"Indefensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seemed to acquiesce in his reasoning, and allowed that their forts could not have stopped him; but they still asserted, that the mandarine would infallibly suffer, for not having done what all his judges were convinced was impossible. To such indefensible absurdities are those obliged to submit who think themselves concerned to support their authority, when ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... found ready learners; the absolute abandonment of all attempts at social and political improvement; the dogged determination of those in authority to remedy no grievance however patent, and to correct no abuse however indefensible. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the eve of a great political crisis, it may be of national disaster, a distinguished Liberal statesman makes public confession of his belief that, as a permanent solution, the Irish policy of the Government is indefensible." ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... appearance of Simeon through the other swing-door cut the speaker short. 'Good Shabbos,' said the shameless sinner. 'Ah, Mr. Gabriel, that was a very fine sermon.' He stroked his beard. 'I quite agree with you. To dig down a public wall is indefensible. Nobody has the right to make more than a private hole in it, where it blocks out his own prospect. So please do not bracket me with Mr. Levy again. Good Shabbos!' And, waving his hand pleasantly, he left them to ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... helped them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, e.g., Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... considered his position, the more indefensible it appeared. Time after time he had thought of Dr. Arnquist's words about judgment and skill. Without one the other was of little value to a doctor, and whatever his skill as a surgeon might have been in the Moruan operating ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... learned and judicious Dr. Wall, in his late posthumous Critical Notes upon all the other Hebrew books of the Old Testament, gives none upon the Canticles, or upon Esther, and seems thereby to give up this book, as well as he gives up the Canticles, as indefensible; I shall venture to say, that almost all the objections against this Book of Esther are gone at once, if, as we certainly ought to do, and as Dean Prideaux has justly done, we place this history under Artsxerxes ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... horrible animal appears upon the scene—the Head Hunter. Again and again we have reasoned with our boys against this bestial practice; but reason and (upon this one point) even ridicule are vain. They admit it to be indefensible; they allege its imperative necessity. One young man, who had seen his father take a head in the late war, spoke of the scene with shuddering revolt, and yet said he must go and do likewise himself in the war which was to come. How else could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... position to offer any effectual resistance. The fort was weak and indefensible. The English inhabitants consisted only of a hundred civilians, and two hundred soldiers. Governor Morse endeavoured to obtain, from the nawab, the protection which he had before granted to Dupleix, a demand which ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... which every other consideration is to be sacrificed, and Lord Normanby's alteration of the terms certainly serve that purpose well; but it is quite independent of the question of mediation, and the only thing in the whole proceeding which is indefensible in principle. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... cause may be allowed indefensible, which such a patron defends so weakly. What can be more chimerical than to imagine that men would lay down their arms, and forsake their standards, because there are twenty more in a company than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... that I was out of sight of land on those high seas of spelling reform in which so many strong swimmers have toiled vainly. To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me, I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it. As I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling, I append a table of some common vowel sounds which no one need consult; and just to prove that I belong to my age and have in me the stuff of a reformer, I have used modification ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he dealt with the potato blight, and consequent Irish Famine, is indefensible. His policy from first to last was a policy of delay—delay in a case in which delay was ruin. He went on by slow and almost imperceptible degrees preparing his colleagues for his altered views on the Corn duties; talking and writing all the time pathetically, about the deep apprehensions ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... little lower down the river is a substantial bridge that runs across from Estcourt to Fort Napier, a quaint-looking structure, neither ornamental nor useful, for hills behind and round it command the situation. Thus commanded, it is utterly indefensible, and would need an army corps to hold it. The garrison, under Brigadier-General Wolfe-Murray, at this time consisted of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Border Regiment, one squadron of Imperial Light Horse, Natal Field ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... summoned before Him," replied Mary. "It was the hardest task of all. Of you, Jacob, I have to ask forgiveness for depriving you of your early and truest friend—yes, and for much more. Of you, sir," addressing the Dominie, "for my conduct towards you, which was cruel and indefensible—will you ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... composure, that I scarcely knew what I did. She even turned, with pretty courtesy, to hold the light for me at the crypt steps,—a service that I accepted perforce and with joyless acquiescence in the irony of it. I knew that I did not believe in her; her conduct as to Pickering was utterly indefensible,—I could not forget that; but the light of her eyes, her tranquil brow, the sensitive lips, whose mockery stung and pleased in a breath,—by such testimony my doubts were alternately reinforced and disarmed. Swept by these changing moods I followed her ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... a great mistake, Wolff," Seaman declared angrily. "I am your superior in the Service, and your attitude towards me is indefensible." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... representation of the Conservative party; and as a party does not need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired whenever the Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed its proper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its most indefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongest practical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had no particular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenly interested in ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... side of the woman. She had thrown herself, therefore, with ardour into the defence of Mrs. Verrier; and for her it was not the wife's desertion, but the husband's suicide which had been the cruel and indefensible thing. All these various traits and liberalisms had made her very dear ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... destined to disarm some possible critics of Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against misunderstandings of his meaning, ought to amplify and more fully explain his statement that concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use. Understood in one way, the thesis sounds indefensible, for by concepts we certainly increase our knowledge about things, and that seems a theoretical achievement, whatever practical achievements may follow in its train. Indeed, M. Bergson might seem to be easily refutable out of his own mouth. His philosophy pretends, if anything, to give a better ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... twelve miles east of Strasburg, was committed to the charge of Colonel Kenly, of the 1st Maryland Regiment in the Federal service, and 1000 rifles and 2 guns were placed at his disposal. The post itself was indefensible. To the west and south-west, about three miles distant, stand the green peaks of the Massanuttons, while to the east the lofty spurs of the Blue Ridge look down into the village streets. A mile and a half north the forks ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in crowded House thought of these miserable men. HARCOURT made his speech; GORST demonstrated that Motion was indefensible, being both too late and too soon; the Mouse came and went amid a spasm of thrilled interest; GLADSTONE delivered oration in dinner-hour; PARNELL fired up at midnight; House divided, and SPEAKER left the Chair. Then was heard the rattling of keys in the door by OLD MORALITY's room; two limp ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... for in specie, a hardship indeed in a community where lawsuits were very common, and whose entire solid coin would not have sufficed to pay the revenue for a single year. Even bitterest Tories' declared this requirement indefensible. Another flagrant feature of the act was the provision that violators of it should be tried without a jury, before a judge whose only pay ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... storm gathered around the capitol. Cinna was overshadowed by the greatness of that plebeian general who had defeated the Cimbrians, and who was bent upon revenge for the mortification and insults he had received from the Roman aristocracy. Famine and desertion soon made the city indefensible, and Rome capitulated to an army of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... a great role in imaginative sketches of winter life in the high north, and it is in the popular idea so connected with the ice and snow of the Polar lands, that most of the readers of sketches of Arctic travel would certainly consider it an indefensible omission if the author did not give an account of the aurora as seen from his winter station. The scientific man indeed knows that this neglect has, in most cases, been occasioned by the great infrequency of the strongly luminous aurora just in the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... inspiration; that heavenly nymph, beyond suggesting the words 'my dear father,' remained obstinately silent; and presently John would crumple up the sheet and decide, as soon as he had 'a good chance,' to carry the money home in person. And this delay, which is indefensible, was his second step ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... vain I urged that her ladyship desiring to be considered absent from London, her grandson was bound to keep her secret. "Keep her secret, yes! Tell me lies, no!" cries out the Colonel. Sir Barnes's conduct was in fact indefensible, though not altogether unusual—the worst deduction to be drawn from it, in my opinion, was, that Clive's chance with the young lady was but a poor one, and that Sir Barnes Newcome, inclined to keep his uncle in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who enters one school system from another is a case in point. Such a pupil nearly always suffers a loss of time. The indefensible custom is to grade the newcomer down a little, because, forsooth, the textbooks he has studied may have differed somewhat from those he is about to take up, or because the school system from which ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... been available medical and nursing service. The remaining 28 percent (442 patients) could not have been cared for adequately in their own homes ... 24 percent of the patients secured no medical care. Many startling instances of unnecessary and indefensible suffering and misery were found.... Of the 113 women who went through childbirth in their homes, only one had the continuous care of a graduate nurse, and only 18 had any service whatever from graduate visiting nurses. 35 percent of the children born came into the world ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... the petty matters which concern the buyer of art and perplex the producer, he pours forth his jeremiads upon the age and its art, subjecting them to indefensible comparisons with the fifteenth century and deploring the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... they were slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended, present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... those of the Temple of Somnauth. Lord Ellenborough gave instructions to General Nott to bring back with him to India both the mace and the gates. The latter, as is well-known, now lie mouldering in the lumber-room of the fort at Agra, for their authenticity is absolutely indefensible; but the mace could nowhere be found by the British plunderer. Mahmud reigned from 997 to 1030 A.D., and in his days Ghuznee was probably the first city in Asia. The extensive ruins of his city stretch northwards along the Cabul road for more than two miles from the present town; but ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... do this, not by the power of their legal visitors or governors, but by acts of the legislature, and to do it without forfeiture and without fault; whether all this be not in the highest degree an indefensible and arbitrary proceeding, is a question of which there would seem to be but one side fit for a lawyer ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... exhaust, weaken &c 160. Adj. powerless, impotent, unable, incapable, incompetent; inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, disabled &c v.; armless^. harmless, unarmed, weaponless, defenseless, sine ictu [Lat.], unfortified, indefensible, vincible, pregnable, untenable. paralytic, paralyzed; palsied, imbecile; nerveless, sinewless^, marrowless^, pithless^, lustless^; emasculate, disjointed; out of joint, out of gear; unnerved, unhinged; water-logged, on one's beam ends, rudderless; laid on one's back; done up, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tone of one resuming an argument] There can't be two opinions about it, Ronny. Young Dunning's refusal is simply indefensible. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... matter who he may be—differs from any pretty and well-dressed woman—no matter who she may be—he is in the wrong. He saw that it was useless for serious, logical, high-minded persons to inveigh against the absurdity of this law, and to call it bad names. The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... ready to be released from the financial exactions of the Holy See, as well as from its practical exercise of patronage. Parliament opened an anti-clerical campaign, but its measures at first were confined to dealing with almost indefensible and obvious abuses. Bishop Fisher recognised the familiar thin end of the wedge, and charged the Commons with desiring "the goods, not the good" of the Church; but the opposition was slender. In ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... public ownership of the tramways, I was glad to take a share. The private ownership of monopolies is indefensible, and my American experiences of the injustice of the system strengthened my resolve to do my utmost to prevent the growth of the evil in South Australia. My attitude on the question alienated a number of friends, both from ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... out-flamed itself in its last-recorded performance, and he had begun to suspect that it had been responsible for some, though by no means all, of his troubles. The killing of Haig's bull, he now realized, was a foolish and indefensible act, which could be traced easily to him because of the bull that was gored; and he must prepare to account to Haig for it. And so, knowing that he would again be in the wrong, as in the affair at the post-office, he was torn between accentuated bitterness toward Haig and growing discontent ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... Pemberton really has command of all the batteries defending Richmond. The raiders are cutting the Georgia and Alabama Road since Bragg went South, and we have lost four pieces of artillery near this city a few days ago. ILL LUCK is indefensible! ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... wanted the coal for the purpose of working the ironfields of Lorraine, and in the spirit of Bismarck they have taken it. Not precedent, but the verbal professions of the Allies, have rendered it indefensible.[38] ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... battle, but lay stupidly upon your back, gazing at the sky; nor did you get up and let your men see you, until Marcus Agrippa had forced the enemies' ships to sheer off." Others imputed to him both a saying and an action which were indefensible; for, upon the loss of his fleets by storm, he is reported to have said: "I will conquer in spite of Neptune;" and at the next Circensian games, he would not suffer the statue of that God to be carried in procession ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... favour of German science and industry, and against the backward Russians. Apart from the absence of natural defences, the Russian frontier had been artificially drawn so as to make her Polish province an indefensible salient, though properly organized it would have been an almost intolerable threat alike to East Prussia and to Austrian Galicia. But for her preoccupation in the West, Germany could have conquered Poland in a fortnight, and Russian plans, indeed, contemplated a withdrawal as far ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... It is indefensible that in the face of incidents of our history such as these Californians should be ignorant of the lives and experiences of those who preceded them on this coast. The history of their experiences is a part of the history of the nation, and the record of the achievement ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... of the world. We ourselves have in some measure pleaded guilty to the impeachment. It is not long since a great majority of our free population, servile to the opinions of those whose opinions they had been accustomed to follow, would have admitted slavery to be a great evil, unjust and indefensible in principle, and only to be vindicated by the stern necessity which was imposed upon us. Thus stimulated by every motive and passion which ordinarily actuate human beings—not as to a criminal enterprise, but as to something generous and heroic—what has been ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted their household slaves to protect the women and children during their absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is another side to ...
— Progress and History • Various
... not to pack cocked pistols about in the hip pockets of their trousers; the custom is wholly indefensible. Such is the opinion of the last man who leaned up against the counter in a Marysville drinking-saloon for a quiet ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... men and women to have for each other—mysterious, inexplicable, yet real as Nature. It was as it should be. These thoughts passed through Disston's mind swiftly. Up there on top of the world, in the moonlight, any consideration which interfered seemed trifling and indefensible. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... he would not have exceeded the bounds of what is regarded as a fair method of deceiving an enemy, but his subsequent proceedings were absolutely indefensible, and are, indeed, almost incredible on the part of the man who in some respects carried the point of honor almost to an extreme. His notion, no doubt, was to paralyze the action of the enemy by exciting suspicions ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... ecclesiastical constitution of the country, but which long survived to be a stain and disgrace to it. A measure so miserably false in principle as to render civil and military qualifications dependent upon a sacramental test must in any case be worse than indefensible. As all feel now, and as many ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or the hard-won treasure of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... pertinacity which he had been unable to understand— which, indeed, had looked like sheer audacity, that he would never marry Margaret Ibbotson. Philip was now convinced that he had done his sister much wrong. Her temper and conduct were in some instances indefensible; but since he had learned all this, and become aware how much of what he had censured had been said and done out of affection for himself, he had been disposed rather to blame her for the lateness of her explanations, than for any excess of zeal on his account,—zeal which he admitted ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... the thief. Stealing a kingdom, however, is one of those national achievements which men justify to themselves as a patriotic feat, or, it may be, a necessity of empire, and it is not classified among punishable offences at all. And then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... could be obtained it would be probably found that the system tends not only to increase disease, but the volume of sexual immorality and crime. From the most materialistic point of view the system is indefensible; while, looking at it from the moral aspect, it is inconceivable that British people, who spent millions of money to stop the traffic in black slaves, would ever officially countenance a system which enslaves the souls ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... Cecil. "It is another example of my decadence. My attitude quite an indefensible one—is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don't care a straw about, but somehow, I've ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... correctly, it was a mere diplomatic squabble, in which the British ministers, with the politic generosity which they are in the habit of showing towards their official subordinates, had tried to browbeat us for the purpose of sustaining an ambassador in an indefensible proceeding; and the American Government (for God had not denied us an administration of statesmen then) had retaliated with stanch courage and exquisite skill, putting inevitably a cruel mortification upon their opponents, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... infallible means of circumventing points of resistance. This conception, which restricts the functions of Cavalry within their narrowest limits, seems to me entirely untenable. It is essentially indefensible when it is a matter of gaining time or of carrying a given position, such as a defensible post on the lines of communication, a convoy marching under escort, the destruction of a defended railway, or in any similar ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... principle of the lawfulness of slavery has been defended by some who are ministers of Christ, that so large a proportion of that body in America, are exerting their influence in favor of the continuance of so indefensible and monstrous a system—and that these emotions of sorrow are especially occasioned with reference to our ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... without comment. He refused to give his adhesion to General Scott's nomination, and he advised his friends to vote for Mr. Pierce, because the Whigs were divided, while the Democrats were unanimously determined to resist all attempts to renew the slavery agitation. This course was absolutely indefensible. If the Whig party was so divided on the slavery question that Mr. Webster could not support their nominee, then he had no business to seek a nomination at their hands, for they were as much divided before the convention as afterwards. He chose to come before ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... so far outstripped our sources of revenue that we have come to look on an annual deficit as a normal and defensible thing. I think it is indefensible. I think it is going to have a bad effect on our attendance and our morals if the members have to look forward to what amounts to a good big assessment at every convention. A deficit is not inevitable. The secretary-treasurer ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... "well, perhaps it would not be a pleasant song to sing, but better, I should think, than some of those dreadful sentimental ones. They are not much worse than the Strephon and the Chloe class, in which our ancestors delighted; still, they are indefensible. If our Lauras find Petrarchs now, they are usually very beardless ones, and the green morocco cover, with its golden lock, covers their indiscretions. Those who write love ditties for the piano must celebrate a shadow who can't be critical. Imagine any man insulting ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Clarke's tone was sneering. "You people don't try to understand them; you can't come down to it. Standing firm on your colour prejudice and official traditions, you expect the others to agree with you. It's an indefensible policy." He turned to the Hudson's Bay agent. "You ought to know something about the matter. On the whole, the Hudson's Bay treat the Indians well; there was a starving lad you picked up suffering from snow-blindness ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... God began to occupy me. It seemed to me in the highest degree indefensible of Him to interfere every time I sought for a place, and to upset the whole thing, while all the time I was but imploring enough for a ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... them; while the labour and zeal of the individual fisherman, who may have only his labour and zeal to give, would find their value in wages or other remuneration. But it is not to be denied that any such legislation would be extremely arbitrary and indefensible in principle. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... with those honest men who will not go the whole way. That independent co-operation can serve the full purpose of the binding alliance that has proved fatal. Above all, let there be no charge of bad faith against the earnest man who chooses other ways than ours; it is altogether indefensible because we disagree with him to call his motives in question. Often he is as earnest as we are; often has given longer and greater service, and only qualifies his own attitude in anxiety to meet others. To this we cannot assent, but to charge him with bad faith is flagrantly unjust ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... an irritation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down into his seat by the tails of his coat. The restoration of the clerks was an indefensible error of judgment, and its indiscretion was heightened by the kind of defence which Burke tried to set up. When we wonder at Burke's exclusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bembridge should ...
— Burke • John Morley
... was acting as substitute for Sir Robert Chambers, the principal of New Inn Hall and Vinerian Professor of Law, who contrived to hold his university preferments, whilst he discharged the duties of a judge in India. To give an honest color to this indefensible arrangement, it was provided that the lectures read from the Vinerian Chair should actually be written by the Professor, although they were delivered by deputy. Scott, therefore, as the Professor's mouth-piece, on a salary of L60 a year, with free quarters in the Principal's house, was ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... not before you The word was injudicious, I allow— But hear my explanation, I implore you, And you will be indignant too, I vow! SIR JOSEPH. I will hear of no defence, Attempt none if you're sensible. That word of evil sense Is wholly indefensible. Go, ribald, get you hence To your cabin with celerity. This is ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... decrees favoured the proletariat. A crime against the Republic was indefensible, but one against the individual was dealt with, with all the paraphernalia of an elaborate administration of justice. There were citizen judges and citizen advocates, and the rabble, who crowded in to listen to the trials, ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... concert, anything in the way of art that was not illicit must have been eminently welcome. But The Task has merits of a more universal and enduring kind. Its author himself says of it:—"If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect, however, I do not think it altogether indefensible), it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the preceding passage, and that, except the fifth book, which is rather of a political aspect, the whole has one tendency, to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... exceeded 5,000; that of the French was 6,000, besides 2,400 Germans who deserted to the British during the night of the 9th in obedience to orders from home. Ever since he assumed the command Soult had shown military ability of a rare order. Bayonne, the base of all his operations, was indefensible before he fortified it. A great proportion of his troops were raw conscripts, or demoralised by defeat, before he inspired them with his own courage and vigour. He was practically dependent for subsistence in his own country on the very system of pillage which had roused a patriotic ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... romance. The immediate subject of these observations is slight and trivial; but the evil itself is wide-spread and important, and deserves severe reprehension, as many portions of our national history have been strangely disfigured by such indefensible practices. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... the Great Powers, which provided Belgium with the strongest and most unequivocal guarantees respecting her territorial integrity. Provided these guarantees were observed faithfully, the closing of the Scheldt by Holland in time of war, the critical situation on the Eastern frontier created by the indefensible cul-de-sac of Dutch Limburg, and the supremacy in Luxemburg of a foreign Power, did not seriously jeopardize the country's security. The treaties of 1839 were considered as forming a whole, the moral safeguard of guaranteed neutrality counterbalancing, to a certain ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... And all now that seems wanting to harmonize science with revelation is, on the one hand, the re-examination of the Scripture texts on which are based the principia from which deductions are made, and which we call theology; and, on the other hand, the rejection of indefensible statements which are at war with both science and consciousness, except in those matters which claim special supernatural agency, which we can neither prove nor disprove by reason; for supernaturalism claims to transcend the realm of reason altogether in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... this and if Christianity says "There is a higher way to which God calls you," I do not think there is here an indefensible contradiction. It is a case of a ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... admit that this uncertainty on the question of justice may not exist in every case. I have always believed that some of the cessions of territory forced on Bulgaria were utterly indefensible from any point of view whatsoever. I refer, not to Macedonia, that impossible jumble of contradictions, but ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... would intimidate the Mexicans from making any insurrectionary movement. Alvarado himself declared that he had information that the Mexicans intended to rise, but he gave no proofs, whatever, to justify his suspicions. The affair, indeed, seems to have been utterly indefensible, and must ever remain a ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... the whole case—viz. upon the petition for land, as affected by the shocking menaces of the Seceders—has, in no other way, been able to evade the double mischief of undertaking a defence for the indefensible, and at the same time of losing the land irretrievably, than by affecting an unconsciousness of language used by his party little suited to his own sacred calling, or to the noble simplicities of Christianity. Certainly it is unhappy for the Seceders, that the only disavowal of the most fiendish ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... had this desire, but there is a principle in human nature, which hankers after the thing forbidden; hence, as St. Paul says, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." We are not defending human nature, which is indefensible, but merely stating facts. Tamar had much desire to visit this mysterious place; and so it happened one day, when she had her dog with her, and the sun was shining, and all about her bright and gay, that she climbed up the little green knoll, and ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... big manufacturers talk about control of production by the farmer as an indefensible "economy of scarcity." And yet these same manufacturers never hesitate to shut down their own huge plants, throw men out of work, and cut down the purchasing power of whole communities whenever they think ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... published his "Letters on International Copyright," in which he took the ground that the facts and ideas in a book are the common property of society, and that property in copyright is indefensible. In 1858 a bill was introduced into the House of Representatives by Mr. Morris, of Pennsylvania, providing for international copyright on the basis of an entire remanufacture of the foreign work and its reissue by an American publisher within thirty days of the publication abroad. The bill ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... too, therefore, the President found himself constrained to give way. And only did he abandon his humanitarian intentions and his strongest arguments to be lightly brushed aside, he actually recoiled so far into the camp of his opponents that he gave his approval to an indefensible clause in the Treaty which would have handed over to France the German population of the Saar as the equivalent of a certain sum in gold. Coming from the world-reformer who, a short time before, had hurled the thunderbolts of his oratory against those ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... doubts about the right and wrong of an attempt to thwart the sheriff before, Laura had none now. Perhaps her course was indefensible; but intuitively she believed that farmer to be a bad man. And she was sure that he was the one who had set the sheriff on ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... too excessive, and in every respect too indefensible to last long; new paper and new juggling tricks were of necessity resorted to; the latter were known to be such—people felt them to be such—but they submitted to them rather than not have twenty crowns in safety in their houses; and a greater violence made people suffer the smaller. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... even resort to blandishments of costume to give their parts a special emphasis. Our leading ladies are more richly clad than the minor members of their companies. Even the great Mansfield resorted in his performance of Brutus to the indefensible expedient of changing his costume act by act and dressing always in exquisite and subtle colors, while the other Romans, Cassius included, wore the same togas of unaffected white throughout the play. This was ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the matter might have rested; for though the conduct of this Arab chief would certainly have been indefensible in a civilized country, the worst charge that can be considered as fairly proved against him is that of being a receiver of stolen goods, as the price of his connivance at the appropriation of the rest by the supercargo—since with the wreck of the ship, whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... because she was a Catholic, or because she excited fear or jealousy, is utterly indefensible. All that the English nation had a right to do was to set her succession aside because she was a Catholic, and would undo the work of the Reformation. She had a right to her religion; and the nation also had a right to prevent its religion from being ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Everett you are wrong; And your superannuated allies, TYPE and FIGURE, whom I disdain to combat, cannot aid you to defend what is indefensible. ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... whatever may tend to justify, however slightly, is eagerly seized upon and proclaimed. There is scarcely an evil practice for which the doer may not raise up or create reasons in justification, and plausible arguments may be made to gloss over the most detestable and indefensible crimes. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... M'Ilraith sent him a flag, reproaching him with shooting his pickets, contrary, as he alleged, to all the laws of civilized warfare, and defying him to a combat in the open field. Marion replied, that the practice of the British in burning the houses of all who would not submit and join them, was more indefensible than that of shooting pickets, and that as long as they persisted in the one he would persevere in the other. That as to his defiance, he considered it that of a man in desperate circumstances; but if ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... capital was blockaded by sea and land, and after a siege of some months surrendered. On the proposal, as it appears, of Alcibiades, all the adult males were put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, and the island colonized afresh by 500 Athenians. This horrible proceeding was the more indefensible, as the Athenians, having attacked the Melians in full peace, could not pretend that they were justified by the custom of war in slaying the prisoners. It was the crowning act of insolence and cruelty displayed during their empire, which from this period ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... critiques and the manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Act and the Seditious Meetings Act, went beyond the necessity of the case; that they were not only violations of the constitution—which, when the measures are temporary, as these were, are not always indefensible—but that they were superfluous, unjust, and impolitic; superfluous, when they proposed to deal with acts already visitable with punishment by the ancient laws of the kingdom; unjust, when they created new classes of offences; and impolitic, as exciting ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Bushman's Hoek range to endeavour to prevent descent into Queenstown district, which would mean general state of rebellion of Dutch. Force will be strengthened at Queenstown by next British regiment which should arrive at Queenstown 5th December, but Queenstown is indefensible position. Are there any orders especially as ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... The first policy found indefensible has been your handling of the border slave states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. You have not yet declared the slaves free in these states, the only ones in which you actually have the power to ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... years from this conversation, 21st February 1777, My Lord Archbishop of York, in his 'Sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts', thus indignantly describes the then state of parties: 'Parties once had a PRINCIPLE belonging to them, absurd perhaps, and indefensible, but still carrying a notion of DUTY, by which honest minds might ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... eye and ear were such as, for accuracy of observation, few have ever witnessed. It is true he could subsist a long time without food, but, like the renowned Captain Dalgetty, when an abundance of it happened to be placed before him, he displayed the most indefensible ignorance as to all knowledge of the period when he ought to stop, considering it his bounden duty on all occasions to clear off whatever was set before him—a feat which he always accomplished with the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... but also a recollection of their own wrongs, made these men eloquent eulogists. Had Socrates appeared to the Athenians as he appears to us, it is not consistent with human proceedings that they should have acted in so barbarous and totally indefensible a manner. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: blossom. Keats and Rossetti are ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... and versification adapt themselves to every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknowledged, but they sink into insignificance when measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, indefensible verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hopelessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shakespeare's vast work is scrutinised ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... say with apparent truth that they are not fighting reasonable, law-abiding workmen, but assassins and incendiaries. No course is easier for the employer who does not seek to deal honestly with his men, and none more secure for that employer whose position is wholly indefensible on the subject of hours and wages, than to sidetrack all these issues by hypocritically declaring that he refuses to deal with men who are led by criminals. And it is quite beyond question that some such employers have deliberately urged their "detectives" to create trouble. Positive evidence is ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... for an indefinite period. When it is remembered that there are still 194 Unions without a woman on the Board of Guardians, the present arrangement, by which the Women Inspectors can only inspect Poor Law Institutions on sufferance, is seen to be indefensible and the need for reform ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... the habit of striking bears as large as a horse with a school-slate was equally dangerous to the slate (which was also the property of Tuolumne County) and to the striker; and that the verb "to swot" and the noun substantive "snoot" were likewise indefensible, and not to be tolerated. Thus admonished Jimmy Snyder, albeit unshaken in his faith in his own courage, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... that he had been genuinely disgusted, not as a matter of duty, but unaffectedly, as a matter of simple nature. What interested him in her was her novel and bold moral attitude, her self-respect in the midst of her sin, her striking arguments in favor of an apparently indefensible course of life. Hers was no common case of loose living, he felt: there was a soul to be saved there, if only Heaven would raise her up a friend in some man absolutely proof against the vulgar fascination of her prettiness. He began to imagine a certain greatness of ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... so profoundly wounded Doyle as to force him into sacrificing lucrative employment, and condemning him in the result to a life of toil. But for once in his career Doyle was guilty of behaviour which, if not inexcusable in the circumstances, was certainly indefensible. He left the paper in the lurch. His letter of resignation was sent in on November 27th, he having allowed the Editor to think that the blocks for the Almanac, already overdue, had all been completed; and when it was discovered that they had not been done, and that nothing was forthcoming, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... France had not asked Garibaldi for his services, and had in the first instance refused them, circumstances had made him general-in-chief of a large corps d'armee composed almost entirely of Frenchmen, and to abandon him would be indefensible. Then the anger of the chancellor blazed forth against Garibaldi. "I want to parade him through the streets of Berlin," he cried, "with a placard on ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... to make an immediate contribution to the empress, and annually thereafter to send tribute to the capital of Japan. Thus they became the three tributary countries (sankan) dependent on Japan. Although this invasion of a foreign country without cause or provocation must be pronounced indefensible, yet it is not unlikely that the subject kingdoms were quite as safe and free under the distant and little intermeddlesome dominion of the Japanese empire, as they had been in the past or were likely to be in the future from their troublesome neighbors, China and the restless Mongolian tribes. To ...
— Japan • David Murray
... held their own as against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... conformity to its requirements. She will still be told that purity of mind, soul, and manners, is the shield of her sex, and yet, in some circles, practices shall be tolerated, or fashions of dress, or conversation permitted, which to her all-unsophisticated reason must seem absolutely indefensible. History tells us, that in the thirteenth century, when the plague raged in Florence, it spread through the suburbs of that city, from the exhalations of certain beautiful flowers. See, my young friends, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... to her invalid grandmother, who lived not far from the Baron's house; but not to arrive at her grandmother's till breakfast-time next morning. Who would suspect an intercalated experience of twelve hours with the Baron at a ball? That this piece of deception was indefensible she afterwards owned readily enough; but she did not stop ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... because of its immediate effect upon the temper of the time, food was very scarce and prices had risen to indefensible heights. The army was short of shoes. In the newspapers, as winter came on, were to be found touching descriptions of Lee's soldiers standing barefoot in the snow. A flippant comment of Benjamin's, that the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of thought, we miss the key to that ecclesiastical statesmanship which dominates the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The programme of the great Popes, from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, must appear a tissue of absurdities, of preposterous ambitions and indefensible actions, unless it is studied in relation to a theology as far remote from primitive Christianity as from the cults and philosophies of ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... which has always seemed to me much to be condemned, and that is the habit of changing the end of a story, for fear of alarming the child. This is quite indefensible. In doing this we are tampering with folklore and ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock |
