"Bias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down among the difficulties to be encountered. As such it will be considered further on. For the present the fact to be noted is that the authorized reviewers are both in honor and in duty bound to keep themselves absolutely clear of controversial bias. The movement is not a movement to alter in any slightest respect the dogmatic teaching of the Church, not a movement to unsettle foundations, not a movement toward disowning or repudiating our past, but simply and only an endeavor to make the Common Prayer, if possible (and we are far ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Aetna and the Lipari islands, has very well observed the distinction of these two different species of lavas; but without seeming to know the principle upon which this essential difference depends. No bias of system, therefore, can here be supposed as perverting the Chevalier's view, in taking those observations; and these are interesting to the present theory, as corresponding perfectly with the facts from whence it has been formed. It will be proper ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... amount of his loss, and frequently with no inconsiderable addition for the temporary use of his property. In short, the law was momentarily extinct in that particular district, and justice was administered subject to the bias of personal interests and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... not reply for a moment. He appeared to be laying the question before himself as an impartial judge, as who should say: 'Now tell me candidly, are you hurt? Speak freely and without bias.' ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... Macchiavelli, Secretary of State to the Signory of Florence. He owed no benefits to Cesare; he was the ambassador of a power that was ever inimical to the Borgias; so that it is not to be dreamt that his judgement suffered from any bias in Cesare's favour. Yet he accounted Cesare Borgia—as we shall see—the incarnation of an ideal conqueror and ruler; he took Cesare Borgia as the model for his famous work The Prince, written as a grammar of statecraft for the instruction in the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... and despise the others. Looking back, indeed, from the advanced point where we are now arrived through the whole of his past career, we cannot fail to observe, pervading all its apparent changes and inconsistencies, an adherence to the original bias of his nature, a general consistency in the main, however shifting and contradictory the details, which had the effect of preserving, from first to last, all his views and principles, upon the great subjects that interested ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... call their powers into action. They are excellent mechanics and artisans, and, as horticulturists, their superiority over many of the Asiatics is acknowledged. They are polite and affable to strangers, but irascible, and when excited are very sanguinary; their natural bias to this revengeful and cruel character, is strengthened and rendered more intense by the ... doctrines of the Roman catholic religion as dictated to them by the designing and interested priests who reside among them. The culprit always finds a sanctuary in the nearest ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... calculated to please Roman Catholics, emanating from a son of the "Most Christian king." And Francis thought himself compelled to clear himself from the charge of lukewarmness in the faith, if not of actual heretical bias, by exercising fresh severities upon the devoted Protestants of his ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... implies that he was ready to sanction any form of reputable worship with a slight bias towards Vishnuism.[517] At the present day the Smartas, who consider themselves his followers, have a preference for the worship of Siva. But the basis of their faith is not Sivaism but the recognition ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... books, and formed my own opinion. "Is it, on the whole, for, or against?" says he. "For," says I. "Then," says he, "you may now, my good friend, give Mr Clennam the means of forming his opinion. To enable him to do which, without bias and with perfect freedom, I shall go out of town for a week." And he's gone,' said Mr Meagles; that's the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... that moment, gave up the idea of the connection. There might be those who would suspect Nancy of a selfish bias in the advice she gave; but Jane knew that no such feeling influenced her pure soul. For one long year the two sisters traversed the hills between Cressbrook and Tideswell. But they had companions, and it was pleasant in the summer months. But winter came, and then it was a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... taste may as well cease to write, for nobody will read his works. When Moliere reformed the stage he attacked modes and ridiculous customs, but he did not insult the public taste; he either followed or explained it." So far Rousseau was right. It is the public that gives the stage its bias—necessarily preceding it in taste and opinion, and pointing out the direction to its object. In return the stage gives the public a stronger impulse in morals and manners. Wherever the stage is found corrupted with bad morals, it may be taken for granted that ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... now about a national bias, to those who have a veneration for diction and style. Assuredly there can be no quarrel with the taste for grace and elegance of speech. I am of opinion that one cannot say too well what he has to say. But it does ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... and corrupted by the habit of over-vigilance, and pushed beyond its natural limits of candour. Neither was Sir Aymer de Valence free from a similar change; suspicion, though from a different cause, seemed also to threaten to bias his open and noble disposition, in those qualities which had hitherto been proper to him. It was in vain that Sir John de Walton studiously sought opportunities to give his younger friend indulgences, which at times were as far extended as the duty ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... abnormal, and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of mental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Petavius, of Marsham and of Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation." Of course his essay had the usual value of such juvenile productions; that is, none at all, except as an indication of early bias to serious study of history. On his return to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was wisely relinquished. He indeed soon commenced a line of study which was destined to have a lasting influence on the remainder of his course ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... condemned to share with a Pope and an Emperor the penalty of speculative heterodoxy. On the other hand, we find Charles of Anjou, the foreign intruder, the bitter foe of the Empire and pitiless exterminator of the imperial race, a man in whom later historians, free from personal or patriotic bias, have seen hardly any virtue to redeem the sombre cruelty of his career, placed, not indeed in Paradise, but in Purgatory, and waiting in sure and certain hope of ultimate salvation, as one who in spite of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... historian. The History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from 1807-14 (1828-40) at once took rank as a classic, and superseded all existing works on the subject. Though not free from prejudice and consequent bias, it remains a masterpiece of historical writing, especially in the description of military operations. It was translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Persian. N. also pub. The Conquest of Scinde (1844-46), mainly a defence of his brother ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... propitiate the Czar. All through the early autumn Lord Palmerston was aware that those in the Cabinet who were jealous of Russia had to reckon with 'private and verbal communications, given in all honesty, but tinctured by the personal bias of the Prime Minister,' to Baron Brunnow, which were doing 'irreparable mischief' at St. Petersburg.[35] The nation did not relish Lord Aberdeen's personal friendship with the Czar, and now that Russia ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... Miss Scudder!—that silk must be cut exactly on the bias"; and Miss Prissy, hastily finishing her last quaver, caught the silk and the scissors out of Mrs. Scudder's hand, and fell down at once from the Millennium into a discourse on her own particular way of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... me less, when I resolve this way, than when I think of the other: and in so strong and involuntary a bias, the heart is, as I may say, conscience. And well cautions the wise man: 'Let the counsel of thine own heart stand; for there is no man more faithful to thee than it: for a man's mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... concerted action as was proposed by the different members was improbable, and although the proposals may have been dictated by the usual French bias in situations where English interests are at stake, these opinions indicate pretty well the real sentiment ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... all along that you had the Old World bias—the idea that it is justice for the Pot to call the Kettle black—the idea that a man can do anything, but that a woman is lost forever if she happens to make one mistake. That all belongs, of course, right back where you came from. No ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... deformities in the country's law system that need the knife of a skilled surgeon, amputating right up to the last joint; among these the divorce laws made in ancient times by the gone-to-dust but still sacred and revered ancestors. Who would give a hang for any old ancestor so cut on the bias? ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... were marked by that exquisite harmony that can come only of a fine natural taste perfected by culture. Her gown was of a simple magenta tulle, cut bias, traversed by three rows of light-blue flounces, with the selvage edges turned up with ashes-of-roses chenille; overdress of dark bay tarlatan with scarlet satin lambrequins; corn-colored polonaise, en zanier, looped with mother-of-pearl buttons and silver ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pre-eminently developed; but manly health and vigour were equally diffused through the whole. They were men of letters. Their minds were by nature and by exercise well fashioned for speculative pursuits. It was by circumstances, rather than by any strong bias of inclination, that they were led to take a prominent part in active life. In active life, however, no men could be more perfectly free from the faults of mere theorists and pedants. No men observed more accurately the signs of the times. No men had a greater practical ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages what was really ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... true, we owe the origin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did as certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... this merely negative tendency that the particular laws of the physical world express. None of them, taken separately, has objective reality; each is the work of an investigator who has regarded things from a certain bias, isolated certain variables, applied certain conventional units of measurement. And yet there is an order approximately mathematical immanent in matter, an objective order, which our science approaches in proportion to its progress. For if matter is a relaxation ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Man inspired; And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw; Or if an unexpected call succeed, Come when it will, is equal to the need: —He who, though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence, Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes; Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be, Are at his heart; and such fidelity It is his darling passion to approve; More brave for this, that he hath much to love:— 'Tis, finally, the Man who lifted high, Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye, Or ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly, the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words; Milton can not resist ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... politicians; there is a nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another, another filed before him, according to the quality of his desert, and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times, and the bias of present practice, wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities: till corruption getteth ground; ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn; every one having a liberty to amass ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... science on to greater victories. Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias: the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to enter; but Kepler sees ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral—so interested that whenever we find them ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... opportunity. It may be asked, has all the honesty and the not always evident purity of Protestantism done so much for the world as those dissolute Popes and Princes? And the artist, judging with a hasty bias perhaps, is likely ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... doctrine, doubtless, mainly prompted his battle-flag resolution, while the time of offering it and his nearly contemporaneous break with his party seemed to betray an unfair and personal bias of ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... Roederer. Herr Roederer, with too much of an author's licence, makes a great figure of his hero—poses him, indeed, to be the centrepiece and cloud-compeller of the whole. But, with due allowance for this bias, the book is able ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles 'to give o ne another pain' should continue at the expense of justice. Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... examination. The stories told by many of these swift witnesses were on the surface absurd, and should have been exposed. Publicity alone would have largely counteracted the evil effect of their narratives, but the examination was secret, and the witnesses evidently felt that the strongest bias against General Stone was the proper turn to give their testimony. The atmosphere was, as it often is in such cases, unfavorable to the suspected man; and his reputation was mercilessly assailed where he could not reply, and was not even allowed to hear. When officers of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... studies necessary for him who would be listened to as a mender of antiquated abuses,—I mean, that record of crimes and miseries—history." Although he may have made an effort to apply himself to historical reading, he was not successful. His true bias inclined him to metaphysics coloured by a glowing fancy, and to poetry penetrated with speculative enthusiasm. In the historic sense he was deficient; and when he made a serious effort at a later period to compose a tragedy upon the death of Charles I, this work was taken up with ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of chief is rather elective than hereditary, but the operation of the elective principle is affected by a strong bias in favour of the most capable son of the late chief; so in practice a chief is generally succeeded by one of his sons. An elderly chief will sometimes voluntarily abdicate in favour of a son. If a chief dies, leaving no son of mature age, some elderly man of good standing and capacity will ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... every cramped or tremulous writing as a forgery. The varieties in a man's writing, caused by his writing with his glove on or off, with a quill or a bad steel pen, drunk or sober, calm or agitated, in full daylight or dusk, etc., etc., all this is a dead letter to them, and they have a bias toward suspicion of forgery; and a banker's clerk, with his mere general impression, is better evidence than they are. But I am an artist of a very different stamp. I never reason a priori. I compare; and I have no bias. I never will have. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... If he were angry now, Merely that Chremes has refus'd his daughter, He'd think himself in fault; and justly too, Before the bias of your mind is known. But granting you refuse her for a wife, Then all the blame devolves on you, and then Comes ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... possess a passion warm and unreasoning. It was strong enough to induce the leaning toward him which, on Carrie's part, we have seen. She might have been said to be imagining herself in love, when she was not. Women frequently do this. It flows from the fact that in each exists a bias toward affection, a craving for the pleasure of being loved. The longing to be shielded, bettered, sympathised with, is one of the attributes of the sex. This, coupled with sentiment and a natural tendency to emotion, often ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... account; and the example, as well as tastes, of these young writers being mostly on the side of established models, their authority, as long as it influenced him, would, to a certain degree, interfere with his striking confidently into any new or original path. That some remains of this bias, with a little leaning, perhaps, towards school recollections[6], may have had a share in prompting his preference of the Horatian Paraphrase, is by no means improbable;—at least, that it was enough to lead him, untried as he had yet ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... portraits of his feminine ancestors that he might decide, as one without bias, whether Matocton had ever boasted a more delectable mistress. Equity—or in his fond eyes at least,—demanded a negative. Only in one of these canvases, a counterfeit of Miss Evelyn Ramsay, born a Ramsay of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... value as the future; but there is another principle in the human mind, the principle of action or will; and of this the past has no hold, the future engrosses it entirely to itself. It is this strong lever of the affections that gives so powerful a bias to our sentiments on this subject, and violently transposes the natural order of our associations. We regret the pleasures we have lost, and eagerly anticipate those which are to come: we dwell with satisfaction on the evils ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... imagination and to prepare changes of opinion, came a series of notable books. They were all similar in that they bore the stamp of the romanticism of the thirties and forties, interpreting history in terms of the {4} individual; but they differed in their political bias. These works were written by Carlyle, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... cannot afford to reckon without. For the first and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have since died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own way. In spite of obvious limitations—bias and fallibility of both informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled techniques, and insufficient controls and checks—this saga must remain the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... that the teaching of the gospel for hire is wrong; because it gives the teacher an improper bias in favour of particular opinions on a subject where it is of the last importance that the mind should be perfectly unbiassed. Such is my private opinion; but I mean not to censure all hired teachers, many among whom I know, and venerate as the best and wisest of men—God forbid that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... material of the kind may be found most convenient, fourteen inches and seven-eighths long and ten inches and a half wide, which is sloped off on the corners, and trimmed with two strips of embroidery, separated by a bias strip of blue satin, which is turned down on the edges an inch wide on the wrong side, and gathered so as to form a puff. The embroidered strips are worked on a foundation of white cloth as shown by Fig. 2. For the corn-flowers use ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... these lines, the controversy appears so typical and so likely to arise again, that he desires to record, in however slight a form, his recollection of it, and his own personal bias, which is in no degree lessened by ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... too much evidence of design in animal organization to allow of our setting down its marvels to the accumulation of fortunate accident, undirected by will, effort and intelligence. Those who examine the main facts of animal and vegetable organization without bias will, no doubt, ere long conclude that all animals and vegetables are derived ultimately from unicellular organisms, but they will not less readily perceive that the evolution of species without the concomitance and direction of mind and effort is as inconceivable as is the independent ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... untrustworthiness and inconsistency are supposed to have caused his overthrow. The Queen made Sir John Cowell write me a note to find out whether John would be disposed to go to the great banquet next Tuesday and sleep at Windsor. Kindly done of her—of course he declines. I read Herbert Spencer on "The Bias of Patriotism," yesterday—much of it truly excellent. To-day I am at "Progress" in the Essays ... of which I have read several here and there. Whenever I have the feeling that I, not Herbert Spencer, have written what I am reading, I have the delightful sensation of complete ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... this, but declined on the ground that there was too strong a personal hostility between both Darwin and Grant Allen and himself to make it possible for him to review the book without a bias against it. (Memoir, ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system has become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one can judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it; when any bed seemed good enough ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... exactly as if this conversation had never passed between us. Should Fanny be doubtful, and consult you, do your duty as Lawless's friend and her brother—place the advantages and disadvantages fairly before her, and then let her decide for herself, without in the slightest degree attempting to bias her. Will you promise to do ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... account for every thing by chemical means; a geometrician is inclined to solve every problem geometrically; and a mechanic accounts for all the phenomena of nature by the laws of mechanism. This undue bias upon the minds of ingenious people, has frequently rendered their talents less useful to mankind. It is the duty of those who educate ingenious children, to guard against ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... shape it is so often travestied among us, but the resolute self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable soul. There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion into the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material bias by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for something of a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also. There are men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the opinion of the circles they ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... with Sterne in Tristram Shandy, though the nexus is not easy to discover, that "there is a strange kind of magic bias, which good or bad names irresistibly impose upon our character and conduct," or perhaps he had misread that controverted passage in Plautus ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... chosen literature for the main field of his career. The portrait which he draws of Lord Macaulay is so irresistibly attractive in many ways, that a critic may be glad to have delivered his soul before his judgment was subject to a dangerous bias, by the picture of Macaulay's personal character—its domestic amiability, its benevolence to unlucky followers of letters, its manliness, its high public spirit and generous patriotism. On reading my criticism over again, I am well pleased to find that not an epithet ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... do so. Every one has such a friend as this, and Mr. Neversaye Die was Harcourt's friend. Mr. Die himself was supposed to be a Tory, quite of the old school, a Lord Eldon Tory; but Harcourt knew that this would in no way bias his judgment. The mind of a barrister who has been for fifty years practising in court will never be biassed ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... version of Hesden's journey was that he had run away to espouse Mollie Ainslie. To her was traced his whole bias toward the colored population and "Radical" principles. Nothing evil was said of her character. She was admitted to be as good as anybody of her class could be—intelligent, bigoted, plucky, pretty, and malicious. It was a great pity that a man belonging to a good family should become infatuated ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... forms of literature. The practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We shall not like those which have nothing to say to us; and though everyone has a right to bias our choice, no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the bold and unique plan of having different classes of people in Rome and the various actors in the tragedy tell the story from their own point of view and thus reveal their own bias and characteristics. Each relation makes the story seem largely new. Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... frequented by ill-people, and such as took dishonest methods to get money. Such are seldom very dose in their discourse when they meet and junket together, and Thomson, then a boy, was so much pleased with their jovial manner of life, eating well and drinking hard, that he had ever a bias that way, even when he was otherways employed, till he was fifteen years old, leading such an idle and debauched life that, as he himself expressed it, he had never heard of or read a Bible or other good ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... circumstances made no fitting response to her generous intentions. Now, however, she assumes her place on the historick roll. I have hitherto been a zealous opponent of the Circean herb, but I shall now reexamine the question without bias. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... undergraduates of higher standing, and occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many might have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But seniors do not seek after juniors; they must be sought; and, with my previous bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and motives, I had no disposition to take trouble in seeking any man ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... honour, where he talked of nothing but cloths and jewels, and whenever they made mention to him of aught, he said, "I have plenty of it." Next day, he again repaired to the market-street where he showed a friendly bias towards the merchants and borrowed of them more money, which he distributed to the poor: nor did he leave doing thus twenty days, till he had borrowed threescore thousand dinars, and still there came no baggage, no, nor a burning ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... performance of his official duties, had to give an opinion on a matter affecting an expenditure of some thirty or forty thousand pounds of public money. I don't think that Laurence has generally a very strong bias this way or that on such questions, but in the case in question he took upon himself to be very decided. He wrote, or got some one to write, a report proving that the service of the country imperatively demanded that the money ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... graveyard interprets the tall and slender shrub laden with white blossoms as a swaying ghost, the misconception does not arise from any fault of mere vision, but from the type of former knowledge which the other surroundings of the moment call up, these evidently giving the mind a certain bias in its interpretation of the sensuous, or ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... either counsel for the state or for the defendant, or by any other party or, source directly or indirectly interested in this inquisition. You are the court's commission, and you must enter upon your duties free from any bias or prejudice, if any there be. You should assume your duties, and I know you will, with the highest motives in seeking the truth, and then pronounce your judgment without regard to the effect it may have upon the state or upon the defendant; in other ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... hereafter hate, and hate as if you might hereafter love." Another favourite sentence of his was, "to a surety loss is at hand." [189] A third, "we try gold by the touchstone. Gold is the touchstone of the mind." Bias, of Priene in Ionia, is quoted, in Herodotus, as the author of an advice to the Ionians to quit their country, and found a common city in Sardinia (B. C. 586). He seems to have taken an active part in ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... qualities, Mr. Gladstone was brought up at school and college among Englishmen, and received at Oxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias and tendency which never thereafter ceased to affect him. The so-called "Oxford Movement," which afterward obtained the name of Tractarianism and carried Dr. Newman, together with other less famous leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr. ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... appoint a commission to investigate "the existing state of the Corporation of the City of London, and to collect information respecting its constitution, order, and government." These commissioners, unlike their predecessors, exhibited from the commencement of their proceedings a strong bias and feeling of hostility against the Corporation. The witnesses they called before them were, with scarcely an exception, the avowed enemies of the existing state of things, and prepared to convert trifling blemishes into radical ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... the hereditary delusion. Good parents, he was convinced, are only an advantage in so far as they have made you good stuff, and bad parents are no discredit to a son or daughter of good quality. Conceivably he had a bias against too close an examination of origins, and he held that the honour of the children should atone for the sins of the fathers and the questionable achievements of any intervening testator. Not half a dozen rich and established families in all England could stand even the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... lie quiet; I did not have to be told. I wanted to lie quiet and hurt. I was hurty from head to toe and back again, and crosswise and cater-cornered. I hurt diagonally and lengthwise and on the bias. I had a taste in my mouth like a bird-and-animal store. And empty! It seemed to me those doctors had not left anything inside of me except the acoustics. Well, there was a mite of consolation there. If the ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... occurs to me as showing a regrettable bias in a leader of intelligent opinion. On January 5, 1897, General Francis A. Walker died. He had served with credit as an officer during our Civil War, and in two thoughtful books had made a valuable contribution to its military history. He was superintendent of the United States Census ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... conscience, the responsibility of action may well be startling; even a wise and experienced man will often pause at such moments, doubtful of the course he shall pursue. It is an easy matter to settle a question, when passion, feeling, interest, or prejudice gives the bias; but where these are all silent, and cool judgment is left alone to decide, the greatest men feel, to a painful degree, how limited are their powers; the high responsibility which is attached to free-will rises before them, and they shrink from the idea of trusting ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... disappointments and my timidity, we've gotten along very well. When I go away to school he always slips me a bill or two for spending money. I could feel that he resented my buying a car, yet he pays for my gasoline without complaint. His bias, prejudice, and vindictiveness doesn't apply to the members of his immediate family, but it does apply intensely and vigorously to others. It's this peculiarity that might wreck the works at ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... that year. Probably the Executive Council took no notice of it; for certain papers found in the iron chest at the Tuileries cast doubts on the purity of Talleyrand's patriotism. Further, as Pache, Minister at War, hated Dumouriez, personal bias told strongly against the moderate proposals coming from London and The Hague. Nevertheless the Executive Council now decided to defer for the present the invasion of Holland, meanwhile chasing the Austrians beyond ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... purse up their lips, at the mere suggestion of "chance," or "accident," having a fortunate or happy application. They do not apply the same train of reasoning to the reverse side of the picture; the bias of their nature is evidently suspicious. These are the minds that refuse to credit those little misfortunes of picnic and pleasure parties, by which young people lose themselves in mysterious ways, and get into wrong boats and ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... home of his mother in Westchester County, N. Y., and looked forward to his future career in life. As often happens, a family bias, or wish, rather than the judgment of the young man himself, induces the first step. John McCloskey was to become a lawyer. We are told that he began the study of Coke and Blackstone, of the principles of law and the practice ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... comic element in caricature. However regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the King and Queen and Court. His description is so vivid that one is tempted to believe it to be history: it is that, and not mere fiction, for it is based on a careful study of facts, and, allowance made for the writer's strong Royalist bias, it is true ethically or in spirit, that highest truth which accurate and laborious historians often fail ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, statecraft, economic ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... not bias your mind by suggesting theories or suspicions, Watson," said he; "I wish you simply to report facts in the fullest possible manner to me, and you can leave me ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... further novels from the pen of Chesterton we shall expect them to have a Roman bias, but we shall hope that they will not bear any signs that Rome has dictated the policy that has made many of her best priests mere puppets, afraid, not of the Church, but of the Pope, who often enough in history has been a very ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth means, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the foretaste of this rest be precious, what must be the glorious consummation? Awaking in the morning of immortality, with the unquiet dream of earth over—faith lost in sight, and hope in fruition;—no more any bias to sin—no more latent principles of evil—nothing to disturb the spirit's deep, everlasting tranquillity—the trembling magnet of the heart reposing, where alone it can confidingly and permanently rest, in the enjoyment of the ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... artist, by the way, that science in their opinion had a tendency to destroy the illusion of Nature and impair the finer sentiments and spontaneity of the soul; hence they left the systematic study of it to the few who possess a decided bias for it. As a rule ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... that adduced by Agassiz, "that it is in accordance with the working of our minds," still further illuminated by the side-lights which science has thrown on it since Agassiz died. The ultimate decision in the individual mind will be according to the bias for or against the "conscious mind" or automatic creation; and it must not be forgotten that one of the most powerful arguments for a large evolution was the discovery by Agassiz that the embryo of the highest organizations ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... unduly favor the South, that he should strengthen the South, and feel that arms and ammunition were stored there with better effect than they could be stored in the North, is very probable. We all understand what is the bias of a man's mind, and how strong that bias may become when the man is not especially scrupulous. But I do not believe that any President previous to Buchanan sent military materials to the South with the self-acknowledged purpose of using ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that, before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain bodyguard ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... communication, appear to have greatly influenced his election.[13] The unfortunate king, Gustavus Adolphus, after being long kept a close prisoner in the castle of Gripsholm, where his strong religious bias had been strengthened by apparitions,[14] was permitted to retire into Germany; he disdainfully refused to accept of a pension, separated himself from his consort, a princess of Baden, and lived in proud poverty, under the name of Colonel Gustavson, in Switzerland.— Bernadotte, the newly ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... the trusty cockney poet has made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman: and has made of him at once a really noble and a heartily amusing figure. His better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman d'Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap; though in the earlier passages of Parisian trickery ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... whose sister was married to Sir Harry Erskine[1141], an intimate friend of Lord Bute, who was the favourite of the King; and surely the most outrageous Whig will not maintain, that, whatever ought to be the principle in the disposal of offices, a pension ought never to be granted from any bias of court connection. Mr. Macklin[1142], indeed, shared with Mr. Sheridan the honour of instructing Mr. Wedderburne; and though it was too late in life for a Caledonian to acquire the genuine English cadence, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his client's neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some point arising in the case which he dared not admit and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so, but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President's struggle in ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the Great had struck out the splendid idea of the marriage of East and West. He secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire, and making one Empire from the Adriatic to this side of the Sutlej or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of East and West in a way of his own. He took three hundred captive princesses and ladies, and married them in a batch to Macedonian officers—a very characteristic piece of symbolism. But his idea was greater and ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... fashion to say Lafayette wanted esprit. This was much the cleverest thing the writer ever heard in the French Chambers, and, generally, he knew few men who said more witty things in a neat and unpretending manner than General Lafayette. Indeed this was the bias of his mind, which was little given to profound reflections, though distinguished for a ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... further, but followed his wife to the gate. On his way to his office, he turned and looked after her with a frown as she rattled her team along the uneven road. She was a vain and covetous woman with a bias towards intrigue, but there had been times since her marriage when she despised herself, and as a natural consequence blamed her husband. Sometimes she hated Thurston, also, though more often she was sensible of vague ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Europe is that it signalled the advent of German influence in the Near East. That influence was strengthened on the Bosphorus after the Turkish revolution of 1908, in spite of the original Anglophil bias of the Young Turks, and as some critics maintain, in consequence of the blundering of the British representatives. The mission of Von der Goltz in 1908 and that of Liman von Sanders in 1914 put the Turkish army under German command, and by the outbreak ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... lacking in the passion for truth that characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender: the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his clay and he would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the people of the United States to believe, for when they talked to Keating they talked to many millions of readers. Keating, in turn, wrote out what they had said to him and transmitted it, without color or bias, to the clearinghouse of the Consolidated Press. His "stories," as all newspaper writings are called by men who write them, were as picturesque reading as the quotations of a stock- ticker. The personal equation appeared no more ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... allow of our setting down its marvels to the accumulations of fortunate accident, undirected by will, effort and intelligence. Those who examine the main facts of animal and vegetable organisation without bias will, no doubt, ere long conclude that all animals and vegetables are derived ultimately from unicellular organisms, but they will not less readily perceive that the evolution of species without the concomitance and ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... Rouse, There falling out at Tennis; or perchance, I saw him enter such a house of saile; Videlicet, a Brothell, or so forth. See you now; Your bait of falshood, takes this Cape of truth; And thus doe we of wisedome and of reach With windlesses, and with assaies of Bias, By indirections finde directions out: So by my former Lecture and aduice Shall you my Sonne; you haue me, haue you not? Reynol. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion with their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience during the present contest for a verification of these conjectures. But if they be not certain in event, are they not possible? are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... free rein was given to the growth of pride and the exercise of irresponsible tyranny. To these feelings, developed without check for thousands of years, and to the mental habits resultant, it is easy to trace much of the bias of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... way was plain before them." If extraordinary and unforeseen circumstances had not intervened, the case would more speedily have been disposed of, and we cannot doubt what would have been its issue. Whatever might be the bias or prejudice of the courts, or however they might have attempted to enforce their first decisions, there can be no question, that, in such a contest, the people would have finally prevailed. The committee were men competent to carry the parish through. A religious society, with such ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... country well." And indeed he could have told her the exact number of bushels of wheat to the acre in her own county of Monterey, its voting population, its political bias. Yet of the more important product before him, after the manner of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... should be of a jovial country-like humour, as gay and pleasing as a harmonious hornpipe of Saulieau or Buzansay. The veridical Triboulet did therein hint at what I liked well, as perfectly knowing the inclinations and propensions of my mind, my natural disposition, and the bias of my interior passions and affections. For you may be assured that my humour is much better satisfied and contented with the pretty, frolic, rural, dishevelled shepherdesses, whose bums through their coarse canvas smocks smell of the clover grass of the field, than with those ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... doubted that political considerations had weighed most heavily with the chairman of the committee. Douglas resented the suggestion with such warmth, however, that it is charitable to suppose he was not conscious of the bias under ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... army, who has since the war made valuable contributions to the history of its operations—especially valuable as well for their accuracy as for their freedom from personal or partisan bias—writes thus of the retreat ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of like passions with himself, but vastly transcending him in power. Thus the notion of causality—the assumption that natural things did not come of themselves, but had unseen antecedents—lay at the root of even the savage's interpretation of Nature. Out of this bias of the human mind to seek for the causes of phenomena ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... eye is not directed towards it, it will not be distinctly seen. And though a demonstration be never so well grounded and fairly proposed, yet, if there is withal a stain of prejudice, or a wrong bias on the understanding, can it be expected on a sudden to perceive clearly, and adhere firmly to the truth? No; there is need of time and pains: the attention must be awakened and detained by a frequent repetition of ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... sight of principles among a crowd of details; and though he had a strong bias in certain directions, he had a just and catholic appreciation even of facts which told against his case. Yet his knowledge was never dry or cold; it was full to the brim of ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... a servant, and chance kindly provided me with one. I was sitting with Madame Rufin, when a young Lorrainer came in; like Bias, he bore all his fortune with him, but, in his case, it was carried under his arm. He introduced ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... you it would be a farce, did I not? How could it be otherwise, when a man like Hubbard was the presiding magistrate? His sympathies were entirely with those who had violated the law; and though he made an effort to conceal his bias, the attempt ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... happiness." So long as Alexander remained true to liberal principles himself, there was some hope that he might abolish serfdom throughout his dominions. He abhorred the "peculiar institution" of his empire with all the force of a mind that certainly was generous, and which had a strong bias in the direction of justice. Once he made a solemn religious vow that he would abolish it. It is probable that he would have made an attempt at complete emancipation, if the circumstances of his time and his country ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... indescribable. In after years in Paris I besought Paragot, almost on my knees, to write an account of the years of vagabondage to which these papers refer. It would make, I told him, a picaresque romance compared with which that of Gil Bias de Santillane were the tale of wanderings round a village pump. Such, said I, is given to few men to produce. But Paragot only smiled, and sipped his absinthe. It was against his principles, he said. The ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... used to compare the two. In the comparison his bias was all in favor of Aurora, but it led him to create in his mind a sort of imaginary friendship between the two girls, though they did not know each other, and even, without his knowing it, to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... respect, but simply, that the resistance of the more refined to the encroachments of the unrefined, has brought about a state of feeling—a feeling that is seldom just and never philosophical—which has created a silent, but almost unanimous bias against the effects of the institutions, in what is called the world. In Europe, one rarely utters a sentiment of this nature, under circumstances in which it is safe to do so at all, without finding a very general sympathy in the auditors; but in the circle into which Eve had now fallen, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... after midnight at this time, and they had met with a number of men at a kind of social club which had no political bias. The leading people of the town were there, and Paul also noticed that Ned Wilson was among them. He fancied he had been drinking heavily. His eyes were bloodshot, and his voice was loud ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... remedy for the effects of bias must be found in a rigorous and searching criticism. If misleading statements and unsound arguments are allowed to pass unchallenged the fault will not ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... of matter or the body, supposed to govern 381:1 man, is rendered null and void by the law of Life, God. Ignorant of our God-given rights, we submit to unjust 381:3 decrees, and the bias of education enforces this slavery. Be no more willing to suffer the illusion that you are sick or that some disease is develop- 381:6 ing in the system, than you are to yield to a sinful temp- tation on the ground that ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads, serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or were hawked about in printed broadsides. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... dust, dullness, and desks? Depend upon it, John, that our tastes and tendencies are not the result of accident; they were given to us for a purpose. I hold it as an axiom that when a man or a boy has a strong and decided bias or partiality for any particular work that he knows something about, he has really a certain amount of capacity for that work beyond the average of men, and is led thereto by a higher power than that of man. Do not misunderstand me. I do not say that, when a boy expresses ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... case of the adult Arab, there is a life's work to undo, and the facing of that fact it is which makes some of our bravest workers drop their hands in despair. With these young Arabs, on the contrary, it is only the wrong bias of a few early years to correct, leaving carte blanche for any amount of hope in youth, maturity, and old age. Being desirous of forming, for my own edification, some notion of the amount of the evil existing, and the efforts made to counteract it, I planned a pilgrimage into this Arabia Infelix—this ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... pursued by the Government of this colony in relation to the admission of Chinese or coolie labour into the Northern Territory is, I understand, among the pressing subjects of the hour. Approaching the subject without prejudice or bias, it does not seem difficult to determine the principles by which the action of the State should be guided. If we have faith in the superior qualities of our own people we shall do well, even at the cost of considerable delay in material development, to reserve ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... officer, too, of large interest, and the Amphytrion of the day; for when they had performed those duties for which they were so well fitted, their medical ones, they were to dine on the scene of their arduous labours. The eldest surgeon had rather a bias against the doctor, as he could not legally put M.D. against his own name. The next in seniority was entirely adverse to the invaliding, as, without he could invalide too, he would have to go to the West Indies in the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the picturesque and does not care for the classic," suggested his colleague; "a fundamental distinction in mental bias." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He would have the State and European society, especially the society of England, revived by a return to the profession and the practice of his own faith. In Prussia also historians ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... This frequently happens, but it does not alter the fact that the squadron was the proper point of attack, and that, especially in the winter season, an opportunity to close must offer soon. D'Estaing, governed probably by the soldierly bias he more than once betrayed, decided now to assault the works on shore. Anchoring in a small bay north of the Carenage, he landed seven thousand men, and on the 18th attempted to storm the British lines at La Vigie. The neck of land connecting the promontory with the island is ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average, it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even practical ones. While I was not sorry you abandoned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... abroad in quest of allies, and he hastened to Holland to assume the reins of government, but he was speedily recalled to Lille to submit once more to paternal authority before being left to his own devices and to maternal bias. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... editorial and reportorial functions of a newspaper are apt to be much less clearly defined in the United States than in England. The English reporter, as a rule, confines himself strictly to his report, which is made without bias. A Conservative speech is as accurately (though perhaps not as lengthily) reported in a Liberal paper as in one of its own colour. All comment or criticism is reserved for the editorial columns. This ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... spirit of old Roman fortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than any other form of solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggeration is the best foil to truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective to the earthward bias of the diffident; by its excess of an opposite defect it drives us soonest into the mean of a simple and manly confidence. It is better for us first to repeat, "Dare to look up to God and say: Make use of me ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... little sympathy with humorists. He was too fiery, too militant, too much preoccupied with the working out of his ideas, to have the leisure or the inclination to take stock of humanity. Indeed I have sometimes thought that if he had had some touch of the quality, he might have given a different bias to the faith; his application of the method which he had inherited from the Jewish school of theology, coupled with his own fervid rhetoric, was the first step, I have often thought, in disengaging the Christian ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to 1840. Mlle. Atala Beaudouin (the actress who under the name of Louise Beaudouin created the role of the Queen in Ruy Bias) had left Frederick Lemaitre, the great and marvellous comedian. Frederick adored her and ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... was a careful, methodical man, about sixty years of age. He always spoke directly to the point, and in his story, he had evidently made no attempt to draw conclusions, or to bias my judgment in any way. Nevertheless, he showed that he was really affected by young Gordon's murder, and I saw that I should get more really valuable assistance from him, than from both of the ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... his past services—and it was too generally known in Ireland, that there was some quality in Treasury gold, however acquired, which attracted the possessor powerfully towards the Castle. The private judgement of Mr. Grattan might also be reasonably supposed to have a bias on the question, from the circumstance of being himself the adviser of the simple repeal—the idea of an explicit renunciation not having been started when Mr. Grattan's principal exertions, seconded by the voice of the people, triumphed over the old system. There was another reason—Mr. Grattan's ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... principles of human conduct. Accordingly, he has prejudiced his claims as a literary critic. He is not interested in Shakespeare's art for its own sake; but that he should use Shakespeare's characters as the subjects of moral disquisitions is eloquent testimony to their truth to nature. His classical bias, excusable in a Professor of Latin, is best seen in his essay "On the Faults of Shakespeare,"(30) of which the title was alone sufficient to win him the contempt of later critics. His essays are the dull effusions of a clever man. Though they ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... critics; and it was the early friends of Stockdale, who, mistaking his animal spirits for genius, by directing them into the walks of poetry, bewildered him for ever. It was their hand that heedlessly fixed the bias in the rolling ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... essentially different from that of a slightly earlier period. The materials of homespun linen and home-dyed crewels were the same. The thing which was different and showed either a cropping-out of original thought or a bias toward the style of embroidery lately introduced by the famous school of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an over-and-over stitch instead of the old crewel method. This over-and-over stitch was apparent in all crewel embroidery devoted to personal wear, but was never found in ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... emotional bias against psi as such," he went on smoothly, "you'd be happy for Tex ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five years, scored an immense triumph with his "Rise of the Dutch Republic." He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists; and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four volumes of the "History of the United ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... esteem and sympathy, love of liberty and hatred of slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to "constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reserved for trained bloodhounds? Surely, in view of what Massachusetts has been, and her strong bias in favor of human freedom, derived from her great- hearted founders, it is to be hoped that the Executive and Cabinet at Washington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning, some opportunity for conquering her prejudices, before letting loose the dogs of war upon her. Let them ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... than to one whose lot it is to bear them. Even the (so-called) "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence—about which so much nonsense has been written—is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor—he never understands a jest—his wife is a beast of burthen—heaven is a hunting-ground—his language has no words to express abstract qualities, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... induced to turn machine inventor or "conjurer," as the pursuit was then popularly termed. Many attempts were made about that time to invent a spinning-machine, and our barber determined to launch his little bark on the sea of invention with the rest. Like other self-taught men of the same bias, he had already been devoting his spare time to the invention of a perpetual-motion machine; and from that the transition to a spinning-machine was easy. He followed his experiments so assiduously that he neglected his business, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... that the ready coincidence of Jervis's views with those of Nelson, as to future possibilities, arose, partly indeed from professional bias and prepossession as to the potency of navies, but still more from the false reports, of which Bonaparte was an apt promoter, and which a commission of the allies in Genoa greedily swallowed and transmitted. The deterrent effect of their own fleet, "in being," ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan |
