"Incompetent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... body, and disposition, and had perfect teaching from infancy, that person could do nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows a person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and then puts this person into the hands of teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... expressed surprise and asked her why. "When our daughters are taken into the palace," answered the mother, "they are dead to us until they are twenty-five, when they are allowed to return home. If they are incompetent or dull they are often severely punished. They may contract disease and die, and their death is not even announced to us; while if they prove themselves efficient and win the approval of the authorities they are retained in the ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... important Situations under the Russian Government, and who is far advanced in years, has neither time, inclination, nor eyesight for the task, and I am apprehensive that my strength and powers unassisted are incompetent to it' (praised be the Lord, they were not!), 'therefore I should be glad to return home. Moreover, the compositors say they are unaccustomed to compose in an unknown tongue from such scribbled and illegible copy, and they will scarcely assist me to compose. Moreover, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... and the establishment of a line of forts and block-houses, dispersed along a considerable extent of country, and occupied by detachments of British colonial troops, or by militiamen. All these were utterly incompetent to effect security; partly from the circumstances of the case, and somewhat from the entire want of discipline, and the absence of that subordination which is absolutely necessary ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... were discharged because you were incompetent, because you were getting money you didn't earn and because you were trying to persuade others to be as worthless and useless as yourselves. You were ordered ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... was successful, and the Emperor Maurice was murdered, together with his sons. Maurice had been unsuccessful in war, unpopular with the army, and his financial measures had been oppressive. Phocas was utterly incompetent as a ruler, licentious and sanguinary as a man. His reign was a period ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... first cause of injury which at first presented itself. Mr. Lincoln had cause to know that in the beginning, even in the South itself, secession was only the work of a turbulent minority. 'To have yielded would have been to have written himself down before the world as incompetent—nay, as a traitor to the cause which he had just sworn to defend.' In short, we were misunderstood—painfully so—and it is not a matter of indifference to learn that at last there is a reaction of intelligence in our favor, and that light is breaking through the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... infecting our parliamentary system have grown still graver; when a democratic House, more and more broken up into small groups, more and more governed by sectional and interested motives, shall have shown itself evidently incompetent to conduct the business of the country with honour, efficiency, and safety; when the public has learned more fully the enormous danger to national prosperity as well as individual happiness of dissociating power from property ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... upon false principles, upheld by obstinacy, folly, and error, and tending to inevitable ruin; that new men and new measures must be adopted before we could hope for success in war, or honour and security in peace; that as ministers had shown themselves incompetent to the management of the war when they only had the Americans to contend with, it was not to be expected that they would be able to contend with the united arms of France and America; and that they would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... bought a certain quantity of reprints from a bookseller in Chancery Lane, Pickering by name. I urged him to print the controversy between Greene and the Harveys. He wished me to write a third part to a fine edition of Cotton's Angler, for which I am quite incompetent.[212] ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... in possession of London bureau are incompetent to establish guilty connivance of either Lanier in any crime except those assaults on the Dodges ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... better than any one else in the world, noted her afresh, inwardly and outwardly, with the result that she desired more than ever to know the man who had been hardy enough to place his life's happiness in the hollow of Evelyn's clinging, incompetent hands. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... competent to bear, and as the engines ran at a slow speed, they developed but a small amount of horse-power in relation to their size. Moreover, as in the land engine, the connection between the parts of the marine engine was such as to be incompetent to stand the strain that would come upon it if a higher pressure, with a considerable expansion, were used, and thus the consumption of coal was very heavy; and we know that, having regard to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... the sophistry of the presumptuous sciolist. Is it true, that this notion prevails universally among the human race? Let him answer to this. He must admit it;—let him then explain it, if he can. Reason, he will say, is incompetent to the task.—Admitted. But so is it to many other tasks—it cannot, for instance, solve the question, why we believe the sun will rise to-morrow and dispel the darkness now cloaking over the horizon? The hope that it will do so, is nevertheless very natural. Who shall say ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... people into waiting expectantly any longer. While I was under age they trustfully gave me credit; it is sad to disappoint them now that I am on the verge of thirty. But what am I to do? Words of wisdom will not come! I am utterly incompetent to provide things that may profit the multitude. Beyond a snatch of song, some tittle-tattle, a little merry fooling, I have been unable to advance. And as the result, those who held high hopes will ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... for one, am not afraid to be open and speak my mind. If the place is going to the dogs because of it's being continually in a state of disorder, then the fault lies with the prefects." (Sensation.) "They're the ones who ought to check it, and if they are incompetent, and can't do their duty, it's no excuse for their trying to shift the blame on to fellows who are innocent, but who happen to stand ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... his eyes closed in pain. All they felt he felt. What their homes were to them, these fellaheen, dragged forth to defend their country, to go into the desert and waste their lives under leaders tyrannous, cruel, and incompetent, his old open life, his innocence, his integrity, his truthfulness and character, were to him. By an impulsive act, by a rash blow, he had asserted his humanity; but he had killed his fellow-man in anger. He knew that as that fatal blow had been delivered, there was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the mark and oscillate beyond its place of equilibrium to and fro. Any medium possessing these two properties can transmit waves, and unless a medium possesses these properties in some form or other, or some equivalent for them, it may be said with moderate security to be incompetent to transmit waves. But if we make this latter statement, one must be prepared to extend to the terms elasticity and inertia their very largest and broadest signification, so as to include any possible kind of restoring force and any possible kind ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... the war, the truce having now expired, Cleon was sent with a fleet of thirty ships to conduct the siege of this important place. That so weighty a charge should have been entrusted to hands so incompetent argues a degree of infatuation in the Athenians which is very hard to understand. On his voyage Cleon succeeded in retaking Torone by a sudden assault, and then proceeding northwards dropped anchor at Eion, where he remained inactive, after despatching messengers to Perdiccas, and to a friendly ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... from George—to be breaking in on that imaginative vision of him, and his life in the trenches, which while it tortured her, yet filled the blank of his absence. So Bridget did it all—corresponded peremptorily with their rather old and incompetent trustee, got all the signatures necessary out of Nelly, and carried the thing through. Again, on another and smaller occasion, Miss Martin had seen the two sisters confronted with a scandalous overcharge for the carriage of some heavy luggage from Manchester. Nelly was aghast; but ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of immorality, should forfeit their privileges. The power of selection of inmates was vested in the trustees, assisted by the vicar and churchwardens of the parish; a clause being added, that, in case of the trustees being incompetent, by reason of infancy or idiocy, the vicar and churchwardens should select. The weekly allowance to the inmates ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... are told that 13 per cent. of all men examined were excluded as unfit for military service. We are now told that 31 per cent. are found to be unfit. Nearly one-third of the young men found physically incompetent to be soldiers! From what cause? Certainly tobacco must bear a large share ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... or of a bustling, energetic Jenny wren, that "looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness." She is a flabby, spineless bundle of flesh and pretty feathers, gentle and refined in manners, but slack and incompetent in all she does. Her nest consists of few loose sticks. without rim or lining; and when her two babies emerge from the white eggs, that somehow do not fall through or roll out of the rickety lattice, their tender little naked bodies must suffer from many bruises. We are almost inclined to ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... voyage and journal: Our pilot proved incompetent, and we narrowly escaped shipwreck in consequence at Martin Garcia Bar, a bad spot in the River Plate. A small schooner captain, observing that we needlessly followed in his track, and being anything but a sailor in principle, wantonly meditated mischief ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... came next morning with a black, extravasated eye, which he bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Universe, and in the harmony and fitness of all its parts, the hand of a great contriver. It may conclude upon attributes, as belonging to the same. It may see the fitness of virtue, and deduce from thence a speculative morality. They only say that it, is incompetent to spiritual discernment. But though they believe the two spirits to be thus distinct in their powers, they believe them, I apprehend, to be so far connected in religion that the spirit of God can only act upon a reasonable being. Thus light ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... the war in Africa; Solomon is slain in battle against them; Sergius, his successor, is incompetent. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so damned incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood. "You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to go about talking as if the rest of Ireland ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... while at the same time the armies of Radetzky and Windischgraetz were stamping out every trace of (p. 455) insurrection in Lombardo-Venetia, in Bohemia, and eventually in Vienna itself. December 2, 1848, the easy-going, incompetent Emperor Ferdinand was induced by the reactionaries to abdicate. His brother, Francis Charles, the heir-presumptive, renounced his claim to the throne, and the crown devolved upon the late Emperor's youthful ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... espoused her cause, and a conspiracy was formed to deliver her, assassinate Elizabeth, and restore the Catholic religion. From the fact that Mary was privy to that part of it which concerned her own deliverance, she was brought to trial as a criminal, found guilty by a court incompetent to sit on her case, and executed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... him upon some subject, and feeling himself as yet incompetent to carry into practice what he had heard, used to be apprehensive only lest he ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... either method may fail in the hands of incompetent or indolent men, and either may be thought to succeed by those whose taste or prejudices are obstinate in its favor. All that I contend for, in advocating unwritten discourse, is, that this method claims a decided superiority over the others in some ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... despises the man to whose merry insolence he submits. But the young Repentigny felt for Vergor such contempt as only an incompetent officer inspires. ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... in Mrs. Majendie's drawing-room, she had no impulse to wound her mortally. Her instinct was rather to patronise and pity, to unfold the long result of a superior experience, to instruct this woman who was so incompetent to deal with men, who had spoiled, stupidly, her husband's life and her own. In that moment Sarah contemplated nothing more outrageous than a little straight talk ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... in, the seaman himself. It is a defect of the system they live under, the responsibility for which must rest with those whose duty it is to train them. It often happens that those who declaim so cynically against the shortcomings of the present-day sailor are incompetent to make a suitable selection of captains and officers who may be entrusted with the task of establishing proper discipline and training aboard their vessels. Very frequently the seamen are blamed when the captain and officers ought to be held responsible. If ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Wilfrid was perhaps incompetent to test the truth of this profound aphoristic remark, delivered with the simplicity of natural conviction. The narrative had, to his thinking, quite released from him his temporary subjection to this little lady's sway. All that he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of children rests squarely upon those who have assumed the responsibility of bringing them into the world, and it cannot be rightly pushed off on to some one else. To the protest of parents that they are incompetent to conduct such training, the only possible reply is a blunt, "Whose fault is that?" If you have been so careless of the fundamental responsibilities of life, you are incompetent to assume a relation which of necessity carries such responsibility with it. It is no ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... This passed away in a few weeks, but the decline of his health, which was attributed to his rapid growth, dates from that period. He died prematurely on July 22, 1832, at Schoenbrunn, and the accounts which may be relied upon indicate either wilfully careless or incompetent medical treatment. It is even asserted that this heir to the throne of France, ushered in twenty-one years before as the herald of Peace, was to be regarded as a source of infinite danger, and for that barbaric reason his health ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Holland, commanding the Royalist troops, conceived the idea of a rising near London. There was to be a horse-race on Banstead Downs, to draw the people together, and he was to lead them. Unhappily for his followers, he was a thoroughly incompetent soldier. He hoisted his standard at Kingston, and marched through Dorking to Reigate, where he held the castle and posted his vedettes on Red Hill. Sir Michael Livesey, commanding some Kentish horse for the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... tide of the Delaware produced heavy crops of grain, as well as pasture for cattle and valuable lumber from its forests. The Pennsylvania settlers were of a class particularly skilled in dealing with the soil. They apparently encountered none of the difficulties, due probably to incompetent farming, which beset the settlers of Delaware, whose land was as good as that ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... a failure. Never was the lot of the workers worse than it is now. "Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunken, your incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties. The salient characteristic of your civilisation is its irresponsibility. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... mysterious affairs of Monday night, including the views and theories of well-known citizens. It also took occasion to "lambast" Constable Foss with great severity. The Constable, being a Republican, (and not a subscriber to the Sun), was described as about the most incompetent official Windomville had ever known, and that it would have been quite possible for the miscreant or miscreants to have poisoned every dog in town, in broad daylight, accompanied by a brass band, without ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... madam, you are Lady Camper, and you command me. I cannot be more precise. In fact, it is the feeling of the necessity for keeping close to the business that destroys what I would say. I am in fact lamentably incompetent to conduct my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist, it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural selection. Since the development ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... and I think I can say that if she judges the match in question opposed to the pride inspired by the first ideas of her education, no persuasion can move her. She possesses to a very marked degree the confident obstinacy of feeble and timid spirits. She does not dare to dismiss an incompetent footman; and when she has once made up her mind, which is only possible in matters about which her opinions are rigidly formed, neither force nor persuasion can modify her. That is my reading of her character, and I think it the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... there among men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real. How often have we seen them, David, jostled and ridiculed by their fellows, pushed aside and forgotten, as incompetent or unworthy. He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob, who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... hundredweight of pork, pasture for a cow, and two hundred pounds of common flour. He also had the right to be absent from the plantation half a day in every month. He did not use these vacations to good advantage, for he was a drunken incompetent and tried Washington's patience sorely. Washington frequently threatened to dismiss him and as often relented and Green finally, in 1794, quit of his own accord, though Washington thereafter had ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... opinion the present Legislature will go down in history as the most incompetent body of lawmakers that ever sat in the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... teacher say that a child is stupid, my first instinctive conclusion is either that the child has adenoids, or that the teacher is incompetent." ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... samples, it is proper to conclude that the causes commonly to be assigned to poverty are both subjective and objective, or individual and social. It was formerly customary to throw most of the blame on the poor themselves, to charge them with being lazy, intemperate, vicious, and generally incompetent, and it is useless to deny that these appear to be the direct causes in great numbers of instances, but as much of the negro and poor white trash in the South was found to be due to hookworm infection, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... responsibility.] Now this system, in depriving the mayor of power, deprived him of responsibility, and left the responsibility nowhere in particular. In making appointments the mayor and council would come to some sort of compromise with each other and exchange favours. Perhaps for private reasons incompetent or dishonest officers would get appointed, and if the citizens ventured to complain the mayor would say that he appointed as good men as the council could be induced to confirm, and the council would declare their willingness to confirm good appointments if the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... Works build several bridges of insufficient capacity in order to find out the necessary dimensions and strength of one which will serve their purpose, we should at once regard them incompetent and wasteful. I know of tile which have been taken up at three different times, larger tile being used each time. This farmer discards the use of lateral drains and rests his success upon single lines of large tile. He will probably be disappointed ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... she said. "I see no cause to be ashamed. If my husband is mad I shall at least do my utmost to prevent the consequences. Picture to yourself, Monsieur and Madame," she went on, for she passed Stubbs over, "that this wretched person - a dauber, an incompetent, not fit to be a sign-painter - receives this morning an admirable offer from an uncle - an uncle of my own, my mother's brother, and tenderly beloved - of a clerkship with nearly a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and that ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of view. If we were considering the life of some commercial or industrial community and trying to forecast its future development, one of the first things we should note would be its general business methods. No manufacturing concern with a defective office administration and incompetent travellers could survive, even if it had an Archimedes or an Edison in supreme control. I cannot see any reason why an agricultural community should expect to prosper while the industry by which ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... followed me, and I supposed that as her aunt had neglected to suggest that I should take a look at my quarters it was her purpose to repair the omission. But she made no such suggestion; she only stood there with a dim, though not a languid smile, and with an effect of irresponsible, incompetent youth which was almost comically at variance with the faded facts of her person. She was not infirm, like her aunt, but she struck me as still more helpless, because her inefficiency was spiritual, which was not the case with Miss Bordereau's. I waited to see ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... of Peers is occupied with the trial of Marshall Ney, the Conseil de Guerre, which was ordered to assemble for that purpose having declared itself incompetent. The friends of Ney advised him to claim the protection of the 12th Article of the Capitulation of Paris, and Madame Ney, it is said, applied both to the Duke of Wellington and to the Emperor of Russia; both ungenerously refused; to the former Nature has not given a heart ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... a chair and struck a bell. A tall, slightly stooped English servant, with correct side whiskers and incompetent, watery blue eyes, answered. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... anxious to find something "worth doing," therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses, with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see no advantages ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... on the average will be sufficiently burdensome to seriously threaten the permanence of the institution. Where disaster has been visited upon assessment companies, the cause has been easily traceable to incompetent or dishonest conduct of the business, and utter disregard of the foundation principles of all insurance. It has in no instance been fairly chargeable to defects in the system. With the record before us of our best assessment companies, faithfully and competently administered, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... add that the injured husband has been married before and that his first wife, honestly supposed to be dead, returns to threaten his happiness, you will see that Mrs. Woods sets forth upon a path trodden by many hundreds of thousands of incompetent feet. To start with such a situation almost suggests bravado. If it be bravado, it is entirely justified as the tale proceeds: for amid the crowd of failures Mrs. Woods's solution wears the singular distinction of truth. That the book is written in restrained ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... organization of our army was that too many old and incompetent officers of the old regular army commanded it. And the one idea that seemed to haunt the President was that none but those who had passed through the great corridors and halls of West Point could command armies or men—that civilians without military training were unfit for the work at hand—furthermore, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... expect aid from me, or from any one," said Madame. "That would at once set you down as incompetent for your office." ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... are used by an incompetent person. I am surprised that you, sir, assistant professor of astronomy in a great institution of learning, should assert that any mathematical fact is not an actual one. Prove to me that figures lie, and you can have my daughter! But this is only nonsense. You are presumptuous and something of ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the sphere of industrial machinery, have made it possible for every human being to have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, leisure and solitude. Man, in this sense, has already conquered Nature; and has secured for his progeny however indefinitely increased, and for the frail and incompetent ones of his race, however indefinitely increased, a more than sufficient supply ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... every class in life; and although of late years one sees the same sort of writings advertised in England, they have certainly not as yet produced any apparent effect upon us—perhaps from being written by incompetent people, or perhaps from the author dwelling too exclusively upon usages which change with the fashion of the day, instead of being based upon right and kind feelings, or, at anyrate, the appearance of them. I have lately met with a little French book, entitled Manuel Complet de ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... man, beating him with the butt of his revolver. Friends of the foreman claim that the ranger is a drunken bully, and should have been discharged long ago. The Supervisor for some mysterious reason retains this man, although he is an incompetent. It is also claimed that McFarlane put a man on the roll without examination." The Supervisor was the protagonist of the play, which was plainly political. The attack upon him was bitter and unjust, ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... remarkable insight into men, promptly estimating character with an accuracy that makes it a difficult matter to deceive him, or to win his favor either for visionary schemes, corrupt attacks upon the treasury, or incompetent place-hunters. He has shown that he has been guided by a wise experience of the past, and a sagacious foresight of the future, exhibiting sacrifices of individual friendship to a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... that the sabotage of business enterprise can be put aside by sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation requires the full use of its ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... some weeks, but her mother, fussily incompetent at most times, was always at her best when sickness came, and she had nursed her daughter devotedly ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... little cottage in such disorder," said Mr. Maddison. "The contractor for the conservatory undertook to erect it in a week, and my only satisfaction is that he is now paying me a forfeit of 500 dollars a day. As for the electricians in this country, sir, they are not incompetent men, but they must be taught to hustle if they are to work under American orders; and I don't quite see how they are to find a ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... make a true poem out of something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in his mind, does not touch this point; it is a further question, one of ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to sacrifice ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... condemns Jerome Morel to pay to Pierre Petit-Jean, merchant,[Footnote: The crafty notary incompetent to proceed in his own name, had got from the unfortunate Morel a blank acceptance, and had introduced a third party's name.] by all his goods, and even with his body, the sum of thirteen hundred francs, with lawful interest, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... among the doctors shall keep the commanding officers in the dark as to the needs—of their men, and that no self-will or ignorance in commanding officers shall neutralize the counsels of the medical men. The military authorities must not depend on the report of any doctor who may be incompetent as to the provision made for the men's health, and the doctor must be authorized to represent the dangers of a bad encampment without being liable to a recommendation to keep his opinion to himself till ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Presidents' messages, and Congress for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing. If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... same. He has merely exchanged several excellent tones below for some very poor ones above. I repeat, one who aspires to be a lyric artist requires the best possible teacher to guide his first steps; he may consult an inferior or incompetent professor, when so firmly established in the right path that he cannot ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... and wept, her head on my chest. I patted her head, feeling entirely incompetent to console her for what ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe. The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in company with drawings and sculpture in high and low ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... acquaintances say that in their country it was not always qualifications that get a candidate into office. Some of the ways were devious and not suitable for publicity. Offices were frequently filled by incompetent men. There had been congressmen and other offices of higher and more responsible duties, filled by persons who could not correctly frame a sentence in their native language, who could not spell the simplest words as they were spelled in the dictionary, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Italian saying which identifies the translator with the traitor ought to give way to a more grateful and hopeful modern recognition of the services done by conscientious translations. We have undoubtedly suffered in England in the past by well-meaning but incompetent translators, especially of spiritual books, who have given us such impressions as to mislead us about the minds of the writers or even turned us against them altogether, to our own great loss. But at present more care is exercised, and conscientious critical exactitude in translating ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... municipal government being, in its personnel, at the moment, incompetent to preserve the fundamental principles on which it was established, permitted a strike of railroad employees to grow without restriction as to the observance of law and order until it became an insurrection. Four ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... choose to do it. I refuse to force your confessedly inexperienced and incompetent services upon my men. What ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... known wagon-masters who really did not know how to straighten out a six-mule team, or, indeed, put the harness on them properly. And yet the wagon-master has almost complete power over the train. It will be readily seen from this, how much valuable property may be destroyed by placing incompetent men in such places. Wagon-masters, it seems to me, should not be allowed, under any circumstances, to have or take charge of a train of animals of any kind until they are thoroughly competent to handle, harness, ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension; for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that would set forth the situation of space ending, and obstruction ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... mental disorder most of us have. We believe everybody above us is incompetent, and everybody below us is after our jobs. You'll get it in time—even some of the ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside; Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other, and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks, except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact, sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Government, must show, in addition to sound principles, that it possessed sufficient practical statesmanship to solve wisely any question relative to the development of the material resources of the country, or it would prove itself incompetent to the trust ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... negotiator plenipotentiary with the Ottoman Porte, on behalf of the Republic of Florence; and the Turkish reis-effendi, or minister of foreign affairs, soon perceived that the Christian embassador was quite incompetent to enter into the intricacies of treaties and the complex machinery of diplomacy. But suddenly the official notes which the envoy addressed to the reis-effendi began to exhibit a sagacity and an evidence of far-sighted policy which contrasted strongly with the imbecility which had previously characterized ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... in which all the articles are negative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior eo ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... emotions so rigidly reject critical restraints, and disdain to be bound by rule, as those excited by the fine arts. A man unimpressible and incapable of moods and tenses, is for that reason an incompetent critic; and the sensitive, excitable man, how can he know that he does not impose his peculiar mood as a ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... its expression may wound the feelings of public men, whose official acts have subjected them to public censure. If it were, history and biography would cease to be guiding stars, and, above all, would offer no wholesome restraint to the cruel, or corrupt, or incompetent exercise of authority."—Tupper's Life and Correspondence of ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... proves, then it is still only one and the same reason which, whether in a theoretical or a practical point of view, judges according to a priori principles; and then it is clear that although it is in the first point of view incompetent to establish certain propositions positively, which, however, do not contradict it, then, as soon as these propositions are inseparably attached to the practical interest of pure reason, it must accept them, though it be as something offered to it from a foreign source, something that has not grown ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Let not incompetent elocutionists or the barbarisms of custom give you tones or enunciations at war with those that God implanted. Study the vocal instrument and then play the best tune on it possible, but do not try to make a flute ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... landed. Many cheered, no doubt, to think of the strong hearts and invincible courage that dwelt in the breasts of Britain's sons; while others,—tracing things at once to their true source,—cheered in broken tones, or were incompetent to cheer at all, when they thought with thankfulness of Britain's faith in the Word of God, which, directly or indirectly, had given that courage its inspiration, and filled those ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was the mass-production of crises, and he created crises as rabbits create their young, nine at a time. In those fuddled incompetent days before the Great War the crisis was a little-known phenomenon. Here and there in the drab routine of peaceful corpulent years there flashed in the prosperous firmament the baleful light of a great anxiety. Agadir was one; CARSON and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... by favour, by that sort of favour which is as likely to come to you as to another. Such places are not given to incompetent young men because their fathers and mothers ask for them. But won't you ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... weak, and he was qualified neither for the ordinary administration, of public business nor for the higher sphere of statesmanship, and was entirely destitute of that experience which sometimes fills the place of natural aptitude. His short administration was one of the most disgraceful and incompetent in English history, originating in an accident, supported only by the will of the sovereign, by gross corruption and intimidation, the precursor of the disintegration of political life and of a whole series of national disasters. Yet Bute had good principles and intentions, was inspired by feelings ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 449) points out that this conversation followed close on the appointment of 'the incompetent Bathurst' as Chancellor. 'Such a conversation,' he adds, 'would not have occurred during the chancellorship of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... April, the very day on which the writs were returnable, Gaspe only excepted. He opened the House with a speech remarkable for nothing but its brevity. Mr. Papineau was re-elected Speaker and the choice approved of. But this was no sooner done than the Assembly found themselves incompetent for the transaction of business. The House must, by law, consist of fifty members, and only forty-nine had been returned. The Gaspe writ was not returnable until the 1st of June. There was no House. Business could not legally be carried on. A ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... difficulty in rigging up from the old clothes of London, and it will go hardly with us, and we shall have worse luck than the ordinary market gardener, if we do not succeed in making sufficient profit to pay all the expenses of the concern, and leave something over for the maintenance of the hopelessly incompetent, and those who, to put it roughly, are not ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... only narrowed his lids when the Colonel pensioned Mr. Hood. But the Colonel had a will before which, when roused, even Mr. Hopper trembled. So that Eliphalet was always polite to Ephum, and careful never to say anything in the darkey's presence against incompetent clerks or favorite customers, who, by the charity of the Colonel, remained on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... schools, though properly excluding sectarian influence, are yet indirectly and not improperly affected by the religious character of the community. Not only does the man who undertakes to write history, while ignoring the religious element, give us an incompetent and false representation, but no one can become a respectable student of history who does not carefully consider the religious development of society as proceeding under the guidance of the several ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... order to get rid of so incompetent an officer, and at the same time punish the insubordination of the men, it was resolved to disband the company. Thus was afforded to Frank the opportunity, which seemed to him almost providential, of joining Captain Edney's ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... in the past. We are not a people which has accomplished much, but one on the way to accomplishment. The achievements of which we can boast are relatively like those of a child of five who boasts that he can count. Our whole world-condition shows us to be racially incompetent, and able to produce no more than incompetent leaders. That is our present high-water mark, and with our high-water mark we ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Another thoroughly incompetent man was one employed to take charge of the negro carpenters, of whom his employer wrote, "I am apprehensive ... that Green never will overcome his propensity to drink; that it is this which occasions his frequent sickness, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... Brunswick, well known for his failure at Valmy in 1792 and his recent support to the policy of complaisance to France. His appointment aroused anger and consternation; and General Kalckreuth expressed to Gentz the general opinion when he said that the Duke was quite incompetent for such a command: "His character is not strong enough, his mediocrity, irresolution, and untrustworthiness would ruin the best undertaking." The Duke himself was aware of his incompetence. Why then, we ask, did he accept the command? The answer is startling; but it rests ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... for taking my troublesomeness in good part. My friend will be greatly consoled to know that you have the poor man "in your eye." Schoolmaster, naturalist, and coal merchant used to be the three refuges for the incompetent. Schoolmaster is rapidly being eliminated, so I suppose the pressure on Natural History ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... voice whatever in the discussion which followed, for they were regarded as incompetent judges, under the circumstances. It was finally decreed by the council that the man's life should be spared, but that he must be exposed to the indignity of a public whipping, and resign all his earthly possessions to the parents of his victim. This sentence was ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... We wish only to "get the best." The needy people for whom we labor have suffered such privations, and such absolute destitution of all adequate religious instruction, that we feel they are now entitled to as good as can be given them. We send no teachers to the field that are incompetent and without adequate experience. We do not believe that everybody is qualified to teach the Negroes, at least it is not fair to them, that we should employ those who cannot find occupation anywhere else. Good health, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 3, March, 1889 • Various
... city has been drained of its wealth and its embellishments. Scarce anything is left but the walls and buildings, which are uninjured, the lives and the industry of the inhabitants. Sandarion is made Governor of the city and province, with, as it seems to me, a very incompetent force to support his authority. Yet the citizens are, as they have been since the day the contest was decided, perfectly peaceable—nay, I rather should say, stupid and lethargic. There appear to be on the part of Aurelian no ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... were combined to ruin him,—the most powerful coalition of the European powers seen since the Thirty Years' War. His only ally was England,—an ally not so much to succor him as to humble France, and hence her aid was timid and incompetent. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... the character of the princess, and the assertion seems to have been a malicious scandal. George liked him, and when he was provided with a household of his own in 1756, he persuaded the king to put the earl at the head of it as his groom of the stole. Though utterly incompetent for the task, Bute instructed the prince in the duties of kingship; he encouraged him in the idea that a king should exercise a direct control over public affairs, and is said to have borrowed for him a portion of Blackstone's ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... up the country house and, with her daughter, settled in one of the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft occurred in her household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate with the police. Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her affairs, she was hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and bonds she would hide away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses, even a soup tureen. One of her most ingenious hiding places was a portrait of her late ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... which might have saved Ireland never came into being. The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands. The metamorphosis they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with the right stamp of leader. Flood, who helped ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... part of it. But my beastly owners and their beastly lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of action. And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself, sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world control on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay unlimited ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... photography; but, from my acquaintance with the modern achromatic microscope, I venture to say that photography applied to this instrument will be of no farther use than as an assistant to the draughtsman. A reference to the plates alluded to will show how incompetent it is to produce pictures of microscopic objects: any one who has seen these objects under a good instrument will acknowledge that these specimens give but a very faint idea of what the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... Khoja was shaved by a most incompetent barber. At every stroke the man cut his head with the razor, and kept sticking on bits of cotton to stop ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... She was libelled in San Francisco, had her cheques protested as fraudulent in Hawaii, and was fined for breach of quarantine in the Solomons. To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her. When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp. When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp. In fact the only blow struck on the Snark was when the cook was manhandled ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... relations arose between them. A fight for place began, a struggle for dominion, a fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and for ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless strife, in which the weak and incompetent steadily went to the wall, the strong, daring, and aggressive rose ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... believed, to do justice, and partly to punish the Southerners, the Northern Republicans gave the Southern negroes equal political rights with the whites. They even handed over the government of some of the States to wholly incompetent blacks. In self-defense the whites terrorized the blacks through such secret organizations as the Ku-Klux Klan, and recovered their ascendancy in governing. Later, by such specious devices as the Grandfathers' Law, they prevented most of the blacks from ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... be necessary for the long extract which we are about to give, to any person who will read it with attention. It is from a lecture on Agricultural Science, by Dr. Madden, and we confess ourselves incompetent to condense or improve the language ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... continues, that it is not within the province of the Chamber of Mines to provide work for incompetent workmen. It was, no doubt, from among these men that Mr. Krueger had raised the signatures of the counter-petition which so "emphatically" declared the administration of the South African Republic "to be all that ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... suddenly, utterly ashamed, although I was quite alone, of the nonsense I was uttering.' 'It is not a speech that I want,' said my friend, 'I can talk for three hours without hesitating, but I want an address to circulate through the county, and I find myself utterly incompetent to put one together; do oblige me by writing one for me, I know you can; and, if at any time you want a person to speak for you, you may command me not for three but for six hours. Good morning; to-morrow I will breakfast with you.' In the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... that all the parties summoned in any cases tried here belonged to the Thing-district; but in this case the deed and the parties belonged to Halogaland. The Thing accordingly ended in doing nothing, as King Eystein had thus made it incompetent. The kings parted in great wrath; and King Eystein went north to Throndhjem. King Sigurd, on the other hand, summoned to him all lendermen, and also the house-servants of the lendermen, and named out of every district a number of the bondes ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... virtue. The Master said, 'Let him preside over them with gravity;— then they will reverence him. Let him be filial and kind to all;— then they will be faithful to him. Let him advance the good and teach the incompetent;— then they will eagerly seek to be virtuous.' CHAP. XXI. 1. Some one addressed Confucius, saying, 'Sir, why are you ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... should like to know why I, as one of a small party, am to be set down as teaching some new doctrine which it is not fit for my countrymen to hear, and why I am to be assailed in every form of language, as if there was one great department of governmental affairs in which I was incompetent to offer any opinion to my countrymen. But leaving the opinions of individuals, I appeal to this audience, to every man who knows anything of the views and policy of the Liberal party in past years, whether it is not the fact that up to 1832 and ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully unaware of the heart aches she would endure within, walked staunchly through the iron gates, with "440 Linton Avenue" boldly wrought in filagree upon their ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... to them—or to the professor if he asked my opinion on that sort of thing and it had to come out—that I was too lazy and too incompetent to manage my own little fortune. So I went down first thing Monday morning and revoked my power of attorney. I simply couldn't wait. When the estate is settled and turned over to me I shall attend to everything and not ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons have not essayed "this great argument," since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... incompetent," Hys said bitterly. "The heat of Dis has cooked your brains in your head. I'll be no part of this ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... lounge in front of the Luxembourg? That will make a contrast that can't help affect the populace. You, the conqueror, ill-clad, unshaven, and with a hat full of bullet-holes, walking outside the palace, with the incompetent Directors lodged comfortably inside, will make a scene that is bound to give the people ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... but who, by the cabals of his enemies, had been forced to resign the great operations of statesmanship which he had been directing, and who now stood, with a quite resigned air, pointing out to the populace the futile and disastrous efforts of the incompetent one who was endeavoring to fill his place. The Clerk of Shipwrecks had never fallen from such a position, having never occupied one, but he had acquired the demeanor referred to without going ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... According to the established rules of war, those three commanders ought to have been tried by court- martial, and, if found guilty, shot or cashiered, for sacrificing their own men and endangering the army. One example of such punishment would do much to deter ignorant and incompetent men from seeking high commands in the field. But the discipline of the volunteer army of a republic must, it appears, inevitably be, especially in respect to officers of high rank, quite imperfect, although it may become ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... representatives. We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagement abroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hang their heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over the consular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be no question that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, the interest, honor, and dignity of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... this fiction to point out how absurd it is to represent the brave men who man our lifeboats of the Goodwin Sands and Downs as ever needing to be roused to action by passing and incompetent strangers, who must be as ignorant of the perils to be faced as of the work to be done. When the boatmen of Deal hang back in the storm-blast, ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... you that he is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself to using, with violence, the sword and the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... I am equally incompetent to pass sentence on the state of learning, and the fine arts, in Vienna. I found, indeed, that it was fashionable to pay court to men of acknowledged talent and genius, and that to music and dancing the Viennese are ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... to impel him, by suggestion, to suicide or to revert to the headache powders, which would have meant the asylum again. Anything to put him out of the way, or to make his testimony incompetent for the will contest. So, when the ex-lunatic returned from Europe a year ago, our friend Honeywell here, in some way located him at the Caronia. He matured his little scheme. Through a letter broker who deals with the rag and refuse collectors, he ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... war had offered me,' he says, 'th' command of a rig'mint,' he says, 'but I cud not consint to remain in Tampa while perhaps less audacious heroes was at th' front,' he says. 'Besides,' he says, 'I felt I was incompetent f'r to command a rig'mint raised be another,' he says. 'I detarmined to raise wan iv me own,' he says. 'I selected fr'm me acquaintances in th' West,' he says, 'men that had thravelled with me acrost th' desert an' th' storm-wreathed ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... "I am incompetent to give your father any advice. Our positions are dissimilar. I myself seek redress for personal injuries. Your father, the Duke of Orleans, ought to obey the dictates of his conscience as a prince, and the dictates ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... honourable and gallant man, who had served with much distinction upon the Continent, landed in Donegal, accompanied by about a hundred French-Irish officers. He instantly took the command of the disorganized and fast-dissolving northern levies; superseded the incompetent Sir Phelim, who from that moment fell away into contempt and impotence; suppressed all disorders, and punished, as far as possible, those who had been foremost in the work of blood, expressing at the same time his utter detestation ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... one of a class, not very small in numbers, who, from cultivating within their bosom a certain tendency towards suspicion, have come to think that all Government servants are idle, dilatory, supercilious and incompetent. That some of these faults may have existed among those who took wages from the Crown in the time of George III. is perhaps true. And the memory of those times has kept alive the accusation. The vitality of these prejudices calls to mind ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... stress of pain, even to the point of complete exhaustion and sudden death, should win for these willing servants a deeper consideration of their welfare. Too frequently are their manifestations of discomfort allowed to pass unheeded by careless, incompetent drivers lacking in a sense of compassion. Symptoms of malaise should never be ignored in any case; the humane and economic features should be realized ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... times on the ranch, just then, and Sam was too busy to go to town often. As an incompetent and generally worthless guest, it devolved upon me to ride in for little things such as post cards, barrels of flour, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... If it be nevertheless pretended that my information and knowledge of mankind, however extensive, and however painfully acquired, by constant domestic enquiry, and by foreign travel, is, natheless, incompetent to the task of recording the pleasant narratives of my Landlord, I will let these critics know, to their own eternal shame and confusion, as well as to the abashment and discomfiture of all who shall rashly take up a song against me, that I am ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... virtue is destroyed by "too much" and "too little," so does a person become incompetent by "more" and "less." For this reason some, like religious and clerics, are debarred from pleading in causes, because they are above such an office; and others because they are less than competent to exercise it, such as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... there are 6,000,000 tons of "ore blocked out"; that two assays by the assayers of the Bank of England average 9% copper; that the copper can be produced at five cents per pound; that there is thus a profit of $10,000,000 in sight. The evidences are wholly incompetent. It is a gamble on statements of persons who have not the remotest ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... the representation of miracles, therefore, which Divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. If they are super-human, they are not super-Satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything." (Vol. i. ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... Baboo JALPANYBHOY and Baboo CHUCKERBUTTY RAM attended for the purpose of arranging their evidence, when I regret to say the former made a rather paltry exhibition of himself, being declared by Mr SMARTLE himself to be totally incompetent to prove anything whatever material to the case, and I am therefore resolved to refuse him admission to ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... as he could never have done. From Aden to Cochin blood flowed beneath his blows, but peace followed; and though he was termed "the Portuguese Mars," his justice became traditional, and his sagacity was shown in the permanence of the settlements he made, even under the incompetent viceroys who ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... up, and if you ask me what I think, I should say it is most probable that we shall be made into a Ministry. How very strange and incomprehensible it seems; and much as I have had to do with public affairs, I feel now as if I knew nothing about them, and was quite incompetent to so great an office—to rule over such vast concerns, with such parties. With so many great things and so many little things to ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... firmly maintained in this chapter that men are incompetent to judge themselves, and need a scientific monitor of unquestionable authority, has long been recognized. The Catholic confessional is a recognition and application of the principles of great value. But the confessional of the narrow-minded and miseducated priest should be ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various |
