"Unintelligent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the third row of stalls. His name was Gregory Jardine; he was not a soldier—though he looked one—but a barrister, and he was content to count himself, not altogether incorrectly, a Philistine in all matters aesthetic. Good music he listened to with, as he put it, unintelligent and barbarous enjoyment; and since he had, shamefully, never yet heard the great pianist, he had bought the best stall procurable some weeks before, and now, after a taxing day in the law courts, had foregone his after-dinner ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... labor, but nothing has parted them. It is not conceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedently improbable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the world is hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unintelligent—unfit to do any other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and fall. Yet there is too little of the work, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... spent with utter weariness, that the only thing to do was to tumble into bed, and books were out of the question. He was being "hardened," as his father called it, but not in a desirable way; for while his body remained slender and weak as ever, his mind became daily more stupid and unintelligent. ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... matter." She said, "Oh, was that a lie? And how could I mention her one single fault, and she is so good?—It would have been cruel." I said, "One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the results of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet-fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound asleep for the last ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... His own sake as well as for theirs. No doubt, the primary purpose was their training for their being sent forth to preach. But no doubt, also, the lonely Christ craved for companions, and was strengthened and soothed by even the imperfect sympathy and unintelligent love of these humble adherents. Who can fail to hear tones which reveal how much He hungered for companions in His grateful acknowledgment, 'Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations'? It still remains true that we must be 'with Christ' much and long before we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... has to perform; again a mistake. The eyes of the foetus are constructed in the darkness of the womb. The human germ, notwithstanding its unconsciousness and its simplicity of structure, develops a body that is complex and capable of a considerable degree of consciousness; though itself unintelligent, it produces prodigies of intelligence in this body; here, consequently, the effect would be greatly superior to the cause, which is absurd. Outside of the body and the germ is a supreme Intelligence which creates the models of forms and carries out ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... and bodily health and vigour, are things which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way as in England. Both are really machinery; yet how many people all around us do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why, I have heard [21] people, fresh from reading certain articles of The Times on the Registrar-General's returns of marriages and births ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 30th.—At daybreak we were off Pulo Pisang, and shortly afterwards the pilot came on board—an unintelligible and unintelligent sort of man, who could not tell us anything, and who had great difficulty in understanding what we said. He brought ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... famous for their elegant and persistent ability to discourse, and frequently assume ignorance in order that they themselves may make reply, and not for the purpose of gaining knowledge. "Now, in the objectionable opinion of this unintelligent person, who has a presumptuous habit of offering his very undesirable advice, a slight covering on the upper lip, delicately arranged and somewhat fiercely pointed at the extremities, would bestow an appearance of—how shall this illiterate person explain himself?—dignity?—matured ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... three were beautiful. High cheek-bones, short noses, oblique Mongol eyes, no eyelashes, and enormous mouths, composed a cast of features which their burnt-sienna complexion, and hair like ill-got-in hay did not much enhance. The expression of their countenances was not unintelligent; and there was a merry, half-timid, half-cunning twinkle in their eyes, which reminded me a little of faces I had met with in the more neglected districts of Ireland. Some ethnologists, indeed, are inclined ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and everywhere he ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... it. Once he lay for some time in the edge of a dark forest of water-weeds, only an inch from a lumpish, stupid-looking creature, half covered with mud, that was clinging to one of the stems. The animal appeared so dull and unintelligent that the young Trout paid little attention to him until another baby came up and approached a trifle closer. Then, quick as a flash, the creature shot out an arm nearly three-quarters of an inch long, bearing on its end two horrible ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... could never evolve a vertebrate from an articulate, nor an articulate from a vertebrate. Then, how are the two series from the same unit; or, if they are connected with two different units, how are those units the effect of the same unintelligent cause? How are we going to cross this chasm lying between the sun's rays and the sea slime upon the one hand, and the articulate and the vertebrate upon the other? Darwin says, "Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... objects of worship. Such was his condemnation of what he considered false gods. He was equally opposed to the idea that there is no God. "All things," he says, "are from God, and not from some spontaneous and unintelligent cause." "Now, that which is created," he adds, "must of necessity be created by some cause—but how can we find out the Father and maker of all this universe? If the world indeed be fair, and the artificer good, then He must ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... of the Hungarians or Viennese, who were living at Pau, she could doubtless have known that Count Menko, the first secretary of the embassy of Austria-Hungary at Paris, had married the heiress of one of the richest families of Prague; a pretty but unintelligent girl, not understanding at all the character of her husband; detesting Vienna and Paris, and gradually exacting from Menko that he should live at Prague, near her family, whose ancient ideas and prejudices and inordinate love of money displeased the young Hungarian. He was left free to act ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... laws have of recent years proved inefficient; yet the land laws themselves have not been so much to blame as the lax, unintelligent, and often corrupt administration of these laws. The appointment on March 4, 1907, of James R. Garfield as Secretary of the Interior led to a new era in the interpretation and enforcement of the laws ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... between it and a bit of glass, you, with the whole Universe sweeping around you in mighty beneficent circles of defensive, protective and ever re-creative power,—power which is yours to use and to control- -imagine that the entire Cosmos is the design of mere blind unintelligent Chance, and that the Divine Life which thrills within you serves no purpose save to lead you to Death! Most wonderful and most pitiful it is that such folly, such blasphemy should still prevail,—and that humanity should still ascribe to the Almighty Creator less wisdom and less love than that ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... began her Augustness, looking round and unscrewing the amber top of her snuff-bottle, "to take an unintelligent part in these proceedings. An example should be set. ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... exception, the most unintelligent thing you have said ever since I have known you. You may understand a lot about running contraband and about the minds of a certain class of people, but as to Rose's mind let me tell you that in comparison with ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Is it possible that this eminent philosophical Novelist is indebted to a quiet perusal of Shibboleths for some of the quaint philosophical touches not to be read off schoolboywise, with hurried ellipses, blurting lips, and unintelligent brain, if any, which make One of Our Conquerors and others, worth perusal? Be this as it may, which is a convenient shibbolethian formula, the Baron read this book, and enjoyed it muchly. There is an occasional dig into the Huxleian anatomy, given ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... know not by what logic you must so conclude. I am sure this is a conclusion that men nowhere allow of. For if they did, they would not make bold, as everywhere they do to destroy ill-formed and mis-shaped productions. Ay, but these are MONSTERS. Let them be so: what will your drivelling, unintelligent, intractable changeling be? Shall a defect in the body make a monster; a defect in the mind (the far more noble, and, in the common phrase, the far more essential part) not? Shall the want of a nose, or a neck, make ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... got to the fags' room,' said Vaughan, pointing the toasting-fork at the Babe by way of emphasis, 'there was the Mutual standing in the middle of the room gassing away with an expression on his face a cross between a village idiot and an unintelligent fried egg. And all round him was a seething mass of fags, half of them playing soccer with a top-hat and the other half cheering wildly whenever the Mutual ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... it's unintelligent, but I do so enjoy being here away from the fevers of war. War is getting tedious, and the summer is all ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... said the young man, generously smiling in sympathy with his father's enjoyment, "they're not unintelligent people. They are very quick, and they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... advantages, he shows in a letter that he wrote there on Aug. 4, 1777. 'I shall inquire,' he says, 'about the harvest when I come into a region where anything necessary to life is understood.' Piozzi Letters, i. 349. At Lichfield he reached that region. 'My barber, a man not unintelligent, speaks magnificently of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "La France a la conquete de Madagascar a faire," and with certain very pardonable defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less hate and fear England, an Englishman ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... upon Breath for life, but he is largely dependent upon correct habits of breathing for continued vitality and freedom from disease. An intelligent control of our breathing power will lengthen our days upon earth by giving us increased vitality and powers of resistance, and, on the other hand, unintelligent and careless breathing will tend to shorten our days, by decreasing our vitality and ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and false religions, had not been extraordinary men, as if nine tenths of the calamities which have befallen the human race had any other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon unintelligent? Caesar and Napoleon—were they unintelligent? Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been associated with poor minds? No, with great minds, which, if the world was to be saved ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... railway was recently questioned as to the quality of engine-driving. "After twenty years' experience he declared emphatically that the very best engine-drivers were those who were most mechanical and unintelligent in their work, who cared least about the internal mechanism of the engine."[220] Yet engine-driving is far less mechanical and monotonous than ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Waterhouse told, or the jurors and the judges neglected the first principles of common sense and failed to inquire about the facts.[6] The questions asked by the queen's attorney reveal hardly more than an unintelligent curiosity to know the rest of the story. He shows just one saving glint of skepticism. He offered to release Mother Waterhouse if she would materialize ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... things, and gives a standard to settle their relative importance. An uninterested spectator sees nothing; or, what is worse, sees wrongly. Most of our mean estimates of human nature in modern literature, and our false realisms in art, and our stupid pessimisms in philosophy, are due to an unintelligent reading of surface facts. Men set out to note and collate impressions, and make perhaps a scientific study of slumdom, without genuine interest in the lives they see, and therefore without true insight into them. They miss the inwardness, which love alone can supply. ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... O king, has become blind to the truth, like that of a foolish and unintelligent reciter of the Veda in consequence of his repeated recitation of those scriptures. If censuring the duties of kings thou wouldst lead a life of idleness, then, O bull of Bharata's race, this destruction of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... was imprudent, was neither unreasonable nor unintelligent. He had told Sam Brattle that he would provide a home for Carry, if Sam would find his sister and induce her to accept the offer. Sam had gone to work, and had done his part. Having done it, he was right to claim from the Vicar his share of the ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... table looked at me, and I looked at them. I was not in any way ill at ease, but I felt a terrible inclination to laugh. The whole affair seemed to me a little ludicrous. There was nothing in the appearance of these men or the surroundings in the least impressive. They had the air of being unintelligent middle-class tradesmen of peaceable disposition, who had just dined to their fullest capacity, and were enjoying a comfortable smoke together. They eyed me amicably, and several of them nodded in a friendly way. I was forced to say something, or I ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mists fell, she would throw her window open, and would stay there, motionless, breathing in unheedingly the damp earthly scent in the air, her mind to all appearance an unintelligent blank, for the ceaseless burden of sorrow humming in her brain left her deaf to earth's harmonies and insensible ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... children learn to read that is important: even more so is what they read. Much unintelligent reading in later life is due to the reading primer in which there was nothing to understand. Children should read books, as adults do, to get something out of them. The time often wasted in teaching reading too soon would be far better employed in cultivating a taste ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... endure for a further period the inconsistency, the stupidity, and the injustice of the disfranchisement of thousands of intelligent women voters rather than to accept the burden of an increase in the mass of unintelligent voters. The first step toward 'equal suffrage' will, in my judgment, be a fight for an educational ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... busy even to eat (vi. 31); He rebukes them gravely when they put a childish interpretation upon His command to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, the formalists and the Erastian (viii. 17); they are unintelligent and uninquiring when He prophesies His death and resurrection (ix. 32), and after this prophecy they actually dispute about their own precedence (ix. 34); when Christ goes boldly forward to Jerusalem, ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased, poor, unintelligent, broken,—and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy in righting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it.... It's a fine subject for a comedy, my ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent. Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the .. minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Unintelligent effort concerns itself with the principle of minimum outlay—seeking to ascertain the least possible expenditure of energy that will yield a subsistence. This is one of the essential distinctions between the present day society and most of those that have proceeded it. Likewise ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... water to quench thirst, but when they are dirty they take a dust bath and are at once cleansed. Of course, birds are often seen in the water, but they go there to catch fish and not to wash. I have often fancied that fish are a dirty, sly, and unintelligent people—this is due to their staying so much in the water, and it has been observed that on being removed from this element they at once expire through sheer ecstasy at escaping ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... faith, and such things. Faith is only fear. And life is a mass of unintelligent forces to which intelligent ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... gift—for teaching. His ideals were lofty; he dreamed of a relationship between university instruction and a liberal public culture which was not to be realised in his time. He was anything but complacent; had he been less intolerant in his hatred of unintelligent and indolent thought on the subjects that were near his heart, his way would have ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... the lesser light that desires to dazzle and bewilder his company, to tyrannise, to show off. It is the most difficult thing to get a great savant to talk about his subject, though, if he is kind and patient, will answer unintelligent questions, and help a feeble mind along, it is one of the most delightful things in the world. I seized the opportunity some little while ago, on finding myself sitting next to a great physicist, of asking him a series of fumbling questions ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nice girls, pretty, beautifully groomed and dressed, and far from unintelligent as they discussed their plans; how their favourite horses and dogs would be moved, and what instructions had been given the maids who had preceded them to their respective homes. Katrina Thayer was just ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... instincts of masculine human nature. No matter how she may deceive herself to the contrary, she is deliberately catering to the animal passion of men. Beautiful and charming women of mind and character do not feel this urge to trade upon their "private charms." But the unintelligent and dubious female is invariably the one to make a bid for the only sort of attention she ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Mackenzie, and, as we said, dressed still in her heathenish garments. She had a strong sense of dignity, for she stood still and waited. Perhaps nothing could have impressed Marion more. Had Lali been subservient simply, an entirely passive, unintelligent creature, she would probably have tyrannised over her in a soft, persistent fashion, and despised her generally. But Mrs. Armour and Marion saw that this stranger might become very troublesome indeed, if her temper were to have play. They were aware of capacities ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Bonbright it laughed. Bonbright was aware it laughed, and he set his teeth and labored. Beside what he was doing now the machine shop had been play. Rear axles are not straws to be tossed about lightly. Nor are Wops, Guineas, Polacks, smelling of garlic, looking at one with unintelligent eyes, and clattering to one another in strange tongues, such workfellows as make the day pass ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.[1] Even if this selective agency had not been invented, the purpose ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... made inquiries concerning this soldier, learned that he was a good fellow, and not unintelligent. On the next promotion he was made sub-lieutenant. It is impossible to give an idea of the effect of such occurrences on the army. They were a constant subject of conversation with the soldiers, and stimulated them inexpressibly. The one who enjoyed the greatest distinction ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... possible, and in which all men, and not the Jews only, live and move and have their being. It was the perception of this which made Paul an apostle to the Gentiles, and it is this very thing itself, which some would degrade into an awkward, unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic apologetic, which is the very heart and soul of Paul's Gentile gospel. Paul himself was perfectly conscious of this; he could not have preached to the Gentiles at all unless he had been. ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... mockery of consolation. He gives freely the affection one has been disappointed in finding elsewhere, and seems to stand by one in his brute vigour and generous unreasoning nature like a true friend. I always feel inclined to pour my griefs into poor Brilliant's unintelligent ears, and many a tear have I shed nestling close to my favourite, with my arms round him like a child's round its nurse's neck. That very afternoon, when I had made sure there was no one else in the stable, I leaned ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... discredited at home by {136} the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the religious papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent, just as too many of our church ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... And history proves that most Zen masters enjoyed a long life in spite of their extremely simple mode of living. Its mental discipline, however, is by far more fruitful, and keeps one's mind in equipoise, making one neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... youth, "My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without fuel. A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both warmth and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in constant danger of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... to take their position, namely, the wide-spread influence of secret societies, whose workings even lately have astonished the world by the facile and apparently inexplicable revolutions effected in a few days, are now in the full possession of the lower classes, who, no longer rude and unintelligent, but possessed of leaders of experience and knowledge, can also powerfully work those mighty ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... be lacking in spirit, of a nervous and despondent temperament, but not unintelligent. I know nothing of her mental powers. We sometimes see an active intelligence directing very inferior abilities, just as our good friend the dog is an excellent shepherd to his silly, docile flock. In her, the most ordinary ideas are ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... impossible for a man of sense not to perceive the fact. It is from this that we get the doctrine of punishment and salvation, either lasting through great ages after death, or eternal. This doctrine is a narrow and unintelligent mode of stating the fact in Nature that what a man sows that shall he reap. Swedenborg's great mind saw the fact so clearly that he hardened it into a finality in reference to this particular existence, his prejudices making it impossible for him to perceive the possibility of new action when there ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... person, we say, was Mrs. Joll, fond of her beer, rather grimy, given to quarrel a little with her husband, could use strong language at times, had the defects which might be supposed to arise from constant traffic with the inhabitants of the Borough, and was utterly unintelligent so far as book learning went. Nevertheless she was well read in departments more important perhaps than books in the conduct of human life, and in her there was the one thing needful—the one thing which, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... fact, the Bethnal Green Museum does no more to educate the people than the British Museum. It is to them simply a collection of curious things which is sometimes changed. It is cold and dumb. It is merely a dull and unintelligent branch of a department; and it will remain so, because whatever the collections may be, a Museum can teach nothing, unless there is someone to expound the meaning of the things. Why, even that wonderful Museum of the House Beautiful could teach the pilgrims no lessons at all until the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... to get a lodgment. A desire constantly repulsed for a fortnight should die, then. That should cure the drinking habit. The system of refusing the mere act of drinking, and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war tactics, it seems to me. I used to take pledges—and soon violate them. My will was not strong, and I could not help it. And then, to be tied in any way naturally irks an otherwise free person and makes him chafe in his bonds and want to get ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pass; and let it be admitted that we can never be guilty of oppression towards the sober, industrious, intelligent, exemplary labourer. There will always be in the world some who are not altogether, intelligent and exemplary; we shall, I believe, to the end of time find the majority somewhat unintelligent, a little inclined to be idle, and occasionally, on Saturday night, drunk; we must even be prepared to hear of reprobates who like skittles on Sunday morning better than prayers; and of unnatural parents who send their children out to beg instead of ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... to get a glimpse of the vanished social problems that had enmeshed civilization, in their true light, now that all he confronted and had to struggle with was the unintelligent and overbearing dominance ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and under the most intricate conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each other, ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost. Then fine weather returned, and he ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Darwin's whole theory aims to account for all creation, with its super-abundant evidences of design, by natural selection, which works without design and without intelligence. The theory is founded upon the monstrous assumption that unintelligent animals and plants, can, by aimless effort arrive at such perfection as the organs of the human body, exceeding anything in mechanical contrivance, invented to date by the genius of man. Indeed, that wonderful invention ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... with mighty volume of sound, Bendigo, who had all this time been quietly seated on the platform, advanced, and began to speak in a simple, unaffected, but wholly unintelligent manner. He was decently dressed in a frock-coat, with black velveteen waistcoat buttoned over his broad chest. He was still, despite his threescore years, straight as a pole; and had a fine healthy looking face, that belied ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... Bob joined the British forces at the front, he was disappointed at not being placed in the fighting-line. Moreover, his duties seemed to him of an unimportant nature, such as could have been performed by the most unintelligent. He saw others take the places which he longed to occupy, while he had to attend to merely ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him, without answering his mother's message, he ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and unintelligent study of such things as an 'even scale' ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... healthy, and even Violet owned that it was good. By which she meant that it slept a great deal. And for a whole month after she had it to herself she had made tremendous efforts to keep it as the nurse had kept it. She saw (for she was not unintelligent) that trouble taken now would save endless trouble in the long run, in dealing with its inconceivably tender person. As for its food, Violet had been firm about the main point, but it was no strain to order once for all from the dairy an expensive ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Oh, how little are those wiseacre generals, the conceited and swaggering West Pointers; oh, how very little, if at all are they aware of the inexhaustible ingenuity and resources, the marvelous skill and power of such intelligent masses as those of which they are the unintelligent, the unsympathising and the thoroughly ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... stock methods of argument of the unintelligent or the superficially informed. Such indisposition or incapacity leads to erroneous conclusions. Nothing but an appeal to facts involving careful and painstaking labor and a wise sifting of facts, that myth and legend be eliminated, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... trying this kind of angling, partly from a temporary distaste for the presence of men and women, partly for the purpose of finishing a work styled "A History of the Unexplained," I once spent a month in the solitudes of Glen Aline. I stayed at the house of a shepherd who, though not an unintelligent man was by no means possessed of the modern spirit. He and his brother swains had sturdily and successfully resisted an attempt made by the schoolmaster at a village some seven miles off to get a postal service in the glen more ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... thing I don't want is the Athanasian Creed. I can't regard it simply as a picturesque monument of ancient and ferocious piety. It seems to me an overhanging cloud of menace and mystification! It doesn't hurt the unintelligent Christian, of course—he simply doesn't understand it; but to the moderately intelligent it is like a dog barking furiously which may possibly get loose; a little more intelligence, and it is all right. You know the dog is safely tied up! Again, I don't ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... walked rather like a policeman also. Her hair was a rich raw sienna, and any man would have made love to her had she but carried an ear-trumpet. She is the "retiring Violet" of verse seven.[A] Millie Wyandotte was malicious and unintelligent; she looked well in white, but was too heavily built for my taste. I may add, as evidence of my impartiality, that she laid a table better than any woman I ever knew; in fact, she took first prize ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability—were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... to himself, "that I shall have to take it to an asylum, but I shall let it stay there only during the period of unintelligent howling. When it is old enough to understand that I am its master, then I shall take it in hand again. It is ridiculous to suppose that a human being cannot be as easily ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... quick-witted; since his sole considerable military achievement, his not very lengthy march to Paris in '70 and '71, the conditions of modern warfare have been almost completely revolutionized and in a direction that subordinates the massed fighting of unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of individualized soldiers. And, on the other hand, since those years of disaster, the Frenchman has learned the lesson of humility; he is prepared now sombrely for a sombre struggle; his is the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... for'ard to the engineer and to the deck-hand. George, meanwhile, was lying oblivious to the rhetoric with which it was plentifully garnished, not to speak of the Latin quotations, taking that cure of bleeding, which was the fashionable cure of a not-unintelligent century. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the case was pigeonholed by the unintelligent care of M. le Juge d'Instruction Faure, the newspapers made efforts, at intervals, to fathom the mystery. One evening paper alone, which knew all the gossip ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... understand that the economic principles which might satisfy the state of affairs in Great Britain could not be hastily and arbitrarily applied to a country suffering under peculiar difficulties. The same unintelligent spirit which forced taxation on the thirteen colonies, which complicated difficulties in the Canadas before the rebellion of 1837, seemed for the moment likely to prevail, as soon as the legislature of Jamaica passed a tariff framed ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... circumstances such a legend as the foregoing would not have attracted much attention. It is as barbarous and unintelligent as any myth of Zulu or Fijian. Strictly speaking, it is not a Creation myth at all. Tiamat and her serpent-brood and the gods are all existent before Merodach commences his work, and all that the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... nature—by whatever phrase we designate the same instinct—is to operate as a practical basis for the affairs of life and the carrying on of human society.' To sum up, the belief in the order of nature is general, but it is 'an unintelligent impulse, of which we can give no rational account.' It is inserted into our constitution solely to induce us to till our fields, to raise our winter fuel, and thus to meet the future on the perfectly gratuitous supposition that it will be ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... human pity in the heart of him full surely. But George is dead; careless of it now. [Coxe (i. 266) is "indebted to his friend Nathaniel Wraxall" for these details,—the since famous Sir Nathaniel, in whose Memoirs (vague, but NOT mendacious, not unintelligent) they are now published more at large. See his Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, &c. (London. 1799), i. 35-40; also Historical Memoirs (London, 1836), iv. 516-518.] After sixty-seven years of it, he has flung his big burdens,—English crowns, Hanoverian crownlets, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... motherly horrors that sometimes brooded over her while she nursed these infants, let me refrain from speaking, since if as vividly depicted as they were real, you, Madam, could not endure to read of them. Her poor, unintelligent mind clung tenaciously to the controverted aphorism, "Where God sends mouths he sends food to fill them." Believing that there was a God, and that He must be kind, she trusted in this as a truth, and perhaps an all-seeing eye reading some quaint characters on her simple heart, viewed ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... too late to retrace your steps. And let me tell you this, Polson, you are attributing your position and its accompanying hardships to the wrong cause altogether. The true state of the case is that you are an ignorant and unintelligent man through lack of education. Did you ever ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to understand ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Unintelligent inbreeding as practiced on many a farm, results in run down stock, not so much from inbreeding as from lack of selection. Out-crossing or mixing in of new blood is better than hit-or-miss inbreeding. Intelligent inbreeding is ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... and then goes out in smoke and darkness. How strange that creatures so exquisitely wrought as we are, capable of such thoughts and acts, rising by science, and art, and letters, almost to the level of gods, should be fixed here for so short a time, running our race with the unintelligent brute; living not so long as some, dying like all. Could I have ever looked out of this life into the possession of any other beyond it, I believe my aims would have been different. I should not ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... on the floor fixing two intelligent blue eyes on dolly junior's unintelligent violet ones, and holding his toes. "Dorly carn't!" said he contemptuously. "Her legs gives. Besides, she's no inside, only brand." This was a new dolly, who had replaced Struvvel Peter, who perished in the accident. His legs had been ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... may agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one finds among the British ruling and administrative class. That seems to me to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the obvious wants and distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling for the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... one of Nature's benevolent tricks That you grow hard of hearing as I grow prolix? And that look of delight which would angels beguile Is the deaf man's prolonged unintelligent smile? ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,—and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such prosperity was not reflected in the population and toilers. The natives were ragged, but friendly, every man carrying a machete, generally in a leather scabbard, and the women almost without exception enormous loads of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, pimple-faced mortals, speaking an Indian dialect and using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian girls were picking coffee here and there, even more tattered carriers lugged it in sacks and baskets to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... among the English latitude-men, the conviction grew that the essentials of a Christian belief must be few and simple and these such as plain men could understand and discuss; and here, as among the sober Dissenters at home, men looked askance on unintelligent outbursts ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... us praise Mr. Peyton's things?" she asked, dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. "Unintelligent admiration must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost as ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... dexterity, that was to her the revelation of a descending god. She found herself face to face with him,—his features cleansed of dirt and grime, his hair plastered in wet curls on his low forehead. It was a face of cheap adornment, not uncommon in his profession—unintelligent, unrefined, and even unheroic; but she did not know that. Overcoming a sudden timidity, she nevertheless told him briefly and concisely of the arrival and departure of ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... of course, if they are illustrated, which will be welcomed, and not a corner of the contents slurred over. Nothing is so contrary to fact as the common opinion that the agricultural labourer and his family are stupid and unintelligent. In truth, there are none who so appreciate information and they are quite capable of understanding anything that may ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... of the army officers and the most constant attention by the medical corps to prevent an outbreak of typhoid, dysentery, and the ordinary train of nearly fatal diseases which are common to large military camps, and which are almost inevitable when dealing with an unorganized and unintelligent mob. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... soon, even as the native women developed into maturity very early. His tired glance rested upon her face. That, too, bore promise of great beauty. The features were fine and regular, singularly well formed, and the eyes those of a gentle cow, unspeculative, unintelligent. She was very white, with the deathlike whiteness of the Tropics, and under the childish eyes were deep, black rings, coming early. He noticed her hands—slender, long, with beautiful fingernails—such hands ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... all who are concerned with this art that a knowledge of the structure and functions of these delicate arrangements of Nature would be at least of great if not of essential importance. The engineer knows the structure and uses of each part of his engine, and does not trust to unintelligent observation of the mere working of mechanisms which others have constructed. The architect studies not only the principles of design, etc., but also the nature and relative value of materials. In his own way he is a ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... cheap ready-made suit of some plain material, and a straw hat tilted on the back of his head. He had round cheeks, he shambled rather than walked, and his vacuous countenance seemed both good-natured and unintelligent. To all appearances a more harmless person never breathed, yet Jocelyn Thew, as he studied him earnestly, felt that slight tightening of the nerves which came to him almost instinctively in moments of danger. He changed his purpose and turned down Fifth ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a glorious sight that met his unintelligent gaze. On the side which he had ascended, the mountain sloped abruptly into the sea, yet its precipices were not forbidding or gloomy, for they were clothed with the luxuriant and lovely ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... her manners mighty comfortable ones," returned the young man. "She's a practical homemaker, that's what she is; and you're a—well, it's unintelligent of you to go on living alone, that's all, with that wrinkled map of Ireland for your ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... the various matters about which he is consulted? That he shall keep abreast of the tide of discovery and improvement, and that upon these subjects he shall know, not trusting to mere hearsay or to unintelligent prejudice for ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... by the sorrowful experience of generations what our dark purposes are, they become more and more fraternal, more and more dependent. And yet how little we really know what their thoughts are. They are so unintelligent in some regions, so subtly wise in others. We cannot share our thoughts with them; we cannot explain anything to them. We can sympathise with them in their troubles, but cannot convey our sympathy to them. There is a little bantam hen here, a great pet, who comes up ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... became painfully evident that they were not equal to the requirements of the situation. I watched the landing of supplies all day Tuesday, and formed the opinion that it was disorderly, unskilful, and unintelligent. In the first place, many of the steamers from which supplies were being taken lay too far from the beach; and there seemed to be no one who had authority or power enough to compel them to come nearer. As a result of this, the boats and lighters were unable to make ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... the head of a skeptic with the heart of a Protestant, Santayana's equally irreligious brain is biased by a sentimental sympathy for the Catholicism in which he was trained. The essence of his criticism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully remarked, no one could be more unintelligent, is that he moved away from the ideal of the gospel. Saint Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for it is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity, abominates ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... would be fine, if you want to wipe out all the Masters and all the Jellies, and possibly us, too. They're vicious and unintelligent, and they can't ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... kinds of beauty, which a stupid man could never be made to understand. And, leaving aside the subject of love, what very good advice it is never to laugh at a person for what can be considered a common failure. In the same way an intelligent man should learn to be patient with the unintelligent, as the same ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... own attitude toward the affair was one of blind, unreasoning rage. In it he saw no necessary routine of discipline, only crass, ignorant stupidity. That any one should suspect him was so preposterous, so unintelligent, as to be nearly comic. And when, instantly, he demanded a court of inquiry, he could not believe it when he was summoned before a court-martial. It sickened, wounded, deeply affronted ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... in these days, when machinery—that "Star called Wormwood"—dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony. The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... watching the embers flare up and die. "I'm not proud of the States," he went on, as if speaking to something which he saw in the flames. "I can't be, after the ruin their unintelligent propaganda and legislation have brought upon Alaska. But they're our salvation and conditions are improving. I concede we have factions in Alaska and we are not at all unanimous in what we want. It's going to be largely a matter of education. We can't take Alaska down to the States—we've got ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... influencing people; but I believe very much in loving them: it's what I call imaginative sympathy that we want. Some people have imagination enough to see what other people are feeling, but it ends there: and some people have unintelligent sympathy, and that is only spoiling. But one must see what people are capable of, and what their line is, and help them to find out what suits them, not try to conform them to what suits oneself; and that isn't as easy ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Taxations, and to 'instant dismissal of your Excise-Farmers,' as the special first item. [Adelung, vi. 364 et seq.; Raumer, 182-193 ("March-September, 1748"); or, in—Chesterfield's Works,—Dayrolles's Letters to Chesterfield: somewhat unintelligent and unintelligible, both Raumer and he.] Which salutary object being accomplished (new Stadtholder well aiding, in a valiant and judicious manner), there has no third dose of that dangerous ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... such as he ventured to take his station among the elect? Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... minimum, and until the character, style, and traditions of the various song forms are well within your grasp. No matter how beautiful may be the voice, or how well placed, no amount of enthusiasm or temperament can atone for a meaningless or unintelligent treatment of the intellectual, emotional, and musical characteristics of the song ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... light green hue, as if unripe or not fully developed, their flesh and clothing being alike green. They stood perfectly lifeless upon their branches, which swayed softly in the breeze, and their wide open eyes stared straight ahead, unseeing and unintelligent. ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... that spared me and acted as though forgiving me a sin, where I felt virtue beyond its comprehension; and the condemnation of Elsje, to which I was now most painfully sensitive, though it went out from this same unintelligent herd. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... find that you have left all who come after you—and on Saturdays at least they are many—to climb the fence. The Silent Pool, when I saw it first, a little disappointed me. I ought to have known that it would, because everybody could tell me where it was, even quite unintelligent people walking about the road two miles away. I think I hoped the pool would be, not only solitary and sequestered, but entirely deserted by human beings; a pool on which you came suddenly, lying hidden in the heart ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... unintelligent criticism often does prove an incentive," said the Traveler. "'Let me be judged by my peers' is a universal sentiment with the conscientious ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... by "nature" he means the "great whole," our author complains of those who assert that matter is senseless, inanimate, unintelligent, etc., and says, "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert or dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... crushing than her mouth. The self-will depicted in those small projecting teeth and that small receding chin was of a more dismaying kind than that which a powerful jaw betokens; it was a self—will imperturbable, impenetrable, unintelligent; a self-will dangerously akin to obstinacy. And the obstinacy of monarchs is not as that ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... imperious dogmatism and an unintelligent and mistaken attempt at a retrogressive movement is resolved into a higher view, which permits the union of conservatism and progress. Violent attempts and rash endeavors made, threatened to bring ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... and insensible to the truth,—a libel which ought to render them liable to fine and punishment. God's truth, fairly presented, is never a matter of indifference or of insensibility to an intelligent, nor even to an unintelligent audience. However an individual here and there may contrive to withdraw himself from the sphere of its influence, truth can no more lose her power than the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 147 pupils. There were many difficulties and much unintelligent opposition in the beginning, but wonderful success attended General Pratt's administration. For many years Carlisle has enrolled about 1,200 pupils each year, keeping almost half of them on farms and in good homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... manner of living appeals to me. I like the color and warmth and fervor of life; and people who drink red wine with their meals seem to me to be more cosmopolitan than those who do not. All this seems part of the pageant of life to me. I am not provincial, and I do not care to be made provincial by unintelligent and unimaginative law-makers. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... possible that such a woman as his wife should be told that her conduct would be watched, and that she should be threatened with the Divorce Court, with an effect that should, upon the whole, be salutary. There be men, and not bad men either, and men neither uneducated, or unintelligent, or irrational in ordinary matters, who seem to be absolutely unfitted by nature to have the custody or guardianship of others. A woman in the hands of such a man can hardly save herself or him from endless trouble. It may be that between such a one and his wife, events shall flow on ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... rather than destructive. No more striking proof of this fact can be cited than the modern experiment in prison reform in which hardened convicts, when "given a chance," frequently become useful citizens. Unjust and unintelligent social conditions are the chief factors in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... now the means of knowing that the lines of calculation along which good people were led into delusion a half-century ago started from utterly fallacious premises. It is to the fidelity of critical scholars that we owe it that hereafter, except among the ignorant and unintelligent, these two books, now clearly understood, will not again be used to minister to the panic of a Millerite craze, nor to furnish vituperative ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... It seemed, indeed, strangely deserted. A swaggering soldier passed them by, going towards the Marble Arch. His spurs clinked; his long cloak gleamed like a huge pink carnation in the dingy dimness of the startled night. How he stared with his unintelligent, though bold, eyes as he saw the kite ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... while I puzzled over the significance of this outgoing and incoming. Shortly a bird soared overhead, circled with powerful sweep, and alighted within ten feet of me. The bird watched me with gray, unintelligent eyes. They were stupid, uncanny eyes, yet somehow so fixed and staring as to seem accusing. One of the little white balls of wool waddled up and, rubbing its fuzzy head against the booby, proclaimed the filial relation. After a few rubs and ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... unintelligent plagiarisms and vexatious absurdities, the actual form and composition of the work show some skill. The poet passes from scene to scene, from battle to battle, with ease and assurance in the earlier books. It is only with the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... yet it is true. The master is obliged to watch over himself when he undertakes to teach a dog. The dog takes after the master. Show me your dog and I'll tell you what you are. The criminal has a dog who is a rogue. The burglar's dog is a thief; the country yokel has a stupid, unintelligent dog. A kind, thoughtful man has ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... carefully began to arrange the curtain so that not a single ray dared fall on her. But again he did not satisfy her, and again she had to interrupt the conversation about mysticism, and correct in a martyred tone the unintelligent Philip, who was tormenting her so pitilessly. For a moment a light ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... the vagueness of the sentiments and ideas of too large a portion of the working-class and to the impatience provoked by their wretched condition, may meet with a temporary, unintelligent approval, but their effect can be only ephemeral. The explosion of a bomb may indeed give birth to a momentary emotion, but it can not advance by the hundredth part of an inch the evolution in men's minds toward socialism, while it causes a reaction in feeling, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... last moment. But, if this whole ground of belief is in its own nature avowedly instinctive and independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the question of miracles? They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what they are. Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether probable or not, is not against ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... least formally, is at work. We may be certain that the paucity of respect we get from the scientific representatives of other disciplines (let us be honest,—such is the case) comes particularly from those relations we have with them as experts, relations in which they find us so unintelligent and so indifferent with regard to matters of importance. If the experts speak of us with small respect and the attitude spreads and becomes general, we get only our full due. Nobody can require of a criminal judge profound knowledge of all other disciplines besides ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... fact between 'blue ribbon' jurors and general jurors is often of such a character as to destroy the representative nature of the 'blue ribbon' panel. There is no constitutional right to a jury drawn from a group of uneducated and unintelligent persons. Nor is there any right to a jury chosen solely from those at the lower end of the economic and social scale. But there is a constitutional right to a jury drawn from a group which represents ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... trodden under foot. The mores are therefore an engine of social selection. Their coercion of the individual is the mode in which they operate the selection, and the details of the process deserve study. Some folkways exercise an unknown and unintelligent selection. Infanticide does this (Chapter VII). Slavery always exerts a very powerful selection, both ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... days. It's my arm that bothers me a little. One of the nerves, the doctor said, must be wrong. I can only just lift it. You've no idea," he went on, "how a game leg and a trussed-up arm interfere with the little round of one's daily life. I can't ride, can't play golf or billiards, and for an unintelligent chap like me," he wound up with a sigh, "there aren't a great many other ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by which, in imagination, we ascribe intelligence and personality to unintelligent beings ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... not to be disturbed, felt themselves bound to prevent the new spirit from extending itself. Never was seen a more striking example of how much such a course of procedure defeats its own object. Left free, Jesus would have exhausted himself in a desperate struggle with the impossible. The unintelligent hate of his enemies decided the success of his work, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... objection to the medium of dialogue is in cases where its form might mislead the reader into mistaking fiction for fact, and the author's invention for the ipsissima verba of the characters he portrays. I hope that this book will attract no readers so unintelligent. Having chosen dialogue for these studies of historical events because I find in it a natural and direct means to the interpretation of character, my main scruple is satisfied when I have made it plain that they have no more authenticity because they happen to be written ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... ennobling influences of war is one of the lies of the conventionalized mind anxious to avoid the truths of life and to extract good from all evil—worthy but unintelligent. How can men in the trenches, foul with dirt and vermin, stench forever in their nostrils, callous to death and suffering, wallowing like pigs in a trough, compulsorily obscene, be ennobled? Courage is the commonest ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... (ibid., p. 617) had previously reported that a considerable number of patients stated that they had suffered a distinct loss of sexual feeling. Lawson Tait, however, throws doubts on the reliability of the Committee's results, which were based on the statements of unintelligent ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... foolish, dull, unoriginal. He discovered something at last that appeared to have a grain of promise, and determined to do his best to put it into shape, but the first paragraph appalled him; it might have been written by an unintelligent schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and shut and locked his desk, heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart. For the rest of that day he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after pipe in the hope of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes. The air in the room became blue and thick with ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... statement, made by Cornelia J. Cannon in The Atlantic Monthly of February, 1922, leads the author of the article to the conclusion that "our political experiments, such as representation, recall, direct election of senators, etc., are endangered by the presence of so many irresponsible and unintelligent voters." Is there a remedy for this, other than waiting for the slow process of education? ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Robert was summoned home, and it seemed quite as much of course, now that there was no necessity for him to "earn his bread by his learning," that he should not return to Oxford. So the half-educated, but not unintelligent, young man continued at home, during the short remainder of ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell |
