"Debatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of about a hundred miles separated this mountain fastness from the similar passes which guarded eastern Virginia along the line of the Blue Ridge. This debatable ground was sparsely settled and very poor in agricultural resources, so that it could furnish nothing for subsistence of man or beast. The necessity of transporting forage as well as subsistence and ammunition through this ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... lay on the shore they saw two French boats on the lake, and Robert was confirmed in his opinion that the prevision of the French leaders would enable them to strike the first blow. Already their armed forces were far down in the debatable country, and they controlled the ancient water route between the ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... prooem.—that when he had smelt, heard, and fully understood—ut ff.si quando paup. fec. l. Agaso. gloss. in verb. olfecit, id est, nasum ad culum posuit—and found that there was anywhere in the country a debatable matter at law, he would incontinently thrust in his advice, and so forwardly intrude his opinion in the business, that he made no bones of making offer, and taking upon him to decide it, how difficult soever it might happen ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a rather chubby specimen of a half grown lad, with a rosy face, and laughing blue eyes. Larry Densmore expected to become a lawyer some fine day, and in evidence of his fitness for the business he was constantly asking questions, and finding debatable points in such matters ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... whatever for the exercise of free fancy and emotional sway. Both the dreamer, with his indifference to (or downright scorn of) Form; and the pedant, with his narrow conception of it; as well as the ordinary music lover, with his endeavor to discover some less debatable view to adopt for his own everyday use,—need to be reminded that Form in music means simply ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... proportions—holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide. That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation of food ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... his shadow, and watch his kingdom coming. In an awful transfiguration all things stand for what they are. Evil is seen to be evil, and good to be good. Right and wrong sunder more far apart, and we cannot mistake them as we do at other times. The debatable land stretching between them—that favorite resort of undecided natures—disappears for a season, and offers no longer its false refuge. The mind is taken away from all artificial supports, and the knowledge comes home to the soul afresh, with strong conviction that "truth is our ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... strongly fortified city, occupying a commanding hill overlooking the Danube; it is a rare old town, battle-scarred and rugged; having been a frontier position of importance in a country that has been debatable ground between Turk and Christian for centuries, it has been a coveted prize to be won and lost on the diplomatic chess-board, or, worse still, the foot-ball of contending armies and wrangling monarchs. Long ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... surely the subject became a debatable one. Where, when Bok began, the leading prophylactic society in New York could not secure five speaking dates for its single lecturer during a session, it was now put to it to find open dates for over ten speakers. Mothers' clubs, women's ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... has been added to this inquiry by the recently-revived controversy between two of the many Churches into which Christendom is divided on the highly debatable matter of Anglican orders. The said controversy had been in a state of suspended animation from the time of the Stuarts up to the Tractarian movement, when it was partially revived, and a fair crop of literature sprang up around it. It has been reserved, however, for our own ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... should like therefore to throw a little helpful light on the subject of nationalisation. Speaking as an owner and not as a miner (I have at the present moment at least six coals and a pound or two of assorted mineral rubbish), I want to consider some of the pros and cons of this debatable proposition. I take it, first of all, that we shall pay for our coal along with our taxes and in proportion to our income. This will come rather hard, of course, on the kind of people who insist on warming their rooms with three large electric ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... That's debatable. Some come from bad fermentations, due to dirty fermentaries, abnormal temperatures, or unripe cacao.[7] Some come from smoky or imperfect artificial drying. Some come from mould. Unfermented cacao is liable to go mouldy, so is germinated or over-ripe ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... have endeavoured to arrange briefly and concisely the various methods at present in use for the study of bacteria, and the elucidation of such points in their life-histories as are debatable or still undetermined. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... you will tell me, and nothing more. But, my dear, I am afraid I shall require some persuasion, before I quite sympathize with this new—what shall I call it?—infatuation is too hard a word, and 'fancy' means nothing. We will leave it a blank. Marriages of cousins are debatable marriages, to say the least of them; and Protestant fathers and Papist mothers do occasionally involve difficulties with children. Not that I say, No. Far from it. But if this is to go on, I ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... a few years since this valley was a place choked with jungle, the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals. Two clans laid claim to it—neither could substantiate the claim, and the roads lay desert, or were only visited by men in arms. It is for this very reason that it wears now so smiling an appearance: cleared, planted, built upon, supplied with railways, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most immature and unpromising efforts, and he has the knack of so handling his own early experience as to make it an encouragement and a stimulus, and not (as the manner of some is) a burden and a bogey. Mr. Morley never obtrudes his own opinions, never introduces debatable matter, never dogmatizes. But he is always ready to pick up the gauntlet, especially if a Tory flings it down; is merciless towards ill-formed assertion, and is the alert and unsparing enemy of what Mr. Ruskin calls "the obscene empires of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... when Mr. Badchild, calling upon his vice, observed that as in all probability there were gentlemen of different political and other opinions present, perhaps the best way would be to give a comprehensive toast, and so get over any debatable ground,—he therefore proposed to drink in a bumper "The king, the queen, and all the royal family, the ministry, particularly the Master of the Horse, the Army, the Navy, the Church, the State, and after the excellent dinner ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... wars between Egypt and Asia Minor, in which Palestine had the misfortune to be the prize struggled for and the debatable land on which the battles were fought, the Jews were often made to smart under the stern pride of Antigonus, and to rejoice at the milder temper of Ptolemy. The Egyptians of the Delta and the Jews had always been friends; and hence, when Ptolemy promised ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... I had fixed for the destruction of the enemy outpost two companies of enemy infantry and three guns marched out of Shmakovka as a reinforcement to the debatable position. I watched through my binoculars their slow movement along the dusty road. I judged what the enemy's intentions were, and knew also that I was powerless to prevent them. He quickly placed his guns in position, and the following day sent a few trial shots at Kalmakoff's ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... himself afloat by his bold, sudden strokes and the nervous energy of his play. Hither and thither he would swim over the vast sea of interests in Paris, in quest of some little isle that should be so far a debatable land that he might abide upon it. Clearly Couture was not in ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... the winter months, became very prominent towards the time of the Easter vestry, when he would appear, having enlisted a small band of supporters, with a number of grievances relating to rates, parish officials, rights of way, footpaths, and such-like debatable subjects. Of course, he should have been promptly squashed by the chairman, but too often an indulgent Vicar would allow ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... head-quarters. In case of intense shelling, the front line garrison, except sentries, could obtain fair cover behind the traverses in the narrow trenches which connected up the wider and more exposed fire bays. It is a debatable question whether deep dug-outs in or near the front line are advisable. When the enemy shells intensively, if he means business, his barrage is closely followed by his infantry. When the barrage lifts, ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... settlements had already sprung up, and by this time—1789, or thereabout—were quite too populous and strong to apprehend any further serious molestation from their Indian neighbors. But between these points and the Ohio River lay a wide border of debatable land, where the restless savages still kept up their hostile demonstrations, which, though less bloody and wasting than at an earlier period, were yet sufficiently frequent and harassing to keep the white settlers in perpetual ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... avoided the society of gentlemen, in which she had formerly taken such pleasure. Richard and Archdeacon Long sat on the verandah, and in moving to and fro, Mary caught a fragment of their talk: they were at the debatable question of table-turning, and her mental comment was a motherly and amused: "That Richard, who is so clever, can interest himself in such nonsense!" Further on, Zara was giving Grindle an account of her voyage "home," and ticking off the reasons that had led to her return. She sat across a hammock, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... present those parts which we are willing to accept as our own standards of action. If there are portions which do not seem practicable, let us post them in our minds as debatable propositions, as points to be tested by the experience of coming years, or as working hypotheses in the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Ettrick and Tweed and Yarrow, and Perthshire—that princely district, half Highland, half Lowland—and the chain of silvery lochs that pierce the mountain shadows through Stirling and Argyle: every league of the fair country he loved. From the Western Isles and the Orkneys to the very fringe of debatable land which parts the northern and the southern half of Great Britain—is his, and has tokens to show of his presence. When he came home to die at the end of almost the most tragic yet most noble chapter of individual history which our century has known, it was the longing of his sick heart above ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... pushed, and hammered by the billows, the wreck drifted, rising and falling, starting and wallowing toward the awful line where the breakers plunged over the undertow and dashed themselves to death on the resounding shore. There was a wide debatable ground between land and water. One moment it belonged to earth, the next lofty curling surges foamed howling over it; then the undertow was flying back in savage torrents. Would the hawser reach across this flux and reflux of death? Would the mast hold ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... accounts for the sailing of Pinzon and Vespucci in company, on that "debatable voyage" described in chapter VI. In the year 1499 both Pinzon and Vespucci were to sail—though in separate fleets—for the coasts of the continent which Columbus had accidentally revealed in his voyage of 1498. Vespucci was to coast its northern shores, while Pinzon, with a confidence born of ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... what seems to be the only debatable question of fact in the case, i. e., whether Captain Turner was negligent in not literally following the Admiralty advices and, also, in not taking a course different from ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... emancipation, if they did not in the meantime lay down their arms. The course of events and the pressure of opinion were at last forcing him to see that the nation was wrestling with slavery in arms; that its destruction was not a debatable and distant alternative, but a pressing and absolute necessity; and that his Border State policy, through which he had so long tried to pet and please the power that held the nation by the throat, was a cruel and fatal mistake. ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... is no more open to doubt or dispute than is the existence of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. But few persons have seen the Canyon, and far fewer ever have proven its existence by descending to its bottom; but none the less Reason admonishes all of us that the great chasm exists, and is not a debatable question. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... evidently considered that this possibly debatable statement was sufficiently answered by a grunt, for that was all the answer ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... saw, about my remote connection with the Duke of East Anglia's family. And we're not accustomed, where I live, to be disbelieved or doubted. It's perhaps the one thing that really almost makes us lose our tempers. So, if you please, I won't go any further at present into the debatable matter of my place ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... between the rival settlers about their right to land, of which, in reality, the poor Indians were the proprietors. In virtue of a grant of parliament in 1750, a large body of English took possession of this "debatable ground;" but scarcely had they done so, when a superior force of French and Indians attacked them, and killing some, made prisoners of others, and drove the rest back. Many vigorous but unsuccessful efforts ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... further justification of the argument two cases in which scrub fowl (MEGAPODIUS DUPERREYI TUMULUS) are concerned may be cited. Being a previously recorded fact, the first is excusable only on the grounds of its applicability to a debatable point. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... infer, good hearing extended to these unblushingly didactic Interludes attracted into authorship writers with purposes more aggressive and debatable than those pertaining to wise conduct. Zealous reformers, earnest proselytizers, fierce dogmatists turned to the drama as a medium through which they might effectively reach the ears and hearts of the people. Kirchmayer's Pammachius, translated into English ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... Glarus was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable. But it was beyond doubt of debate that ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... placing his finger on the spot so marked. "Roads a-plenty, too. Well, it's odd, Loskiel, but in this cursed, debatable land I feel more ill at ease than I have ever felt ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... this time Mrs. Payne corresponded regularly with Gabrielle. Now that Arthur's safety was beyond question and even in the earlier debatable period, she had not the least objection to sharing him with her rival ... at a distance. She even sent her his letters from abroad. In this way they arrived at a curious and altogether happy intimacy. Gabrielle's letters became part of her life, and when, in ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... more than in any other. Even with the best of them, he will have to be careful of the involuntary, unconscious and almost inevitable interference of telepathy, which is also very interesting, though it is a phenomenon of a different class, much less surprising and debatable than pure psychometry. He must also learn the art of interrogating the medium and refrain from asking incoherent and random questions about casual or future events. He will not forget that "clairvoyance is ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... like a racing-yacht in a squall. We had met opposing currents of air in the debatable area where wind and fog struggled for the mastery. The fog had the mighty trade wind behind it, forcing it landward. Already we were approaching the sand-dunes, the very spot for an easy descent if ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... protectors from time to time put forward pretensions only to be justified by a revival of the sovereignty which was extinguished by the Treaty of Utrecht. Thus, they attempted systematically to prevent any English settlement at all upon the debatable shore. For residential, mining and agricultural purposes this strip would thus be withdrawn from colonial occupation. It is much to be regretted that these claims were not summarily repudiated. The Imperial Government, however, encouraged ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... slave-trade in the District of Columbia was abolished; a more stringent fugitive-slave law was passed; and for the adjustment of State boundaries, which reduced the positive slave-area in Texas and threw it into the debatable territory of New Mexico, Texas received ten millions of dollars. Although this adjustment was not entirely satisfactory to either the North or the South, the nation settled itself for a period of quiet to repair the waste and utilize the conquests of the Mexican ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... first wear glasses? This is a much debatable question. Where there is simply a defect of vision I should never prescribe a pair of glasses for a child under ten years of age. A child under this age runs many risks of injury to the eyeball by accident ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... in the experience. Before Charles Dilke set out to cross a land still debatable, where travel still was what travel had been for the pioneers, he wrote home two letters. Both are dated August 26th, 1866, from Leavenworth in Kansas, now a sober town of twenty thousand inhabitants, then carrying recent memories ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... subjects, to whom the memory of the Battler was dear. As king of Aragon he took a share in the work of the reconquest, by helping his cousin Alohonso VIII. of Castile to conquer Cuenca, and to suppress one Pero Ruiz de Azagra, who was endeavouring to carve out a kingdom for himself in the debatable land between Christian and Mahommedan. But his double position as ruler both north and south of the eastern Pyrenees distracted his policy. In character and interests he was rather Provencal than Spanish, a favourer of the troubadours, no enemy of the Albigensian heretics, and himself ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... if not Filippino? That is the question; but into such problems, which confront one at every turn in Florence, I am neither qualified nor anxious to enter. When doctors disagree any one may decide before me. The thought, moreover, that always occurs in the presence of these good debatable pictures, is that any doubt as to their origin merely enriches this already over-rich period, since some one had to paint them. Simon not pure becomes hardly less ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Without going into debatable questions, such as the possibility of predetermining the sex of the child to be born, one can find many helpful ways of aiding and benefiting the growing life by autosuggestive means. The mother should avoid with more than ordinary ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians. Neither dared dwell therein,[1] but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces[2] which they ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Here, too, there was ample room for their communities, for the West was as yet but sparsely tenanted. No inconsiderable number, penetrating far into the interior, settled eventually about the headwaters of the Potomac and the James. This highland region was the debatable ground of the United States. So late as 1756 the State of Virginia extended no further than the crests of the Blue Ridge. Two hundred miles westward forts flying French colours dominated the valley of the Ohio, and the wild and inhospitable tract, a very labyrinth of mountains, which ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... my full permission to appropriate this story in the next edition of his "Debatable Land between this World and the Next." Should they do so, their readers will doubtless be favoured with an elaborate analysis of the facts, and with a pseudo-philosophic theory about spiritual communion with human beings. My ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... minded of the clergy, have now reached an interesting stage, both for those without the Church as well as for those within it. Although he does not feel called upon to state his own private conclusions on such debatable questions, he no longer regards the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Resurrection as essential prerequisites of Christianity and would consider fit for ordination any candidate who rejected them, provided such a person still acknowledged the divine nature of Jesus ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... preordain it. It does not admit the supposition of his being a participant in any unholy deed or device. The question never came up among Methodist divines, whether God prefers, in any instance, sin to holiness? They would not, could not, consider it a debatable question. Nor that other question—Is sin the necessary means of the greatest good? Calvinism is justly entitled to the honor of originating such questions as these. No one would ever think of ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... this sweet bank your head thrice sweet and dear I lay, and spread your hair on either side, And see the new-born woodflowers bashful-eyed Look through the golden tresses here and there. On these debatable borders of the year Spring's foot half falters; scarce she yet may know The leafless blackthorn-blossom from the snow; And through her bowers the wind's ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... fire burning certain nights in the vicinity of the grave. They hold and believe, at least the 'Big Indians' do, that the spirits of the departed are compelled to cross an extremely attenuated greasy pole, which bridges over the chasm of the debatable land, and that they require the fire to light them on their darksome journey. A righteous soul traverses the pole quicker than a wicked one, hence they regulate the number of nights for burning a light according to the character for goodness or the opposite which the deceased possessed in ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... whom, amidst the gibes of his contemporaries, he likened himself, he wanted everything; and those with this aspiration must necessarily be heedless of their neighbours' smaller ambitions. "Without genius, I am undone!" he cried in despair; but when it was proved beyond dispute that this gift of debatable beneficence was ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... power of analysis; a gift of shrewd speech, a command of hard words that will cut like a diamond; a mental vigour analogous to, though naturally not so powerful, as that displayed by Browning in The Ring and the Book. It is still a debatable proposition whether or not this is high-class poetry; but it is mixed with brains. Imagine the range of knowledge and power necessary to create two hundred and forty-six distinct characters, with a revealing ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... there must have been something in it" is always the last word on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the proven fact, the world always prefers to hold ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... just how long the small multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into conviction—that nobody can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. They are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a De Quincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I advise you who are beginners to keep well one side or other of the frontier, remembering that there is plenty of room and what happened ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... American Revolution the West Indies represented a debatable ground where British interests clashed with those of her enemies, France, Spain, and Holland. It was very rich in trade importance; in fact, about one fourth of all British commerce was concerned with the Caribbean. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... lose an arm than a leg," remarked the Gunner from the next bed. For a while they pursued this debatable point, much as men discuss politics, and incidentally with far less heat. . . . It was a question of interest, and the fact that the Gunner had lost his leg made no difference to the matter at all. An onlooker would have listened in vain ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... themselves personally at the polls during the three days of election. They repeatedly addressed the people, and did all that men could do. They frequently met at the same polls, and argued, in the presence of large assemblages, the debatable questions. Their deportment towards each other and towards their opponents was such as comported with the dignity of two of the most accomplished and courtly gentlemen of the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... account of a dispute about bounds in a transaction under the Land Purchase Act. After all other agencies failed, the landlord's sister called the disputants before her to the disputed spot, stepped the distance of the land debatable, drove her walking-stick into a crevice of the rock (disputes are passionate in opposite ratio to the value of the land) and, collecting stones, built a small cairn round it. "Now men," she said, "in the name of God let this be the bounds." And it ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... right and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer to action and the conduct of our lives. In religion, in politics, in economics, in sociology, what is truth to one man may be error to another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... to the serious question with which we opened this chapter. Whether or not reliable analyses can be made by the observation of physical characteristics is no longer debatable. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... imagined, and I am glad to have this opportunity of referring, with admiration, to the work of my friend Dr. Bjrn Magnsson Olsen on the Sturlunga Saga (in Safn til Sgu Islands, iii. pp. 193-510, Copenhagen, 1897). Though I am unable to go further into that debatable ground, I must not pass over Dr. Olsen's argument showing that the life of the original Sturla of Hvamm (v. inf. pp. 253-256) was written by Snorri himself; the story of the alarm and pursuit (p. 255) came from the recollections ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... and mocked at the sharpness and futility of the grief which that farewell brought with it. For this was a grown woman who pleaded with him surely, acting as advocate? A child, compelled to treat such controversial, such debatable matters at all, would have done so to a different rhythm, in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... negligence from the jury, without distinguishing [127] nicely whether the doubt concerned the facts or the standard to be applied. Legal, like natural divisions, however clear in their general outline, will be found on exact scrutiny to end in a penumbra or debatable land. This is the region of the jury, and only cases falling on this doubtful border are likely to be carried far in court. Still, the tendency of the law must always be to narrow the field of uncertainty. That is what analogy, as well as the decisions on this very subject, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... part-organic, artificial brain—was one of the most promising recent developments of Challon science. It was also one of the most debatable, for the Challonari was capable of independent thought in its limited fashion and yet had been devised solely as an instrument, a tool. It had no freedom of action, no physical independence, but it had childlike emotions ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... reviewer. If you do not deliver your oracles without hesitation, how are the world to receive them on trust and without inquiry? People read to have something to talk about, and 'to seem to know that which they do not.' Consequently, there cannot be too much dialectics and debatable matter, too much pomp and paradox, in a review. To elevate and surprise is the great rule for producing a dramatic or critical effect. The more you startle the reader, the more he will be able to startle ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... that debatable time when the owls in their corner were just beginning to wake up, two of the youngsters ran over quite near them. The temptation was irresistible. There was a light pounce, a light squeak instantly strangled, and one of the youngsters, badly frightened, ran back to the mother. ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... subsequently for two years in the Continental line, and for the last four years of the war as a lieutenant in the New York militia, actively employed in the perilous service of protecting life, property, and the public stores in the zone of debatable territory,—the "bloody ground" which surrounded the British lines in New York. At the close of the war, New York having been evacuated by the enemy, Lieutenant John Cooper retired to civil life, and resumed business ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... the Ambassador's plea, made in the name of his master, for immediate and unguaranteed evacuation of the debatable land by the arguments already so often stated in the Advocate's instructions to Caron. They had been put to great trouble and expense already in their campaigning and subsequent fortification of important ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... property has value is undeniable; whether it be worth what it costs us, in the long run, and from all points of view, may be left to the judgment of generations to come. Law in its origins is Divine; whether our human derivations from it partake of its high nature is debatable. Medicine and psychology, professing much, have not explained to us what or why we are, or what is our degree of responsibility for what we are and do. Politics sits on the bench and argues through the mouth of the public prosecutor; is justice ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war. Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment (effective December 18, 1865), was expected by all and accepted without a fight. The next amendment, inspired by ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... Texas—the "Department of the Trans-Mississippi"—cut off from the main body of the Confederacy and hemmed in between the Federal army and the deep sea. Another group of States—Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama—became so soon, and remained so long, a debatable land, on which the two armies fought, that they also had scant opportunity for genuine political life. Florida, small and exposed, was absorbed in its gallant achievement of furnishing to the armies a number of soldiers ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... It was a debatable point, of course, why treacherous, sneaking hounds should be considered ineligible to talk about beetles, and I dare say a good cross-examining counsel would have made quite a lot ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... the domain of partisan politics. It would be a most desirable thing to put the fourth-class postmasters in the classified service. It is possible that this might be done without Congressional action, but, as the matter is debatable, I earnestly recommend that the Congress enact a law providing that they be included under the civil-service law and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... ceased to give those excellent summaries of celebrated trials which for many years had been a feature of its volumes. The question whether "the appetite for the strange and marvellous" has abated in an appreciable degree with the passing of time and is not perhaps keener than it ever was, is a debatable one. But it is undeniable that the present volumes of the Annual Register have fallen away dismally from the variety and human interest of their predecessors. Of the trial and execution of Peace the volume for 1879 ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... on the authority of an auction note, the little collection Poems and Essays, with a Paraphrase on Cicero's Laelius, or, Of Friendship ... By a Gentleman (1674), and G. Thorn-Drury, on the equally debatable evidence of an anonymous manuscript ascription on the title page of his own copy, ascribed the Poetical Reflections to Howard.[6] An examination of the Poems and Essays, however, reveals no point of resemblance with our poem. How, then, does Howard fit into the picture? He was ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... to the call of duty. A few verses in the ballad are clearly by aut Gualterus aut diabolus, and none the worse for that. Salkeld, of course, was not really slain; and, if the men were "left for dead," probably they were not long in that debatable condition. In the rising of 1745 Prince Charlie's men forded Eden as boldly as Buccleuch, the Prince saving a drowning ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... moral half-lights—there were no gradations in their sense of right and wrong. Sin was sin, and righteousness was righteousness—the one night and the other day. They drew a line, narrow and inflexible, and knew no debatable zone where those who lingered were neither sinners nor saints. And so with the doctrines they held. Severity characterized them. Justice became cruelty, and faith superstition. They knew nothing of progressive revelations. The old Sinaitic God ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... in criticisms contained in these articles. This is the author's duty to write in such a fashion as to seem impartial. It is needless to suggest that he ought to be impartial, since no one ever takes a real interest in any debatable matter without ceasing to be impartial, and nobody will ever write a play worth seeing unless he takes a ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... beyond the boundaries of London until the time came when he could enjoy his brief period of well-earned ease. Dr. Sidney Lee says that the name of Shakespeare does not appear in any known list of the actors who travelled from England between 1580 and 1630, a period more than sufficient to cover the debatable years. Against this must be set the fact that the name appears in certain records of the town of Aberdeen as that of a member of a travelling company visiting the city in the period ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... street; and—it seemed incongruous, queerly out of place somehow—the Rat lived with his mother. Home ties, or home relationships, hardly seemed in harmony with the Rat! Still, in this case, it was perhaps very debatable ground as to which was the more pernicious, the old woman or the son! Ostensibly, she kept a little variety store; but her business, if report were true, was the edifying occupation of school mistress—the children graduating under ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... could hold out no longer. They were forced by the clamour of public opinion to strike out the debated and debatable clause from the long-contested bill, and immediately it was passed into law by ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of Altopascio is reached, the traveller must accomplish a lonely stretch of road, which runs for some three miles through a ragged wood. This place bears a bad name; it is debatable land, as we say, between the Republic of Lucca and the Grand Duchy, and a well-known haunt for footpads, highwaymen, outlaws, and other kinds of cut-throat. So, at least, my servant said when, stopping the carriage, I got out and proposed to walk through the wood by a direct path and meet ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... relation to the pending negotiations over the new submarine order. For the Administration, Senator Stone, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the question of armed merchantmen was at least debatable. The position at this stage was that the Administration was taking cognizance of Germany's charge that British merchantmen were armed for offensive purposes, had been instructed to attack submarines, and that rewards had been offered for their success in so doing. Germany offered to furnish ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... it's a debatable matter, which I don't intend to debate. You are our man. If you won't deny the Brown canard, then we must go ahead without ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... so, but she was the last person in the world to attempt such an invasion. There never had been the faintest streak of sympathy between them. Neither was there any tangible antagonism, for each by mutual consent avoided all debatable ground. But there existed very curiously a certain understanding each of the other which induced respect if it did not inspire confidence. Without deliberately avoiding each other they yet never deliberately ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... have been elected in the absence of this interference by the king, which the adventurers protested as an unwarranted invasion of their liberty, is itself an interesting and debatable question. By his many criticisms of the previous conduct of the company's affairs, Sandys had won the undying enmity of Sir Thomas Smith and his important friends. More than that, he had quarreled with his ally of ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... banter or to get the better of one; is so averse to witnessing discomfiture that even when forced into an argument, he is loath to push it to the bitter end. Yet when he does engage in argument, he drives things home with very telling force, especially when writing on debatable points. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... students who carve the first gashes in the new desks will learn, if perchance they listen in intervals of whittling, that this World on which they live is perhaps not flat, but actually round, like a ball. It is debatable doctrine, to be sure, but we must not forget that Signor Columbus, recently dead, found land off to the west which is probably a part of the Asiatic continent. If the earth be indeed a ball, then the sun and stars whirl clear around ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... happiness by reliance on fallacious beliefs which will not bear examination. Such, at least, is the feeling or motive which has prompted me to devote much time and thought to a difficult but important inquiry in a debatable region of inference and conjecture, where (I am afraid) evidence on either side can never be absolutely conclusive, and where, especially, the absolute demonstration of a universal ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... of 1848—and the concurrent return of the Mexican soldiers—seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his way to Washington, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... to women and of women to men are necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women as citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men. Our decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the larger ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... her. He learned, that is, to speak of it only casually, for since she knew it was there, to keep silence altogether would only increase her pain. So from time to time he skimmed the surface just to let her show him where he was wrong and think she won the day. It remained a debatable land of compromise. He listened with patience to her criticisms, her excursions and alarms, knowing that while it gave her satisfaction, it could not change himself. The thing lay in him too deep and true for change. But, for peace' sake, some meeting-place ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... Coriolanus and Henry V., he was too kingly as Hamlet, and Booth is the princeliest Hamlet that ever trod the stage. If Kean and the elder Booth were more supernal in their lightnings of passion and scorn,—and there are points in "Richelieu" which leave this a debatable question,—Edwin Booth is more equal throughout, has every resource of taste and study at his command; his action is finished to the last, his stage-business perfect, his reading distinct and musical as a bell. He is thus the ripened ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... awoke his mind was apparently clear. He met Billie's anxious look with a faint, white-lipped smile. To his friend the young fellow had the signs of a very sick man. It was a debatable question whether to risk moving him now or take the almost hopeless chance of escaping detection where ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... true. The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be paid for the golden fruit of knowledge. The swimmer cannot tell his strength ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... may still seem debatable among those who know the social and medical facts. Certainly some of the eugenic postulates go too far. It is, for instance, extremely difficult to say where the limit is to be set for permissible marriages. There may be no doubt that feeble-mindedness ought not to be transmitted ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... to the concerns of the Prince de Gonzague for other reasons than the presence of the three pictures, for to any one who knew anything about the arrangements of the palace this room represented, as it were, a kind of debatable land between the kingdom of Gonzague on the one side and the kingdom of Nevers on the other. A door on the left communicated with the private apartments of Louis de Gonzague. Cross the great room to the right, and ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that interest shortly. The road runs through debatable ground from St. Resa to de la Pama. Not an inch of it but what is being hotly contested. But it isn't the regulars that make the trouble, for at present the territory belongs to Peru, though how soon she will lose it is ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... to Vesta not only as a solemn invocation of the Goddess, but also as a sporting chance, I intend to have a definite, unquestionable understanding beforehand on every debatable point. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... which marine or brackish water conditions of sedimentation are requisite to the later formation of oil, as is suggested in the above quotation, has long been a debatable question. It may be noted that certain oil shales formed in fresh water basins contain abundant organic matter which is undoubtedly suitable for the generation of oil and gas, and that these shales on distillation ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... fear in every man's heart which throbs more or less responsively to the relation of the wonders of that "debatable land," which, by some, is believed to lie "on the boundaries of another world." La Salle felt impressed in spite of himself, and the whole party seemed grave and unwilling to pursue the subject. The silence was, however, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as queen, or the contemptible age of her new husband. PLEUROIT FORT LADITE ISABEAU; the said Isabella wept copiously. (1) It is fairly debatable whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (September 1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death. Short as it was, however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find that, in the last decade of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson |
