Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Misrepresentation   /mɪsrˌɛprɪzɛntˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Misrepresentation

noun
1.
A misleading falsehood.  Synonyms: deceit, deception.
2.
A willful perversion of facts.  Synonym: falsification.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Misrepresentation" Quotes from Famous Books



... that in Marguerite's dismissal of the subject twice forced upon him to his misrepresentation, there was an indignant treatment of her guardian which she tried to cheek: as though she would have flamed out against him, but for the influence of fear. He also observed—though this was not much—that he never ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

... played upon your bodily eye when looking over ten miles of sea upon Staffa? You do not see the basaltic columns now; but that is because you see wrongly. You do not burn at the remembrance of the wicked lie, the crafty misrepresentation, the cruel blow; but perhaps you ought to do so. And now (to speak of less grave matters) when all I had to say about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly? Do I see it as my reader would always have seen it? Or has it faded into falsehood, as well as into distance and dimness? ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... that he had no reasonable prospect of carrying his measures, he should retire, but not till then; and that one defeat ought not to make him throw up the game. However, he owned that this qualification ought to have formed part of his original declaration, in order to obviate all misrepresentation. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... were persuaded that I was not to blame in what had occurred,—yet that reports so injurious had gone abroad, so many partial and imperfect statements were circulated, that nothing but my return to headquarters would avail, and that I must not lose a moment in having Trevyllian out, with whom all the misrepresentation had originated. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... the public mind. Their journals, unable to deny the truth, even acknowledging the benefit they had by the king's confession and communion, cunningly labored to counteract the same by the grossest misrepresentation. They related that the king, at the moment of his death, had spoken both as a Christian and an infidel revolutionist. They made him thus retract his retractation. "In all that I have done, I am conscious of having always fulfilled my duties ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... the power of steady misrepresentation,"—and greatly indeed has the just fame of Lamarck been eclipsed in consequence; "but," as Mr. Darwin finely continues, "the history of science shows that fortunately this power does ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... proportion of the Jewish population has since been naturalized. The Jewish question in Rumania is undoubtedly a very serious one; but the matter is too controversial to be dealt with in a few lines without risking misrepresentation or doing an injustice to one or other of the parties. For which reason it has not ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... arms of his controversy, as terrible as the artillery of his logic—and really gentle and altogether noble nature, present a spectacle which, redeemed from sectarian prejudice and perverse historical misrepresentation, challenges in the most eminent degree the admiration ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... degrees the whole teaching of the first five was reversed and therefore shown to be a fraud. Fraud in fact constituted the system of the society; in the instructions to the Dais every artifice is described for enlisting proselytes by misrepresentation: Jews were to be won by speaking ill of Christians, Christians by speaking ill of Jews and Moslems alike, Sunnis by referring with respect to the orthodox Khalifas Abu Bakr and Omar and criticizing Ali and his descendants. Above all, care was to be taken ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... here and in other places, and which, when taken together with the context and candidly construed, will appear to mean nothing but what was reasonable and constitutional and moderate, have been distorted and mutilated into something that has a seditious aspect. But who is secure against such misrepresentation? Not, I am sure, the right honourable Baronet the Member for Pembroke. He ought to remember that his own speeches have been used by bad men for bad ends. He ought to remember that some expressions which he used in 1830, on the subject of the emoluments divided among ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... says, in his work on Skepticism: "I have never heard a correct statement of the Calvinistic system from an opponent;" and, after specifying some alleged instances of misrepresentation, he adds: "It is needless to say that falsehoods more absolute and entire were never stereotyped in the foundry of the father of lies, or with greater industry worked off for gratuitous distribution from age ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson

... was unquestionably the brightest ornament of the British bar. Immediately afterwards the press teemed with tributes to his memory: some of them characterised by great acuteness and discrimination, several by exaggerated eulogy, and one or two by a harsh disingenuousness amounting to misrepresentation and malevolence. Nothing excited more astonishment among those who had thoroughly known Sir William Follett, than the appearance of these attacks upon his memory, and the bad taste and feeling which alone could have prompted the perpetration ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... intention to reflect on me was ex proprio motu. It is curious that the Morning Chronicle, which not only inserted the misrepresentation, but made it the object of a leading paragraph, afterwards omitted the contradiction. This I was told, but on examination ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... rendered especially odious throughout the North by the use of certain unfortunate expressions which in the heat of the hour were somewhat distorted by the anti-slavery press, and made to appear unwarrantably offensive. But there was no misrepresentation and no misunderstanding of the essential position of the Court on the political question. It was unmistakably held that ownership in slaves was as much entitled to protection under the Constitution in the Territories of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... town: A visit to Sir Barnard: Admission denied: Enquiries after the wounded stranger, who had disappeared: An endeavour to guard against misrepresentation: The ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... misrepresentation was this: qualified propositions, the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications, were stripped of these and taken as absolute. Thus, the attempt to establish a presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was considered as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... evil soil; his fate has been a cruel one. He, the most sincere and transparent of men, whose only wish was to be seen as he actually was, has perhaps more than any other great man been the victim of misrepresentation, alike from his senseless persecutors and from his equally senseless adulators. While he lived, every imaginable calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to besmirch his character and his art. Now it ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... better satisfied than I to see Mr. Darwin's book refuted, if any person be competent to perform that feat; but I would suggest that refutation is retarded, not aided, by mere sarcastic misrepresentation. Every one who has studied cattle-breeding, or turned pigeon-fancier, or "pomologist," must have been struck by the extreme modifiability or plasticity of those kinds of animals and plants which have been subjected to such artificial conditions ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley

... failed in establishing slavery where it was prohibited by compromise, attempt to break up the government. If they will hold on a little while, they will find no injury can come to them, unless, by their repeated misrepresentation of us, they stir up their slaves to insurrection. I still hope that no state will follow in the wake of South Carolina; then the weakness of her position will soon bring her back again or subject ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... heaven, prepared to work and win our way, be anywise troubled in our Jubilee by the drivelling ineptitude which insanely reminds us of the miseries of those who went before us? We have thus arrived at the cardinal, [151] essential misrepresentation, out of scores which compose "The Bow of Ulysses," and upon which its phrases mainly hinge. Semper eadem—"Always the same"—has been the proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... compelling creed. Justice to the dead is one of the commandments in that creed. Let the controversy rage. Let the sword be unsheathed in the face of misrepresentation and wrong. General Custer was a daring and chivalrous officer. He had won laurels on many a hard fought field under Southern skies—he was a strategist, brave and unfaltering. He had served in ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... the speculative period, when men were possessed with an unhealthy desire for fortune-making, and, not content to wait the natural harvest of the seed sown, departed from the sound and honest principles of construction and management; trying, at first, by all sorts of pretence and misrepresentation, to conceal, and last by legislation to counterbalance, the results of their ignorance and of their insane desires. Railroads were compared, as an investment, to banks; and it was even supposed that the more they cost the more they would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... was to exhibit another set of qualities, the possession of which had perhaps been less suspected: an instinct for the trend of the national will not unlike that of Jackson, and a far-seeing patience and persistence under misrepresentation ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... wife's relations, if they have the means of so doing and are satisfied with the conduct of the husband. Some travelers have represented that the "marriage by purchase" among the Indians is a mere sale of the woman to the highest bidder, whose slave she becomes. Matthews regards this a misrepresentation so far as it concerns the Hidatsa, the wedding gift being a pledge to the parents for the proper treatment of their daughter, as well as an evidence of the wealth of the suitor and his kindred. Matthews has known many cases where large marriage ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey

... Polignac, Comte de Fersan, Mirabeau, the Cardinal de Rohan, and others; her great miscalculation of the time when the Queen's confidence in Barnave began, and when that of the Empress-mother in Rohan ended; her misrepresentation of particulars relating to Joseph II.; and her blunders concerning the affair of the necklace, and regarding the libel Madame Lamotte published in England, with the connivance of Calonne:—all these will be considered, with numberless other statements ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... best of all our customers. What I propose to do in the present chapter is to examine some of the detailed statements in Mr. Williams's book and to show that in many cases the inferences he draws are so seriously exaggerated as to amount to a positive misrepresentation of the facts. For the purposes of this examination we cannot do better than begin with the chapter which Mr. Williams devotes to chemicals. "The chemical trade," he tells us, "is the barometer of a nation's prosperity.... The discomforting significance of the appearance of chemicals in this ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox

... egotistical a letter; but it is your fault, for you have so delighted me; I never dreamed that you would have time to say a word in defence of the cause which you have so often defended. It will be a long battle, after we are dead and gone...Great is the power of misrepresentation... ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... have had[7], it has been my study to make it as perfect as I could in this edition, by correcting some inaccuracies which I discovered myself, and some which the kindness of friends or the scrutiny of adversaries pointed out. A few notes are added, of which the principal object is, to refute misrepresentation and calumny. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... of the Art itself, in which several of them are embodied. It is hastily done: but it exemplifies well enough what I have said of the Poetical department; and exhibits most of those qualities which disappointed Authors are fond of railing at, under the names of Flippancy, Arrogance, Conceit, Misrepresentation, and Malevolence: reproaches which you will only regard as so many acknowledgments of success in your undertaking; and infallible tests of an established fame, and [a] ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water, insomuch that an historian of the day gravely tells us that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a willful misrepresentation. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... laying his hand upon Glendower's shoulder, "listen to me. There are in this country men whose spirits not years of delayed hope, wearisome persecution, and, bitterer than all, misrepresentation from some and contempt from others, have yet quelled and tamed. We watch our opportunity; the growing distress of the country, the increasing severity and misrule of the administration, will soon afford it ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... could be bent to meet any emergency, but this efficiency had been attained at the sacrifice of some indispensable safeguards for the carrying out of impartial justice. First, no parishioner's acts, whether done in an official or a private capacity, were ever quite safe from misrepresentation, or downright falsification by his enemies, for secret denunciation to wardens or sidemen (or to the ordinary himself) by any one[182] might start a proceeding against the person denounced and force him upon oath to disclose the most private, the most confidential, matters. ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware

... it is worth whatever truth or skill it has taught you; to a judge of paintings it is ten dollars' worth of paint thrown away; but as an article of sale it is worth what it will bring without misrepresentation." ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... province they have undertaken, that it is almost a question, whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole

... recurring) that possibly I might have fallen under a false bias at this point of my youthful memorials. I myself had seen reason to believe—indeed, sometimes I knew for certain—that, in the personalities of Irish politics from Grattan downwards, a spirit of fiery misrepresentation prevailed, which made it hopeless to seek for any thing resembling truth. If in any quarter you found candor and liberality, that was because no interest existed in any thing Irish, and consequently no real information. Find out any man that could furnish you with ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... of Cleanthes, in the same [K]Chapter, is a Misrepresentation of Nature.—"Cleanthes is a very honest Man; he has chosen a Wife, who is the best and the most reasonable Woman in the World: They, each of them, in their respective Ways, make up all the Pleasure and Agreeableness of the Company they are ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally

... But so long as she accepts it as the significant truth it is, I am entirely incapable of regretting it. I have painted her, with her permission, as I saw her, as she is. If I had given her a, squint or a dimple, I could accuse myself; but I have not wronged her or gratified myself by one touch of misrepresentation." ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... As an alloy of misrepresentation of fact, arrogant bluster and idle menaces, I doubt whether it has ever been equalled upon this side of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... forced into such currency as to impose itself even on so careful a writer as Mr. Schouler, in his "History of the United States." It is impossible to read this part of American church history intelligently, unless the mind is disabused of this misrepresentation. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... success granted to few.... But as exponents of Japanese life and thought they are unreliable.... They have given form and beauty to much that never existed, except in vague outline or in undeveloped germs in the Japanese mind. In doing this they have unavoidably been guilty of misrepresentation.... The Japanese nation of Arnold and Hearn is not the nation we have known for a quarter of a century, but a purely ideal one manufactured out of the author's brains. It is high time that this was pointed out. For while such works please a certain section ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... attention. She would describe the surprising phenomena exhibited by the powerful Medium with the same freedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Her supposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation, which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated by circumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... without godliness. Never have sharper words of reproach fallen from human lips than these which Jesus directed against the scribes and Pharisees; they are burdened with indignation for the misleading of the people, with rebuke for the misrepresentation of God's truth, and with scorn for their hollow pretence of righteousness. Through it all breathes a note of sorrow for the city whose house was now left to her desolate. The change of scene which introduces the widow offering her gift in the temple treasury heightens the significance ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... exploits with an air of honesty, and without any extraordinary effort to set them off in undue relief. He speaks of himself in the third person, and, as his manuscript was not intended solely for posterity, he would hardly have ventured on great misrepresentation, where fraud could ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... ancien regime. Compensation for the emigres was already mooted; ecclesiastical control of education suggested. Direct criticism of the ministry was rendered difficult, and even dangerous, by the censorship of the press. Above all, the champions of reaction relied upon a certain misrepresentation of the recent history of their country. The memory of the Terror was still vivid; it was sedulously kept alive. The people were encouraged to dread revolutionary violence, to forget the abuses by which that violence ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... "an accomplished young man of splendid gifts and large worldly expectations." It would have been a serious delinquency in him had he failed to answer to this personal description, for how else could this glorious instance be rounded into completeness? Incapable of intentional misrepresentation, Mrs. Frankland could never help believing that the undisclosed portion of any narrative conformed to the exigencies of artistic symmetry and picturesque effect. She set the story of Phillida's sacrifice before her now ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... also given a similar misrepresentation of Johnson's treatment of Garrick in this particular, as if he had used these contemptuous expressions: 'If Garrick does apply, I'll black-ball him.[1408] Surely, one ought to sit ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... pioneer; later he gave expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching or misrepresentation or sophistry, the ugliness of his youth ceases to be his own and becomes only the presentation of a curious social condition. In his youth he expressed a low condition, in later life a noble one; at each period he expressed ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... that no question of the good or evil effect of their writing should be allowed to trammel their imagination. But the critic would rightly reply, that truth at least must be respected in a work of art; that the imagination must not be allowed the liberty of misrepresentation; and that the novelist in whose pages vice predominates, or is given an alluring aspect, is no more artistic than the writer of Sunday-school books. In judging the influence exerted by the great body of writers of fiction whose names have been mentioned in ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... the sample of an enormous quantity of second-rate corn which Henchard had in hand, and removed the pinched, blasted, and smutted grains in great numbers. The produce if honestly offered would have created no scandal; but the blunder of misrepresentation, coming at such a moment, dragged Henchard's name into ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... faculty which the soul has of being touched in a certain manner, of giving forth a certain sound of a particular and indefinable nature in the face of the beauty of things, he who is not a poet is not a man." True poetry does not imply fiction, unreality, misrepresentation. The true poet is not a deluded dreamer and a visionary. The scientist tells us certain facts about existing things, the poet draws forth the beauties and suggestions of those facts, brings them into moral and emotional connexion with ourselves, makes them, at his best, effective ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... sympathizer with these societies and their purposes were ascertained to belong to the Republican party, and generally to be active members thereof. Some of the circulars contained the grossest misrepresentation of facts, and in almost all cases the immigrants expected large aid from the government of clothes, or land, or money or free transportation, or something of that kind. Hundreds of them, on given days at various points in the South, crowded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... GLENCOE.—A Highland chief, MacIan of Glencoe, with many of his followers, was treacherously slaughtered by order of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, who governed Scotland, and had obtained by misrepresentation from William leave to extirpate that "set of thieves," ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... plank. And there are contemporary pictorial representations of both these modes of procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as to the main event, may and do exhibit various degrees of unconscious and conscious misrepresentation, suppression, and invention, till they become hardly distinguishable from pure fictions. Thus, they present a transition to narratives of a third class, in which the fictitious element predominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... time forward, not a day, scarcely an hour passed, but her ladyship did or said something to depreciate the country, or its inhabitants, in our hero's estimation. With treacherous ability, she knew and followed all the arts of misrepresentation; all those injurious arts which his friend, Sir James Brooke, had, with such honest indignation, reprobated. She knew how, not only to seize the ridiculous points, to make the most respectable people ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth

... beautiful. The architect of the bridge now being built over the Neva, at St Petersburg, is turning it to account in a very practical manner. Being an Englishman, he has had to endure much jealousy and misrepresentation, and attempts have been made to prejudice the authorities against him. To counteract these designs, he takes every week photographs of the work, which distinctly shew its progress, and these he sends to the emperor, who looks at ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various

... when consciously committed, in the numbers reached by its injury, in the degree of suffering it causes to those whom it ruins, in the baseness of its calculated betrayal of implicit trust, in the yet more perfect vileness of the obtaining such trust by misrepresentation, only that it may be betrayed, and in the impossibility that the crime should be at all committed, except by persons of good position and large knowledge of the world—what manner of theft is so wholly unpardonable, so inhuman, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... a jollity that is his own is taking its place. Most of the men and women of the race, who have written enough to win public notice, are known to be persons of a cheerful and jovial disposition. For such a person to live in the role of the miserable is at least a misrepresentation. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... wonted ability. A treasury note invited the supporters of the government to vote against the motion. To the astonishment of all, and to the consternation of his supporters, Pitt announced that he agreed to the charge; he sharply criticised the misrepresentation of Hastings's opponents, and conclusively maintained that the raja was bound to furnish the troops and money demanded of him, but he considered the fine imposed on him "exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical". Many of the government party voted ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... reader of Keats's preface will find that this is a misrepresentation. Keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism, nor did he ask to remain uncriticised in order that he might write more. What he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that Keats's own sense of failure ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... mature consideration and repeated fruitless experiments. All the alchymists were in arms immediately, to refute this formidable antagonist. One Solomon de Blauenstein was the first to grapple with him, and attempted to convict him of wilful misrepresentation, by recalling to his memory the transmutations by Sendivogius, before the Emperor Frederic III. and the Elector of Mayence; all performed within a recent period. Zwelfer and Glauber also entered into the dispute, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... altered shape which the question assumed when introduced in the new session. During the recess, Lord Cochrane, with the help of advisers, some of whom were more zealous than wise, William Cobbett being the chief, had prepared an elaborate series of "charges of partiality, misrepresentation, injustice, and oppression against the Lord Chief Justice;" and these were formally introduced to the House of Commons on the 5th of March. "When I recollect," said Lord Cochrane on that occasion, "the imputations ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald

... Species," but only to be told that Mr. Darwin had not got anything to give him, and he must go away; the author of the "Vestiges of Creation" was also just mentioned, but only in a sentence full of such gross misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as usual, without calling attention to what he had done. It would have been in the highest degree imprudent, not ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... keeps its respectability unblemished. It makes a liberal use of falsehood in diplomacy, only feeling embarrassed when its evidence is disclosed by others of the trade. An unscrupulous system of propaganda paves the way for widespread misrepresentation. It works up the crowd psychology through regulated hypnotic doses at repeated intervals, administered in bottles with moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating the obstructive ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... remoteness from real life—which was sometimes appreciable in the original—to such an extent that it should be impossible to suppose that any of the grotesques of the parody is intended for anybody in real life. Nobody in the parody is intended to be a representation, or even a misrepresentation, of any real person living or dead. For instance, Inmemorison is not intended to be a caricature of Tennyson, but the passage which deals with him is intended to parody some of the stuff that ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain

... containing narrations of the lives, delineations of the characters, and strictures of the several authors, they are far from being always to be depended on." He adds: "The characters are sometimes partial, and there is, sometimes, too much malignity of misrepresentation, to which, perhaps, may be joined no inconsiderable portion of erroneous criticism." The several clauses of this censure deserve to be answered, as fully as the limits of this essay ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... from us in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear. He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms. Betimes, I set myself to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress in humanity—has attained, caring little what misrepresentation I incurred, what hostility I provoked, in searching through a devious labyrinth ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... be ignorant; and finally, he thought it right, and proper, and humane, to give to the world a work which contained the reasons for the unbelief of the countrymen of Jesus; who for almost eighteen hundred years have been made the unresisting victims of, as the reader will find, groundless misrepresentation, and the most amazing cruelty; because they refused to believe what it was impossible that they should believe, on account of reasons their persecutors did not know, and refused to be ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... arrangement he was sent to the wrong house, and a most iniquitous account of Ali substituted for his, which I am sure would have been a kind one. The "Morning Herald" did it ample justice, without appearing to puff it. It is an abominable misrepresentation of the "Times," that Farren played Ali like Lord Ogilby. He acted infirmity of body, but not of voice or purpose. His manner was even grand. A grand old gentleman. His falling to the earth when his son's death was announced was fine as anything I ever saw. It was as if he had been blasted. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... has been endeavoring for nearly a quarter of a century to hold back the progress of scientific chemistry, is a great and unjustifiable misrepresentation of the distinguished chemist and member of the Institute of France, who has done so much for thermo-chemistry, and the more unfortunate as it seems to serve only the purpose of a prelude to the following sentences: "But Mr. Vogel cannot claim, as can ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... it is misrepresentation; for if they took proper means, they would find out the delusions under ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman

... official embezzles power and turns to his own advantage the authority entrusted to him to use for the public good. We should punish him and try to safeguard the people. The initiative and referendum are valuable because they enable the people to protect themselves from misrepresentation. ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... thieves, became at first tools and received some small share of the spoils is true. But two considerations must be added: much of the legislation which resulted in fraud was represented to the Negroes as good legislation, and thus their votes were secured by deliberate misrepresentation. Take, for instance, the land frauds of South Carolina. A wise Negro leader of that state, advocating the state purchase of farm lands, said, "One of the greatest of slavery bulwarks was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand, ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... "Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung," which eagerly seizes every opportunity of expressing its unconquerable aversion to the evolution theory, accused me, in one of its hostile articles, of a virulent and undignified attack on Virchow. In contradiction of this misrepresentation in the Augsburg paper—which was copied by other journals—I must expressly assert that not Virchow but I myself am the person attacked, and that, therefore, the matter in question is not an unjustifiable attack by me on a formerly revered friend, but a defence ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... solely vested in those who have the advantage of being denominated the friends of the late Lord Rockingham. I have thought it necessary to state this outline of our determinations to your Excellency, to counteract any misrepresentation that may be made of the basis or purport of our junction with Lord North (to which I conceive it may be liable, from the very false and groundless accounts which are reported to have been transmitted to Ireland of Mr. Fox's speech on Mr. ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... all, resident. If an accidental complaint happened to be preferred by one man against another, they generally were qualified by a knowledge of their characters to administer justice between them, without the risk of being misled by misrepresentation. This prevented many complaints founded in malice or party-spirit, and consequently reduced litigation to an examination of the very few cases in which actual injury ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... of buyers and a shameless vaunting of every one's wares by himself and his hired mouthpieces, coupled with a boundless depreciation of rival sellers and the wares they offered. Unscrupulous and unbounded misrepresentation was so universally the rule in business that even when here and there a dealer told the truth he commanded no credence. History indicates that lying has always been more or less common, but it remained for the competitive system as fully ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... referring to individuals; if it does fall into such an error, the sequel is either an abject apology or else an uphill fight in the law courts followed by the payment of heavy damages. It is quite conceivable that the author of this unpardonable misrepresentation imagined himself to be telling the truth and that he erred out of sheer ignorance; but, if so, that merely serves to indicate how badly informed journalists often are of the matters which they are dealing with, when the question at issue happens ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition on either side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts. However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of Labour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... it is her truest interest to set an example of fairness, legality and sincerity. No country, not even the greatest, can afford to neglect that reasonable and enlightened opinion of thoughtful men in other countries—not to be confounded with the invective and misrepresentation employed by the press of each nation against the others—which determines the ultimate judgment of the world, and passes into the ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... wrath, he forgot as much as he remembered. It had been represented to him that this odious romp had been no more than a minuet; but he did not bear in mind that his wife had been no party to that misrepresentation. And he forgot, too, that he himself had been present as a spectator at her express request. And when his wrath was at the fullest he almost forgot those letters from Adelaide Houghton! But he did not forget that all Mrs. Montacute Jones' world had seen him as in his ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... Moore, "another instance of his propensity to self-misrepresentation. However great might have been the irregularities of his college life, such phrases as the 'art of the spoiler' and 'spreading snares' were in no-wise applicable ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... a free country with freedom of expression—especially with freedom of the press—there will be a lot of mean blows struck between now and Election Day. By "blows" I mean misrepresentation, personal attack and appeals to prejudice. It would be a lot better, of course, if campaigns everywhere could be waged with ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... creditable to the judgment and discrimination, as they are honourable to the feelings and humanity of the minister who wrote it, and who, in the absence of personal experience, and amidst all the conflicting testimony or misrepresentation by which a person at a distance is ever apt to be assailed and misled, has still been able to separate the truth from falsehood, and to arrive at a rational, a christian, and a just opinion, on a subject so fraught with difficulties, so involved ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... the masonry of the cottage. Every house in the neighbourhood was more or less injured by shrapnel, and one of them was the scene of a sanguinary conflict which was utterly misrepresented by one of the Cape papers. The misrepresentation was to the effect that at the battle of Modder River the house in question was occupied by a number of Boer wounded from Belmont and Graspan in charge of several attendants. It was alleged that two of the attendants ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett

... evidence of having ever fully appreciated. He is far from being alone in this, and perhaps merely takes up and reiterates, without much consideration, assertions previously assumed by others. Nothing could be further from Mr. Darwin's mind than any, however small, intentional misrepresentation; and it is therefore the more unfortunate that he should not have shown any appreciation of a position opposed to his own other than that gross and crude one which he combats so superfluously—that he should appear, even for a moment, to be one of those, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... liberty must be and should be conceded to legitimate criticism. From this, as is well known, I never shrank in the least; on the contrary, I court it, and desire nothing better for my books, provided only that the criticism be pertinent, intelligent, and fair. But misrepresentation for the purpose of detraction is not criticism at all; and (notwithstanding numerous quotations perverted by unfair and misleading glosses, including two misquotations quite too useful to be accidental) this ostensible review is, from beginning ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot

... certain misguided persons have banded together to oppose by force the entry of our future Lieutenant-Governor into our territory in Red River. Her Majesty does not distrust the loyalty of her subjects in that settlement, and can only ascribe to misunderstanding and misrepresentation their opposition to a change planned for ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... under difficulties have guarded the flame of tradition and love of the splendid past with its bright galaxy of "heroes, martyrs, saints." True, the glowing embers often smouldered beneath a debris of neglect and even harsh misrepresentation but were not and could not be extinguished. And now faithful hearts may beat fast with holy joy for the feeble light fanned by loving zephyrs has burst into a glowing flame destined to diffuse its love and influence to all, regardless of ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field

... whose misrepresentation was wilful, though not maliciously so, also fell into silence; he did not believe that his conversations with Amy had seriously affected the course of events, but he knew that he had often said things to her in private which would scarcely ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... who were interested in maintaining the encomiendas and repartimientos, whose suppression meant the diminution of their incomes, laid instant siege to them. Las Casas was abused and even threatened in the public streets, and a well organised campaign of calumny and misrepresentation was set actively in motion. The Indians were represented as lazy, filthy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and fit only for slavery, in which state alone there might be some hope of instructing and converting them ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... depressed for conversation down below. The weigh-bill from the station-agent was even worse than he had expected; and the question which he asked himself over and over was whether Jennings's under-estimation of the weight was deliberate misrepresentation or bad figuring? Whatever the cause the costly error had shaken his ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... to record their lease in a public register. Proper penalties might be enacted against concealing or misrepresenting any of the conditions; and if part of those penalties were to be paid to either of the two parties who informed against and convicted the other of such concealment or misrepresentation, it would effectually deter them from combining together in order to defraud the public revenue. All the conditions of the lease might be sufficiently known from ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... to me fitting that I should fully make known my sentiments in regard to several of the important questions which then appeared to demand the consideration of the country. Following the example, and in part adopting the language, of one of my predecessors, I wish now, when every motive for misrepresentation has passed away, to repeat what was said before the election, trusting that my countrymen will candidly weigh and understand it, and that they will feel assured that the sentiments declared in accepting ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson

... adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our conception, our definition. The first growth of the Platonic "ideas," as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle, provided against this twofold misrepresentation. Its aim is to secure, in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise equivalence to what they denote. It was a "mission" to go about Athens and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the passage from facts to their thoughts about them, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... infamies you have been told, you have still a little indulgence left. Well then, I give you my word of honour that I have never dressed as a man here in London. I did not even bring my sculptor costume with me. I give the most emphatic denial to this misrepresentation. I only went once to the exhibition which I organised, and that was on the opening day, for which I had only sent out a few private invitations, so that no one paid a shilling to see me. It is true that ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... could; and his servant was already the bearer of a letter from Berenger that was to be sent at once to England with Walsingham's dispatches, to prepare Lord Walwyn for the arrival of the runaways. The poor boy laboured to be impressively calm and reasonable in his explanation of the misrepresentation, and of his strong grounds for assuming his rights, with his persuasion that his wife would readily join the English church—a consideration that he knew would greatly smooth the way for her. Indeed, his own position was impregnable: nobody ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... matter, could not entirely eradicate from the minds of Crowheart's merchants the picture presented by the procession of excursionists returning with their satchels to the station, glowering at Crowheart's citizens as they passed and making loud charges of misrepresentation ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... generally believed that Carnot dictated to him from a closet in the Luxembourg all the plans of his operations, and that herthier was at his right hand, without whom, notwithstanding Carnot's plans, which were often mere romances, he would have been greatly embarrassed. This twofold misrepresentation was very current for some time; and, notwithstanding it was contrary to the evidence of facts, it met with much credence, particularly abroad. There was, however, no foundation for the opinion: Let ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... said, my boys, my hearts! Sing but like nightingales thus when you come to your misrepresentation, and we are made for ever, you rogues! so! steal a way now to your homes without inspection; meet me at the Duke's ...
— A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763) • William Shakespeare

... included in the States of Minnesota and North Dakota, on the south side of the boundary line between Canada and the United States. The Nor'-Westers are frantic; but the fates are against them. The duel has begun! Who will win? Cunning and misrepresentation are to be employed to check the success of the Colony, and also local opposition on the other side of the Atlantic, should the scheme ever come to anything. At present their hope is that it may fall to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... because across two centuries he almost physically felt the feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... to Mr. Behnke that the use of the term "abdominal" instead of "diaphragmatic" breathing led to misconception and misrepresentation of his views on this important subject, he discarded the words "abdominal breathing" and used only the term "diaphragmatic breathing" in his teaching and writing. Will readers kindly bear this ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke

... materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians."[Footnote: Johnson's Life of Milton, in his Lives of the Poets (Cunningham's edit. I.91-93)] What an egregious misrepresentation this is of Milton's project the reader, who already knows the project itself in its completeness, will see at once. Milton included all that Johnson wanted to have included, and more largely and systematically than Johnson would have dared to dream of, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... Henry had other illegitimate children besides the Duke of Richmond it is difficult to understand why their existence should have been so effectually concealed when such publicity was given their brother. The King is said to have had ten mistresses in 1528, but the statement is based on a misrepresentation of the only document adduced in its support.[529] It is a list of New Year's (p. 186) presents,[530] which runs "To thirty-three noble ladies" such and such gifts, then "to ten mistresses" other gifts; it is doubtful if the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... child to Ardworth, with such a sum as he could scrape together for its future maintenance. And to Ardworth, rather than to his fellow-sectarian, this double trust was given, because the latter feared scandal and misrepresentation if he should be ostensibly mixed up in so equivocal a charge. Poor and embarrassed as Walter Ardworth was, Braddell did not for once misinterpret character when he placed the money in his hands; and this because the characters we have known in transparent ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... render his 65 original faithfully, as to the sense of each passage, he must necessarily destroy a considerable portion of the spirit; if he endeavour to give a work executed according to laws of compensation, he subjects himself to imputations of vanity, or misrepresentation. I have thought it my duty to remain 70 bound by the sense of my original, with as few exceptions as the nature of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... contract fails to be made, although the usual forms have been gone through with, the ground of failure is commonly said to be mistake, misrepresentation, or fraud. But I shall try to show that these are merely dramatic circumstances, and that the true ground is the absence of one or more of the primary elements, which have been shown, or are seen at once, to be necessary to the ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... does not declare in so many words that the shutting up of the saloons would obviate all the arrests and all the hospital, jail, and charity bills. Instead of wipe out she says shrivel. No truth would have been lost by avoiding all misrepresentation. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... had finished this Paper, the printer sent me two small pamphlets, called "The Management of the War,"[9] written with some plausibility, much artifice, and abundance of misrepresentation, as well as direct falsehoods in point of fact. These I have thought worth Examining, which I shall accordingly do when I ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... original sources, it may not be amiss to cast a glance at the representations of this subject in our former publications during the last quarter of a century, as we have frequently been charged, not indeed by the author of the Plea, but by superficial writers, with self-contradiction and misrepresentation. It would indeed have been in perfect unison with the habit of the best authors of Europe and America, to change our opinions as we extended our investigations, and freely to profess such change. Nor should we feel any reluctance in following such distinguished authorities, if we ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker

... without design, then, that the great facts of revelation are made liable to misrepresentation; that its essential principles are arrayed against the pride of human wisdom; and that its blessed institutions are so obnoxious to abuse and opposition. Such a constitution of things is evidently intended to ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin

... blackguard, the writer would ask, he who uses his fists to take his own part, or instructs others to use theirs for the same purpose, or the being who from envy and malice, or at the bidding of a malicious scoundrel, endeavours by calumny, falsehood, and misrepresentation to impede the efforts of lonely and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and other ornamental organizations who, being entirely uninformed on the subject, permit themselves to become the conduits through which the misrepresentation and animosity of avaricious creditors and rapacious attorneys are discharged upon ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... which the packers are now conducting and for the support of which they at their recent convention in Kansas City, voted to raise a fund of $500,000, is being carried on by the grossest chicanery and misrepresentation. Pseudo-scientific men are being put before the public as great authorities in human nutrition and these men are sending out plausible but most misleading eulogies of meat as a foodstuff possessing essential ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... understands it sufficiently," said Miriam, with balanced tone. "He has really nothing but prejudice to go upon. There will be a great deal of misrepresentation in his book—if he ever ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... truth and honesty must spring from a soil early prepared for them, and that a young person who is in the habit of falsehood is not a Christian and needs to go back to first principles. I can't endure subterfuges, misrepresentation, and the like; the whole foundation looks wrong when people indulge themselves in them, and to say to a Christian, "I hope you are truthful," is to my mind as if I should say to him, "I hope you wash your face and hands every day." Now if your observation says I ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... one. Though Roberdeau's conduct has been really blamable, yet we suppose the principal object of the arrest was to remove him off the ground. As the prosecution of him to judgment might give room to misrepresentation of the motives, perhaps you may think it not amiss to discontinue the proceedings. You will receive herewith a packet of papers, among which are several projects and estimates which have been given in by different persons, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson



Words linked to "Misrepresentation" :   wrongful conduct, overstatement, evasion, feigning, snake oil, skullduggery, window dressing, overrefinement, distortion, misconduct, falsity, misrepresent, bill of goods, torture, hocus-pocus, wrongdoing, humbug, dissimulation, dissembling, slickness, actus reus, skulduggery, pretense, equivocation, deception, falsification, duplicity, deceit, half-truth, snow job, blind, jiggery-pokery, hanky panky, fraudulence, fabrication, straining, untruth, pretence, facade, tergiversation, magnification, falsehood, prevarication, twisting, subterfuge, trickery, exaggeration, lying



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com