"Feeble-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will you imagine me such a feeble-minded person?' asked Dora. 'You have so often spoken like this. I have really no ambition to be a doll ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... in vain. The principal looked into the case, scratched his head, stroked his whiskers, coughed, and decided that the public-school funds should not be wasted in trying to "teach imbeciles," and so reported to the parents. He advised them to send the boy to a Home for the Feeble-Minded, sending the message by an older brother. So the parents took the child to the Home and asked that he be admitted. The Matron took the little boy on her lap, talked to him, read to him, showed him pictures and said to the astonished parents, "This child has fully as much intelligence ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... of the feeble-minded child. At first the child is viewed as a bit slow in walking, talking, in keeping clean, and the mother explains it all away on this ground or that. A previous illness, a fall in which the head was hurt, difficulty with the teething, diet, etc., all receive the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... apathy; for the rest she wept. Many a time she was on the point of writing to Richard, but could not quite bring herself to that. She could not leave the house, for it rained or snowed day after day; the sun seemed to have deserted the heavens as completely as joy her life. She grew feeble-minded, tried to amuse herself with childish games, played 'Beggar My Neighbour' with the servant for hours at night. She had fits of hysteria, and terrified her sole companion with senseless laughter, or with alarming screams. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... intelligent; and its extracts, when they can be given in advance of the publication of the works themselves, will be the choicest and most valuable possible. Without cant or hypocrisy, or the influence of any clique of feeble-minded and ambitious aspirants in letters, the INTERNATIONAL MISCELLANY will in this respect, the publishers trust, win and preserve the respect and confidence of all who look to published critical judgments as guides for the reading ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... deadlock, yet each feared to make the first overtures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Gibson, who had come down to direct his sister's interment and settle the family affairs. Georgiana said she dreaded being left alone with Eliza; from her she got neither sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor aid in her preparations; so I bore with her feeble-minded wailings and selfish lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for her and packing her dresses. It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I thought to myself, "If you and I were destined ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... we need not be especially concerned with in our case histories. It has been well brought out in the previous literature on pathological lying, as witness in our Chapter II. In the present chapter we do not include the out-and-out insane, nor the definitively feeble-minded, nor ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... up through the top sash of the schoolhouse windows, when they had screened the lower part to keep us from idling, and it's lasted all through my married life. The Squire and I always went on a May picnic by ourselves, until the year he died, though the neighbours all reckoned us feeble-minded." ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the smaller man. "Where'd you get the 'old' at? I've acted like a feeble-minded idiot, I'll admit—bein' imposed on so regular—but that's over and I'm breathin' free. Wait till you shove off in that front end; it 'ain't got the beam and you'll upset. Ha!" He uttered a malicious bark. "You'll drownd!" Mr. Quirk ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... of instruction. The means of supplying the want of these things are always at the command of those who are intelligent, resolute, and determined. It is only the irresolute, the incompetent, and the feeble-minded that are dependent for their progress on having a teacher to show them and to urge them onward, every step ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... party's fools, 'Cause they don't vote his way; He says the "feeble-minded schools" Is where they ought ter stay; If he was law their mouths he'd shut, Or blow 'em all ter smash; He says their platform's nawthin' but A great ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... tender-hearted little child, and by the time these verses were finished she hardly knew whether to laugh or to cry. "Poor old, feeble-minded thing!" she said, compassionately. "And what became of ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... lacking in that particular kind of humour that finds entertainment in the defects and misfortunes bestowed by Nature. Owing to this defect in their constitution they are not moved to laughter (as are their northern brothers) by the spectacle of the deformed, the feeble-minded or ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... insane asylums, homes for the feeble-minded, and hospitals are not what they should be, nor what they will be some day. All of this is not due to the attitude of the mind of the public, but is due to the method of administration which is not within the scope of this book. If justice and humanity ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... am, there shall ye be also." "In the world ye shall have tribulations; ... but be of good cheer, ... in me ye shall have peace." In giving to each other the parting hand and the holy kiss tears and good wishes are not out of place. Connected with these a word of comfort to the feeble-minded, a word of encouragement to the brother or sister of weak faith, a word of gentle admonition whispered into the ear of the erring, a word of caution to the rich, lest they be exalted and trust in their uncertain ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... not feeble-minded any more than you are! That's just a bluff! Miss Sniffen got scared and made up all that rubbish! Miss Twining is beautiful. I love her—oh, I love her dearly! She writes the nicest poetry! Father says it is real ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... person to realise what is the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... them in the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick. In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations), rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance between flexors and extensors, the significance ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... literature for the seaside. Bacon's ESSAYS AND ELEMENTS OF LOGIC were the first Emily beheld, and while she stood regarding them with mingled horror and respect, in ran Avice to fetch them, as the two sisters are reading up for the Oxford exam—'ination' she added when she saw her two feeble-minded aunts looking for the rest of the word. However, she says it is only Pica who is going up for it this time. She herself was not considered strong enough. Yet there have those two set themselves down with their books ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... little bits to be put together again, or the juvenile imbecility known as the "rebus," or "picture puzzle." The former species may be said to be adapted to the amusement of the sane man or woman; the latter can be confidently recommended to the feeble-minded. ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the Blind. Grand prize New York State collaborators: State School for the Blind, Batavia New York School for the Blind, New York city Association of Medical Officers of Institutions for Idiots and Feeble-Minded Persons. Grand prize New York State collaborators: State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots, Rome State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children, Syracuse Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf. Grand prize New York State collaborator: Wright Oral School for the Deaf, New York ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth? One doesn't like to be cruel,—and yet one hates to lie. Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism,— recommends study of good models,—that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a fool, Mr. Coristine, an abject, unthinking, infatuated fool, to entrust my comfort, my safety, my life, to a man without the soul of a man, to a childish, feeble-minded, giggling and guffawing player of senseless, practical jokes, to a creature utterly wanting in heart, selfish ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... only seemed quieter and more plaintive, and all treated him much as before. The imbecile alone, even if he had not been himself so feeble-minded, was capable of understanding Huerlin's condition and his gradual decline and feeling a certain horror at the sight; for this friendly and peaceful soul had become the manufacturer's constant companion ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... poor woman came to him in distress, because her only son had been induced to enlist in the Navy, and was already on board a man-of-war at the Boston Navy-yard. Mr. Bird knew the youth, and was aware that he was very slightly feeble-minded. The vessel would sail in three days, and there was no time to be lost. He telegraphed the facts as briefly as possible to Senator Wilson, and in twenty-four hours received an order to have the widow's son discharged. Then he would ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... been used by Doctor Hamilton in an experimental study of reactive tendencies. He proved so remarkably inefficient in the work that Doctor Hamilton was led to characterize him as feeble-minded, and to recommend him to me for further study because of his mental peculiarities. With me he was from the first frank, aggressive, and inclined to be savage. It was soon possible for me to go into ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... matched very well the enamel-trimmed oil stove and the tinned dainties and the expensive suitcases. Casey went back to camp feeling as though he had stumbled upon a picnic of feeble-minded persons. He wondered what in hell two men of such a type could be doing out there, a hundred miles and more from an ice-cream soda and a barber's chair. He wondered too how "Fred" had expected to ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... church-yard, his mother leaning on his arm, his step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant space by his father's grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would shortly cover him. His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle, feeble-minded sister, who had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her colorless existence to that of her brother. Hughie was the romance of her gray life: what Hughie said, what Hughie thought, Hughie's wife—oh, jealous ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... inexperienced girl of seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148 feeble-minded children to curse ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... language with fantastic solecisms, or even seek to enrich it with new and startling verbal combinations. They rather resist novelty, and devote themselves to formulating that which use has already established.' In the same page with this, Mr. White compliments the great unknown as 'some precise and feeble-minded soul,' and elsewhere calls him 'some pedantic writer of the last generation.' To add even one word toward a solution of the knotty point here indicated transcends, I confess, my utmost competence. It is painful to picture to one's ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... been passed by certain of the States in America, which are eugenic experiments. Feeble-mindedness, in so many ways a social evil, is readily reproduced, and the weak-minded are easily controlled by the sex instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States accordingly annul the marriage ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... from a visit to this admirable Institution in company with a friend who is one of the Directors, we propose giving a short account of what we saw and heard. The great success of the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth, several of the scholars from which have reached considerable distinction, one of them being connected with a leading Daily Paper in this city, and others having served in the State and National Legislatures, was the motive which led to the foundation of this excellent charity. Our late distinguished ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... coldness. Of all the passions inherent in the heart of a woman, that of jealousy is the most dangerous to herself and others: it is fierce and restless in its nature; when infuriated, nothing can oppose its progress; and although most powerful in the most feeble-minded, it frequently assumes the semblance of intellectual strength. Zillah's jealousy kept pace with her headlong love, and in one of its most violent paroxysms she made the attempt on the life of Burrell, which, it is easy to believe, he never forgave. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the Science Community, he became fascinated by its advantages over New York; a new system to plan from the ground up; no obsolete installation to wrestle with; an absolutely free hand for the engineer in charge; no politics to play; no concessions to antiquated city construction, nor to feeble-minded city administration—just a dream of an opportunity. He almost asked for the job himself, but Rohan was tactful enough to offer it, and the salary, though princely, was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... choicest possession, she says, is a letter which she once received from the superintendent of a home for the feeble-minded. He spoke in glowing terms of the pleasure with which the "inmates" had read her little book, "Marm Lisa," ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Immortality, the audience was at first aghast, and then enthralled. He maintained that they had nothing to work for unless it was for eternity; that their business was concerned with souls, and that the souls of the feeble-minded were as much heirs of immortality as those of others more fortunate, and that no man has the right to condemn or stand in judgment. It was a bold speech to such an audience, and held their rapt attention; it was perhaps the more ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... elapse before our feeble-minded governor can make up his mind to the sally. A couple of Spanish frigates lie at anchor in the harbour, in readiness to bombard the town if the rebels should effect an entrance and stir up the inhabitants, their countrymen, to revolt. The garrison has been considerably augmented by ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... was a vast bunco game. There were many hereditary inefficients—men and women who were not weak enough to be confined in feeble-minded homes, but who were not strong enough to be ought else than hewers of wood and drawers ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... love! Every step, almost, along its banks is sacred to some noble name. 'Stat magno nominis umbra' should be its motto. Strawberry Hill reminds you of witty, keen-sighted Horace Walpole, and his gossiping chit-chat concerning wrangling princes, feeble-minded ministers, and all the other imbecilities of the last century. Twickenham brings back to one, bitter-tongued Pope, his distorted body and waspish mind. Richmond Hill recalls the Earl of Chatham in his enforced retirement, his ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... well as the desire for positive comforts; and the motive that depends on comparisons might even be at its strongest when the lowest class should so dwindle that few would be left in it except cripples, the aged, or the feeble-minded. An efficient worker would struggle harder to keep his family out of such a class than to keep it out of one which would have upon it only the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... supper to beg. A rural and a twilight repose lay on everything. Only in the air, rosy with the level light, flew out and greeted each other those musical voices of the bells rich with the memories of all the days of Alcala. The church was not open, but we followed a sacristan in, and he seemed too feeble-minded to forbid. It is a pretty church, not large nor imposing, with a look of cosy comfort about it. Through the darkness the high altar loomed before us, dimly lighted by a few candles where the sacristans were ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... instinct which can thus be turned round can scarcely be strong, and it seems probable that in some of these cases the episode of normal love simply serves to bring home to the invert the fact that he is not made for normal love. In other cases, it seems,—especially those that are somewhat feeble-minded and unbalanced,—a love-disappointment really does poison the normal instinct, and a more or less impotent love for women becomes an equally impotent love for men. The prevalence of homosexuality among prostitutes may be, to a large extent, explained by a similar ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... The feeble-minded are people who know the truth, but only affirm it so far as consistent with their own interest. But, apart from that, they ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... houses, getting a living by his wits. He was the toughest specimen of a man I ever saw. There was a challenge in him which I at once accepted. It was in his looks and in his words. It was an intimation that he was master—that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopes and glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. The people who had owned the soil had been driven away. A state home for the feeble-minded had also been demolished to ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... prude would have had cheap scruples about compromising herself by taking a man in her arms. Not a vulgar person, who would have required the stranger to be properly recommended by somebody who came over in the Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a feeble-minded damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would have fled away, gasping and in tears. No timidity or prudery or underbred doubts about this thorough creature. She knew she was in her right womanly place, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... the lamb, by a stern resolve, can refuse to see the injustice which it has no power to remedy. The will of man is little less than omnipotent in the wide sphere of its appropriate power; and that sphere is much wider than feeble-minded people ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... &c. 498; inapprehensible[obs3]. weak headed, addle headed, puzzle headed, blunder headed, muddle headed, muddy headed, pig headed, beetle headed, buffle headed[obs3], chuckle headed, mutton headed, maggoty headed, grossheaded[obs3]; beef headed, fat witted, fat-headed. weak-minded, feeble-minded; dull minded, shallow minded, lack-brained; rattle-brained, rattle headed; half witted, lean witted, short witted, dull witted, blunt-witted, shallow-pated[obs3], clod-pated[obs3], addle- pated[obs3]; dim-sighted, short-sighted; thick-skulled; weak in the upper story. shallow, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... will interest you. I know the date you came to this country, which I didn't know before, and I know how you earned your living until you found me. I know of some shares in a non-existent Rhodesian mine which you sold to a feeble-minded gentleman at Cromer, and to a lady, equally feeble-minded, at Felixstowe. I've not only got the shares you sold, with your signature as a director, but I have letters and receipts signed by you. It has cost me a lot of money to get them, but ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke to her; and he never knew that she was feeble-minded. She just missed being an imbecile. Perhaps you would not have known that all at once; you might not have found it out at all only meeting her casually. The old man Raynier sent her down to school—the first that had ever been there: she could never learn to read. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... up stenography, its usefulness having been impressed upon me by my inability to transcribe the narrative of the feeble-minded black boy. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... offence. A budding painter, a sculptor, a musician, may be the boast of a proud family circle, but to give a youth the reputation of writing verses is at once to call down upon his head a storm of ridicule and patronising disdain! He is credited with being effeminate, sentimental, and feeble-minded; his failure is taken as a preordained fact; he becomes a ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the carpet now?" he greeted that lady, airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or is it the 'Relation of the Child to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West had just told me—that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots in their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic or feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without exception they were ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... gained wages, small indeed, but which, added to the general stock, would help to provide against the severities of the coming winter. There are always some kind hearts to be found in every community, who are willing to comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, and encourage all virtuous effort, although the service rendered be but trifling. A kind-hearted farmer, hearing of the little boy's exertions to aid his mother, employed him to wait on his reapers during harvest; and as the ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... mankind. They imply that the Missing Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any man who knows the world knows perfectly well that ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the evil has provided its own remedy. For men of strong heads and ambitious temper, perceiving the exorbitant power which a belief in inspiration places in the hands of the feeble-minded, have often feigned to be similarly afflicted, and trading on their reputation for imbecility, or rather inspiration, have acquired an authority over their fellows which, though they have often abused it for vulgar ends, they ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... or less, out of 3000 women only 22 per cent. have married, and the number of children born to each marriage is undoubtedly very small.' The writers consider that this state of things is extremely dangerous for the country, inasmuch as we are now breeding mainly from our worst stocks (the feeble-minded are very prolific), while our best families are stationary or dwindling. Without denying the general truth of this pessimistic conclusion,[19] it may be pointed out that the miners are, physically at least, above the average of the whole population, and that the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... was unreasonable to expect it of him. Her idea of getting him out of town for a time, as the judge had advised, was to send him up to San Francisco to be close-herded there. Casey had promised to go, but now the prospect jarred. He wasn't feeble-minded, that he knew of; it seemed natural to want to do his own deciding now and then. When he got back home in the morning, Casey meant to have a serious talk with the Little Woman, and get right down to cases, and tell her that he was built for the desert, ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... 'maybe you've really got kleptopigia. And maybe when we get out of the pig belt you'll turn your mind to higher and more remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with such a distasteful, feeble-minded, perverted, roaring beast ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... think, some more than some men (the feeble-minded), do they have souls? If so, where do ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... hollowness of existence? Are you consumptive? Are you subject to hereditary insanity? Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell? Are you poor, like—lots of people? Have you been crossed in love? Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? Are you feeble-minded, a cripple, an outcast? Are you—repulsively ugly?" She laughed again. "Is there any reason in the world why you should not enjoy all you ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... played their part; also perhaps telepathy; and, as Gurney points out elsewhere, "The imagination which may be unable to produce, even in feeble-minded persons, the belief that they see things that are not there, may be quite able to produce the belief that they have seen them, which is all, of course, that their testimony implies" ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... endured which if enforced by a mistress would lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year till ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... regret that the white race generally is such a sorry mixture of humanity. The good and the bad, the intelligent and the ignorant, the feeble-minded and the strong, the criminal and the righteous, have been combined so frequently and in so many ways that the marvel is that more of the human race are not degenerate as the result of contamination. Since the great characteristic of heredity is to breed true and thus perpetuate ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... Chris testily. "These New York hall-porters are recruited entirely from homes for the feeble-minded. I suppose he was a new man. Well, Pilkington, my boy, I shall expect you at seven o'clock. Goodbye till then. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... villagers, to beseech them to be reconciled to God. In this work she went, perhaps, even beyond her strength, that sinners might be brought into the fold of Christ. She rejoiced to lend a helping-hand to the seeking soul; warning the unruly, comforting the feeble-minded, and encouraging believers to seek after a full devotion of heart and life to the service of Christ. Her faithfulness in the administration of reproof was exemplary; and though naturally of a retiring disposition, in the defence of truth and the ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... feeble-minded and erring do those offices of the church prove a stay and support, when their own ordinary powers of resistance would fail them! Rose, however, viewed the matter just as it was, and ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... criminal responsibility consistent with humanity and modern medical knowledge. Even then, although murderers who indulge in popular crime will probably be acquitted on the ground of insanity, we shall at least be spared the melancholy spectacle of juries arbitrarily committing feeble-minded persons charged with homicide to imprisonment at hard labor for life, and in a large measure do away with the present unedifying exhibition of two groups of hostile experts, each interpreting an archaic and inadequate test of criminal responsibility in his own particular way, and each conscientiously ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... New-Englanders had something shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was out of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical that they showed their true quality, as Englishmen are wont. It has been the fashion lately with a few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New England Puritans, as if they were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-minded fanatics. But all the charges brought against these large-minded and far-seeing men are precisely those which a really able fanatic, Joseph de Maistre, lays at the door of Protestantism. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... civilization of the nineteenth century. Do you think our sons can rise from such studies with a high ideal of womanhood? And with what feelings do you suppose women themselves read these laws, and the articles in the State constitutions, rating them with the disreputable and feeble-minded classes? Can you not understand the dignity, the pride, the new-born self-respect which would thrill the hearts of the women of this nation in their enfranchisement? It would elevate their sphere of action and every department of labor ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus,' ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... relentless wreckers which it numbered in its hovels. 'Rough materials!' said the bishop, Dr. Prettyman, when I waited upon him to be licensed to the curacy—rough materials to work upon; but by care and diligence, Mr. Ancelot, wondrous changes may be effected. Your predecessor, a feeble-minded man, gave but a sorry account of your flock; but under your auspices, I hope they will become a church-going and a church-loving people! Make them churchmen—you understand me? Make them churchmen!'... Heaven help me! They needed first to be made honest and temperate—to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... a big spider and weave a net to catch men and destroy them. You destroy alike your victims and your tools. The poor boy, Peter Gudge, whom you sent to my home—my heart bleeds when I think of him, and what you have put him up to! A wretched, feeble-minded victim of greed, who ought to be sent to a hospital for deformed souls, you have taken him and taught him a piece of villainy to recite, so that he may send a group of sincere idealists ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... rises to unusual sacrifice because it is close to pity and feebleness. "My cousin and his family had to go back to Italy. He got to Ellis Island with his wife and five children, but they wouldn't let in the feeble-minded boy, so of course they all went back with him. ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... own supply of groceries was about exhausted, there were several cubic yards of salt codfish in the schooner's hold, and this they would eat: they were used to it themselves, and science had declared that it was good brain-food—good for feeble-minded Englishmen who couldn't splice wire nor take care of ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... pay for concerts and balls; low prices at the opera, which never pays its own expenses; even Chevet's dinners are reasonable, if you avoid his sham Johannisberg. All these cheap delights, the gold, the colors, the garden, the music, the lights, are paid for by the losses of feeble-minded Avarice. But, there—I said all this to Ned Severne, and I might as well have preached sense to ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... ingenious contrivance, there may be sham open fireplaces within, with ingle nooks about the sham glowing logs. The needlessly steep roofs will have a sham sag and sham timbered gables, and probably forced lichens will give it a sham appearance of age. Just that feeble-minded contemporary shirking of the truth of things that has given the world such stockbroker in armour affairs as the Tower Bridge and historical romance, will, I fear, worry the lucid mind in a great multitude ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... is not feeble-minded can be a success at something in this big world. Every normal-minded individual is able to create, invent, improve, organize, build or market some of the myriads of things the world is crying for. But he will succeed at only those things in which his physiological ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... there are none who "draw" better than the gymnasts who risk their necks by attempting hazardous feats. The fool who attaches himself by the heels to the car of an ascending balloon is sure to have thousands of feeble-minded females waving handkerchiefs at him. BLONDIN, the great French tomfool, brought more people to Niagara Falls to see him, possibly, add a new Fall to the prospect, than ever the Falls themselves did. And when another donkey ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... conditions of the Irish Poor Law system are set forth in the reports of various Royal and Viceregal Commissions. The most important are those of the Viceregal Commission on Poor Law Reform in Ireland (1906), the Departmental Commission on Vagrancy, the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, and the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (Majority Report). The study of all these reports is a rather distracting business. They establish between them an urgent need for reform; on the methods, and even principles, of reform there ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... with the Municipal Court in Boston gives as his opinion that while the percentage of actually insane or feeble-minded among deserters is no higher than among other offenders they are extremely likely to present some of the phenomena of psychopathic personality. Such people have to be studied by the social worker and the psychiatrist, ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... seen, we detect some such difficulty or absurdity as makes necessary its rejection, we certainly could never for a moment be tempted to a suspicion that there is anything supernatural in the matter. Such an idea is simply ridiculous, and will be tolerated only by the ignorant, the feeble-minded, or the insane. Still, the "knockings" are sufficiently mysterious, and if unexposed, sufficiently fruitful of evil, to be legitimate subjects of investigation, and he who under such circumstances ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... benevolent, sympathetic, philanthropic, self-reliant; possessed of all the qualities, in fine, which inspire respect and confidence in their fellow men, and cause them to be recognized as leaders. Others are timid, ignorant, feeble-minded, credulous, prone to lean upon others, hero worshippers; people whose natural bent it is to follow some one in whom they put faith. The sentiment of loyalty is inherent in the human breast, and will find an object whereon to fasten. At one time it is an Alexander; then a Washington, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... do not 'tote' my gun with the silencer on it. If it interests you, I may as well explain that I came by the silencer several years ago, when I was on the bench. A notorious Chicago gunman, on trial for murder here, and acquitted by a feeble-minded jury, made me a present of the very silencer he had used in killing his victim—an ironic gesture, a gesture of supreme insolence, but an entirely safe gesture, since he well knew that a man once acquitted of a crime cannot again be placed in ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... made the editorial page corrupt and brilliant—never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal friends—the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... members of this group are not far above the standard of feeble-minded boys. They are what might be termed "all-round defectives." The object of the athletics selected for this group has been to awaken and arouse them from that lethargic state into which they periodically relapse. This has been ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... that the feeble-minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing. That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... greatest difficulty. But that isn't the fault of the people; they are magnificently developed for their surroundings. They have attained this condition by centuries of weeding out the unfit. They have no hospitals for the feeble-minded or feeble-bodied—abnormal persons are not allowed to live. The same reasoning accounts for their perfect cleanliness, moral and physical. Vice is practically unknown. They believe that clean living and ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... also state schools for the deaf, dumb, blind, and the feeble-minded. These institutions are all located at Faribault, in Rice county, and each has a very handsome, commodious, and in every way suitable building, where these unfortunates are instructed in every branch of learning and industry of which ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but aesthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which should not be a travesty of the old ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... irritation from the genitals ending in reflex neuroses is always, as a rule, associated with the male, and that it has not been more associated with the female has deprived her of the same benefit that the prosecution of the study in this regard has been to the male sex. Masturbation among the feeble-minded, which is so common, must, of necessity, have for its determining cause a foundation of morbid irritability of the sexual organs. This is well known to be so among the males, whose hands seem instinctively to be drawn to those parts. Dr. C. F. Taylor, of New York, in an article ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded alliance. It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by auction. (Goods taken in execution). He was a widower in a white under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... a slow, mechanical step. His fallen jaw, open mouth, and generally idiotic expression of countenance would have justified his detention by any policeman who might have met him, on suspicion of being a feeble-minded person escaped from custody. Turning the first corner, he kept on with the same dragging step till he came to a vacant lot. Then, as if he were too feeble to get any farther, he stopped and leaned his back against the fence. Bracing his ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... or, indeed, domestic servants of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the ground of a canon of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier usage. The only exception would be servants employed to attend on the persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants properly come under the head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse |
