It's a pity, too, because he is fighting for a lost cause." ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... for his energetic and consistent representations the steps that were taken—all too late as they proved—never would have been taken at all, or deferred to such a date as to let the public see by the event that there was no use in throwing away money and precious lives on a lost cause. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... world had not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two thousand years, and now pronounced it false—false in its external credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the reductio ad absurdam of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... Tokugawa adherents. It was the great exception made, when Hida no Kami (Yagyu[u] Matajuro[u]) admitted Kume no Heinai to his fencing room and discipleship. The ro[u]nin, of course, deserved the proscription, being often the devoted adherents of a lost cause—Hoo[u]jo[u] or Toyotomi—and unwilling to transfer their fealty to a second lord. The most noted and hated of the ro[u]nin, though free from any taint of rebellion to the Tokugawa, was this Heinaibei; the vilest assassination, that of his friend ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has conquered by the blood and agony of saints and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... woman been made who could inspire such passion without returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer, lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, "I have always ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia, the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys; to the high style of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause—even if not quite the "tender" grace of a day that is dead—considerably adds a style. With the dome of St. Peter's resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... courage to fight a lost cause when there is no hope even of victory. To contest every inch of ground with as much persistency and enthusiasm as if we were assured of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Good-bye, Lost Cause! I am young. I must 'look forward and not backward—up and not down.' Henceforth I shall live and breathe and act for the future, not for the past! Repining is about the most senseless and profitless occupation that the human ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... given the preference. Though the last of these pieces is not contemptible in style, none of these writers had sufficient ardor to compel attention; and if sentimentalism had not been steadily disseminated through other literary forms, especially the novel, it might well have been regarded as a lost cause. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... to be hid away, And gales of laughter came from gardens, Where bright tear-dashed eyes must weep farewells The braver lips refused to falter— Mouths then seemed only made to kiss For men in gray, Who left the ancient houses of proud names, Through magic gates upon that magic day When the lost cause was ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... your flowers are a lost cause," he remarked cheerfully. "They were looking pretty good two or three weeks ago. This hot weather has dried them up. Next year we'll have water down here to the house. All these ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... an end there had crept into Clara's manner a polite calmness which I never liked to see. What was I going to do with these two after supper, when my cousin Flagg, with his mind undistracted by relays of cream toast, could give his entire attention to the Lost Cause? ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and trained by Yuan Shih-kai, when he was Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were, it is true, proving themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and South China troops; yet that circumstance was meaningless. Those troops were fighting for what had already proved itself a lost cause—the Peking System as well as the Manchu dynasty. The fight turned more and more into a money-fight. It was foreign money which brought about the first truce and the transfer of the so- called republican government from Nanking to Peking. In the strictest sense of the words every phase of ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... of the Parlement Maupeou, of a whole indifferent acquiescing world, miserably beaten. In all men's opinions, only not in his own! Inspired by the indignation, which makes, if not verses, satirical law-papers, the withered Music-master, with a desperate heroism, takes up his lost cause in spite of the world; fights for it, against Reporters, Parlements and Principalities, with light banter, with clear logic; adroitly, with an inexhaustible toughness and resource, like the skilfullest ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... are clinging to the radio-activity theory desperately, an S.O.S. of a lost cause, depending, like evolution, on a great many assumptions, and unproven hypotheses. The assumption is that a radio-active substance, like uranium, "decays," or passes into many other substances, of which ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... a Spanish army would come to the aid of the Irish. A large Spanish force was actually despatched for the purpose, but the news of Tyrone's defeat reached the Spaniards on their arrival, and they promptly reembarked, and gave up what they considered a lost cause. Some of the Irish chiefs were compelled to surrender; others fled to Spain, in the hope of stirring up some movement there against England, or at least of finding a place of shelter. Ireland was suffering almost everywhere from famine, and in many districts famine of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... physical impossibility to continue longer. Senators went away with dark frowns or care-knit foreheads. Out in the Forum bands of young "Optimates" were shouting for Pompeius, and cursing Caesar and his followers. Drusus, following Antonius, felt that he was the adherent of a lost cause, the member of a routed army that was defending its last stronghold, which overwhelming numbers must take, be the defence never so valiant. And when very late he lay down on his bed that night, the howls of the fashionable mob were ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... amuse himself with ill-grounded hopes: neither the learning of that most excellent man, nor the industry of such as may follow him, will be able to promote the interests of Eloquence, or to establish her former glory. It is a lost cause. Before the vices, which have been so ably described, had spread a general infection, all true oratory was at an end. The revolutions in our government, and the violence of the times, began the mischief, and, in the end, gave ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... ganger's lawful prey. In the case of an outward-bound ship, the gang-officer's duty was confined to seeing that she carried no more hands than her protection and tonnage permitted her to carry. All others were pressed. Cowed by armed authority, or wounded and bleeding in a lost cause as hereafter to be related, the men were hustled into the boat with "no more violence than was necessary for securing them." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1437—Capt. Aldred, 12 June 1708.] Their chests and bedding followed, making a full boat; and so, having cleared the ship of all her pressable ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... guest in a Paris restaurant has been challenged by a noisy party of young Frenchmen to join them in drinking a health to Poland. He refuses; they denounce him as a craven and a slave; he bares his breast and shows the scars of wounds received in fighting for the country whose lost cause has become a subject for ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying things. "Come hither child, and rest—Behold the weary west," might have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the essence of his lost cause. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God's thunderbolts," Wolf Larsen was saying. "Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten. A third of God's angels he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... where the students gather daily, then passing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where nobly conceived in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as champion in chief of the "Lost Cause," but the light on his face is not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to the Military Institute. Stonewall Jackson had ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the uniform. It signified nothing, since the Confederacy had fallen. Then she understood. He had not surrendered. Nor had those he represented. The gray, for him, still had its reason, and was a power yet; the power to decide an empire's fate. It was the grave dignity of a lost cause; striving, before being doffed forever, to leave behind a new cause. Or, if failing, to accept the lot of surrender. In either case, her chevalier de Missour-i was wearing the dear uniform for the last time. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... monastery of St. Germain, in hackney coaches; twenty-two of them were priests. Lewis XVI. had fallen because he refused to proscribe the refractory clergy who were accused of spreading discontent. Beyond all men they were identified with the lost cause, and it had been decided that they should be banished. They were imprisoned in large numbers, as a first step towards their expulsion. That group, escorted by Marseilles from the Mairie to the Abbaye, were the first victims. The people, who did not love them, let them ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Institute were crowded. As the cortege entered the Institute grounds a salute of artillery thundered its arrival, and reverberated it far across the distant hills and valleys of Virginia, awakening echoes which have been hushed since Lee manfully gave up the struggle of the "lost cause" at Appomattox. Winding along the indicated route toward the grounds of Washington College, the procession slowly moved past the Institute, and when the war-horse and hearse of the dead chieftain ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... from a gun if he really wanted me," said Ruth. "No, the only way I can bring Ronicky is to surround myself with new dangers, terrible dangers, make myself a lost cause again. Then Ronicky would come laughing and singing, eager as ever. Oh, ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... dexterity, proved to her, if she needed proof, that she had chosen the higher. A man who could so stoop—to lies—was not the man for her. To say nothing of his iniquity, his folly was apparent. For Jack had behaved like a fool, he must see that himself, in his espousal of a lost cause. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick |
