"Bias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three essential facts about the people of the United States which largely determine the attitude of any people toward war. First, they have no grievance. Second, no appeal is being made to their patriotic bias. Third, their emotions ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... authority of Aulus Gellius, fl. B. C. 586), "as if you might hereafter hate, and hate as if you might hereafter love." Another favourite sentence of his was, "to a surety loss is at hand." [189] A third, "we try gold by the touchstone. Gold is the touchstone of the mind." Bias, of Priene in Ionia, is quoted, in Herodotus, as the author of an advice to the Ionians to quit their country, and found a common city in Sardinia (B. C. 586). He seems to have taken an active part in all civil affairs. His reputed maxims are plain and homely—the elementary ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which these unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... innocence in the midst of all those black-robed, subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance must have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may be called the lay spectators, those who had no especial bias more than common report, and whose credit or interest were not involved in bringing this unlikely criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own Jeanne at home," might many a father have said, dismayed ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Canterbury added insult to injury. Instead of booting the pigskin down the field in an honest and earnest endeavour to obtain distance, she deliberately and with malice aforethought, dribbled it on the bias, so to speak, toward the side-line. Benson, right end, should certainly have got it, but he was so perplexed that he never thought of picking it up until a Canterbury forward had performed the task for him and had raced nearly twenty yards ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... favourite taste. A chemist is disposed to account for every thing by chemical means; a geometrician is inclined to solve every problem geometrically; and a mechanic accounts for all the phenomena of nature by the laws of mechanism. This undue bias upon the minds of ingenious people, has frequently rendered their talents less useful to mankind. It is the duty of those who educate ingenious children, to guard against ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... they preserve the bias of their original utilitarian function, and carry this mark with them everywhere, leaving it upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to make ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... journalist in the United States, as an Australian journalist, I found that her work, though good enough, was essentially woman's work, dress, fashions, functions, with educational and social outlooks from the feminine point of view. My work might show the bias of sex, but it dealt with the larger questions which were common to humanity; and when I recall the causes which I furthered, and which in some instances I started, I feel inclined to magnify the office ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... to the picturesque and does not care for the classic," suggested his colleague; "a fundamental distinction in mental bias." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... rather to hide than to bring to light the object sought for. It would be doing them injustice to assume that this has been done with deliberate intention. It is much more likely due to professional bias, which exercises over the minds of members of definitely limited professions incessant and potent domination. When alluding to occurrences included in the enumeration given above, they exhibit signs ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from his own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early bias and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any other people than his own; but as ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... ten years ago would have objected to it as a name of ill-omen see in it now nothing which may not be harmonised with the most ordinary of political and social doctrines. It is hardly any longer the badge of a school. Yet it does retain at any rate the bias of a tendency. It suggests chiefly the transference of ownership in land and capital from private hands into their possession in some form or other by the society. The means of this transference, and the manner in which this social possession is to be maintained, are very ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever Nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needless pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind: Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... knowing Farrell, might be able to gage how long it would take in his case. Of course, we labor under difficulties. Three years having passed, we cannot rely on direct investigation. Purposely I gave you no bias when I asked you to gather up the known facts, and from your report I judge you have come to the conclusion that Farrell committed suicide, possibly driven into a corner by some ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... indispensable middleman) leads a life of mingled joy and pain. He is constantly on the move, and from meeting innumerable types of men, becomes very shrewd in judging character. Resource, readiness, abundance of glib phrases must in time become his. He must not, for fear of offence, show any marked bias in politics or religion. His temper must be well under control; he must have the patience of an angel; he must smile with those that are merry, be lugubrious with those that are in the dumps, and listen, with apparent interest, to the stock stories of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... which nothing could be expected that was candid and impartial; nothing but what a weak or crafty understanding could supply towards confirming those prejudices with which they happened to be possessed, especially where religion was the subject, which above all other motives strengthens every bias, and inflames every passion of the human mind. And that this was actually the case, I have shown also, by many instances in which we find them roundly affirming as true things evidently false and fictitious; in order ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, under the strange and subtle bias of the will, this excessive conscientiousness will be unconsciously fostered in inert and sluggish natures which are constitutionally disinclined to effort. The main lines of duty in the great relations of life are sufficiently obvious, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the man to whom you and I both owe so much? Oh, I cannot understand it. Some demon, equally cowardly and malignant, must have poisoned your own naturally generous mind. Some villain, equally profligate and hypocritical, has, for some dark purpose, given this unworthy bias to ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this life—makes it potent—within the individuality of the artist. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... he had newly appointed to the horrid task of exterminating the royalists of La Vendee. Santerre had undertaken this work, and had failed in it, and it was now said that he was a friend and creature of Danton's; that he was not to be trusted as a republican; that he had a royalist bias; that it would be a good thing that his head should roll, as the heads of so many false men had rolled, under the avenging guillotine. Poor Santerre, who, in the service of the Republic, had not shunned the infamy of presiding at the death of Louis. He, however, contrived to keep his burly ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... More than repay us for whole years of care, At Friendship's summons will my Wilkes retreat, And see, once seen before, that ancient seat, 160 That ancient seat, where majesty display'd Her ensigns, long before the world was made! Mean narrow maxims, which enslave mankind, Ne'er from its bias warp thy settled mind: Not duped by party, nor opinion's slave, Those faculties which bounteous nature gave, Thy honest spirit into practice brings, Nor courts the smile, nor dreads the frown of kings. Let rude licentious Englishmen ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... are disqualified for this task of self-inspection either by a selfish bias which is unwilling to recognize a fault, or by the fault itself which biases the judgment. The faculty, or passion, which misleads one becomes a part of his judging faculty, and cannot condemn itself. The miser cannot realize ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... chiefly in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think now that by the standard of a British public school he did rather well ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... his opportunity, and did not hesitate. "No, you are wrong, wholly wrong," he said. "I did not bias what I said in my report —a report I was bound to make—by any covert prejudice against Mr. Calhoun. I guarded myself especially"—there he lied, but he was an incomparable liar—"lest it should be used against him. It would appear, however, that the new admiral's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her parents, and afterwards with her husband, and thus her natural bias was encouraged. It was not until her two sons were of age to be educated that she remained stationary—on their account. As the business concerns of her husband required his presence alternately in Vienna and in Lemberg, he intrusted to his wife the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... to write. Her big brown eyes were full of wistfulness and romance; for Sidney was romantic, albeit a faithful and understanding acquaintance with her father's books had given to her romance refinement and reason, and the delicacy of her own nature had imparted to it a self-respecting bias. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and it was the early friends of Stockdale, who, mistaking his animal spirits for genius, by directing them into the walks of poetry, bewildered him for ever. It was their hand that heedlessly fixed the bias in the rolling bowl of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... hoeing or weeding—the farmer's triad of duties in the vegetable field—and as they worked side by side, the questions of the day were discussed with freedom and with partisanship, but with good nature. The one who had a bias for art brought forward his art hobbies; the dress reformer aired his and the vegetarian argued his cause. Personal questions often came to the front—as how Smith probably voted in the Association meeting in the case of the admission of some mooted person; he was so sly you could ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... these clauses speak eloquently for themselves, and as to the law in general Professor Burgess, who certainly has no anti-Southern bias, comments: "Almost every act, word or gesture of the negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and then be consigned to a condition of almost slavery for ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... concession to the breaking point in the vain attempt to propitiate the Czar. All through the early autumn Lord Palmerston was aware that those in the Cabinet who were jealous of Russia had to reckon with 'private and verbal communications, given in all honesty, but tinctured by the personal bias of the Prime Minister,' to Baron Brunnow, which were doing 'irreparable mischief' at St. Petersburg.[35] The nation did not relish Lord Aberdeen's personal friendship with the Czar, and now that Russia was beginning to show herself ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the boys, and from the propinquity of that sliver of store and the natural loquacity of Miss Kirk, which would have overflowed a much more generous area, Lilly was to learn much of life as it is lived on that bias which is cut against the warp and woof of society. Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that plied between ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... hand was visible throughout, has been subjected to some degree of scrutiny. A man's words and deeds, although arising only on one occasion, may supply an effectual test of his real self. There could, for instance, be hardly any doubt regarding the leading bias of his disposition, if a supremely able ruler, that he may procure his ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... judgment, my dear Chamisso; I do not seek to bias it. I have long been a rigid censor of myself, and nourished at my heart the worm of remorse. This critical moment of my life is ever present to my soul, and I dare only cast a hesitating glance at it, with a deep sense of humiliation and grief. Ah, my dear ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... come to the Rand. We must consider the Rand without any bias or prejudice whatever. The Rand is not a town or city, but a mining district covering 1,600 square miles, whose population of adult males practically balances the whole of the rest of the country. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... effectively swayed by that humanitarian philosophy of France which in the actions of its maturity so awfully belied the promise of its youth. We are, I think, on surer ground when, admitting a national bias towards material benevolence, and not denying some stimulus from literature and philosophy, we assign the main credit of our social regeneration to the ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... have to say of the work of the Irish poets, I am thinking of it solely as a part of English literature. I have in mind no political bias whatever, though I confess I have small admiration for extremists. During the last forty years Irishmen have written mainly in the English language, which assures to what is good in their compositions an influence ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a fellow. We have dimly suspected, perhaps, from time to time that we were something rather out of the ordinary run of men, but there has always been a haunting fear that this view was to be attributed to a personal bias in our own favor. When, however, our suspicion is suddenly confirmed by the only judge for whose opinion we have the least respect, our bosom heaves with complacency, and the world has ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... between men and women, the law in theory claims to be impartial, but in practice it has not been impartial. Before a Court of male judges or a jury of men the bias is in favor of the woman; and if she is pleasing, in person and manners, such ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... which runs through his whole book,—namely, the connection between honouring Jehovah and national prosperity. He did not import that thought into his narrative, but he insisted on it as moulding the history of Judah. Modern critics charge him with writing with a bias, but he learned the 'bias' from God's own declarations, and had it confirmed by observation, reflection, and experience. The whole history of Israel and Judah was one long illustration of the truth which he is constantly repeating. No doubt, the divine dealings ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... success of my enterprise, Betty liked me. She told me this with the same engaging candor she would have used in informing me that she hated me, if she had happened to take a bias ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and heart. Men are coming to idolize intellect. Brilliancy is placed before goodness and intellectual dexterity above fidelity. Intellect walks the earth a crowned king, while affection and sentiment toil as bond slaves. Doubtless our scholars, with the natural bias for their own class, are largely responsible for this worship of intellectuality. When the historian calls the roll of earth's favorite sons he causes these immortals to stand forth an army of great thinkers, including philosophers, scientists, poets, jurists, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... mistaken, Lionel. I am certain that you hold a very great influence over Lucy. I observed it first when you were ill, when she and Decima were so much with you. She has betrayed it in a hundred little ways; her opinions are formed upon yours; your tastes unconsciously bias hers. It is only natural. She has no brother, and no doubt has learned to regard you ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... if a riper judgement has robbed us of the pleasing fancy, it has been at least replaced by the grateful conviction that they were the overflowings of a mother's heart, and by the blessing of God, contributed in a great measure to give an early bias in favour of religious truth. A specimen written at this ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... of the Conference. The misgivings of other delegates turned upon a matter which at first sight may appear so far removed from any of the pressing issues of the twentieth century as to seem wholly imaginary. They feared that a religious—some would call it racial—bias lay at the root of Mr. Wilson's policy. It may seem amazing to some readers, but it is none the less a fact that a considerable number of delegates believed that the real influences behind the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... much the cleverest thing the writer ever heard in the French Chambers, and, generally, he knew few men who said more witty things in a neat and unpretending manner than General Lafayette. Indeed this was the bias of his mind, which was little given to profound reflections, though distinguished for a ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... liked Miss Buckston—disapproved of her as a type. Of course, he must disapprove of her. Didn't she contradict all the things he approved of—all the laboriousness, the earnestness, the tolerant bias towards the views and feelings of the majority? And Althea felt, with a rather sharp satisfaction, that it would give her some pleasure to show Franklin that she differed from him; that she had other tastes than his, other needs—needs ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... this till a report of a sermon by Dr Stanton, the first Bishop of North Queensland, appeared. His lordship, alluding to certain conditions of the human mind which rendered one's judgment 'subject to warp and bias,' the intelligent compositor made it 'wasps and bees,' and Denison, being very sleepy when he read the proof, let it go. And Dr Stanton, good and generous man, laughed heartily when Denison, with a contrite and broken heart ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... know, Cap'n," remarked the lanky one. "The climate of Californy is a curious proposition. It's built on the bias down at ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... knows that it was not some beggar's daughter, a Gagaian, or a maiden of Hanirabbat or Ugarit whom my messengers saw?" Then Nimmuria took up the tale, and complained that Kadashman-Bel sent only ambassadors who had never frequented his father's Court, and were moreover of adverse bias. "Send a kamiru" (evidently a eunuch is meant) "who knows thy sister." Further misunderstandings come under discussion, from which it is evident that the general situation between the two princes ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... physical investigations in which my success had been assured, rather than encroach on their preserve. I had thus unwittingly strayed into the domain of a new and unfamiliar caste system and so offended its etiquette. An unconscious theological bias was also present which confounds ignorance with faith. It is forgotten that He, who surrounded us with this ever-evolving mystery of creation, the ineffable wonder that lies hidden in the microcosm of the dust particle, enclosing within ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... there was some hope that he might abolish serfdom throughout his dominions. He abhorred the "peculiar institution" of his empire with all the force of a mind that certainly was generous, and which had a strong bias in the direction of justice. Once he made a solemn religious vow that he would abolish it. It is probable that he would have made an attempt at complete emancipation, if the circumstances of his time and his country had enabled him to concentrate his thoughts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... concerning the deleterious effects of cigarette-smoking; and when I had made an end, and doggedly lighted another one of them, Bettie said nothing.... She minded chiefly that one of us should have thought of the other without bias. She said it was not fair. And I know now that she ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... grandfather, and treated him with a degree of kindness little less than paternal. His genius was originally inclined to poetry; and there are many natives of Penzance who remember his poems and verses, written at the early age of nine years. He cultivated this bias till his fifteenth year, when he became the pupil of Mr. (since Dr.) Borlase, of Penzance, an ingenious surgeon, intending to prepare himself for graduating as a physician at Edinburgh. As a proof of his uncommon mind, at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... about a national bias, to those who have a veneration for diction and style. Assuredly there can be no quarrel with the taste for grace and elegance of speech. I am of opinion that one cannot say too well what he has to say. But it does not follow that the things best said and best written are ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... has not been influential among the governing classes in Britain since the days of the Commonwealth. It has formed one of the great forces on which they have calculated—a formidable power among the people, that they have striven, according to the nature of the emergency, to quiet or awaken, bias or control,—now for the ends of party, when an antagonist faction had to be overborne and put down,—now for the general benefit of the country, when a foreign enemy had to be repelled or an intestine discord to be ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... daring to rest, continued his journey, forty odd miles, to Philadelphia, with the other on. Frozen, stiff, and sore, he arrived there on the following day, and every care was extended to him by his old friends. He was nursed and attended by the late Dr. James, Joshua Gould Bias, one of the faithful few, whose labors for the oppressed will never be forgotten, and whose heart, purse, and hand were always open to the poor, flying slave. God has blessed him, and his reward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... nature. He is strongly attached to all Auvergnats, and to water-carriers in particular. His predilection that way is well known in Paris. Perhaps his father was a water-carrier—or his first love a girl from Auvergne. Who can tell what gave rise to the partiality in a mind that is full of bias ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... seen that every achievement of the human understanding passes through the same phases, and reaches the same goal. We have adduced witnesses to confirm our own observation from history and ethnography in general, apart from any bias for a religious and scientific system. We believe that in this way alone there can be any true progress in the science which we have undertaken to consider in ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... color, and has no basis of comparison, it soon leaves a vague memory that cannot be described. These models, on the contrary, lead to an intelligent estimate of each color in terms of its hue, its value, and its chroma; while the permanent enamels correct any personal bias by a ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... writings none will give a more intimate view of politics than Senator William Maclay's Journal (1890). William Sullivan, Familiar Letters on Public Characters (1834), gives some lively sketches of notable figures, but he writes with a strong Federalist bias. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to "constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reserved for trained bloodhounds? Surely, in view of what Massachusetts has been, and her strong bias in favor of human freedom, derived from her great- hearted founders, it is to be hoped that the Executive and Cabinet at Washington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning, some opportunity for conquering ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... endeavor—if he starve in his obstinacy—engineers are men of the temperament, aside from the training, to minister to public needs and desires. Self-effacement is the engineer's chief characteristic. He views largely and without bias. He can see things from the other fellow's angle because he is not an engineer if he has not the gift of imagination. The successful engineer has this most precious of endowments, and, having it, cannot but be possessed also of kindliness and sympathy, which are ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... for ages been upsetting and uprearing creeds, he seemed both naturally incapable of comprehending differences of belief, and unwilling to dwell upon them for an instant. Indeed, he constantly impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction, that he was by religious bias of nature a monk of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... with which I could sympathise deeply, based upon the theme of England's regeneration by means of the right type of Tory squire, but it would be a novel with a more credible hero and conceived in a less petty spirit of party bias than Mr. H. N. DICKINSON has given us in The Business of a Gentleman (HEINEMANN). For, in the first place, Sir Robert Wilton, who figured of course in Keddy and Sir Guy and Lady Rannard—he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... convinced that a fairer idea of them is thus imparted, and that facts otherwise dry may in this way be made attractive and indelibly impressed on the mind. He has tried throughout to be fair and national. He has neither introduced offensive allusions, nor invidiously attempted to bias the minds of the young on controverted questions connected ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... has been published as the first plate in the third livraison of the ECCLESIASTICAL ANTIQUITIES of Vienna—accompanied by French and German letter-press. I have no hesitation in saying that, without the least national bias or individual partiality, the performance of Mr. Lewis—although much smaller, is by far the most faithful; nor is the engraving less superior, than the drawing, to the production of the Vienna artist. This latter is indeed faithless in design ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Explanations of difficulties were desirable, but they were not the first or principal things required. The great, the one thing needful, at the outset, was a fitting state of mind,—a mind sufficiently free from irritation, painful excitement, and consequent unhappy bias, to enable me to do justice to the religion of Christ. And the circumstances in which I was placed in Nebraska were calculated to bring me to this desirable state of mind; and many things which befel me there were calculated to stimulate ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... when I asked him for a new copy of Horace, that the translation of "Poeta nascitur, non fit"[456-1] was "a nasty poet for nothing fit"—a remark which I took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to the "humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for a no less personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story, my granduncle, Rumgudgeon, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... country will be unable to tap sufficient domestic savings to maintain current high levels of growth. Administrative and legal barriers are also causing costly delays for foreign investors and are raising similar doubts about Vietnam's ability to maintain the inflow of foreign capital. Ideological bias in favor of state intervention and control of the economy is slowing progress toward a more liberalized ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the case, guardedly enough, but with evident bias, Selenin became excited, and expressed his opinion with too much nervous irritation ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... mind inherited from a noble-minded mother, produced the illustrious man whom all Protestant Christendom has lately joined to mourn, Dean Stanley, of whom, however, no mention was made in the above discussion.] You, who know the political bias of these men, will be better able to judge than I am, how far this was a compliment to Arnold's intellect; to his moral influence, I suppose, the character of "only such" pupils would ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... on these two questions, thus framed, the following gentlemen were elected as a sub-committee: James O'Hea, Sir Colman O'Loghlen, Robert Mullen, James O'Dowd and myself. Of that committee, each approached his task with that instinctive bias, inseparable from ardent minds, excited by a darling hope. They read the precedents, the cases, the arguments and judgments applicable to their enquiry with the aid of such a hope, and still they came ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... Mr. Hake has recalled it to my mind. It shows not only Borrow's relations to childhood, but also his susceptibility to those charms of womankind to which Dr. Jessopp thinks he was impervious. Borrow was fond of telling this story himself, in support of his anti-tobacco bias. Whenever he was told, as he sometimes was, that what brought on the "horrors" when he lived alone in the dingle, was the want of tobacco, this story ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the adjective? Ought we to say with the French—un cheval noir; or to say as we do—a black horse? Probably, most persons of culture would decide that one order is as good as the other. Alive to the bias produced by habit, they would ascribe to that the preference they feel for our own form of expression. They would expect those educated in the use of the opposite form to have an equal preference for that. And thus they would conclude that neither ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... self-consciousness and impertinence which detract so much from the value of most recent books of travel, it may be doubted whether, since the French Revolution gave birth to the Caliban of Democracy, there has been a tourist without political bias toward one side or the other; and now that the "Special Correspondent" has been invented, whose business it is to be one-sided, if possible, and at all events entertaining, the last hope of rational information from anywhere would seem to be cut off. And of all travellers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Margaret of Burgundy; she pursued, like a vendetta, the family quarrel with Henry VII., and earned the title of Henry's Juno by harassing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the pious AEneas. Other rulers, with no Yorkist bias, were slow to recognise the parvenu king and quick to profit by his difficulties. Pretenders to their rivals' thrones were useful pawns on the royal chess-board; and though the princes of Europe had no reason ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... good deal of misunderstanding about the meetings, arising from garbled newspaper reports. The newspaper reporter has a bias for things off colour—buzzard-like, he sees only the carrion—at least he is trained to report only the carrion—this always against his will. So we were kept explaining to men and women of the church who had not been able to attend and see for themselves. There was ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... whatever. The ordinary use of the word commend, in any advantageous introduction of a stranger by letters, seems here to maintain itself—namely, placing him in such a train towards winning favour as may give a favourable bias to his opportunities. The opportunities are not left to their own casual or neutral action, but are armed and pointed towards a special result by the influence of the recommender. So, also, it is here supposed that amongst several chalices, which might else all have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... disposed of a possible opponent. She has all to gain, and nothing to lose by such procedure. Unless I greatly mistake the Rincon character, the lad will yield to our inducements and his mother's prayers, the charm of the Church and the bias of her tutelage, and ultimately take the oath of ordination. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... modest obscurity, was—and, believe me, I do not speak from bias—one of the most perfect women to be found in France. Had she desired or been compelled to make herself known to the world, she would assuredly have been famous and extolled beyond all her sex. But she found her happiness in her own family, and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of Saint-Saens in the history of French music lies in his attitude towards the art as a whole, especially of the German masters,—the absence of national bias in his perceptions. He was foremost in revealing to his countrymen the greatness of Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. Without their influence the present high state of French ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias, and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects which entice ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Pythonice in the Vica Sacra; and we know that Phryne offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes, by Alexander overthrown. And surely, if modern guide-books instruct us to weep in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise over the grave of Fanny Bias, history will say a word or two in honour of Cerito, who proposed through the newspapers, last season, an alliance offensive and defensive with no less a man than Peter Borthwick, Esq. M.P., (Arcades ambo!) to relieve the distress of the manufacturing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... said; "it won't spot. Cut on the bias. They're not real tucks though, Margery. They're laid on; Mrs. Minchin ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... returned to the home of his mother in Westchester County, N. Y., and looked forward to his future career in life. As often happens, a family bias, or wish, rather than the judgment of the young man himself, induces the first step. John McCloskey was to become a lawyer. We are told that he began the study of Coke and Blackstone, of the principles of law and the practice of the courts, in the office of Joseph W. Smith, Esq., of New ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... an average, or "errors," are assumed to conform to the law (1) that the greater errors are less frequent than the smaller, so that most events approximate to the average; and (2) that errors have no "bias," but are equally frequent and equally great in both directions from the mean, so that they are scattered symmetrically. Hence their distribution may be expressed by some such figure as ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... United States v. Wood,[26] the act was held valid as applied in a criminal prosecution for theft from a private corporation. By a narrow majority the Court has subsequently held that government employees as a class are not disqualified by an implied bias against a person accused of violating the federal narcotics statutes,[27] nor against an officer of the Communist party charged with willful failure to appear before a Congressional committee in compliance with a subpoena.[28] In both cases, the way was left open for a defendant to establish ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... robbers, and therefore must submit to being robbed; and this I plainly told him. Further, I even threatened the sultan with a pretended determination to return to Aden, where I said the matter would be settled at our police court without bias or favour. I then desired the interpreter to look out for any vessel that would give me a passage to Aden, as it was obvious to me Sumunter had more power in the land than the sultan. This took them all by surprise, abashed the old sultan and his family—for ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... 'is a rattlesnake who travels on the bias, as I've heard my wife remark about her clothes—he's a kind of Freemason; he lets you in on the level and out on ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Bias of. In a Siemens' polarized relay the pole pieces are adjustable so that they may be brought nearer to or withdrawn from the tongue. One of the poles is adjusted so as to be nearer the tongue. This one-sided adjustment ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... influential with one Mr. Hyde, then President of the Board of Education, induced him to provide a school-room and hire a teacher for the instruction of the Negroes. The following persons, since known as Mrs. Emma Stewart (Mason), Miss Mary Thomas, Mr. John Brown, Jr., Miss Alice Brown, and Mr. Harry Bias, presented themselves as the first students of this school. One Mr. Ross, a white man, was the first instructor. The next teacher of this school was a white man, and he was followed by a member of his ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... imagined, there may not be a kind of sex in the very soul, I shall not pretend to determine. As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men. They should each of them therefore keep a watch upon the particular bias which nature has fixed in their mind, that it may not draw too much, and lead them out of the paths of reason. This will certainly happen, if the one in every word and action affects the character of being rigid and ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... to portray the anger, disgust, and degradation which it produced in the Southern mind. To be summoned before the officer of the Bureau, confronted with a negro who denied his most solemn averments, and was protected in doing so by the officer who, perhaps, showed the bias of the oppressor by believing the negro instead of the gentleman, was unquestionably, to the Southerner, the most degrading ordeal he could by any possibility be called ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... presence. prsent, m., present, gift; present (time). prsenter, to present, offer; se —, to appear. pressant, pressing, imminent. presser, to be pressing, oppress. prtendre, to mean. prter, to lend. prtre, m., priest. prvenir, to warn, notify; forestall; anticipate, bias. prier, to pray. prire, f., prayer. priv de, deprived of, without. prix, m., price, prize, reward, penalty. prochain, adjoining. prodiguer, to lavish. profanation, f., profanation, desecration. profane, profane, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... the temper of his associates in the aggregate, the hero of the book holds the scales between the rival parties with admirable evenness—and this notwithstanding the strong bias of his temper and upbringing. Indeed, until the time when he has become, not metaphorically, but literally maddened by the wrongs and outrages to which he has been subjected, the book, in so far as it constitutes an expression of his personal sentiments, is a perfect ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence—about which so much nonsense has been written—is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor—he never understands a jest—his wife is a beast of burthen—heaven is a hunting-ground—his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... talents, but none detest or despise the man; and he is said by those who are judges of such matters to have one talent, and that is a thorough knowledge of the House of Commons and great quickness and tact in discovering the bias and disposition of the House. If Althorp abstains from any rough opposition, and endeavours to restrain others, upon the principle of giving a fair trial to those who may have taken his place because he would ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... me. I suppose I must pull away at the leather all my life." He spoke bitterly, and leaned his face upon his hands; and, between his fingers, the tears were seen slowly trickling. In truth, he had no taste or inclination for the trade to which he was forced. If the bias of his own mind had been consulted, he might have been contented in some employment ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... Erskine, when he was at the bar, upon a trial for libel. On that occasion, indeed, Lord Kenyon told him, that he believed it flowed from the pen of Dr. Johnson, and that Lord Erskine took as a valuable concession; for from the frame of mind and bias of that learned man on political subjects, he was certainly not a friend to popular liberty, while Lord Chesterfield, I believe, acted without deviation upon Whig principles, and was a constant advocate for the freedom of the ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... religion, and worship must we needs have! Nothing can be so dangerous as PRINCIPLES thus TAKEN UP WITHOUT QUESTIONING OR EXAMINATION; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men's lives, and give a bias to all their actions. Who might not justly expect another kind of life in Aristippus, who placed happiness in bodily pleasure; and in Antisthenes, who made virtue sufficient to felicity? And he who, with Plato, shall place beatitude in the knowledge of God, will have ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... people wish to intend the domination of the ideas of their own time over all the past and into all the future. Marriage seems to them an everlasting institution, a godly regulation, through which they can lend to their individual bias, the dignity of that which is humanly purest and highest. Consequently it also seems to them that the present form of marriage and its accompanying conditions for motherhood, resting as these do on the mutual consent of God and man, that these ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... more free and independent, he would not be haunted by the bugbear of losing his position by temporarily displeasing his political friends, he could give his undivided attention, as he cannot do now, to federal affairs, and work without bias or fear, and without interruption, for the welfare of his nation. He would have more chance of really doing something for his country which was worth while. A further advantage is that the country would ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the second page of Punch. Conscious of cherishing a natural prejudice in favour of his own productions, Mr. Punch forbears to commend this little volume, but he may permit himself to say that, in the judgment of The Daily News, which is above suspicion of bias, it is calculated to provoke "a sorrow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... repel the poison. James, the simplest man of his time, drank off the whole chalice. The poison met in his composition with all the fear, all the credulity, and all the obstinacy of temper proper to increase its virulence and to strengthen its effect. The first had always a wrong bias upon him; he connived at the establishment, and indirectly contributed to the growth, of that power which afterwards disturbed the peace and threatened the liberty of Europe so often; but he went no ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many might have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But seniors do not seek after juniors; they must be sought; and, with my previous bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and motives, I had no disposition to take trouble in seeking ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... passion warm and unreasoning. It was strong enough to induce the leaning toward him which, on Carrie's part, we have seen. She might have been said to be imagining herself in love, when she was not. Women frequently do this. It flows from the fact that in each exists a bias toward affection, a craving for the pleasure of being loved. The longing to be shielded, bettered, sympathised with, is one of the attributes of the sex. This, coupled with sentiment and a natural tendency to emotion, often makes refusing difficult. It persuades them ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Dumouriez and he had drawn up in the spring of that year. Probably the Executive Council took no notice of it; for certain papers found in the iron chest at the Tuileries cast doubts on the purity of Talleyrand's patriotism. Further, as Pache, Minister at War, hated Dumouriez, personal bias told strongly against the moderate proposals coming from London and The Hague. Nevertheless the Executive Council now decided to defer for the present the invasion of Holland, meanwhile chasing the Austrians beyond the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... builds. His education as an engineer should have fortified him against just such a contingency. It should have left him with the ideal of craftsmanship supreme in his life. And if his technical education failed to do this, his general education ought, at least, to have given him a bias in the right direction. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... went to the table sacred to litter; and from a wild welter of books, pipes, papers, golf-balls, hats, cigar-boxes, dog-collars, switches, cartridges and other sediment, he extracted a large gilt-edged card and studied it without enthusiasm or bias. ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... strong a bias we regard our own side of any question, and he regarded his side in this question with a very strong bias. Nevertheless he had refrained from a word, and would have refrained, ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... unconsciousness and simplicity of childhood is the goal, not the starting-point. The unconsciousness aimed at is not of the same kind as that with which we set out. In early life we catch the habits of our home or even derive our conduct from hereditary bias. We begin, therefore, as purely natural creatures, not asking whether the ways we use are the best. Those ways are already fixed in the usages of speech, the etiquettes of society, the laws of our country. These things make up the uncriticised warp and woof of our ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... the old way,' I shall attempt of that kind nothing further. I follow the bias of my own mind, without considering whether women or men are or are not to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli |
