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conniving
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show 62 more with this conextual meaning
  • You're as conniving a person as I know."†   (source)
  • "B'gettin' his own self a lizzard, mebbe, mebbe," he answered, but there was something conniving in his voice.†   (source)
  • These forces sought to ignite a war between the ANC and Inkatha, and I believe many members of Inkatha connived at this as well.†   (source)
  • To reach this point so helpless against your own connivings that the truth has been obscured from you.†   (source)
  • Dishonesty and conniving for ill gain are unknown.†   (source)
  • They connive, and complain and frustrate one to the utmost.†   (source)
  • Well, Bree and I decide no way will the conniver make us run.†   (source)
  • The older one is an unpleasant conniver like her mother and the younger one is a simpleton.†   (source)
  • …but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.†   (source)
  • Something conniving lay veiled behind her dark eyes.†   (source)
  • And prove to the jury that conniving her way into wills handwritten by her old and vulnerable bosses was a devious pattern.†   (source)
  • It was her conniving that helped Jacob steal the blessing from his brother.†   (source)
  • A cruel, conniving thing you are, David Menlo!†   (source)
  • If you fail to punish me, men will believe that we connived together to free Jaime Lannister.†   (source)
  • The Empress of the West would connive for power, but the Empress of the East was good and kind and full of light.†   (source)
  • It was a side he would show no one but his victims, or those who connived with him.†   (source)
  • It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from.†   (source)
  • "I took Mary to the park…… " "I am now cutting a captain's inspection…… " "Herbert is now trimming the barberry bushes…… " "Yesterday I sent you a two-pound box of candy for your birthday…… " A later generation, with hindsight's infallible judgment, found the atomic bombing easy to condemn as a crime in which we had all connived, if only subconsciously.†   (source)
  • Your kindness may be meanness now, and your bleak honesty fretful and conniving.†   (source)
  • Still keeping Mundt's identity a close secret, they connived at Riemeck's enlistment and enabled indirect contact to be established between Mundt and the Berlin command.†   (source)
  • No strange robber, no treacherous host conniving at the plunder of his guests, or stealing to their beds to kill them in their sleep, no nightly prowler, however terrible and cruel, could have awakened in her bosom half the dread which the recognition of her silent visitor inspired.   (source)
  • stop those who connive to steal state secrets
  • They are conniving to get government contracts in return for campaign contributions.
    conniving = planning an improper activity
  • Granpa said a conniving woman got Samson drunk and cut his hair off.†   (source)
  • We have fallen victim to their plot; at best Comrade Fiedler is guilty of a most serious error; at worst of conniving with imperialist spies to undermine the security of the worker state, and shed innocent blood.†   (source)
  • Yet here the tone was subtly conniving.†   (source)
  • None of them doubted that the family fortune had been finagled into English bank accounts by British connivers.†   (source)
  • Have all the plaster golems in the cheder connived to read in relays?†   (source)
  • This is not to say that he was a conniving husband.†   (source)
  • But you shouldn't overlook also how much secret thought and conniving goes on.†   (source)
  • The usual conniving hand had led him by the finger on tiptoe to the chosen bed.†   (source)
  • Even when you say you love me you're conniving.†   (source)
  • Or, if I chose to be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed wiseguy and conniver in two-bit cases.†   (source)
  • It seems unlikely in the last degree that he should connive at the abduction of the son of the house.†   (source)
  • Too long this world of ours has connived at evil, too long has it counted on the divine mercy, on God's forgiveness.†   (source)
  • Many repeated pressures with the same effect as one strong blow, that was his method, he said, and it was his special pride that he knew how to use the means contributed by the age to connive as ably as anyone else; when in a not-so-advanced time he'd have been mummy-handled in a hut or somebody might have had to help him be a beggar in front of a church, the next thing to a memento mori or, more awful, a reminder of what difficulties there were before you could even become dead.†   (source)
  • She bowed her head, vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim.†   (source)
  • She had been made awkward by her not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother's tolerance.†   (source)
  • The maroon had connived at his escape in a shore boat some hours ago, and he now assured us he had only done so to preserve our lives, which would certainly have been forfeit if "that man with the one leg had stayed aboard."†   (source)
  • Changes had crept in, Marilla conniving at them resignedly, until it was as sweet and dainty a nest as a young girl could desire.†   (source)
  • Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached.†   (source)
  • This was exactly what Sir Thomas and Edmund had been separately conniving at, as each proved to the other by the sympathetic alacrity with which they both advised Mrs. Norris's continuing where she was, instead of rushing out into the hall as soon as the noises of the arrival reached them.†   (source)
  • Haley saw that I hesitated about selling this child, and he'll think I connived at it, to get him out of the way.†   (source)
  • In the gayest and happiest spirits she set forward with her father; not always listening, but always agreeing to what he said; and, whether in speech or silence, conniving at the comfortable persuasion of his being obliged to go to Randalls every day, or poor Mrs. Weston would be disappointed.†   (source)
  • …exacting obedience than open war must be very near its ruin, for one of two alternatives would then probably occur: if its authority was small and its character temperate, it would not resort to violence till the last extremity, and it would connive at a number of partial acts of insubordination, in which case the State would gradually fall into anarchy; if it was enterprising and powerful, it would perpetually have recourse to its physical strength, and would speedily degenerate into…†   (source)
  • Thou must connive at her escape, Malvoisin, and I will transport her to some place of greater security and secrecy.†   (source)
  • If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves; the sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery, in our national body; the sons of the free states would not, as they do, trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in their mercantile dealings.†   (source)
  • In all the confederations which had been formed before the American Union the Federal Government demanded its supplies at the hands of the separate Governments; and if the measure it prescribed was onerous to any one of those bodies means were found to evade its claims: if the State was powerful, it had recourse to arms; if it was weak, it connived at the resistance which the law of the Union, its sovereign, met with, and resorted to inaction under the plea of inability.†   (source)
  • You and the north wind had connived, sent gales against that man, brewed up sea-perils for him, driven him over the salt waste to Kos Island.†   (source)
  • Do our laws connive at them?†   (source)
  • By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.†   (source)
  • …now as the women
    bustled in from the spring, the swineherd at their heels,
    driving three fat porkers, the best of all his herds.
    And leaving them to root in the broad courtyard,
    up he went to Odysseus, hailed him warmly:
    "Friend, do the suitors show you more respect
    or treat you like the dregs of the earth as always?"
    "Good Eumaeus," the crafty man replied,

    "if only the gods would pay back their outrage!
    Wild and reckless young cubs, conniving here
    in another's house.†   (source)
  • Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore.†   (source)
  • CREON Not to connive at disobedience.†   (source)
  • The world who have already censured the regard I have shown for you may think, with some colour at least of justice, that I connive at so base and barbarous an action—an action of which you must have known my abhorrence: and which, had you had any concern for my ease and honour, as well as for my friendship, you would never have thought of undertaking.†   (source)
  • …it is not to be inferred from this principle, that the representatives of the people, whenever a momentary inclination happens to lay hold of a majority of their constituents, incompatible with the provisions in the existing Constitution, would, on that account, be justifiable in a violation of those provisions; or that the courts would be under a greater obligation to connive at infractions in this shape, than when they had proceeded wholly from the cabals of the representative body.†   (source)
  • …theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.†   (source)
  • I do not comprehend what you mean by your 'casting about,' or by 'the bending and handling things so dexterously that, if they go not well, they may go as little ill as may be;' for in courts they will not bear with a man's holding his peace or conniving at what others do: a man must barefacedly approve of the worst counsels and consent to the blackest designs, so that he would pass for a spy, or, possibly, for a traitor, that did but coldly approve of such wicked practices; and…†   (source)
  • Besides, sir, you cannot but be acquainted that Mr Allworthy himself would never forgive my conniving at such matters, and particularly with you.†   (source)
  • …if she could make any discoveries that might lessen the affection which Mr Allworthy seemed to have contracted for this child, and which gave visible uneasiness to the captain, who could not entirely conceal it even before Allworthy himself; though his wife, who acted her part much better in public, frequently recommended to him her own example, of conniving at the folly of her brother, which, she said, she at least as well perceived, and as much resented, as any other possibly could.†   (source)
  • I have, indeed, not only connived at the villany of others, but been myself active in injustice towards him.†   (source)
  • Now it required no very blameable degree of suspicion to imagine that Mr Jones and his ragged companion had certain purposes in their intention, which, though tolerated in some Christian countries, connived at in others, and practised in all, are however as expressly forbidden as murder, or any other horrid vice, by that religion which is universally believed in those countries.†   (source)
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