"Incompetent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of success, are not infallible, but their opinion of a beginner's work is far more correct than his own can ever be. They should not depress him quite, but if they are long unanimous in holding him cheap, he is warned, and had better withdraw from the struggle. He is either incompetent, or he has the makings of a Browning. He is a genius born too soon. He may readily calculate the chances ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... deep and delicate sense of beauty in form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe. The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in company with drawings and ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... bull, good-natured though that bull might be. The same thought struck Judge Tiffany. Antonio, the Portuguese, lolling half-asleep against the dashboard, was worse than useless; the nearest visible help was a Chinaman, incompetent against horned cattle, and another ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... line of distinction as against Germans or Irishmen, and institute no test of religion, politics or culture, we ought not to erect an artificial barrier of color. If the Negroes are competent they should be commissioned. If they are incompetent they should not be trusted with the grave responsibilities attached to official position. ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... its diplomatic correspondence and its foreign representatives. We 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the Jewish kingdom has come to an end. The frivolous levity, which fed itself on illusions and would not be sobered by facts, has been finally crushed out of the wretched people. The dreary succession of incompetent kings—now a puppet set up by Egypt, now another puppet set up by Babylon, has ended with the weak Zedekiah. The throne of David is empty, and the long line of kings, which numbered many a strong, wise, holy man, has dwindled into a couple of captives, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... libidinous propensities. How far their peculiar circumstances may either account for or palliate their apparent immorality in this respect, is quite another question; one too, it is probable, which the prejudiced and erring mind of man is, of itself, incompetent to solve. One thing, however, is most certain: The Judge of all the earth will do what is right with his creatures, whether he take vengeance for transgression, or pardon in mercy, or ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... "The police, my dear boy, is the most incompetent thing on this earth, and government the feeblest in all matters concerning individuals. Neither the police nor the government can read hearts. What we might reasonably ask of them is to search for the causes of an ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... if the character of the newspaper man in The Doctor's Dilemma is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... 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 even jokes about ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... infecting our parliamentary system have grown still graver; when a democratic House, more and more broken up into small groups, more and more governed by sectional and interested motives, shall have shown itself evidently incompetent to conduct the business of the country with honour, efficiency, and safety; when the public has learned more fully the enormous danger to national prosperity as well as individual happiness of dissociating power from property and giving the many an unlimited right of confiscating ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... that way, myself; and I think,' said poor Milly, making an effort, and growing very red; she quite lost her head at that point, and was incompetent to finish ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Catholic question his conduct has exhibited a series of blunders which have at length terminated in his fall. The position in which he then stood was this:—He had a Government composed of men who were for the most part incompetent, but perfectly subservient to him. He had a considerable body of adherents in both Houses. The Whigs, whose support (enthusiastically given) had carried him triumphantly through the great contest, were willing to unite with him; the Tories, exasperated and indignant, feeling insulted and betrayed, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... 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
... spoke of you as I have found you. (I told him you were a disreputable hound, and that Moore had crossed a fight.) I told him you were a drunken ass, and Moore an incompetent and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Shiloh—so N.V. says—but this is 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 Iowa history there was in the ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... 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
... it has been said, "make a majority." But in this case God was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... speaking on behalf of our dominant race, and the Hare, speaking as an appointed advocate of the subject animal creation, finished their argument in the light of fuller knowledge. Much also do I wonder which of them was proved to be right, a difficult matter whereon I feel quite incompetent to express any views. ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... and incompetent workman. If chipping or cutting is required, he will grasp the first chisel at hand. It may have a curved end, or be a key-way chisel, or entirely unsuited as to size for the ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... that the day for the old individualism has passed. Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... belonging to Cananor having a Portuguese pass, which he sunk with all her moorish crew sewed up in a sail that they might never be seen. But this wicked action was afterwards discovered, for which Vaz was broke; a very incompetent punishment for so great a crime, owing to which the Portuguese afterwards suffered severe calamities, as will appear ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... served with much distinction upon the Continent, landed in Donegal, accompanied by about a hundred French-Irish officers. He instantly took the command of the disorganized and fast-dissolving northern levies; superseded the incompetent Sir Phelim, who from that moment fell away into contempt and impotence; suppressed all disorders, and punished, as far as possible, those who had been foremost in the work of blood, expressing at the same time his utter detestation of the horrors which had hitherto ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... officers had, most of them, been degraded in rank. Many of them had been retired on pittances which were not paid. Those who were lucky enough to be retained in active service were superseded by superannuated, often incompetent old officers of the old royal army before the revolution, or by young scions of nobility with no knowledge or fitness to command veterans, to whom the gross-bodied, uninspiring, gouty old King did not appeal. Again, the regimental names and associations ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... bigotry and fraud, it is also the party of gay liberality with other people's money. In the matter of directing the destinies of this country towards a higher and better national existence, there is really nothing to choose between Republicanism and Democracy. Both are equally unwilling and incompetent, both, despite the prating of civil service snobs and snivellers are dominated by spoils, and the managers of both regard a campaign not as a battle for the betterment of America but as a battle for boodle. The McKinley administration has appointed some Negro ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... bare-footed or on rude wooden sandals. These people, the reader must understand, were an urban population sunken back to the state of a barbaric peasantry, and so without any of the simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways they were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they had material, and they were forced to plunder the continually dwindling supplies of the ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the lives of your comrades, and my own. It is your good fortune that a Council delegate has not been present at one of your exhibitions. But I dare not risk more. Let the warning whistle come from your station just once again and I shall report you as an incompetent. You know the law." ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... our Aunt Esta. "Your Doom has overtaken you! Go hence with the clatter of a Horse's Hoof until such time as your Incompetent ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... sport of chance and error. Socrates, the wisest of men, needed the warning voice of his good genius, or [Greek: daimonion], to enable him to do what was right in regard to his own personal affairs, or at any rate, to avoid mistakes; which argues that the human intellect is incompetent for the purpose. There is a saying—which is reported to have originated with one of the Popes—that when misfortune happens to us, the blame of it, at least in some degree, attaches to ourselves. If this ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... may easily take his choice from amongst twenty different sorts. There is, however, so little difference in the various members of the family, either as regards hardiness, laying, or hatching, that the most incompetent fancier or breeder may indulge his taste without danger of making a bad bargain. In connection with their value for table, light-coloured ducks are always of milder flavour than those that are dark-coloured, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... is used to attest that the world alone {180} exists, and that monism knows of but one existence,—namely, that of the world; while the contrary view of the world—that of theism, which in a manner wholly incompetent, and historically wholly unjustified, is called dualism—supposes two existences, God and the world. But then this name does not correctly represent either itself or theism. It does not correctly represent itself: for the so-called monism does not, indeed, suppose ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... down my opinion, that Liberia is firmly planted, and is destined to increase and prosper. This it will do, though all further support from the United States be discontinued. A large part of the present population, it is true, are ignorant, and incompetent to place a just estimate on freedom, or even to comprehend what freedom really is. But they are generally improving in this respect; and there is already a sufficient intermixture of intelligent, enterprising ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... it, at least, that I have seen fit to preserve," replied the old man. "Thou art but just in time for this even. It is proper to apprise thee that the virtues of the talisman having necessarily dwindled with its bulk, it is at present incompetent to evoke any Genie, and can at most summon an imp, of whose company thou wilt never be able to rid thyself, inasmuch as the least friction will inevitably destroy what little of the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... "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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 in his path. Without obstruction he crossed the Apennines, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... that caucuses, divisionalists, stump-oratory, and speeches to Buncombe will not carry men to the immortal gods; that the Washington Congress, and constitutional battle of Kilkenny cats is there, as here, naught for such objects; quite incompetent for such; and, in fine, that said sublime constitutional arrangement will require to be (with terrible throes, and travail such as few expect yet) remodelled, abridged, extended, suppressed, torn asunder, put together again—not without heroic labour and effort, quite other than that of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... powerfully enforced by William de Powerie, their spokesman, that the exposure of the enormities permitted in England called up a deep blush on the face of Innocent, and he allowed that he had been wrong in thrusting in these incompetent Italians. There was one good effected at this council, namely, the appointment of Richard Wych ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... moved by a beneficent purpose to the acts which have inspired them. The sun is a symbol of this creative power—by many even imagined to be its reality. But that mighty orb is unconscious of the feelings it may inspire; and the Divine Omnipotence, which it symbolizes, must be no less incompetent to earn them. For purpose is the negation of power, implying something which power has not attained; and would imply deficiency in an existence which presents itself to our intelligence as complete. Reason therefore tells us that God can have no resemblance with ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 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 ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... priori grounds which shall embrace a universe the larger portion of which is virtually beyond the field of observation. We are conscious of possessing some rational data and some mental equipment for the former task, but for the latter we feel utterly incompetent.[261] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... nominate Broglio, the fat choleric Marshal, of Italian breed and physiognomy, whom we saw at Strasburg last year, when Friedrich was there. Broglio will quit Strasburg too soon, and come. A man fierce in fighting, skilled too in tactics; totally incompetent in strategy, or the art of LEADING armies, and managing campaigns;—defective in intelligence indeed, not wise to discern; dim of vision, violent of temper; subject to sudden cranks, a headlong, very positive, loud, dull and angry kind of man; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... can we allege for this neglect? None, unless it be that the season of strenuous burrowing is past. The instincts have a calendar of their own. At the given hour, suddenly they awaken; as suddenly, afterwards, they fall asleep. The ingenious become incompetent when the prescribed ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... be necessary for the long extract which we are about to give, to any person who will read it with attention. It is from a lecture on Agricultural Science, by Dr. Madden, and we confess ourselves incompetent to condense or improve the language of ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... character. The compass of the voice remains exactly the same. He has merely exchanged several excellent tones below for some very poor ones above. I repeat, one who aspires to be a lyric artist requires the best possible teacher to guide his first steps; he may consult an inferior or incompetent professor, when so firmly established in the right path that he cannot ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... party interested, the qualifications of other possible candidates, Coke, Hobart, and the Archbishop Abbott. Coke would be "an overruling nature in an overruling place," and "popular men were no sure mounters for your Majesty's saddle." Hobart was incompetent. As to Abbott, the Chancellor's place required "a whole man," and to have both jurisdiction, spiritual and temporal, "was fit only for a king." The promise that Bacon should have the place came to him three days afterwards ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... objections to this course. However incompetent, I should not shrink from the labour involved; nor do I entirely approve the growing demand for German minuteness and exactitude in editors. But, firstly, the ballad should be subject to variation only while it is in oral circulation. Secondly, editorial garnishing has been ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... matter, through his smiling but incompetent interpreter, to explain that he wanted the use of the smith's appliances. To quicken their apprehension he produced a couple of half-crowns, pointing out that they were worth four rupees, and offered these as payment ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... thing. Why should any one desire true erudition? The more incompetent a man, the pleasanter his life is and the more he is admired. Look at professors, poets, orators. Man's mind is so made that he is more impressed by lies than by the truth. Go to church: if the priest deals with serious ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... to master such more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... new titles of President, Governor, and Captain-general. Don Melchior Bravo de Saravia was invested with this triple character in 1568; a man well qualified to act as president of the court of audience and civil governor of the kingdom, but utterly incompetent to sustain the charge of captain-general; yet he was anxious to signalize the commencement of his government by the attainment of a splendid victory over the redoubtable Araucanians, for which an opportunity soon offered, but which redounded to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... the national Church, with its disproportionate wealth and its selfish, incompetent, and often degraded officials, could not but be a growing offence to the developing intelligence of the nation; and to quicken this feeling there were minor grievances which were an ancient ground of complaint on the part of the laity against their spiritual ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... a 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 ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... situation was exploited by the Vienna Government, while at the same time the armies of Radetzky and Windischgraetz were stamping out every trace of (p. 455) insurrection in Lombardo-Venetia, in Bohemia, and eventually in Vienna itself. December 2, 1848, the easy-going, incompetent Emperor Ferdinand was induced by the reactionaries to abdicate. His brother, Francis Charles, the heir-presumptive, renounced his claim to the throne, and the crown devolved upon the late Emperor's youthful nephew, Francis Joseph I., ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and with a hopelessness that prepared defeat, did he make efforts to find occupation. But he was not naturally an idle man nor in all directions incompetent, and he watched the people passing to office, shop, workroom, with a gaze which had grown ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... there was sufficient warning, time and room. At best, sea travel is a hazard; the finest of ships are liable to meet with disaster. But over much of this sacrifice of life hung grim, ugly charges of mismanagement and corruption, of insufficient crews and incompetent officers; of defective machinery and rotting timber; of lack of proper inspection ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... her lace parasol had a knot of yellow ribbon at one side, to match the tint of her sash. Her long tan gloves and the Marechal Niel roses at her neck were finishing touches of the picture which Sydney was incompetent to grasp in detail, although he felt its charm on a whole. The sweet, delicate face, with its refined features and great dark eyes, was one which might well cause a man to barter all the world for love; and, in Sydney's case, it happened that to gain its owner meant to gain the world ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the more cruelly. One general after another became the scapegoat for the popular indignation. Then the General Staff was freely censured, and whispers went round that the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Czar, was not only incompetent to conduct a great war, but guilty of underhand dealings with the contractors who defrauded the troops and battened on the public funds. Letters from the rank and file showed that the bread was bad, the shoes were rotten, the rifles outclassed by those of the Turks, and that trenching-tools ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... been invited by Philip to make ready to take in hand the affairs of Flanders, sadly disorganized under the incompetent rule of Alva. It occurred to him that if he were to issue victoriously from that enterprise—and so far victory had waited upon his every venture—if he were to succeed in restoring peace and Spanish order in rebellious Flanders, he would then be able to ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... intolerable, this! Do you think that I do not see through these dummy waiters, these obsequious shopmen, these ladies who drop their eyes when I pass, these commissionaires, these would-be acquaintances? I tell you that they irritate me, this incompetent, futile crowd. You pit them against me! Bah! You should know better. When I choose to disappear, I shall disappear, and no one will follow me. When I strike, I shall strike, and no one will discover what my will may be. You are ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sat there most of the day, the mere pulp of a man. His one desire now was to escape from the eyes of his fellow-men. He felt that he bore the marks of his disgrace, obvious at a glance. He had been turned out of the army as a hopeless incompetent; he was worse than a slacker, for the slacker might have latent ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... know something of this young person. She wants nothing but an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly incompetent. It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that surround it. There is no question ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and is actually so, as the consciousness of the moral law proves, then it is still only one and the same reason which, whether in a theoretical or a practical point of view, judges according to a priori principles; and then it is clear that although it is in the first point of view incompetent to establish certain propositions positively, which, however, do not contradict it, then, as soon as these propositions are inseparably attached to the practical interest of pure reason, it must accept them, ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... that with such ignorance in the Cabinet as to the condition of the country, that the administration at Washington was so incompetent in the Civil War. No person can read Secretary Wells's diary of the daily doings at Washington of the Cabinet during President Lincoln's administration and see how little appreciation and support he got ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... nerve embrace the entire range even of radiation. Some rays, when they reach it, are incompetent to evoke its power, while others never reach it at all, being absorbed by the humours of the eye. To all rays which, whether they reach the retina or not, fail to excite vision, we give the name of invisible or obscure rays. All non-luminous ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... commanded respect: he was diminutive in stature, and he could boast of no noble blood running in his veins.[128] A more formidable hinderance in the path to distinction had been the barbarous instruction he had received from incompetent masters, both in the inferior schools and in the university itself. But all obstacles, physical, social, and intellectual, melted away before the ardor of an extraordinarily active mind. Rising steadily above the contracted views, the blind respect for authority, and ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... the collapse; others continued to act, but in a half-hearted way. Sixty new detectives were taken on by the Yugoslav authorities, and fifty-six of them had to be dismissed. After all, if one can judge a person's character from his face, the detective who allowed you to do so would be so incompetent as not to warrant a trial. And after six or seven months of Yugoslav administration only thirty-three out of fifty-two detective appointments in Sarajevo had been definitely filled. So there was ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... that this present blame is ominous of their future or final destiny. If this be the case, your tenderness for me betrays you. Be assured that the decision of these persons has nothing to do with the question; they are altogether incompetent judges. These people, in the senseless hurry of their idle lives, do not read books, they merely snatch a glance at them, that they may talk about them. And even if this were not so, never forget what, I believe, was observed to you ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... her about Randall, and other vexations which she had carefully concealed from Catherine, lest they should make her unhappy. Thus she represented it to herself: the truth was, lest Catherine should make a point of Randall being parted with, an effort she knew herself quite incompetent to make. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... ever saw Giddy. She never heard the drum of an airplane without getting a sick, gone feeling at the pit of her stomach. She knew, now, that there was more to the air service than a becoming uniform. She was doing some war work herself in an incompetent, frenzied sort of way. With Giddy soaring high and her foreign stocks and bonds falling low she might well be excused for the panic that shook her from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she tardily closed them ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Car-proprietors and drivers in the island, that he did not mean to suggest for a moment that there was the slightest real danger to the public who patronise those highly popular and excellently-conducted vehicles, or that any actual driver was either intemperate or incompetent; and that, should such an impression have been unfortunately produced—which he hopes is impossible—no one would regret so unjust an aspersion more sincerely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in "Samson Agonistes"; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the degree of Doctor of Letters. I have seen a good many of these theses, and I am sure this account is correct. With very rare exceptions they are as dead as mutton, and much less nourishing. The upshot of our conversation was that he thought me an incompetent professor, and I thought him an ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... 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
... 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 and ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... the misapplication of the serious faculties.[13] It was a design manifestly beyond the author's powers; and even the fragment which is turned into the fourth book of the Dunciad takes him plainly out of his depth. He was no philosopher, and therefore an incompetent assailant of the abuses of philosophy. The fourth book consists chiefly of ridicule upon pedagogues who teach words instead of things; upon the unlucky "virtuosos" who care for old medals, plants, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... that the plot failed because a man unauthorized and incompetent, William Paul, undertook to make enlistments on his own account. He happened on one of precisely that class of men,—favored house-servants,—whom his leaders had expressly reserved for more skilful manipulations. ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... childhood and manhood how incalculable is the mischief which ignorance in the home has the power to cause! Between the drawing of the first breath and the last, how vast is the moral suffering and disease occasioned by incompetent mothers and nurses! Commit a child to the care of a worthless ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done. Let the mother be idle, vicious, and a slattern; let her home be pervaded by cavilling, petulance, and discontent, and ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... delegate will be so much the higher as talents are more rare among his constituents. It will therefore frequently happen that the less constituents have to expect from their representative, the more they will anticipate from him; and, however incompetent he may be, they will not fail to call upon him for signal exertions, corresponding to the rank ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... harmony with those popular rights which had been proclaimed, the half-hearted leaders proceeded to look about for a King; and from that time till now they have been in this quest, as if it were the Holy Grail, or happiness on earth. The royal family of Spain was declared incompetent. Therefore a king must be found outside,——and so the quest was continued in other lands. One day the throne is offered to a prince of Portugal, then to a prince of Italy, but declined by each,——how wisely the future will show. At last, after ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... The President has a remarkable insight into men, promptly estimating character with an accuracy that makes it a difficult matter to deceive him, or to win his favor either for visionary schemes, corrupt attacks upon the treasury, or incompetent place-hunters. He has shown that he has been guided by a wise experience of the past, and a sagacious foresight of the future, exhibiting sacrifices of individual friendship to a sense ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his second childhood and so sunk in senility that he was the laughing-stock of his subjects. All despised him utterly, and disregarded him because he was incompetent to control State affairs, but they paid their court to Justinian with awe, for he terrified them all by his love of disturbance and ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... have reached two thousand. The Post-Office Department and the Customs Service were purged with special severity. The sole principle on which the new appointees were selected was loyalty to Jackson. Practically all were inexperienced, most were incompetent, ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... 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
... trust a bale of merchandise with him; and surely he will not abandon his bark of existence to the command of a charlatan, who knows nothing of the principles of the art he professes, and is altogether incompetent to steer clear of the numerous rocks and quicksands in the course of life; but a man of reflection and judgment is not a very common character; he is surrounded by hundreds who examine not for themselves; and are easily deluded, by the fairest promises, to surrender their opinions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was "ever ready," &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people's feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... by little, as midsummer came and went, beacons were gathering on every hill, ships were approaching efficiency, and troops assembling at Tilbury under the supremely incompetent command of Lord Leicester. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... been generally supposed that St. Cecilia with a cold in her head would be incompetent to "Nix my Dolly;" and this erroneous and popular prejudice is continually made the excuse for vocal inability during the winter months. Now the effect which we have before described upon the articulation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... the highest organs of sense, as developed in the vertebrates on the one hand, and in the mollusks on the other, present us with residuary phenomena for which "Natural Selection" alone is quite incompetent to account. And that these same phenomena must therefore be considered as conclusive evidence for the action of some other natural law or laws conditioning the simultaneous and independent evolution of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... was crazy," agreed the seamen. It was as though the gaiety, the spring of gladness, within the little man had been dried up; there was left only the incompetent and despised Dago. He faced the routine of his toil now with no smile of preoccupation for a sweeter vision; he shuffled about decks, futile as ever, with the dreariness of a ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the moral elevation and political advancement of the colored man are the first to turn against him when he wants a friend." The correspondent then goes on to say that the school directors persist in employing teachers "totally incompetent." What the schools were in New York the report made by the New York Society for the promotion of Education among Colored Children to the Honorable Commissioners for examining into the condition of Common Schools ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 449) points out that this conversation followed close on the appointment of 'the incompetent Bathurst' as Chancellor. 'Such a conversation,' he adds, 'would not have occurred during the chancellorship of Lord Hardwicke ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the lower grades. The assurances of the pilots were accepted after an examination by a lieutenant of the flagship, who could find nothing deeper than twenty-two feet. Fortune's favors are thrown away, as though in mockery, on the incompetent or the irresolute. On the 22d of July a fresh north-east wind concurred with a spring tide to give the highest ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... women into other—I had almost said any other—avenues of labor than that of housewifery. Eagerness to break up housekeeping and try boarding for a while, in order "to get rested out," is not confined to the incompetent and the indolent. Nor is it altogether the result of the national discontent with "the greatest ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... saying that travel by automobile is not delightful elsewhere; certainly it is equally so in many places along the Rhine, in Northern Italy, and in England, where the chief drawback is the really incompetent catering of the English country hotel-keeper to the demands of the traveller who would dine off of something more attractive than a cut from a cold joint of ham, and eggs washed down with stodgy, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... 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 and tendency of great moral ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... average English unconventional mind—such as those of these clean, natural-minded boys—would be a great mistake. Unquestionably, as in the case of Dickens, a missionary was unpractical if not hypocritical, and mildly incompetent if not secretly vicious. I found myself always fighting against the idea that I was termed a missionary. The men I loved and admired, especially such men as those on our athletic teams, felt really strongly about it. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Indian-fighters, led the cavalry against the Apaches. Crook's understanding of the Indian was perfect; and not only was he able to beat the natives at their own game of ambuscade but he thoroughly sympathized with their cause. He knew how Washington and incompetent officers had ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... man to manage the mine has to be obtained, and some one is placed in charge, of whose capabilities the Directors have no direct knowledge. Being profoundly ignorant of practical mining they are incompetent to examine him as to his qualifications, or to check his mode of working, so as to ascertain whether he is acting rightly or not. All they have to rely on are some certificates often too carelessly given and too easily obtained. Finally, quite a large proportion of the allottees ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... 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 the people food ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... course of his frequent nights from it, found himself always dodging the corners of black glazed boxes and swaying pyramids of pasteboard; always lifting his hat to sidling milliners' girls, or effacing himself before slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opopanax. He felt incompetent to pronounce on the needs to which these visitors ministered; but the reappearance among them of the blond-bearded jeweller gave him ground for fresh fears. Undine had assured him that she had given up the idea of having her ornaments reset, and there had been ample time for their return; but ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... devote entirely to writing. Surely my book will make some progress now. How many words should there be in a book? I've got 18,000 now; "ragged incompetent words" they are, too. I wonder what makes a writer of books! Would knowing all the words in the dictionary help me? My statements are so bald, somehow. It doesn't seem an interesting tale to me, so I'm afraid I can't expect an unprejudiced reader to find it thrilling. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... greatly obliged to you; and, if it should be necessary, I will, without hesitation, avail myself of your kind offer. I feel the deficiency of my education most sensibly in respect to my daughter. I find myself incompetent to take the direction ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... have had. I've plucked it up: it's too late for it to flower. My dear Julia, I'm perfectly incompetent and perfectly resigned." ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... their faces, my good gun's crew rapidly fired the gun, and we had the satisfaction of striking her once, near her after funnel, but it did no vital damage, as a few minutes afterwards she drew out of range! What a pack of incompetent cowards! ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... manufacturer of sugar supplies as the high speed separator or centrifugal." Unless the product of experience and good workmanship, it is a dangerous thing at high velocities. Besides, its usual fate is to have an incompetent workman assigned to it, who does not use judgment in charging and running. So that designers and manufacturers have been forced not only to take into account the disturbing forces inherent in revolving bodies, but also to make allowance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... still have three at home, three big, incompetent girls!" sighed Darsie in reply, and her heart swelled with a sudden spasm of rebellion. "Oh, Dan, after all my dreams! I'm so bitterly disappointed. Poor ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... vicissitudes than that of any other Eastern people in the earliest times. No sooner had the Assyrians arrived, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of five or six generations, at the very summit of their ambition, than some incompetent, or perhaps merely unfortunate, king appeared on the scene, and lost in a few years all the ground which had been gained at the cost of such tremendous exertions: then the subject races would rebel, the neighbouring peoples would pluck up ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
