"Procrustean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... An Englishman coming among you is soon assured that you do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from considerations of morality and honor, he finds every man of sense here aware that extent of territory is your danger, if you wish to be one nation,—and further, that freedom of development, and not procrustean centralization, is the best thing for the New as well as for the Old World. But the mass of our people have not been among you; nor do they know that the hot words sedulously repeated to them by our Southern press are not authentic expressions of your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... steamer, but preferred the latter, as I should now, if there were any packets crossing the ocean. In old times travel was a pleasure or an art; now it is the science of getting from place to place in the shortest time possible. Hence, with all our patent Pullman cars and their dentist's chairs, Procrustean sofas, and headlong passages, we do not enjoy ourselves as we did when the coach went on the road so slowly as to allow us to see the country, when we halted often and long, many a time in curious old villages. But "the idea of dragging along in that way!" Well, and what, O tourist, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... American libraries, and in many European ones, are economy, simplicity, brevity of notation, expansibility, unchanging call-numbers, etc. It has been criticised as too mechanical, as illogical in arrangement of classes, as presenting many incongruities in its divisions, as procrustean, as wholly inadequate in its classification of jurisprudence, etc. It is partially used by librarians who have had to introduce radical changes in portions of the classification, and in fact it is understood that the classification ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford |
