"Bias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of their last meeting she had been engaged to another man, a fat, bald, doddering, senile fool, whose only merit was his money. Scarcely a fair description of Mr Pickering, but in a man in Bill's position a little bias is excusable. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... which some do yet multiply as several species under one genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention. So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws, and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our understanding to discover ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... our clergyman, and was secretly pleased to find, not only that he was singularly quick in imbibing my instructions, but displayed a strong natural taste for those investigations towards which I had shown so marked a bias. ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... adjective. Is it better to place the adjective before the substantive, or the substantive before the adjective? Ought we to say with the French—un cheval noir; or to say as we do—a black horse? Probably, most persons of culture would decide that one order is as good as the other. Alive to the bias produced by habit, they would ascribe to that the preference they feel for our own form of expression. They would expect those educated in the use of the opposite form to have an equal preference for that. And ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... experience, the utter failure of many negotiations, and a careful reconsideration, now had, of the whole subject, at a moment when the passions are laid, and no present interest or emergency exists to bias the judgment, have fully convinced this government that this is not only the simplest and best, but the only rule, which can be adopted and observed, consistently with the rights and honor of the United States and the security of their ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... definitely beyond the necessity of being of any earthly use in the house. Advena's occupation to some extent absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to attribute them to her being naturally "through-other," or naturally clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs Murchison no longer excused or complained of her daughter; but she ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... or acute illness, dissipation, etc." Such conditions, like the grave psychotic forms, he regarded as due to physical exhaustion of the brain cells, but, since he thought psychic stress could produce this exhaustion, this "organic" view did not bias his general formulations. He makes a division into two stupors: Anergic Stupor and Delusional Stupor. The former may be primary, being generally caused by a sudden intense shock (Esquirol's "Acute Dementia"), or secondary (a) to convulsions of any kind, (b) to mania in women, (c) to any ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... weights and measures, in order to prevent injustices and oppressions of the poor. He most rigorously forbade all his officers and servants ever to receive the least presents, which are no better than bribes, and bias the most impartial. Every Wednesday and Friday he sat the whole day on a bench before the church, that all might have free access to him to lay their grievances before him, and make known their necessities. He composed all differences, comforted the afflicted, and relieved ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... deep and permanent influence on one's character, how rarely is it possible to point to a particular book, and say, "That book gave me the message I most needed, made me take the right turn, gave me the requisite bias, the momentous impulse"? We tend to want to do things on too large a scale, to affect great masses of people, to influence numerous hearts. An author should be more than content if he finds he has made a difference to a handful of people, or given innocent pleasure to a small ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... time of Hippocrates, and even before, have been the originators and professional advisers of the athlete. The change in the manner of living of athletes, if we can judge from the writings of Hippocrates, was anterior to his time; for in Book V of the "Epidemics" we read of Bias, who, "suapte nature vorax, in choleram-morbum incidit ex carnium esu, praecipueque ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... beating nigh us As we fight the fight of life, Hearts unstain'd by guilty bias, Hearts ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Philadelphia, with the other on. Frozen, stiff, and sore, he arrived there on the following day, and every care was extended to him by his old friends. He was nursed and attended by the late Dr. James, Joshua Gould Bias, one of the faithful few, whose labors for the oppressed will never be forgotten, and whose heart, purse, and hand were always open to the poor, flying slave. God has blessed him, and his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... white, twenty-seven inches wide—a stiff, thin, open-meshed material, used to make soft hat frames, to cover wire frames, and in bias strips to cover edge wire after it is sewed ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... caressing this seeming favorite with one white, slender hand, almost fine enough for a lady's, while I observed him with keen scrutiny. He was an English Canadian, I learned that before I ever saw him, born and bred under Canadian skies, but this implies little of his bias ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... ran a frigate right athwart our course. "Are they mad?" some voice exclaimed from our deck. "Do they woo their ruin?" But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Diego Belloso and Bias Ruiz had hardly boarded their ships, when Captain Gallinato entered Chordemuco with the flagship, by way of the river. They told him all that happened with the Chinese and Cambodians and of the favorable condition of affairs for continuing them, alleging ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... have been compiled with great care, from works by the best French authors. Every subject has been carefully excluded that could in any manner wound or bias the preconceived opinions of the American reader in relation to religious or ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... events of his life, and he cherished them. His attendants now permitted and even encouraged him to speak; but he seemed entirely incurious and indifferent. Sometimes they read to him, and he listened, but he never made remarks. The works which they selected had a religious or ecclesiastical bias, even while they were imaginative; and it seemed difficult not to be interested by the ingenious fancy by which it was worked out, that every thing that was true and sacred in heaven had its symbol and significance in the qualities ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation. Unquestionably each investigator and writer is influenced by the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes the historian to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments and new insight for dealing ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the one deed, he sees in it something more than an isolated act. It leads him down to its motive; that motive carries him to the state of mind in which it could have power; that state of mind, in which the motive could have power, carries him still deeper to the bias of his nature as he had received it from his parents. And thinking of how he had fallen, how upon his terraced palace roof there the eye had inflamed the heart, and the heart had yielded so quickly to the temptations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in this and many kindred passages Sir C. Lyell protests against the bias here illustrated, he seems himself not completely free from it. Though he utterly rejects the old hypothesis that all over the Earth the same continuous strata lie one upon another in regular order, like the coats of an onion, he ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... without a brief glance at his political career. His birth in 1782 just after the Revolution, and in South Carolina, gave him the opportunity to share in the victory that the West and the far South won over the Virginians, headed by Madison. His training at Yale gave a nationalistic bias to his early career, and determined that search for the via media between consolidation and anarchy which resulted in the doctrine of nullification. His service in Congress and as Secretary of War ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the 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
... materials, mixing a great deal of his own with them. In a work, which is sure of going down to the latest posterity, I thought it material to set facts to rights as much as possible. The author was well disposed; but could not entirely get the better of his original bias. I send you the article as ultimately published. If you find any material errors in it, and will be so good as to inform me of them, I shall probably have opportunities of setting this author to rights. What has heretofore passed between us on this institution, makes it my duty to mention ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... this the best means of bringing political influence to bear upon the question, but who would prefer voting for such anti-slavery candidates, as might be nominated by either of the two great parties already existing, or in the absence of any such candidate would decline voting at all. My own bias was in favor of this course, since it was the one pursued in Great Britain, and which had been so eminently successful in the general election of 1833. I became convinced, however, that the "third party" has ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... one occasion, indeed, he borrowed a classical phrase, and referring to the intrusions of the barbarian, declared roundly that he would allow no man to snore alongside of his bed. Brought up in this spirit, Hsien Feng had already begun to exhibit an anti-foreign bias, when he found himself in the throes of a struggle which speedily reduced the European ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... and again in spring and early summer before the annual departure of the Hanbury family for the sea, the pleasant yard with its wide shade trees and its shrubbery was a land of enchantment threatened by a genie. Black Bias, the family coachman, polishing the fat carriage horses in the stable yard, was the genie; and George the intrepid knight who, spurred by Honora, would dash in and pinch Bias in a part of his anatomy which the honest darky had never seen. An ideal genie, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Germany and her Emperor, with a distinct love of discipline and a bias in favor of military training, and with an experience of actual warfare such as only a score or so of German officers of my generation have had; but I am bound to say I found this pounding in of patriotism on every side distinctly nauseating. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... BIAS EYES.—1. Letters relating to business matters connected with this paper—such as inquiries relating to advertising rates—are the only ones answered by mail. They must invariably contain a stamp to pay postage on such reply. 2. Any reader complying with the rules governing the exchange department ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... They seem to have given little attention to the various theoretical universal languages which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and the world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... a heart as unbiassed as I can prevail on it to be; as free, I mean, from its customary bias; for I strive to call up feelings and ideas similar to his. I know how pure to him would be the satisfaction of leaving the world with the belief of a thorough change ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... labor was a piece of national patchwork—a composite of the canny Scotch, the persistent and witty Irish, the conservative but indomitable English, the effervescent French, the phlegmatic German, and the irascible Italian. I found this variety beneficial, for the usual national and race bias was sufficiently in evidence to preclude a combination to retard the work. I had three Americans, that were neither white nor colored; they were born black; one of them—Tambry, the cook—will ever have my grateful remembrance for his fatherly ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... was a war and a cheat. If the universe were entirely composed of knaves, he would be sure to have made his way. Now this bias of mind, alike shrewd and unamiable, might be safe enough if accompanied by a lethargic temper; but it threatened to become terrible and dangerous in one who, in default of imagination, possessed abundance of passion: and this was the case with the young outcast. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... speaker. They advertised perfect mutual understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being any need for anything else between us! they said. Their editor then supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a soupcon of personal feeling in the case—bias, pique, whatever one likes to call it. You know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a breach of confidence, only I know I shall be ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... 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 ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... what, he acknowledged, might have been his stern sense of justice; yet he, as a father, could not but remember that he was indirectly the cause of Jack's loss. He felt this, but did not allow his feelings in any way to bias his conduct. Tom and Becky were therefore directed to make all necessary preparations to do honour to the guests present and expected. Mrs Askew and Margery were also not idle in arranging the provisions and the rooms for ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... an imperative order from the authorities, from whose will there is no appeal. As a book-reviewer he labored under similar disadvantages; he stoutly maintained that the reading of a volume would necessarily and unduly bias the critic's judgment, and that a man endowed with a keen, literary nose could form an intelligent opinion, after a careful perusal of the title-page, and a glance at the preface. A man who wrote a book naturally labored under the delusion ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... although at times this was the case, philosophical opinions, on which the differences between these two parties were founded, were not of sufficient strength to determine for any length of time the political and religious bias of either school. The Realists were chiefly supported by the Dominicans, the Nominalists by the Franciscans; and there is always a more gentle expression beaming in the eyes of the followers of the seraphic ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... ideal service to their communities. They could bring together, upon the lofty basis of Jewish idealism, men of different views in the community, who approach practical Jewish problems in different, sometimes in mutually antagonistic, ways. Devoid itself of any sectarian or fraternal or political bias, a graduate Menorah organization should be ideally fitted to serve as a kind of intellectual clearing house of the Jewish community, and thus promote on all sides a deeper understanding of one another, a clearer vision of the common problems, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... executive government of the country might be carried on;"—but imagination has not far to go in supposing a case, where the enormous patronage vested in the Crown, and the consequent increase of a Royal bias through the community, might give such an undue and unsafe preponderance to that branch of the Legislature, as would render any safe opportunity, however acquired, of ascertaining with how much less power the executive government could be carried on, most acceptable, in spite of any dogmas ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... not, but the mere position of an English official gives him a point of view which cannot but bias his mind on this question." Pagett moved his knee up and down a ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... the morning, chance, and the set of the current, and the bias of his own right-handed body so decided it between them that he came to shore upon the beach in front of Attwater's. There he sat down, and looked forth into a world without any of the lights of hope. The poor diving-dress of self-conceit was sadly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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:— ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... accompanied with the necessary talent of knowledge to make amends for those imperfections. He had religion enough for this world. His own good sense, or else his inclination, always led him to the practice of virtue if his self-interest did not bias him to evil, which, whenever he committed it, he did so knowingly. He extended his concern for the State no further than his own life, though no minister ever did more than he to make the world believe he had the same regard for the future. In a word, ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... is not only no necessary antagonism between the general theory of "evolution" and a Divine action, but the compatibility between the two is recognized by naturalists who cannot be suspected of any strong theological bias. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The Colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... the profane handicraftsman who might claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which he saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and disguised with a host of spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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 seven watchmen, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... also had looked at this mode of interpretation, but discovered in the bias of his mind greater difficulties, to which others of an external nature were added. As early as the year 1524, he had written to the "Christians at Strassburg:" "This I confess—if any one had been able to assure me five years ago ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... strong places to be doubled, lest the slippery enemy should take advantage of too much confidence reposed in his good faith. The preachers throughout the commonwealth, each according to his individual bias, improved the occasion by denouncing the Spaniard from their pulpits and inflaming the popular hatred against the ancient enemy, or by dilating on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war. The peace party and the war party, the believers in Barneveld and the especial adherents ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... still struggling for a livelihood that the event happened which changed the bias of her character, as a geranium transplanted from the garden changes its ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... 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 ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... of a woman falsely charged and deeply wronged, majestic in her proud self-control. Was it merely a superb, an unparalleled piece of acting? [Footnote: See Appendix C. Mr. Froude is dramatically at his best in telling the story; but his partisan bias is correspondingly emphasized.] Was it the heroism of a martyr? The voice of England had doomed her; she appealed to a higher Tribunal than England. King or Queen never faced their end more triumphantly. Mary Stewart, royal in ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... reflected, the more limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... confronted you, impressed me favourably. It was not that of a guilty man. But I could not let an opinion bias me, for, in spite of everything, you might still have been guilty. There was a great possibility that ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... the sight of Cutwolfe's horrible punishment, recall Jack Wilton to himself. He regrets his irregular life, but not to the point of refunding the money stolen from the Countess Juliana; rich as Gil Bias, he can now, like him, take rank among peaceable and settled folk; he marries his Venetian lady, and returns to the king of England's army, occupied in giving a grand reception to Francis I. at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There ends the most complete career furnished in England, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... awakened early that morning by a resonant neigh at the head of her bed, she mistook it for the trump of doom. Miss Hazy's cottage, as has been said, was built on the bias in the Wiggses' side yard, and the little lean-to, immediately behind Miss Hazy's bedroom, had been pressed into service as ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... and physician, born at Paris; his early writings, poems and romances, are socialistic in bias; member of the Legislative Assembly in 1848; retired to England after the coup d'etat; returned to France and rose to be a member of the Senate (1875); wrote three works descriptive of the social and religious ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... compared the Catholics to the beggar in Gil Bias: who made them beggars? Who are enriched with the spoils of their ancestors? And cannot you relieve the beggar when your fathers have made him such? If you are disposed to relieve him at all, cannot you do it without flinging your farthings in his face? As a contrast, however, to this beggarly ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... together. Anyone desiring to know more about the charitable institutions of Berlin will find a most interesting account of them in the pamphlet written by the Birmingham Brassworkers, and published by P.S. King & Son. The bias of the authors is so strongly German that when you have read to the end you begin to lean in the opposite direction, and look for the things we manage better over here. "In 1900," they say, "there was such a shortage ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of the Society. That a boy of but mediocre talents should have failed to participate in the debate, will not be considered remarkable when the question is stated: "Whether, in public elections, the vote of faction should prevail by internal suggestions, or the bias of jurisprudence?" ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... influence of frivolity, baneful as it always is, is most peculiarly dangerous and destructive—education, politics, and religion. On all these great points, inseparably connected as they are with human happiness and virtue, the frivolity of women may give a bias to the character of the individual, which will be traced in his career to the last moment of his existence. The author well observes that frivolity and ignorance, rather than deliberate guilt, are the causes of political error and tergiversation. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... note that you do not like him, or if that is too strong, that you see nothing to admire in him. What is there antipathetic in his nature to you, and in yours to him? He doesn't like you either. Yet you both seem to me such gracious, kindly men. Surely you have no bias against other nationalities—a man with a cosmopolitan record ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... we have 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... specially mentions Smith as one of the principal figures of the club, and says their conversation, "besides the usual subjects with young men, turned principally on literary topics, religion, morality, belles-lettres, etc., and to this conversation my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended a college, and being then but a mechanic."[74] According to this account religion was not proscribed, but Professor Traill's ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... offered no other natural solution of the mystery of the orderly incoming of cognate forms. As examples of the effect of Darwin's "Origin of Species" upon the minds of naturalists who are no longer young, and whose prepossessions, even more than Lyell's, were likely to bias them against the new doctrine, two from the botanical side are brought to our notice through recent miscellaneous writings which are ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... and though he knew, that by delaying his return to a warmer climate, he was giving up the only chance that remained for his recovery, yet, careful and jealous to the last degree, that a regard to his own situation should never bias his judgment to the prejudice of the service, he persevered in the search of a passage, till it was the opinion of every officer in both ships that it was impracticable, and that any farther attempts would not ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... man can well be; but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune, and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect—as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again, where he alters the letters ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the first place, there is the fact that Liberals attach a special importance to the liberty of the individual. The general relation of the individual to the State is rather outside my subject, but we start from the fact that the bias of Liberals is towards liberty in every sphere, on the ground that spiritual and intellectual progress is greatest where individuality is least restricted by authority or convention. Variety, originality in thought ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... enthusiasm. Enthusiasm belongs to youth. His thoughts were busied with dreams of Paris; thither flew his wishes. "Yes, I will travel!" exclaimed he; "that will give my whole character a more decided bias: I will and must," added he in thought. "My sorrow will be extinguished, the recollections of my childhood be forgotten. Abroad, no terrific figures, as here, will present themselves to me. My father is dead, foreign ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... no more certain way of judging a man than from his own words, if his real words be in our possession. In doing so, we are bound to remember how strong will be the bias of every man's mind in his own favor, and for that reason a judicious reader will discount a man's praise of himself. But the reader, to get at the truth, if he be indeed judicious, will discount them after a fashion conformable with ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... character of the writer cooperates in an under current to the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... reference to the particular tenet before us, analyze it, discriminate the appropriate in it from the inappropriate, the true from the false, maybe difficult; but it is necessary for a satisfactory conclusion. To this task let us therefore now address ourselves, putting away all bias and prejudice, invoking in equal ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Lavengro in the flesh, such as Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell. Borrow was shy, angular, eccentric, rustic in accent and in locution, but with a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible. Hake was polished, easy and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice and bias, ready to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... north-western tributary of the Sutledge, that Alexander's army turned back. The river was then called Hyphasis; Pliny calls it Hypasis,[218] a very fair approximation to the Vedic Vipas, which means "unfettered." Its modern name is Bias or Bejah. ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... knows that it was not some beggar's daughter, a Gagaian, or a maiden of Hanirabbat or Ugarit whom my messengers saw?" Then Nimmuria took up the tale, and complained that Kadashman-Bel sent only ambassadors who had never frequented his father's Court, and were moreover of adverse bias. "Send a kamiru" (evidently a eunuch is meant) "who knows thy sister." Further misunderstandings come under discussion, from which it is evident that the general situation between the two princes was very ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... advice— All kinds of vulgar prejudice I pray you set aside: With stern, judicial frame of mind From bias free of every kind, This trial ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and vast wealth, in the early days of that ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... will have effectually disposed of a possible opponent. She has all to gain, and nothing to lose by such procedure. Unless I greatly mistake the Rincon character, the lad will yield to our inducements and his mother's prayers, the charm of the Church and the bias of her tutelage, and ultimately take the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... as many men were killed at sea as would have fallen in a moderately important battle. The number of missing steamers was great, and there is no doubt but that most of these vessels foundered. The "Coquet" was built under the eye of a critic who did not suffer champagne to bias his ideas of solid workmanship. She is still earning heavy dividends for her owners. The steamers that broke in two and went down were not superintended on the stocks by a shrewd and vigilant overlooker: ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... better qualified, and certainly much the better disposed to assert the genuine principle of the laws; in which we can, as a body, have no other than an enlarged and a public interest. We have no common cause of a professional attachment, or professional emulations, to bias our minds; we have no foregone opinions, which, from obstinacy and false point of honour, we think ourselves at all events obliged to support. So that with our own minds perfectly disengaged from the exercise, we may superintend the execution of the national ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... MACAULEY, who herself has told us how she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius, impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... practiced by Great Britain without a conviction of its title to preference, inasmuch as the latter leaves the discrimination between the mariners of the two nations to officers exposed by unavoidable bias as well as by a defect of evidence to a wrong decision, under circumstances precluding for the most part the enforcement of controlling penalties, and where a wrong decision, besides the irreparable violation ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... one reason arising from the thing itself; there is another arising from our own constitution and make: for in each man's own case those things give the impression of being more contrary to the mean to which we individually have a natural bias. Thus we have a natural bias towards pleasures, for which reason we are much more inclined to the rejection of all self-control, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... image three days over a fire, and during that time he dies in torment In Sister Helen we touch the key-note of Rossetti's creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and were purely ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... annals? He wore—"a wadded coat (kosode) of fine silk from Hachijo[u] in Izu, and that of quintuple stripe. The obi (sash) was seamless and of a purple crape. Into brick coloured leggings was twisted bias white thread, and his straw sandals (waraji) matched them." The jail had given to a naturally fair colour a somewhat livid greenish tint, rendered more commanding and terrible by the piercing cold eyes. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... is that neither to curious acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... repeated reports, that it is to have a further operation with respect to the defraying the charge of the administration of justice, which would not only be a further diminution of those rights, but tend in all constitutional questions, and in many other cases of importance to bias the judges against the subject. They humbly rely on the justice and goodness of his Majesty for the restitution and preservation of ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... 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 ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... author's works; and recently in a separate tract. The earliest edition that has been discovered bears the date of 1691; from which our copy has been prepared for the press. This is the first book of this class that was composed upon the broad basis of Christianity, perfectly free from sectarian bias or peculiarity. It is an exhibition of scriptural truths, before which error falls without the trouble of pulling it down. It is in the world, like the ark of God in the temple of Dagon. It is alike admirably calculated to convey the most important truths to the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... these few facts deliberately that you may know the personal bias of the man who wrote this history and may understand his point-of-view. The bibliography at the end of this book, which represents all sorts of opinions and views, will allow you to compare my ideas with those of other people. And in this way, you will be able to reach your ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... left to those who came into the field after the laborers had quitted it, to garner up what they could at second hand. Pizarro's situation may be thought to have necessarily exposed him to party influences, and thus given an undue bias to his narrative. It is not difficult, indeed, to determine under whose banner he had enlisted. He writes like a partisan, and yet like an honest one, who is no further warped from a correct judgment of passing affairs than must necessarily come from preconceived opinions. There ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... generally the ordinary Histories of Greek Literature may be consulted, but especially the "Hist. de la Litterature Grecque" I pp. 459 ff. of MM. Croiset. The summary account in Prof. Murray's "Anc. Gk. Lit." is written with a strong sceptical bias. Very valuable is the appendix to Mair's translation (Oxford, 1908) on "The Farmer's Year in Hesiod". Recent work on the Hesiodic poems is reviewed in full by Rzach in Bursian's "Jahresberichte" vols. 100 (1899) ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... of the Republican party. It is not the part of an historian, who is absolutely destitute of political principles, to pass judgment. Facts have crept into this history, it is true, but no one could regret it more than the author; yet there has been no bias or political prejudice shown, other than that reflected from the historical sources whence ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... to the picturesque and does not care for the classic," suggested his colleague; "a fundamental distinction in mental bias." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... little 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 ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to this writer, concerning sin, makes it a state rather than an act. It is not merely the act of disobedience, but the wrong bias of the will, out of which the act proceeds. He thinks it wrong to call "sin a nature," for neither the substance of the soul, nor its faculties, are sinful. The depravity of nature is not choice, so much as tendency which leads to choice. It is hereditary, being ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... itself: every truth in the universe agrees with every other truth in the universe, whereas falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves. Surely Mr. Colman is influenced by no bias, no prejudice; he has no feelings to warp him, except, now that he is contradicted, he may feel an interest ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... day adding to a most respectable circle of literary connexions, and I hope, a few months after the settlement of your present affairs, to offer shares to you of works in which you will feel it advantageous to engage. Besides, as I have at present no particular bias, no enormous works of my own which would need all my care, I am better qualified to attend to any that you may commit to my charge; and, being young, my business may be formed with a disposition, as it were, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... of the torrents of rain which must precede it? The little episode with Jack outside the door afforded her secret entertainment, and although she did not look upon it as a bona-fide proposal, that did not bias her intention of relating the anecdote for Bertie's delectation. It might be just as well to let him see if he couldn't speak out, others could, and if he were jealous, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... early grave. The satisfaction of working unrestrained, of resting when nature and woman's constitution demanded, and the whole matter of living without fear, had given her a sound and healthy body and a mind broader and less liable to emotional bias. The principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of housework where all individuality is denied the worker. ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... of Italian genius in the second half of the sixteenth century, and which well nigh sterilized that genius during the two succeeding centuries. In common with the rest of Europe, and in consequence of an inevitable alteration of their mental bias, they had lost the blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 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 from which we have escaped (Posthaec meminisse iuvabit)—and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which culminated in the historic one of March 26-27, began in the fall of 1937. Lady Astor had been having teas with Lady Ravensdale and had entertained von Ribbentrop, Nazi Ambassador to Great Britain, at her town house. Gradually the Astor-controlled London Times assumed a pro-Nazi bias on its very influential editorial page. When the Times wants to launch a campaign, its custom is to run a series of letters in its famous correspondence columns and then an editorial advocating the policy decided upon. During October, 1937, the Times sprouted letters ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... appetite there is a difference of views with some who believe that appetite is never transmitted but always acquired. This difference of view is more apparent than real. It is not the drunkard's appetite that is transmitted, but the bias or proclivity which renders the subject of such an inherited tendency more susceptible to exciting causes, and therefore in greater danger from the use of ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... All the Christian writings antecedent to the Nicene Council have been put into the hands of competent translators. These will make it their first and principal aim to produce translations as faithful as possible, uncoloured by any bias, dogmatic or ecclesiastical. They will also endeavour, in brief notes, to place the English reader in the position of those acquainted with the original languages. They will indicate important ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... histories and biographies, we always accept with a bias in favor of the person described the anecdotes of those who talk of them. We know that the ready wit of the surrounding world has taken up these affairs of the moment and turned them into ridicule—then as they do now. We discount the "Hierosolymarius." We do not quite believe that Bibulus never ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... inevitably destined to fill so portentous a page on its records. At the present time, to speak of the good of which he may have been either the intentional or the involuntary instrument, without some bias of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... 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 ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools were generally trained ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of human brotherhood and social service—in short, the programme of the Christian Social Union—win the workers to the side of orthodoxy? These questions were answered according to the idiosyncrasy or bias of those to whom they were addressed, and they were not settled when, twenty-seven years later, Holland returned from St. Paul's to Oxford. Indeed, several answers were possible. On one point only there was an absolute agreement among those who knew, and this was ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... are moral truths, some are practical lessons; but the great characteristic of all those which are to be thought of in this essay is, that we have to learn them and act upon them in the face of a strong bias to think or act in an opposite way. It is not that they are so difficult in themselves, not that they are hard to be understood, or that they are supported by arguments whose force is not apparent to every mind. On the contrary, the things ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... gratification of the sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of Beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism the whole cast of his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which imperceptibly led him to perceive that the most advantageous, if not the sole legitimate field for the exercise of the poetic sentiment, was to be found in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. Thus it happened that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... winds reject you—try the waves." Puff. The wind, you know, is the established receiver of all stolen sighs, and cast-off griefs and apprehensions. "Tilb. Yet must we part!—stern duty seals our doom Though here I call yon conscious clouds to witness, Could I pursue the bias of my soul, All friends, all right of parents, I'd disclaim, And thou, my Whiskerandos, shouldst be father And mother, brother, cousin, uncle, aunt, And friend to me! Whisk. Oh, matchless excellence! and must we part? Well, if—we must—we ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... preoccupation with the revolutionary struggle passed to the question of their relationship. He began to question her. She told him of the days before his awakening, spoke with a brief vividness of the girlish dreams that had given a bias to her life, of the incredulous emotions his awakening had aroused. She told him too of a tragic circumstance of her girlhood that had darkened her life, quickened her sense of injustice and opened her heart prematurely to the wider sorrows of the world. For a little time, so far as he was ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... called the "Seven Wise Men of Greece," the accounts are confused and contradictory, and their names are variously given; but those most generally admitted to the honor are Solon (the Athenian legislator); Bias, of Ionia; Chi'lo (Ephor of Sparta); Cleobu'lus (despot of Lindos, in the Island of Rhodes); Perian'der (despot of Corinth); Pit'tacus (ruler of Mityle'ne); and Tha'les, of Mile'tus, in accordance with ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... carried the idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But in my experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began, and it was nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the bias of his mind where he thought it best to reserve ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a genius! That is precisely what I was about proposing to do, and now, dear, be sure you bid adieu to all bias. Elise, I received a letter two days since, which annoyed ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... will my Wilkes retreat, And see, once seen before, that ancient seat, 160 That ancient seat, where majesty display'd Her ensigns, long before the world was made! Mean narrow maxims, which enslave mankind, Ne'er from its bias warp thy settled mind: Not duped by party, nor opinion's slave, Those faculties which bounteous nature gave, Thy honest spirit into practice brings, Nor courts the smile, nor dreads the frown of kings. Let rude licentious Englishmen comply With tumult's voice, and curse—they ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... unworthy supporters as, at the same time, to uphold the one 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 him through life, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Hesiod, Xenophon, and Catullus, whose chief value resides in their antiquity, and a much larger number of modern authors, such as Balzac, Victor Hugo, Freytag, and Ruskin, who have been over-estimated in their own time. Petrarch, and the author of "Gil Bias," might be placed on a level with Hawthorne, but certainly not above him. Those whom he most closely resembles in style and subject matter ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... hand, had had an entirely different training. The artists of Touraine had no shadow of Flemish influence in their practice. Their sculptures, enamels, colour-scheme were of another bias. Their stamp came from Italy, and if not so deep as that of Flanders or Dijon, it was equally inevitable and ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... there a summons that the council should assemble, and the chiefs, already risen from the banquet, prepared to give him audience. With a proud and firm step he approached the table; and though, from habit, he repressed the natural feelings and bias of the temper, yet there was an evident expression of hostility against the intruders, accompanied with a glance of unequivocal ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... mission of reform, and some one suggested that the character of that mission would be raised in the eyes of the public if so well known a philanthropist as Gordon, whose views on all subjects were free from official bias, could be associated with it. I do not know whether the idea originated with Sir Bruce Seton, Lord Ripon's secretary, while at the War Office, but in any case that gentleman first broached the proposition to Sir Henry Gordon, the eldest brother of General ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... address, to confine myself to physical investigations in which my success had been assured, rather than encroach on their preserve. I had thus unwittingly strayed into the domain of a new and unfamiliar caste system and so offended its etiquette. An unconscious theological bias was also present which confounds ignorance with faith. It is forgotten that He, who surrounded us with this ever-evolving mystery of creation, the ineffable wonder that lies hidden in the microcosm of the dust ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the ETERNAL and ABSOLUTE laws of our mind, and at the same time by the secondary rules, ordinarily faulty, which are suggested to us by imperfect observation. This is the most fecund source of false prejudices, and the permanent and often invincible cause of a multitude of errors. The bias resulting from these prejudices is so strong that often, even when we are fighting against a principle which our mind thinks false, which is repugnant to our reason, and which our conscience disapproves, we defend it without knowing ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... breath of life of a free society is intelligent public criticism of its institutions and policies. Without this, there can be no change, no progress. But intelligent criticism implies scientific criticism, that is, criticism based upon adequate scientific knowledge and without personal bias. This means the scientific study of institutions and social organization. If the American people are to perfect their institutions, they must maintain and develop their moral freedom; and to maintain true moral freedom, they must encourage the scientific ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... ethics of a police-office translate themselves, insensibly, into the ethics even of religious people. But I tell that sycophantish fanatic—not this only, viz., that he abuses unfairly, against Kate, the advantage which he has from the inevitably distorted bias of society; but also, I tell him this second little thing, viz., that upon turning away the glass from that one obvious aspect of Kate's character, her too fiery disposition to vindicate all rights by violence, and viewing her in relation to general religious capacities, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... tablespoonfuls of flour. Mix all well together and let it stand an hour or more. Sprinkle a pastry board thickly with flour, turn the mixture out from the bowl, cut off pieces of it and roll with the hands until about an inch and a half thick, cut in pieces about two inches long, the ends bias. Have a saucepan ready with boiling water, drop the pieces into this without crowding and cook until they float—about five minutes—take them out with a skimmer. Roll in dried bread crumbs, fry brown on both sides in butter, and serve hot ...
— The Golden Age Cook Book • Henrietta Latham Dwight
... so aptly put it, these good people wish to intend the domination of the ideas of their own time over all the past and into all the future. Marriage seems to them an everlasting institution, a godly regulation, through which they can lend to their individual bias, the dignity of that which is humanly purest and highest. Consequently it also seems to them that the present form of marriage and its accompanying conditions for motherhood, resting as these do on the mutual consent of God and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... pride, joy, hate, greed, melancholy— From any kind of vice, or folly, Bias, propensity or passion That is in prevalence and fashion, Save one, the sufferer or lover May, by the grace of God, recover: Alone that spiritual tetter, The zeal to make creation better, Glows still immedicably warmer. Who knows of a ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... by Otare, himself an 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 they are content ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... conclusion, I feel it is desirable to state that any antecedent bias with regard to Theism which I individually possess is unquestionably on the side of traditional beliefs. It is therefore with the utmost sorrow that I find myself compelled to accept the conclusions ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... propose to discuss the "preparedness" of the State to care for its unfortunates. And I propose to do this without any party bias and without blame upon any particular individual, but in just criticism of ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... the children to study the subject in their histories or in any reference books that may be handy. Help them to get at the truth of the matter. Hawthorne may show prejudice. Does he? We may feel a bias in favor of one side or the other. Do we? Then to the extent of that bias we are liable to be unfair and to fail in making ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... I have no confident judgment of my own. I do not see how any thoughtful man can have who knows anything of the complexity of the problem. It is a problem which must be studied, studied immediately, and studied without bias or prejudice. Nothing can be gained by becoming partisans of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this life—makes it potent—within the individuality of the artist. This so-called 'acquired constitution of the life of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... has also had a long Indian career, and no one suspects him of pro-British bias—rather the reverse. Yet we find him writing to the Times in 1895 about one of the Indian provinces, as follows: "The new Bengali language and literature," he says, "are the direct products of our Law Courts, particularly the High Court at Calcutta, of Mission ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... life!—we bring A bias with us here, And, when here, each new thing Affects us we come near; To tunes we did not call ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... within the limits which he laid down, and within which he confined his reasonings, he used his materials with skill and force; and even those who least agreed with him and were most sensible of the strong and hardly disguised bias which so greatly affected the value of his judgments, could not deny the frankness and the desire to be fair and candid, with which, as far as intention went, he conducted his argument. His first appearance as a writer was in ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... interest at that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them. . . . He was indeed a very wise man, and of great parts, and possessed with the most absolute spirit of popularity, and the most absolute faculties to govern the people, of any ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... close their leaves, men have no occasion to consult the stars for what the clouds and the earth are telling them. You were thinking of Prince Arthur when I introduced myself yesterday, as if musing upon the great events which seem to have received their bias from the apparent accident of ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... only attach to one in every way gifted to test all things to their uttermost, is taken as clear proof, "under unbiased exposition," that the only one who was exactly thus gifted was not the author! The claim to freedom from bias is in almost ludicrous ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... according to the sympathies or the point of view of the critic. His imprisonment and attempted disgrace have been made the theme of indignant comment and of extenuating apology. His moral character and marital relations are subjects of irreconcilable differences of judgment. His deep religious bias, so manifest in nearly all his writings, has been praised as a mark of exalted merit by some writers, and stigmatized by others as cant and superstition. The last resting-place of his bones, even, is in doubt, which it required an elaborate investigation by the Royal Academy of History ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... in Congress, effectually to provide for the same." This he was careful not to offer himself, but, as he says, it was "introduced by Mr. Tyler, an influential member, who, having never served in Congress, had more the ear of the House than those whose services there exposed them to an imputable bias." He adds that "it was so little acceptable that it ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... case are put very clearly, and quite invincibly, by Miss Margaret Macmillan in Infant Mortality. See also The Babies' Tribute to the Modern Moloch, by F. Victor Fisher. (Twentieth Century Press, 1d.) These are small polemical tracts. The case is treated fully, authoritatively and without bias in Infant Mortality by ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... born song-writer would scribble verses on his copy-books and read Racine for his own amusement. Turning his back upon the mill-wheels of his native town and an assured future in a Parisian business house, like Gil Bias's friend, il s'est jete dans le bel esprit—in other words, he betook himself to the career of a troubadour. Never, surely, did master of song-craft write and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... much lower 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 work ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw |
