"Incompetent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his iron boot, or the celibate on his iron cot. While for him who would fain revel in tobacco, but cannot, it is a thing at which philanthropists must weep, to see such an one, again and again, madly returning to the cigar, which, for his incompetent stomach, he cannot enjoy, while still, after each shameful repulse, the sweet dream of the impossible good goads him on to his fierce misery once ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... twenty-two years old when he began business with Meredith. They had no capital, and in fact were in debt for part of their appurtenances. Meredith proved not only incompetent, but a hard drinker as well; so that Franklin, accepting the kindness of two friends who lent him the money, soon bought his partner out and conducted the shop alone. He prospered steadily, and in twenty years was able to retire from active business. From the beginning friends came ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... delicate pencil-drawings have taxed the energies of the very best engravers of whom England can boast,—of Vizetelly, of Landells, of Jackson, of Thompson, and of Thurston. George Cruikshank would never suffer his drawings on wood to be slashed and chopped about by hasty or incompetent gravers; and although the ateliers of "Punch" are supplied with a first-rate staff of wood-cutters, very great haste and very little care must often be apparent in the weekly pabulum of cuts; nor should such an appearance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... made it possible for every human being to have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, leisure and solitude. Man, in this sense, has already conquered Nature; and has secured for his progeny however indefinitely increased, and for the frail and incompetent ones of his race, however indefinitely increased, a more than sufficient ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... himself, in spite of all Louis's wit on Rolands and Olivers—and yet those soft satirical speeches did more than all direct attacks to shake his confidence in his own magnanimity; more especially because Fitzjocelyn always declared himself incompetent to judge, and never failed to uphold that he was so far right, that his ministry must ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... people, and convincing them of the justice and patriotism of his course, his political enemies charged him with peculation, of which he was convicted, and his nomination as general was cancelled. He retired to private life, but his successors in office were incompetent and irresolute, and it was not long before he was re-elected general. He appeared to recover his ascendancy; but in the middle of the third year of the war he died, a victim ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... woman suffrage lie, first, in the fact that to give the vote to women is to give it to voters who as a class are quite incompetent to adjudicate upon political issues; secondly, in the fact that women are a class of voters who cannot effectively back up their votes by force; and, thirdly, in the fact that it may seriously embroil ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... perhaps right to mention that for the first time in Russia, purposeless rudeness and insolence came to my notice on the part of the ticket officials of the Mercury line. They behaved like stupid children, and were absolutely incompetent to do the work which had been entrusted to them. They were somewhat surprised when I took them to task and made them "sit up." Having found that they had played the fool with the wrong man they instantly became very meek and obliging. It is nevertheless a great pity ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... a lounge in front of the Luxembourg? That will make a contrast that can't help affect the populace. You, the conqueror, ill-clad, unshaven, and with a hat full of bullet-holes, walking outside the palace, with the incompetent Directors lodged comfortably inside, will make a scene that is bound to give ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... of humanity, that one is particularly remarkable which inclines us to esteem persons and things not by their real value, or even by our own judgment, so much as by the opinion of others, who are often very incompetent judges. Dick Middlemas had been urged forward, in his suit to Menie Gray, by his observing how much her partner, a booby laird, had been captivated by her; and she was now lowered in his esteem, ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... efficiency. Fenger had made it a slogan in the Haynes-Cooper plant long before the German nation forced it into our everyday vocabulary. Michael Fenger was System. He could take a muddle of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent workers, and of them make a smooth-running and effective unit. Untangling snarls was his pastime. Esprit de corps was his shibboleth. Order and management his idols. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... insinuated herself into the West India Islands, and she was mistress of Gibraltar. So it was with no little satisfaction that they saw her involved in a serious quarrel with her American colonies, at a time when a stubborn and incompetent Hanoverian King was doing his best to destroy her. The hour seemed auspicious for recovering Gibraltar, and also to drive England out of the West Indies. The alliance with France had become a permanent one, and was known as a family compact between the Bourbon cousins Louis ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... questionable loyalties and capabilities. In the ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Transportation—controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr—the Facilities Protection Service is a source of funding and jobs for the Mahdi Army. One senior U.S. official described the Facilities Protection Service as "incompetent, dysfunctional, or subversive." Several Iraqis simply referred ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... the old regiments by injudicious promotions. He does in some instances, it is true, reward faithful soldiers; but often complaining, unwilling, incompetent fellows are promoted, who get upon the sick list to avoid duty; lay upon their backs when they should be on their feet, and are carousing when they should be asleep. On the march, instead of pushing along resolutely ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... line in it that tells you anything but that there is to this little woman a bitterly sad, mean, beastly world. She must be grieving over mankind. It is her duty to see that no spoon is lost, and not an orange or banana wasted, and her mournful eyes are fixed with the intensity of despair upon the incompetent waiters, who, when hard pressed by wild shouts from American officers, frantic for lack of proper nourishment, fall into a panic and dance and squeal at each other; and then the woman of fixed sorrow, her left shoulder thin and copper-colored, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully unaware of the heart aches she would endure within, walked staunchly through the iron gates, with "440 Linton Avenue" boldly wrought in filagree ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... him in the conversation of the boys were immeasurable. When he came next morning with a black, extravasated eye, which he bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with a book in his hand. History and Geography ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... his enemies, had been forced to resign the great operations of statesmanship which he had been directing, and who now stood, with a quite resigned air, pointing out to the populace the futile and disastrous efforts of the incompetent one who was endeavoring to fill his place. The Clerk of Shipwrecks had never fallen from such a position, having never occupied one, but he had acquired the demeanor referred to without going through ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... clamorously to push forward, crying out that they should all starve. The night which succeeded was intensely cold, so that one of the men was severely frost-bitten. In the course of the night, Mr. Crooks was taken ill, and in the morning was still more incompetent to travel. Their situation was now desperate, for their stock of provisions was reduced to three beaver skins. Mr. Hunt, therefore, resolved to push on, overtake his people, and insist upon having the horse of Pierre Dorion ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... know what a man in love can do,' I cried. 'Trust me; give me yourself as you have promised, and sooner or later I will give you what you have asked. I am not a weak man or an incompetent one. Politics opens a vast field to an ambitious nature, and if war breaks out, as we all expect it will, you will see me rise to the front, if I have you ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... the lawyer was a surprise to Dickson and dissipated his notions of an aged and lethargic incompetent. Mr. Loudon was a strongly built man who could not be a year over fifty. He had a ruddy face, clean shaven except for a grizzled moustache; his grizzled hair was thinning round the temples; but his skin was unwrinkled and his eyes had all the vigour ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... prefers to the woodlands, and to which it always retreats if by accident it is found straggling in the hills, confiding no doubt in its wonderful fleetness. We also killed a few young geese, but as this game is small and very incompetent to the subsistence of the party, we have forbidden the men any longer to waste their ammunition on them. About four and a half miles above Gass's creek, the valley in which we have been travelling ceases, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... looked Lawyer Baumberger, from the snagged hole in his hat-crown where a wisp of graying hair fluttered through, to the toes of his ungainly, rubber-clad feet; loosely disreputable, but not commonplace and not incompetent. Though his speech might be a slovenly mumble, there was no purposeless fumbling of the fingers that chose a fly and knotted it fast upon the leader. There was no bungling movement of hand or foot when he laid his ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... work with a will, and it was not long before the benefits of his administration became manifest. He had been informed that the force was almost as incompetent and inefficient as its old time predecessor, and he resolved to stop this. He caused the creation of the grade of inspector, and the appointment of energetic and reliable men. These inspectors are required to keep a constant watch over the rank and file of the ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... school, and during the brief period of its duration it assumed so malignant a type that it is still a marvel to me how any one of its victims ever survived it. The medical and other authorities were utterly incompetent to deal with it. In fact—incredible as it may seem—they deliberately ignored its existence, and left the sufferers to pull through as and how they could. Had it been an ordinary outbreak, as, for instance, scarlatina or diphtheria, or even measles, they would have cleared ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Philadelphia, Bishop Paine advised me to publish a sketch of my life, but I told him I was altogether incompetent to such an undertaking. Though I have improved my mind somewhat since that time, I still remain of the same opinion; but I trust my motives will excuse what might otherwise seem presumptuous. I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... and died the man who first sent ships and men to the soil of North Carolina. That he failed in what he desired to accomplish should not detract from the gratitude and reverence due to his memory. If incompetent and unworthy agents, and the accidents of fortune, thwarted him in his designs, the fault is not his. He was the greatest and most illustrious man connected with our annals as a State, and should ever receive the applause ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... "I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on such important matters. My mother had a passion for every description of flower. I fancy I have some recollection of her scattering the flower you mention ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... counties, and the establishment of a line of forts and block-houses, dispersed along a considerable extent of country, and occupied by detachments of British colonial troops, or by militiamen. All these were utterly incompetent to effect security; partly from the circumstances of the case, and somewhat from the entire want of discipline, and the absence of that subordination which is absolutely necessary to render an ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... should perpetuate the best features of the old system. But there was much opposition to this plan in Congress. The Negroes would be exploited, objected some; the scheme gave too much power to the proposed organization, said others; another objection was urged against the employment of a horde of incompetent and unscrupulous officeholders, for "the men who go down there and become your overseers and Negro drivers will be your broken-down politicians and your dilapidated preachers, that description of men who are too lazy to work and ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... disgusted with the impediments and delays caused by incompetent judges, and had determined to discontinue making his drawings and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... day before yesterday when I was to arrive at Badshah Junction, and naturally expected he'd come in person or have some one meet me, but I presume the message must have gone astray. At all events there was no one there for me and I had to come on alone. It's hardly been a pleasant experience; that incompetent tonga-wallah behaved precisely as though he had deliberately made up his mind to delay me.... And the tonga's nearly ready; I must ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... entered Oxford in 1728 the Master of his college assured him that he was the best qualified applicant whom he had ever known. Johnson, on his side, was not nearly so well pleased with the University; he found the teachers incompetent, and his pride suffered intensely from his poverty, so that he remained at Oxford little more than a year. The death of his father in 1731 plunged him into a distressingly painful struggle for existence which lasted for thirty years. After failing as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and Grenville believed the French Government to be incompetent as well as exasperatingly cruel. In their eyes Jacobins were sworn foes to all that made government possible. The mistake was natural. The English Ministers knew little of what was going on in France, and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... but an endless routine of anointing and washing, washing and anointing sheep. To the credit of Mr. Thompson it must be told that of the four hundred who had been taken in time no single sheep died; but of the others a good many. There are incompetent shepherds as well as incompetent statesmen and doctors, though not so many. Abner was one of these. An acute Australian shepherd would have seen the more subtle signs of this terrible disease a day or two before the patient sheep began to rub themselves with fury against the trees and against ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... reports from his agents, occasionally taking time out to growl a command into his desk mike. Tired he was, from the long sleepless hours he was putting in, but Number One was in his element. As he had told that incompetent, Kardelj, he had been through this thing before. It was no mistake ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... down as teaching some new doctrine which it is not fit for my countrymen to hear, and why I am to be assailed in every form of language, as if there was one great department of governmental affairs in which I was incompetent to offer any opinion to my countrymen. But leaving the opinions of individuals, I appeal to this audience, to every man who knows anything of the views and policy of the Liberal party in past years, whether it is not the fact that up to 1832 and ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... grade of General, to be relied on for executing orders; and, madam, you are Lady Camper, and you command me. I cannot be more precise. In fact, it is the feeling of the necessity for keeping close to the business that destroys what I would say. I am in fact lamentably incompetent to conduct ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and making my own bed and washing my own handkerchiefs and blouses, and renovating last year's hats to make them look like this year's. I fear a poor husband and a procession of children, and doing the housework with an incompetent maid, or maybe without any at all. Those are the things I ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which twenty per cent. of humanity did not slowly starve to death would not necessarily be less worthy of admiration. Nor would religion disappear if every one were healthy, unless religion means the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite beauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by the conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather—and my own perusal of the poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief—that ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... like you, Miss Gourlay, has no right to make exceptions. Your want of experience, which is only another name for your ignorance of life, renders you incompetent to form an estimate of what constitutes, or may ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... in the same repulsive and insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Rhodes has written, one would naturally assume that the opposite of this was true, that the Republican party in that section was under the domination of northern "carpet baggers," a few worthless southern whites and a number of dishonest and incompetent colored men. This, no doubt, is the false, deceptive and misleading picture which had been painted from the vividness of his partial, mistaken, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the intention (I daresay the fault is mine) of that passage in the "Pickwick Papers" which has given you offence. The design of "the Shepherd" and of this and every other allusion to him is, to show how sacred things are degraded, vulgarised, and rendered absurd when persons who are utterly incompetent to teach the commonest things take upon themselves to expound such mysteries, and how, in making mere cant phrases of divine words, these persons miss the spirit in which they had their origin. I have seen a great deal of this ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... her life had Clover felt so small and incompetent and so very, very young as when the train with Car Forty-seven attached vanished from sight, and left her on the platform of the Denver station with her two companions. There they stood, Phil on one side tired and ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... sort of mental disorder most of us have. We believe everybody above us is incompetent, and everybody below us is after our jobs. You'll get it in time—even some of the Commissioners ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... under his Protestant successors, it might be an impregnable refuge for persecuted Catholics. He estimated that it would take five years of preparation. Tyrconnel also contemplated separation, and arranged for a French invasion, if James died. When James came over Tyrconnel thought him hopelessly incompetent, and offered his country to Lewis XIV. Sarsfield detested his treachery, and invited Berwick to undertake the government. Of James's French counsellors, one was Lauzun, who commanded the auxiliary army, and proposed to burn Dublin to the ground and ravage the open country. The other ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Although, however, this formidable rebellion was thus successfully quelled, the great expedition did not mature. Keno, its intended leader, did indeed proceed to Mimana and assume there the duties of governor, but he proved at once arrogant and incompetent, employing to an extravagant degree the ordeal of boiling water, so that many innocent people suffered fatally, and putting to death children of mixed Korean and Japanese parentage instead of encouraging unions which would have tended to bring the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... they are under a double deception; first with regard to time which is limited, whereas they want to explain appearances by a cause acting in a limited time; secondly, with regard to operation, their supposition of a great debacle is altogether incompetent for the end required. How, for example, accumulate the debris of the Breven, as we have now seen, upon the summit of that mountain, by the force of running water? But this is only one of a thousand ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... exclaimed. "Oh, no, he ain't incompetent. He's competent enough to sue us for five thousand dollars after we fire him, ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... the first time I have had a chance to tell it as it was, without some squirt of a lawyer pointing his finger at me and trying to make me change the story; or some other limb of the law interrupting me with objections that it was incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial, not the best evidence, hearsay, a privileged communication, and a lot of other balderdash. This is what took place, just as I have stated it; and this is all the Vandemark Township, Monterey County, or ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... saw incompetent men advanced to positions of importance, his anger was unrestrainable, "Why," he asked bitterly, "are the Egyptian donkey-boys so favourable to the English?" Answer, "Because we hire more ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... grant, and accordingly the right to conquer and colonize the country between the Rio de las Palmas, in eastern Mexico, and Florida was accorded him.[1] His force originally consisted of six hundred soldiers and colonists. The whole conduct of the expedition—incompetent in the extreme—furnished one of the most appalling tragedies of early exploration in America. The original number of men was reduced by half by storms and hurricanes and desertions in Santo Domingo and Cuba, and those who were ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... monitors having charge of this class, are also cooped up in the same cage, and therefore suffer the same privation. The result of my own experience, as well as that of others, is, that a child is decidedly incompetent to the duties of a monitor, if he cannot keep the youngest class in order without any such means. I would therefore deprecate, in the strongest terms, the separation referred to, as not only altogether ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... genuine convictions, and how far Massinger's adhesion implied a complete sympathy with them, or might indicate that kind of delusion which often leads a mere literary observer to see a lofty intention in the schemes of a selfish politician, are questions which I am incompetent to discuss, and which obviously do not admit of a decided answer. They confirm, as far as they go, the general impression as to Massinger's point of view which we should derive from his writings without special interpretation. 'Shakespeare,' says Coleridge, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Aye-Ayes, so difficult a word is No to us all. There is some malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this refractory monosyllable. An abject and herpetic Public Opinion is the Pope, the Anti-Christ, for us to protest against e corde cordium. And by what College of Cardinals is this our God's-vicar, our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with sang-froid and an unruffled good nature, while the Padre Concha, whose place it surely was to take the lead in such woman's work as this, slowly rubbed his bony hands together, at a loss and incompetent to meet the urgency of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... Weekes, to attack Vingorla. They carried a company of sepoys under Stanton, one of the Company's military officers. On the way they were joined by the Revenge, and they also had with them ten or twelve gallivats. Weekes appears to have been timid and incompetent, while the force was altogether insufficient for the purpose. Several days were spent in trying to find a landing-place, without success, on the rocky, surf-beaten shore, while the fortress was bombarded ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... were back at school in Constantinople, shuffling their feet and throwing ink pellets at one another; Raisuli, home again in the old mountains, was working up the kidnapping business, which had fallen off sadly in his absence under the charge of an incompetent locum tenens; and the Chinese, the Bollygollans, and the troops of the Mad Mullah were enduring the miseries of ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... to this fiction to point out how absurd it is to represent the brave men who man our lifeboats of the Goodwin Sands and Downs as ever needing to be roused to action by passing and incompetent strangers, who must be as ignorant of the perils to be faced as of the work to be done. When the boatmen of Deal hang back in the storm-blast, ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... queried Jim, "that my abandonment of the things in which I believe in the face of this attack would prove to your mind that I am competent? Or would it show me incompetent?" ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... humanity, between workmen and capitalist? Because it will fail of its humane intention. We should heartily rejoice—who would not?—if a reasonable minimum of wages could be established and secured. But it cannot. Is the legislature equally incompetent when it steps in to prevent children and very young persons from being overworked; from being so employed that the health and vigour of ensuing generations may be seriously impaired, (which would be a grave mistake even in the economy of labour;) from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... he will acquit him with unusual brilliancy and power, supposing his native ability to be good. But he can not or will not seek and find for himself such work and such position. He feels helpless, and incompetent to stir about and hold himself upright amid the jostling, competitive throngs that crowd the world's paths, and there seek life's prizes by performing life's duties and executing its requisitions. Solitude, with his books, his dreams and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Innumerable devices have been tried with considerable ingenuity to remedy this evil, and the best possible intentions by the professors and other public-spirited persons who are sincerely grieved to see so many incompetent, half-qualified men in almost every ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... might be like without the churches, faulty or incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what the family life misses without its own institution ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... not prove so favourable to the measures of the minister as he expected: Monsieur DE CALONNE was displaced, and the assembly was soon after dissolved, having declared itself incompetent to decide on the ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... have suffered in times past from sad mismanagement abroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hang their heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over the consular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be no question that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, the interest, honor, and dignity of the nation will ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Government, which asked for the dissolution, was undefeated. Both the Conservatives and Liberals, and their leaders the Argus and Age, alike blame the Governor for granting the dissolution, on the grounds that the House was just as incompetent to transact business six months ago as now, and that the Government would never have applied for a dissolution but for the certain defeat which awaited them directly the House met, on account of the failure of the loan. To me, however, it seems that the Governor was perfectly right. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... can only stand aside and admire the marvelous flexibility of a language which admits of such diverse interpretations. But assuredly, in the face of such contradictions of authority upon matters respecting which he is incompetent to form any judgment, he will abstain, as I do, from ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... sympathetic. She had been thinking of herself as to be pitied, and this ruthless introduction of the Barry question entirely upset the argument. If Mary Bishop and Katrina Thayer were the standard, then Norma Sheridan's life was too utterly obscure and insignificant to be worth living. But of course if incompetent strugglers like the Barrys were to be brought into the question, then Norma might begin to feel the solid ground melting from ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... ever shall the bard be muted By stars and stripes, but freely, as of yore, When swords are sheathed and I'm civilian-suited, I shall have speech with certain of my corps, Speak them the insults which I now but brood: "Pompous," "incompetent," "too fond of food," And fiercely taste the bliss of being rude And unrestrained by Articles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... in, the seaman himself. It is a defect of the system they live under, the responsibility for which must rest with those whose duty it is to train them. It often happens that those who declaim so cynically against the shortcomings of the present-day sailor are incompetent to make a suitable selection of captains and officers who may be entrusted with the task of establishing proper discipline and training aboard their vessels. Very frequently the seamen are blamed when the captain and officers ought to be held responsible. ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... more precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable in his speculations eagerly welcomed a theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality and degraded religion into a mere affair of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... was associated in her mind with the ruin of Russia. She was agitated and incessantly tortured by the thought of the dangers to which her brother, the only intimate person now remaining to her, was exposed. She was worried too about her nephew's education for which she had always felt herself incompetent, but in the depths of her soul she felt at peace—a peace arising from consciousness of having stifled those personal dreams and hopes that had been on the point of awakening within her and were related to her ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first snowflakes of that pitiless ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... administered with a liberal hand; and much more might have been done to augment these comforts. Instead of now being the object of matured and wise regulations, the captive is exposed to the rapacity of our enemies, who will derive great advantages from our abandonment of the trade, and those who are incompetent, from the want of local knowledge, to ease his shackles, and sooth him in his state of bondage. The magnitude and nature of the disease, required a comprehensive system of policy to eradicate it; and although in its nature ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... my language, and have often been reproached on this score. But I have always found it possible, without using vulgar and exaggerated abuse, to express the contempt which, in common with every right-minded man, I feel for the grovelling herd of incompetent boobies, whose minds are as muddy as the Rowley Mile after a thunderstorm. Surefoot was always a favourite of mine. Two months ago I said, "if Surefoot can only face the starter for the Two Thousand firmly, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... better than you, dear Miss Jane, her duties and obligations; and no one performs them more religiously. But your recent acts, I confess, puzzle me. Why should you choose from a lot of inexperienced, incompetent girls a successor to Thomas Bradley's fortune, when he especially requested you in his will to look after any of his relatives, should they need assistance? Kenneth Forbes, his own nephew, was born after Tom's death, to be sure; but he is alone in the world now, an orphan, and has had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... Mr. Darwin's theory of female choice as incompetent to account for the brilliant colours and markings of the higher animals, the preponderance of these colours and markings in the male sex, and their display during periods of activity or excitement, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... be confessed that Miss Harriet was a most bewildering instructor, and that her pupil's brain was easily confused and prone to blunders. The coming of Helena had been somewhat dreaded by reason of this incompetent service, but the guest took no notice of frowns or futile gestures at the first tea-table, except to establish friendly relations with Martha on her own account by a reassuring smile. They were about the same age, and next morning, before cousin Harriet came ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for a single ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton, East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the cultural and character-creating influences of education and environment—beyond a certain definite point—than are ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... faculty sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists. I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace painters. We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else—but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... South. Her cities, among the gayest and grossest in the world, her ecclesiastics enormously wealthy and strenuously opposed to progress and liberty, South America groans under the tyranny of a priesthood which, in its highest forms, is unillumined by, and incompetent to preach, the gospel of God's free gift; and in its lowest is proverbially and habitually drunken, extortionate and ignorant. The fires of her unspeakable Inquisition still burn in the hearts of her ruling clerics, and although ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... kill Grouse. At least I can't. I sometimes suspect there are others of the population equally incompetent, and perhaps still less interested in battues; though the Twelfth figures in everybody's calendar like a Church festival, and the newspapers devote leaders to it, and the comic papers have pictures, and sometimes ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... you. Your—what I would call bumptious self-assertiveness (I mean the expression in its complimentary sense) has already made you a bos'n's mate, and it will make an admiral of you in time, if you work it properly, you dear, incompetent old impostor! My dear fellow, I'd give my right arm for one ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the conversation, as the listener had for some time supposed, that the second lieutenant of the Vernon was the real leader of the enterprise of which Corny was the nominal head. Probably the restraint of over a week imposed upon him had fretted his spirit, and when he found himself alone with his incompetent superior, he became conscious of the superiority his knowledge and ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... of my real labors, I discovered how incompetent a conspirator Kossuth was. He had given me the name of his correspondent in Pesth and his residence, in the Karolyisches Haus, as if that were his ordinary residence, without warning me, though he knew it, that he was really in hiding from the police, and probably only to be reached with ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... revolutions at the palace, the elevation of incompetent generals, and the general security in which the people indulged, resolved to march to a renewed attack. Again he crossed the Alps, with a still greater army, and invaded Italy, destroying everything ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... one hand, as MAIRE DU PALAIS to the incompetent Otto, and using the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the whole capable male population of the state to military ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to bring you out something which will give you pleasure," replied Captain Sinclair, "but as for the fashions, I know you are only joking, by your trusting a person so incompetent as I am to ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... an apparently good question. "I object," says the other lawyer, "on the ground that it is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial." The judge has to rule. He may not exactly have heard the question. The stenographer reads it again. The other lawyer leans forward in a frenzy of fear lest the question be ruled ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... much. They were conscious, too, that the North, the sluggish North, which had been so long in putting forth its full strength, was now preparing for an effort far greater than any that had gone before. The incompetent generals, the tricksters and the sluggards were gone, and battle-tried armies led by real generals were coming in numbers that ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... critical vision. It was soft and satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... is to be said about the duc de Sagosta, save that his headman swindled him, his soldiers were conscienceless natives committing acts of brigandage in his innocent name, whilst his chief at Moanda was a peculating and incompetent scoundrel. ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... blockade of which still continued without any visible progress. On arriving there an attack was made on the walls by battering engines and by the other aggressive methods then practised; but nothing whatever was achieved. In fact, the armament became incompetent for all serious effort, from the aggravated character which the distemper here assumed, communicated by the soldiers fresh from Athens even to those who had before been free from it at Potidaea. So frightful was the mortality that out of the four thousand hoplites under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... there is one kind of person in the world dad considers wholly useless and incompetent, it's an ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... self-humiliation, giving up into the hands of others the engagement that had hitherto been the cherished treasure of his life; and above all, in exposing Laura to bear the brunt of the penalty of the fault into which he had led her. 'Oh, for Guy to comfort him,' thought she, feeling herself entirely incompetent, dreading to intrude on his feelings, yet thinking it unkind to go away without one sympathizing word when he ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... early days were renewed. Nor was there any great difference from them. It was a pell-mell rush. Incompetent, harpy, "sharp" and the gold seeker of substance. It was a train of the northland flotsam, moving again without scruple or mercy. Kars watched its beginning. He understood. None could understand this sort of thing ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... you have nourished secret sour opinions Akin to his, and thereby helped to scathe As stably based a project as this age Has sunned to ripeness. Ever the French Marine Have you decried, ever contrived to bring Despair into the fleet! Why, this Villeneuve, Your man, this rank incompetent, this traitor— Of whom I asked no more than fight and lose, Provided he detain the enemy— A frigate is too great for his command! what shall be said of one who, at a breath, When a few casual sailors find them sick, When falls a broken boom or ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side, such as that of the annexation of England ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... movement of the army was with me, and whilst I should be inclined to confer very freely with my principal subordinates and explain my purposes, I should call no councils of war, and submit nothing to vote till I felt incompetent to decide for myself. If they apologized for their conduct and showed earnestness in military obedience to orders, what they had now said would be overlooked, but on any recurrence of cause for complaint I should enforce my power by the arrest of the offender at once. I dismissed them with ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... cat,' said Annette. She felt her temper, always quick, getting the better of her. She knew just how incompetent Sellers was, and it irritated her beyond endurance to see Beverley's ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... ministry of the church, because it tends to make lay members second-class citizens who feel incompetent on matters of religion. When the ordained member makes religious interpretation and action his professional monopoly, the lay member responds by exhibiting increasing ignorance and incompetence. Sometimes it seems ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... decision in Post v. Avery, the case of Fraley v. Bispham was tried in one of the inferior courts; in which the Judge, thinking that Post v. Avery, however the intention may have been disclaimed, did in fact overrule Steele v. The Ph[oe]nix, rejected as incompetent one of the nominal plaintiffs, a retiring partner, who upon dissolution had sold out for a price bona fide paid, all his interest in the firm to his copartners, who continued the business. A motion ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... representative of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Co. of Shanghai from whom the cars were purchased. He discovered immediately that the difficulties which the Chinese had encountered were largely the result of incompetent chauffeurs. ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... work for any sort of wages from me," interrupted Timothy Robinson decidedly. "I tell you plainly that I won't hire you. You're the wrong man's son for that. Your father was lazy and incompetent and, worst of all, untrustworthy. I did try to help him once, and all I got was loss and ingratitude. I want none of his kind around my place. I don't believe in you, so you may as well take yourself off, Ellis. I've no ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... expense of the Court of Aldermen. They are to administer the money and funds of the City, subject to the audit of three persons annually elected, an abstract of whose statement is to be laid before Parliament. The Corporation are therefore deemed unworthy or incompetent to manage their own finances. Men of business are told that their ignorance is so crass, or their honesty so doubtful, that the Legislature is compelled to keep a watchful eye on their expenditure. The proposition is as absurd as it ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... derived little satisfaction from those entertainments, where they considered themselves as led in triumph by their ostentatious conqueror. [FN [r] P. 211, 212. [s] As the historian chiefly insists on the silver plate, his panegyric on the English magnificence shows only how incompetent a judge he was of the matter. Silver was then of ten times the value, and was more than twenty times more rare than at present; and consequently, of all species of luxury, plate must have been ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the secrecy attending the celebration of marriages in that Territory makes the proof of polygamy very difficult, and the propriety is suggested of modifying the law of evidence which now makes a wife incompetent to testify against ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... the organization of our army was that too many old and incompetent officers of the old regular army commanded it. And the one idea that seemed to haunt the President was that none but those who had passed through the great corridors and halls of West Point could command armies or men—that civilians without military training were ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... religion. The Reformation in like manner is only to be understood after we have perceived the enormous mass of superstition, injustice, and wilful ignorance by which the theological idea had become so incrusted as to be wholly incompetent to guide society, because it was equally repugnant to the intellectual perceptions and the moral sense, the knowledge and the feelings, of the best and most active-minded persons of the time. The same sort of consideration explains and vindicates the enormous power of Voltaire. France ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... incompetent man was one employed to take charge of the negro carpenters, of whom his employer wrote, "I am apprehensive ... that Green never will overcome his propensity to drink; that it is this which occasions his frequent sickness, absences from work and poverty. And I am convinced, moreover, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... possession of London bureau are incompetent to establish guilty connivance of either Lanier in any crime except those assaults on the Dodges ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... briskly. Powder-smoke in three directions at once! Here were pickets far out-lying, and a double line of skirmishers deployed in extended order, and a mounted reserve, and men standing to horse—a command of near a hundred, a pudding of pompous, incompetent, callow bosh, with Augustus by his howitzer, scientifically raising and lowering it to bear on the lone white tepee that shone in the plain. Four races were assembled to look on—the mess Chinaman, two black laundresses, all the whites in the place (on horse and foot, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... which our greatest masters cannot approach, and with a grace and appropriateness of gesture rivalling that of our best actors.... One of the girls who pronounced such discourses was but thirteen years and a half old; and most of them were utterly incompetent, in their natural state, thus to treat subjects far ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... folly, and error, and tending to inevitable ruin; that new men and new measures must be adopted before we could hope for success in war, or honour and security in peace; that as ministers had shown themselves incompetent to the management of the war when they only had the Americans to contend with, it was not to be expected that they would be able to contend with the united arms of France and America; and that they would be still less able if Spain ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real. How often have we seen them, David, jostled and ridiculed by their fellows, pushed aside and forgotten, as incompetent or unworthy. He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob, who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, and refuse ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... Mr. Burnham," said our host. "I'll give you a start of three questions, and then you must be prepared to answer every reasonable question I put to you, or be branded publicly as an unreliable witness and an incompetent detective." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... Whether she knew of some other place in which she might meet Geoffrey? or whether she had gone back to the inn? or whether she had acted under some sudden impulse of despair?—were questions which Arnold was necessarily quite incompetent to solve. There was no choice but to wait until an opportunity offered of reporting what had ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... pocket-money. The allowance was amply sufficient for the old man; it scarce appears how Miss Hazeltine contrived to dress upon it; but she did, and, what is more, she never complained. She was, indeed, sincerely attached to her incompetent guardian. He had never been unkind; his age spoke for him loudly; there was something appealing in his whole-souled quest of knowledge and innocent delight in the smallest mark of admiration; and, though the lawyer had warned her she was being sacrificed, Julia ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... simple enough to admire what they liked; young ladies of the present day can find nothing to admire except their own perspicacity in detecting faults in Raphael's drawing or Michael Angelo's colouring. This is the age of incompetent criticism in matters artistic, and no one is too ignorant to volunteer an opinion. It is sufficient to have visited half-a-dozen Italian towns, and to have read a few pages of fashionable aesthetic literature—no other education is needed to fit the intelligent young ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Keeper became very serious; since the Claim of Right, the power of appealing from the decisions of the civil court to the Estates of Parliament, which had formerly been held incompetent, had in many instances been claimed, and in some allowed, and he had no small reason to apprehend the issue, if the English House of Lords should be disposed to act upon an appeal from the Master of Ravenswood "for remeid in law." It would resolve into ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in his mind, does not touch this point; it is a further question, one of ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will generally be in favour of ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... agent (for more than three years) of the Leyden congregation, and, in spite of the wickedly unjust criticism of Robinson and others, incompetent to judge his acts, their brave, sagacious, and faithful servant—properly ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... in a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening; he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... passion. He was singularly shy of talking about his own troubles, of which he had more than his share at home, but often strange clouds cast shadows upon him, and the reasons he gave for the change observable in him were curiously incompetent to explain such results. David, who had watched him from the other end of the saw for twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath meant, and that, though their assigned cause lay in the block before them or the weather, the real ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... Jerry who took charge of the situation. Here was a prodigious laboratory in which Winslow's science was useless, but in fighting with nature—even nature in as weird and terrifying a mood as this—Jerry felt himself not entirely incompetent. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Dillon to guard the ford and to give timely notice of any attempt to effect a crossing. He also ordered the Seventeenth Ohio with three pieces of artillery and another company of cavalry, all under the command of Colonel Connell, to support the cavalry under Dillon. The latter proved wholly incompetent, and failed to comply with his orders in any particular. He went into camp two miles in the rear from where he was ordered, and neglected even to post his men to guard the ford, whereby Zollicoffer was enabled to occupy the north bank of the Cumberland without opposition ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist
... some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave the field at night, wishing to sleep at the end of their row. The inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good masters and mistresses at the South,—"and I have known very few who were not good," adds the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... time many persons know that the wild animals and birds now living upon the earth are here solely because they have had sufficient sense to devise ways and means by which to survive. The ignorant, the incompetent, the slothful and the unlucky ones have passed from earth and joined the grand ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... time as the most senseless peasant in the Galtchinskoy district, was taking his old woman to the hospital. He had to drive over twenty miles, and it was an awful road. A government post driver could hardly have coped with it, much less an incompetent sluggard like Grigory. A cutting cold wind was blowing straight in his face. Clouds of snowflakes were whirling round and round in all directions, so that one could not tell whether the snow was falling from the sky or rising from the earth. The fields, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Belize Advisory Council (this council serves as an independent body to advise the governor general with respect to difficult decisions such as granting pardons, commutations, stays of execution, the removal of justices of appeal who appear to be incompetent, etc.) National Assembly: elections last held 30 June 1993 (next to be held NA June 1998); results - percent of vote by party NA; seats - (28 total) PUP ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pure reason; our present object is exclusively a critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only when we make this critique our foundation, do we possess a pure touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of ancient and modern writings on this subject; and without this criterion, the incompetent historian or judge decides upon and corrects the groundless assertions of others with his own, which have ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... be troubled because you also are so dependent on others—so hedged in by your circumstances, so limited by sickness and pain, so incompetent through inexperience and ignorance, or that you are so compelled to stand and wait when you would fain rush on and do or dare for your Lord. All this may be even so, and yet you may be called to share in the same high vocation as ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... or Patagonia, and a late telegram comes in and announces in some broken-kneed words the bare fact of the crisis. Then the editor summons Captain Sarrasin, and Sarrasin quietly explains:—'Oh, yes, of course; I knew that was coming this long time. The man at the head of affairs was totally incompetent. I gave him my advice many a time. Yes, it's all right. I'll write a few sentences of explanation, and we shall have fuller news to-morrow.' And he would write his few sentences of explanation, and the paper he wrote for would come out ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... well as by an assumption of powers which had no precedent; he was giving a handle to his enemies by the profusion of his own household, his appropriations of clerical lands and even of the fabric of consecrated buildings to his own use; and finally his conduct of foreign affairs had been so incompetent that while the Emperor declined an English alliance, the position of Boulogne—which remained quite inefficiently garrisoned—was becoming critical, and a French squadron, ostensibly in pursuit of English pirates, attacked the island of Jersey. By the end ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... said that having an adventure means that something unexpected or unforeseen has happened; that some one has been incompetent. I had the satisfaction of knowing that the fault of this adventure, if such it could be called, was mine. Here we were, at our goal in Mexico, supposed to be a hostile land, with scant provisions ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... city has been drained of its wealth and its embellishments. Scarce anything is left but the walls and buildings, which are uninjured, the lives and the industry of the inhabitants. Sandarion is made Governor of the city and province, with, as it seems to me, a very incompetent force to support his authority. Yet the citizens are, as they have been since the day the contest was decided, perfectly peaceable—nay, I rather should say, stupid and lethargic. There appear to be on the part of Aurelian no apprehensions ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... practiced on a general scale. But we can take a more objective view of war today. What was so terrible about it? War had a profound selective value, perfectly in accord with the teachings of Darwin and Mendel and others. Without war the mass of useless, incompetent mankind, without training or intelligence, is permitted to grow and expand unchecked. War acted to reduce their numbers; like storms and earthquakes and droughts, it was nature's way of eliminating ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... progress, but rather to render me assistance. Poor fellows! how suspicious they are of their great overgrown neighbor to the north. What good-humored fellows these Turkish soldiers are! what simple-hearted, overgrown children. What a pity that they are the victims of a criminally incompetent government that neither pays, feeds, nor clothes them a quarter as well as they deserve. In the fearful winters of Erzeroum, they have been known to have no clothing to wear but the linen suits provided for the hot weather. Their ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself to using, with violence, the sword ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... which seemeth familiar with Plato, whereby the principles of sciences may be pretended to be invented, and so the middle propositions by derivation from the principles; their form of induction, I say, is utterly vicious and incompetent; wherein their error is the fouler, because it is the duty of art to perfect and exalt nature; but they contrariwise have wronged, abused, and traduced nature. For he that shall attentively observe how the mind doth gather this excellent dew of knowledge, like unto that which the poet speaketh ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Sally Fred picked out, an' not one of the other girls," she declared; "she's twenty-nine years old now—a good, sensible age—pleasant an' easy-goin', same's her mother is, an' yet real capable. Ruth always was a silly, incompetent little thing—she has to hire help most of the time, with nothin' in the world to do but cook for Frank, look after that little tiny house, take care of them two babies, an' go into the store off an' on when business ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... somewhat incompetent service, in the parish of Cailsham, the Rev. Samuel Bishop was requested to accept the chaplaincy at some distant Union. It was in this manner that ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... by his lonesome, Mr. President. His income was immense. But he cut into it something terrible. His brothers in the East began to row at the way he poured it out. When he began to draw in advance they were goin' to have him declared incompetent. Even his brothers say he's cracked. Recently they've drawn in on him. Won't let him ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... industry. But although much was done, the good was greatly hindered, especially in the inland districts, by the vice, ignorance, and stupidity of many of the Roman Catholic priests, who totally neglected their duties,—which, indeed, they were incompetent to perform,—and in many instances, were no better than miscreants in disguise, teaching the people ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... with Aunt Sophia in her assertion that Von Zwenken was not the "right man in the right place." He made no good use of his possessions; and the house was entrusted to a care-keeper, who was as incompetent as he afterwards proved himself dishonest. The old steward, who had been dismissed to make room for this stranger, was immediately engaged by Aunt Sophia to stay in the neighbourhood and keep her informed of all that happened at the ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... fourteenth century saw no hope anywhere, only gathering storms. In France, to the prudent Charles V. succeeded the mad fool Charles VI. In England the strong King Edward III. was followed by the incompetent Richard II. In Germany the Emperor Charles IV., a statesman, had as his successor the drunken sot Wenceslas. In England the Wars of the Roses were looming in the future. Agincourt proved more disastrous to England ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of three hundred men and forty horses, just half the force he sailed with from Spain the previous June, and of the three hundred men whom he led into Florida, only four lived to reach civilization - the rest perished. That is but one example of incompetent leadership. When Portola organized his expedition for the march from San Diego Bay to Monterey, many of his soldiers were ill from scurvy, and at one time on the march the sick list numbered nineteen men, including the governor ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... that, guilty or not guilty, Hook had been both incompetent and inconsiderate. Doubtless he congratulated himself highly on receiving, at the age of twenty-five, an appointment worth L2,000 a year in the paradise of the world; but how short-sighted his satisfaction, since this ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... winced, and shot a glance at the aged, unheroic figure. "And there," thought he, "but for God's grace and a woman's word, stands Narcisse Vigoureux! Even so, a few days since, did I consent to be incompetent and dread only to ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
