"Impractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Impractical men have told me that right will always triumph of itself; it needs no fighters to support it. The man who believes that is ignorant, and such ignorance is dangerous. Right is always trampled down when no fighter upholds it. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... in a long silken garment evidently thrown on over her night attire, a little cap of lace and ribbon confining her hair, the most impractical of slippers on her feet, stood smiling at her cousin, sleep still clinging ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... An impractical idealist lives in the silence with beautiful pictures of "how he desires to be when married." When he gets married there isn't a single detail of his daily experience which is like his mental picture. He is sadly disappointed and ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the public and in private generosity. He founded museums, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... that we had to make some arrangement to operate the ships, and we again turned to our competitor, Mr. Mather, in the hope that he would add this to his cares. Unfortunately, because of his obligations to others, he felt that this was impractical. I asked Mr. Gates ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... placing a hand on the deputy's arm. The spirit of his renunciation had been strong within him, but another feeling was stronger still, he found; an ennobling pride in her devotion and trust. What a pity the finer things of life were so often the impractical! He pushed past the ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... had any reason for keeping this a secret, other than your fear of confessing that you violated a few bigoted and idiotic mining rules—which, after all, are binding only upon sentiment—and which your success has proved to be utterly impractical?" ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... his wild notions adopted, and gasped in profound astonishment at the alacrity of his townsmen. Consetena Tate had unwittingly stumbled upon a solution of that "surplus" difficulty. He wasn't thinking of the surplus. He was too utterly impractical for that. He was a tall, gangling, effeminate, romantic, middle-aged man whom his parents still supported and viewed with deference as a superior personality. He was Smyrna's ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... dismissed as impossible or highly impractical his impulse to investigate the eleven-year-old scandal on Flora Hackett, who was now Flora Miles, as told him by Gladys Earle of the Forsyte School. Even more difficult would it be to find out why Janet Raymond's mother had taken her abroad for a year. Of course—he had ruefully told himself—Nita ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... treated as criminals rather than contribute in any way to the shedding of blood even in the defence of their country and themselves; and only the baser among their fellow-men attributed to them any worse motive than impractical idealism. The example of the mother-country was subsequently followed, with more liberal exemptions, by New Zealand and the Dominion of Canada; but Australia, which had long enjoyed compulsory military service for home defence, ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... to the omission of any authority after a cultivar-name. Many cultivars are first described in reports of trials, in catalogues, and other anonymous publications; this makes the quoting of an authority impractical, but there is provision in the Code for writing the raiser's or introducer's name in brackets after the cultivar-name if so desired, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... first chance proved we shall see later. The second was impractical, for the current carried the ice through the strait so fast, that any party trying to cross the floe, would have been carried south to where the strait widened out into Baffin's Bay before they could possibly ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... difficulty. The possibility of the vehicle itself moving occurred to us; but, as I pointed out, the task of replacing their heavy apparatus in it, and then reassembling the apparatus in a new position, made such a step impractical. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... are, in the first place, the get-rich-quick swindles, the out-and-out impostures, which have deceived the credulous into investments that never could pay. Bonanza mines, impractical inventions, town lots laid out on the prairie, orange groves that existed only on paper-such bogus hopes have enticed many an honest man and woman, who could ill afford to lose, into turning over their small earnings to the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... with the demands of the previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... method of putting the propeller-shaft in place. The young boat-builder will readily understand that it would be very impractical merely to bore a hole in the hull of the boat to put the propeller-shaft through. In this way water would surely leak into the hull and the boat would sink in a short time. Some method must be evolved to keep the ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... thought, this was impractical. Parasight was worthless beyond the borders of the null. No surrogate could penetrate it and no weapon would operate within it. It would be most unsafe for any true man to enter. There, one would be subject to gross, physical attack ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... Miss Smith,—just it. Your heart is good, but you need strong practical advice. You know we weak women are so impractical, as my poor Job so often said. Now, I'm going to arrange to endow this school with at least—at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. One condition is that my friend, Mr. Cresswell here, and these other gentlemen, including ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... adventures with an old criminal and his mistress in the first part of the story, and with a harlot in the second, have only occasional and languid interest; it is one of the many books of Dostoevski that one vigorously vows never to read again. The sickly and impractical Ordinov spends most of his time analysing his mental states, and indulging in that ecstasy of thought which is perhaps the most fatal of all Slavonic passions. Soon after appeared a strange and far better novel, called "The Gambler." This story is told in the first person, and contains ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... word for the navy. "It is evident by Captain Blake's own admission, that the proposed venture must fail. It has been evident to some of us from the start." It was a fighter of the old school who was speaking; his voice was that of one whose vision has dimmed, who sees but the dreams of impractical visionaries in the newer inventions, and whose reliance for safety is placed only in the weapons ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... "Impractical, but sensible," commented the ambassador. He turned a page. "There's Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It's technically backward. There's a landing grid, but space exports are skins and metal ingots and practically ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... thought that if I took the example of the Saviour's life for my guiding star, I would certainly get along very well. Undoubtedly this would have sufficed in a spiritual sense, but I found that it would be impractical as applied to my temporal welfare and the requirements of the present time. For I could not perform miracles nor could I live as the Saviour had done, roaming over the country and teaching the natives. And then, seeing that there were so many Jews ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man's hunger for "belief" which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of a more tangible sort remained from the Crusades, when the service of the Holy Sepulchre had become a legend, and the name of Crusade a byeword for whatever enterprises are most impractical and visionary, the answer must be, that they affected Europe chiefly in a negative sense and through indirect channels. They helped to discredit the conception of the Church militant; they relieved Europe of a surplus population ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... that idea it was impractical. He was too far ahead of the times. But to-day, lad, it means that every mine dump in the Cripple Creek region will be worked over again and the gold removed at a trifling expense, for in that tube are the blueprints of the ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... They generally know just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not, for the most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent unusual places. The finespun speculations of the philosophers and the impractical dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the world they live in is a sharply defined and clearly lighted and rather limited place. They like to say to this man come and he cometh, and to that man go and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... All sorts of impractical schemes tormented her feverish brain. She would appeal to the manager of the place. She was a woman. She would understand. She would do any work, anything, for her bare keep. Take care of the rooms, wait on table, anything. Then the thought came to her of how Gertie would gloat to hear—and ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... And, on the other hand, those who take great pride in speaking of their own practicality are many times the least practical. Or again, in some ways they may be practical, but so far as life in its totality is concerned, they are absurdly impractical. ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... follower of Oriental philosophy, a non-resistant, an advocate of woman suffrage, an abolitionist, a vegetarian, and heaven knows what besides. So in the end, he was sold out, and removed with his family to Concord, where he developed into a sort of impractical idealist, holding Orphic conversations and writing scraps of speculation and criticism, and living in ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... romancer. The government gave him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned for debt, and sank into such abject poverty that he depended on his friends for bread. How much the gloomy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... however, where only a few, or possibly only one, of the fingers has sufficient ridge detail for identification. In such instances a search through the FBI files would be impractical. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of making a positive identification by the use of the one finger. Though a search through the file is not possible, a comparison can be made with the fingerprints ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... she has played so many jokes, practical and impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... trailing tones. After giving the subject new points of view, showing him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely radical, so impractical. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... could play Scrooge in Christmas Carol without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got out of college, and that was while the War was still going on. 'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,'" his father mimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't agree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new company Alpha-Interplanetary, we have an application for charter in, and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... had frustrating ways. Sometimes there were hordes of fish. Again they stayed away in large numbers. They were usually present during warm weather when spoilage was worst. The first colonists had no ice at all and very little salt. Frequent spells of damp weather made sun-drying impractical. If more fish were caught than could be eaten at once, the excess was very likely wasted. Fishing gear was consistently inadequate. But from the very first, fishing and its development had been kept in mind by the promoters of ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... time in talking about it," he told the grateful members who sought to press his hands. "Go home and organize. I've got your name. Get your neighbours into line, and keep me informed. I'll pay for the postage-stamps. I'm no impractical reformer, and if we're going to do this thing, we'll have to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... suggestive, comprehensive, and practical. Resolutely avoid all thoughts which are uncertain, recondite, obscure, immature, unimportant, shallow, weak, visionary, absurd, vague, extravagant, indefinite, or impractical. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... to the utter rejection of a law. Sentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of forgiveness an impractical one. Yet we indorse it every time we utter the Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it possible to forgive or not. If this law means the mental flabbiness that sends bouquets to bloody ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... used. The sums expended upon the branches were not spent in vain, for they provided the scholastic foundation of the University in its first years. Nor is the erection of University buildings to be criticized, except as to their impractical character. This defect the experience of a few years was to show, for one of the first acts of Dr. Tappan, when he became President in 1852, was to end the use of the two University buildings as dormitories; while the professors' houses, ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... favor the cause of colonization received from the press, it was an impractical, impossible, wild, and visionary scheme that could not be carried to the extent its projectors designed. It lost strength yearly, until all were convinced that the Negro would be emancipated here and remain here; that it was as impossible to colonize ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... was the first to introduce rifles into Ceylon, which were then regarded by the highest authorities in the island as impractical innovations, too difficult to sight, whereas an ordinary gun could be used with ball more quickly ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... was a great empire of a hundred and eighty million people. They mobilized twenty-five million men. Six million of them are dead. The Czar was overthrown, a new government was set up, one of conservative socialism, and that was swept aside and a group of impractical socialists put in its stead, and where is Russia now? Broken to bits, its population dying of hunger, its industries unworked, its soil untilled, and Germany coming on with her great feet, stamping down the few who are brave enough to interpose themselves between ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... without giving the author any compensation. Gray was soon hit upon as the author. Unfortunately, the success of the poem gave no increased income to the poet. Dodsley, the publisher, is said to have made about a thousand pounds from the various poems of Gray, but Gray had the impractical idea that it was not dignified for a poet to make ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... wares of these magazines which are used for various purposes. Those which are in danger of spoiling shall be distributed by his order; and what shall not be thus disposed of shall not be passed over, at the time, to the royal officials. That ordinance is impractical, for, besides the continual occupations of the governor in affairs of greater importance and his inability to personally supervise things so minute, your Majesty had issued the necessary ordinance before the visit, and I ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... and looked with favor upon laboring men and washerwomen using their hard earned savings to erect costly churches. Why did they look cross-eyed at and frown at the higher education of the Negro, which they said made him impractical, while they smiled and looked with satisfaction at his religion, which they didn't take seriously, but regarded as a dope? Why did they emphasize education and minimize religion for white men, and on the other hand minimize education and emphasize religion ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... with everything else save the unique gun his famous brother had made for him. Why he should wish for a flint-lock rifle was an unanswerable question, but someone wanted that sort of a gun or it would not have been made, and my father's letters showed him to be a man of sentiment, and impractical, just the sort of fellow to use a flint-lock when he might just as well have had a ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... Sprague was powerless. The freebooters listened sedately to his protests and redoubled their offending, well aware that in their candidate's chamber politics could have yet no place. Far from the turmoil, the celebrity ate the jellies of his idolaters, and spent his waking hours in the impractical companionship of a certain Shelley and ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the work of a politician and man of business, a London banker, a Radical M. P., whose devotion to ancient history and literature forms the most illustrious confutation of the charges brought against such studies as being useless and impractical." ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... his speech the other night so heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Arquebus to Our Rifle 3. Progressive Introduction of Fire-Arms Into the Armament of the Infantryman 4. The Classes of Fire Employed with Each Weapon 5. Methods of Fire Used in the Presence of the Enemy; Methods Recommended or Ordered but Impractical 6. Fire at Will—Its Efficacy 7. Fire by Rank Is a Fire to Occupy the Men in Ranks 8. The Deadly Fire Is the Fire of Skirmishers 9. The Absolute ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... put in Mr. Heath's heavy voice again, "I tell you, Dave, it can't be done. It's impractical. Why, no car ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... yet he was hungry. He could not understand it. No doubt an empty stomach inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws. There comes with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason, and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... that impractical librarian," she declared. "Why did Dorothy marry him? She might have known what the result ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... idea abandoned at the very moment of its birth. It's a good idea, and in no way impractical, in my opinion. So permit me to make another proposition. I will build the twenty theatres myself, and furnish the films for them, provided the young ladies will agree to assume the entire management of them when they ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... are fondly called "Boston types." There is the professor from Cambridge, a gentleman with a pointed beard and a noticeably cultivated enunciation; one from Wellesley—this, a lady—with that keen and paradoxically impractical expression which marks pure intellectuality; an alert matron, plainly, almost shabbily, dressed (aristocratic Boston still scorns sartorial smartness); a very well-bred young girl with bone spectacles; a student, shabby, like the Back Bay matron, but for another reason; ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... those delicious days that followed, I wandered down Sixth Avenue to New York's then most correct shops, buying clothes and clothes and clothes. I bought practical and impractical gifts for the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good friends who had helped ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... "Yes, it seemed very impractical to business men. When you have to build up a factory system from the machinery itself, you have something gigantic on your hands. And that is the task on which Mr. Dennison and Mr. Howard embarked. I suppose nobody will ever appreciate the trials those dauntless pioneers went through. Four years ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... defenders of property who look upon the Church as impractical; who consider the Golden Rule as something all right for the minister to talk about on Sundays, but something useless to try to follow during the week. Those men criticize the Church for preaching love, for talking the Sermon on the Mount, ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... entered largely into the making of print-paper in England. Mixed with rags it makes an excellent product, but the chemicals required to free it from resin and gritty silica are expensive, while the cost of importation has rendered its use in America impractical. Flax, hemp, manila, jute and straw, and of course old paper that has been once used, are extensively employed in this manufacture, the process beginning with the chemical treatment and boiling that ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... we had just moved to Venice," he said, still dazed at the amount of carved fire screens, tapestries, dim, impractical candlelights, and soft-eyed Madonnas which smiled at him ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... nature of a leasehold upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than any other of its treasures. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... lands. The fact is there is a side to agriculture that I knew almost nothing about as a so-called practical farmer, and I am coming to believe that what we commonly call practical farming is often the most impractical farming,—certainly this is true if it ultimately results in depleted and abandoned lands. The truly practical farmer is the man who knows not only how to do, but also what to do and why he does it. The Simplon ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... attitude of a supposedly conservative Englishman of recognised ability, he was tried almost beyond endurance. For the next two or three days the newspapers printed caustic contributions from fellow architects and builders, in each of which the luckless Medcroft was taken to task for advocating an impractical and fatuous New York hobby in the way of construction,—something that staid old London would not even tolerate or discuss. The social chroniclings of the Medcrofts in Vienna, as despatched by the correspondents, offset ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... Superintendent. "She's too young and full of ideals to have anything so ordinary as a romance. Everybody," his laugh was not too pleasant, "can have a romance! And few people can be so filled with ideals as Miss Thompson. Oh, it's her ideals that I can't stand! It's her impractical way of gazing at life through pink-coloured glasses. She'll never be of any real use here in the slums. I'm only afraid that she'll come to some harm because she's so trusting and over-sincere. I'd hate to see her placed in direct contact with some of the young men ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... they offered him little aid in his difficulties. Having farmed all their lives and been content with the meager results they had obtained, they shrugged their shoulders at Martin's experiments with irrigation and fertilizer, regarding his attempts as the impractical theories of a fanatic. Of youth, Sefton Falls contained only a scattering, the more enterprising young men having gone either to the city ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... bloodshed; it was guarded by the Royalist Cossack clans, as lawless as they are brave. The Ufa Directorate derived its authority from the moderate Social Revolutionary party composed of the "Intelligenzia"—republican, visionary, and impractical. Kerensky was, from all accounts, a perfect representative of this class, verbose and useless so far as practical reconstructive work was concerned. This class blamed the unswerving loyalty of the Cossacks and the old army officers ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... climate, I began to wonder about complete food self-sufficiency. How did the early pioneers irrigate their vegetables? There probably aren't more than a thousand homestead sites in the entire maritime Northwest with gravity water. Hand pumping into hand-carried buckets is impractical and extremely tedious. Wind-powered pumps are expensive ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... on the white plain to serve the present, and temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had collected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical, speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions. Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office and shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the best that is found in brain, enterprise and ability and should have every possible aid and cooperation. Furthermore it should be protected from impractical promoters, impractical ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... the teaching of the Old Philosopher was its extremely impractical character, its unsuitability to the needs of men and women engaged in the ordinary avocations of life. In one sense he was an Anarchist, for he held that the empire would fare better if there were no government at all, the fact being that violence and disorder had always been conspicuous ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... International, in order that Eccarius, Liebknecht, and others might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... might perhaps to the reader appear an impractical ideal, I would propose here to attempt to reach it by explaining the logical method which I ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... his theories, and impractical as were many of his ideas, to an age tired of absurdities and pretensions and injustice, and suffering deeply from the abuses of both Church and State, his attractively written book seemed almost inspired. The Social Contract virtually became the Bible ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... their own rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... should study several people to ascertain how well those people have their experience organized. Is their experience available? Can they come to the point immediately, or, are they hazy, uncertain, and impractical? ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... the heat of the greatest of all battles. Woman asks for the suffrage. The world answers, "impractical." We are told that this movement is quite different from all others because there is an organized opposition of women themselves against it, but the "remonstrant" is not new. This century has witnessed ten generations ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... educated and enterprising, the leaders of their race. Why? Let the facts answer. I have already said that the Church strove to continue after the war the same method of dealing with the negroes as before. She tried to keep the races together; but she has found it impractical, that impracticability growing more and more clear as the years have run on. The races have been steadily drifting apart in all social or semi-social life; the better class of each race is coming less and less into ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... with these cutthroats, and you certainly can't venture into the jungle with me; yet someone must go in search of your father. He is more than apt to wandering off aimlessly, regardless of danger or direction, and Mr. Philander is only a trifle less impractical than he. You will pardon my bluntness, but our lives are all in jeopardy here, and when we get your father back something must be done to impress upon him the dangers to which he exposes you as well as himself by ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... only or chiefly, repose, lightness, facility, elasticity, graceful, delicate playing, and a fine touch. It is necessary to play such music after those brilliant qualities have already been, to a certain degree, acquired by mere studies and appropriate pieces. It is, however, still more foolish and impractical, when parents (who perhaps are skilful musicians, but who have no recollection of their own youth) hold the mistaken opinion that their children ought, from the very beginning, to practise and play only fine classical ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... but a bee would overestimate human beings like that? Your Miss Cassandra, or whatever her name is, doesn't know her history. Those cities and towers and other human devices you speak of are none of them any good to us. Who would take such an impractical view of the world as you do? If you don't accept the premise that the earth is dominated by the flies, that the flies are the most widespread and most important race on earth, you'll scarcely get a real knowledge ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... sick of this hateful alliance Which the ladies have form'd with impractical Science! They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics, And give themselves airs for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... halted at a junction, where a troop-train from the Front was already at a standstill. Tommies in steel helmets and muddied to the eyes were swarming out onto the tracks. They looked terrible men with their tanned cheeks and haggard eyes. I felt how impractical I was as I watched them—how ill-suited for campaigning. They were making the most of their respite from travelling. Some were building little fires between the ties to do their cooking—their utensils were bayonets and old tomato cans; others were collecting water from the exhaust of ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... years went by in the period of Alvin's boyhood when no school was held that he could attend. The school term was only for three months, beginning early in July. It was found impractical to hold sessions in the winter, for many of the children lived long distances away and the branches from the mountain springs that crossed the roadways and fed the River Wolf, would go on rampages that could hold the pupils water-bound over night. The schools ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... that joyous stage-coach journey of young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he describes in "Roughing It." Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... important preventive discovery since vaccination, the mosquito dogma, the Crescent City marshaled her defenses. This time there was no panic, no mob-rule of terrified thousands, no mad rushing from stunned inertia to wildly impractical action; but instead the enlistment of the whole city in an army of sanitation. Every citizen became a soldier of the public health. And when, long before the plague-killing frost came, the battle was over, New Orleans had triumphed not only in the most brilliant ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... nutrient composition to blood meal, leather dust, feather meal, or meat meal (tankage). It is a powerful source of nitrogen with significant amounts of phosphorus. Like other slaughterhouse byproducts its high cost may make it impractical to use to adjust the C/N of compost piles. Seed meals or chicken manure (chickens are mainly fed seeds) have somewhat lower nitrogen contents than animal byproducts but their price per pound of actual nutrition is more ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... disregarded altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... son—heavily enough punished—did not prevent her from loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... school of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that unless he would devote himself entirely to the improvement ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... the romantic, impractical farmers!" ejaculated Neil Chase, as he beheld this arrangement at close range, the table set with old blue-and-white china, a great bowl of Sally's old-fashioned pink roses in the centre. "Don't you know that ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... the far side of the hut awaiting she knew not what impending fate. She could not sleep so filled was her mind with wild schemes of escape though each new one must always be discarded as impractical. Half an hour after the warrior had returned her to her prison he rose and entered the hut, where he tried to engage in conversation with her. Groping across the interior he leaned his short spear against the wall and sat down beside her, and as he talked he edged closer and closer until at last ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... since his visionary scheme for the wholeness of life was so out of touch with the jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the larger vision that underlay The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is now merely a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated, as seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved to be of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave them their point in Dury's own day, his ideas have become the accepted standards of modern librarianship. Dury himself would not have been heartened by his secular acceptance: ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... you thought how impractical the machine must prove to be? The world is after all as it is. Suppose a man, a poor young man, has a rare gift. He must eat to live; he may have to support others. How is he going to ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... elements or divisions of psychological study as determined by a consensus of psychologists, and to illustrate each in turn from the three types of management; but the results from any such method would be apt to seem unrelated and impractical, i.e., it would be a lengthy process to get results that would be of immediate, practical use ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... small amount by steaming instead of boiling the vegetable, or any drained off can be used in gravy, soup, sauce, or some similar fashion. The strong flavor of some vegetables, however, makes such economy rather impractical. ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... the chair). I should not go that far. He had already freed himself, but did not know in what direction to move. He was still groping. He might have followed an utterly wrong course, might have fooled away his time with literature and impractical things like that. His rescue from all that was my work. I guided him! You know he was a pupil of my father. When we became acquainted, I had no difficulty in showering things upon him. You see I had spent my whole ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... impractical! Wholly a back-eddy in the forward-moving current. You can't go back of a world-wide movement. Things are too complicated now for everybody to do his share of anything. It's as reasonable, as to suggest that everybody do his share of watchmaking, or fancy juggling. Every man ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of such a thing," went on the repressed voice, "not even when at first you were slow to give your consent to our marriage. I fancied it was merely because you thought me impractical, because I cared nothing for a life that was different, was not my own. Nor again, even a bit ago when you asked me to promise—what I did promise—I did not suspicion such a thing. I thought it a compliment, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... the pyramids. When they had finished here they might want to look over the country around what is now Bagdad, but then only near the capital city of Nebuchadnezzar's empire. This is about eight hundred miles away, an impractical trip by helicopter, so they would return to the platform, climb to a few hundred thousand feet, and scoot over in a few minutes. Here they would land again in some uninhabited spot and repeat the maneuver. This country was probably sprinkled with more people than they ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton
... while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage engine, where compactness ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... bleed to state, was of an impractical, pensive turn. He despised industry, scoffed at Sunday-schooling, set up a private standard of morals, and rebelled against natural authority. He wouldn't be a dutiful son—not for money! He had no natural affections, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... begin with, that a home on the forty-eighth story of the tower was entirely impractical, since it would mean that most of their time would have to be used in laborious climbing, they quickly changed ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... energetic September, succeeded in putting all the furniture to rights and in evoking curtains and linen. Anybody, even the impractical Father, can fill a house with furniture, but it takes two women and at least four weeks to make the furniture look as though it had grown there. She had roamed the fields, and brought home golden-rod and ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... dinner at noon is often very inconvenient and sometimes impossible, because frequently one or more members of the family are at business some distance from home and their coming home at noon for dinner is impractical. In such an event, the evening meal should be the heavy one, but it should not be made too hearty and ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... your fellow passengers. How can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary. Things don't work out as happily as that in ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of Montgomery upon the newly arrived was rather pleasing, with a something rather provincial, quite in keeping with its location inland. Streets, various in length, uncertain in direction and impractical as to pavement, ran into Main street at many points; and most of them were closely built with pretty houses, all of them surrounded by gardens and many by handsome grounds. Equidistant from the end of Main street and from each other, stood, in these cradle days, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... semi-Indian costume with their powder-horns slung from their shoulders and long sheath-knives in their beaded belts. One after the other they addressed the crowd and each gave it as his opinion that the short cut was impractical. The country ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... to admit it, there are engineers who are not capable and who yet occupy positions of great responsibility. The young engineer, fresh from college and a bit puzzled as to the game as a whole, if he accept a connection under an engineer, for instance, whose inventive ideas are impractical, will unwittingly absorb such a man's viewpoint on construction, and so spoil himself as an engineer for all time to come. Cases like this are not rare. The writer personally knows of more than one young man who enlisted under an engineer whose ideas on administration ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... for removing carbon deposits from gas engine cylinders were very impractical and unsatisfactory. The job meant dismantling the motor, tearing out all parts, and scraping the pistons ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... surroundings, where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... why every attempt to settle them on a purely economic basis leads to conditions more confused than those from which we have emerged. The so-called purely economic basis is the basis where only Mammon's laws are considered, and God's are held to be impractical. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of by-gone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... They know about the thing, and I've got to finish it—or furnish definite proof it's impractical." He turned back to the desk. "Should be through with the other band in a few minutes. Just have to put in a couple ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her. Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and achieve a shining and ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... that the horse moved to a definite goal. Where the prairie lay smooth he kept his course straight as an arrow's toward the east. Deflected by hill or arroyo or impractical spinous brakes, he quickly flowed again into the current, charted by his unerring instinct. At last, upon the side of a gentle rise, he suddenly subsided to a complacent walk. A stone's cast away stood a little mott of coma trees; beneath it a jacal ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... directions in braces such as {MICIO and DEMEA apart.} were added by the transcriber where the original format was impractical. ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... compared to the man who would advocate Confiscation. They have nothing to fear from the anarchist, except a stray bomb now and then, for they know full well that the "plain" people will always stand between them and that wild-eyed dreamer of the impractical. ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... The impractical cooperative which fails is bad enough, for it discourages many people from making a second attempt, but the false cooperative is a greater menace to the cooperative movement. The private promoter with his selfish interests rigs up ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... b. at Berlin, Conn., was a precocious child, and a morbid and impractical, though versatile man, with a fatal facility in writing verse on all manner of subjects and in nearly every known metre. His sentimentalism appealed to a wide circle, but his was one of the tapers which were extinguished by Lowell. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... lives and sacrifice their wives. These men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. They could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece—modest ones—on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. Professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things in their ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of Lockwin that he was impractical; that he was a dreamer. He had done singular things. He had not studied ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... been waiting for some sign of the "crank," the impractical dreamer. She was confident that this question would reveal the man she had been warned against—that in answering it he would betray his true self. But he disappointed ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... guidance by the highest and best, by conviction with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. For most of us, the best education is that which makes us the best and most obedient servants. This is the way of peace and the way of nature, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the hardship, for he carried on his back a bulky bundle of clothes for Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... discovered. This one, it appeared, was unusual only in that she had adopted a particularly exacting form of charitable work. Nursing, even as a rich woman's diversion, must be anything but agreeable. O'Reilly pictured this Evans person in his mind—a large, plain, elderly creature, obsessed with impractical ideas of uplifting the masses! She would undoubtedly bore him stiff with stories of her work: she would reproach him with neglect of his duties to the suffering. Johnnie was too poor to be charitable and too deeply engrossed at ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed to handle, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty, if it be bewildered or thwarted by an ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Lady Boyle being old and infirm. Ah, but your talking friend would interest you, and you might accept the talk in infinitesimal doses, you know. Lamartine has surely acted down the fallacy of the impractical tendencies of imaginative men. I am full of France just now. Are you all prepared for an outbreak in Ireland? I hope so. My husband has the second edition of his collected poems[174] in the press by this time, by grace of Chapman and Hall, who accept all risks. You speak of Tennyson's vexation about ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... little fishing village viewed the vanguard of the ex-soldiers with sullen indifference. Silvanus Rock had told them not to worry their heads over the "efforts of an impractical dreamer to turn the town upside down." And who knew, if Rock didn't? As the days went by, however, and the invasion became more noticeable, the alien element of the fishing colony began to experience a feeling of sharp resentment ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make sure ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... truly for the kindness which you have shown to B. He is in many things somewhat awkward, impractical—and almost looks as though he could not devote himself to any productive and consistently carried-out form of activity. None the less is there in him a certain capacity and worth which, in a somewhat more regular position than he has yet been able ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... whom Tony had always adored and admired extravagantly. Just visiting her had always been like taking a trip to fairy land and to live with her—well, it would be just too wonderful, Tony thought. But Doctor Holiday had vetoed decidedly both these pleasant and impractical propositions. Tony was far too young and pretty to live alone. That was out of the question. And he was scarcely more willing that she should go to Mrs. Norman, though he liked the latter very well and was glad that his niece would have her to go to in any emergency. He knew Tony, ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... than Mr. Blackstone and Lord Coke. I have seen a murder in the law that was, in fact, only a kind of awful accident, and I have seen your catalogue of crimes gone about by feeble men with no intent except an adjustment of their rights. Their crimes, Lewis, were merely errors of their impractical judgment." ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... believe these strange, impractical, unnatural beliefs, because of the sincerity of others. It's better to do, and to be the thing we can ourselves measure, understand ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... and scorn, was he wise in the remedies he proposed. Only God can overrule the wrath of man, and cause melodious birth-songs to succeed the agonies of dissolution. Burke saw the absurdity of sophistical theories and impractical equality,—liberty running into license, and license running into crime; he saw pretensions, quackeries, inexperience, folly, and cruelty, and he prophesied what their legitimate effect would be: but he did not see ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... "That's about what I'd expected," he said. "I suppose Gomes got his data out of one of the dustier storage-stacks at Jan Smuts or Montevideo, in the first place.... Well, I still want that bomb finished by yesterday afternoon, but since that's impractical, you'll have to take a little—but ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... Some of my friends secured that old unused van and wished to make the attempt. But I considered it impractical without the concurrence of a number of unusual circumstances. However, I found it useful to carry out that attempted escape and give it the widest publicity. An audaciously planned escape, though not completed, gave to the succeeding one the character of reality ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... afternoon enabled him, he thought, to translate that look. The Eliot woman, in her speech before the Woman's Forum, had doubtless placed the responsibility for the continuation of those factory conditions upon the district attorney's office, had doubtless repeated those damn fool, impractical questions which the suffragists were ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... in use at this time among the Japanese were far less seaworthy than those of European nations. The accompanying figures given by Charlevoix, although probably somewhat fanciful, show the impractical character of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... promptly sends a vigorous though respectful reply, which is intended to convey that they are to have done with such impractical foolery. It is a world-shaking fight he has on hand. The honour and military glory of France are at stake. It is not for mere theoretic upholders of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity to meddle with such ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... in the gutter says, "I'll never reach it." And he is right. He never will—of himself, alone. Yet that's truth, true truth. "A hopeless case" you say; "utter impractical idealizing! Case ruled out of court." Just wait, that's only half the case, and not ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon |
