"Ineffective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mahogany, and big—long—dark blue eyes that look as if they were not afraid of anything, and make you afraid sometimes, and regular features, and a whiter skin than Tiny's, with a beautiful pink colour—" She stopped short, feeling that her attempt at description was as ineffective as the hours wasted upon ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Lambert. One night she slipped into the chamber of the lady of the castle, approached the bed of the sleeping woman with a cat-like step, and smothered her with the pillows, the poor invalid offering but a feeble and ineffective resistance. ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. The conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied "respectability." ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... island, and many in this new population were illegitimate children of the Knights. For, though the vow of chastity was insisted on to the end as a condition of entrance into the Order, in practice, by the eighteenth century, it had become entirely ineffective. ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... denudation of an arid region, wind erosion is comparatively ineffective as compared with deflation (Latin, de, from; flare, to blow),—a term by which is meant the constant removal of waste by the wind, leaving the rocks bare to the continuous attack of the weather. In moist climates denudation is continually impeded by ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... principle. It carries important measures away from the Federal Legislature to submit them to the votes of the entire people, separating decision from deliberation. The operation is so cumbrous as to be generally ineffective. But it constitutes a power such as exists, we believe, under the laws of no other country. A Swiss jurist has frankly expressed the spirit of the reigning system by saying, that the State is the appointed ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... treason, as had been already done to General Custine, and to so many others who had paid with their lives their tried loyalty to the republic. He wanted to anticipate the storm, and sent in his resignation. As the Convention left his petition unanswered, he renewed it, and as it remained still ineffective, he gladly, forced to this measure by sickness, transferred his command to General Landremont. The Convention had then to grant him leave of absence, and, as it maintained him in his rank, they ordered ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... in all its forms is as natural a field to the Thoracic as salesmanship is to the Alimentive. The pleas of fond papas and fearsome mamas are usually ineffective with this type of boy or girl when he sets his heart on a career before the foot-lights or ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... painful experience had taught the nations the superiority of the arts of peace over those of war; it was not until the pressure of numbers upon the means of subsistence had been sorely felt, that the ingenuity of man was taxed to provide substitutes for those ineffective and wasteful methods, under which the fertility of the virgin soil had been well-nigh exhausted. But with you, gentlemen, it is far otherwise. Canada springs at once from the cradle into the full possession of the privileges of manhood. Canada, with the bloom of youth yet upon her cheek, and with ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... that, with all his Irish intelligence well arranged in his mind—the agrarian crime, the ineffective police, the timid juries, the insolence of the popular press, and the arrogant demands of the priesthood—how was it that, ready to state all these obstacles to right government, and prepared to show that it was only by 'out-jockeying' the parties, he could hope to win in Ireland still, that ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... intention—no doubt at the moment sincerely made—was designed to check the falling away from Laurier's leadership in Quebec, which was becoming more noticeable as election day drew near. But the appeal was ineffective.. The effective opposition to Laurier in Quebec came not from Borden or from Monk, the official leader of the French Conservatives, but from Bourassa. Laurier and his lieutenants fought desperately, but in vain, ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... too, who was now handing the tea-cake, believed in fashion—ecclesiastical fashion. Like his wife, he was gentle and ineffective. His clerical dress expressed a moderate Anglicanism, and his opinions were those of his class and neighbourhood, put for him day by day in his favourite newspaper, with a cogency at which he marvelled. Yet he was no more a hypocrite than his wife, and below his common-places both of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... our discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such "poore people" as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders, and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had left her bar to fetch it in ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... am sure you have done all that could be done with the very ineffective clues which unfortunately are our only possession, but you are quite wrong in thinking it was the Princess herself who attended the ball, and I don't blame your assistant for refusing to bolster up an impossible ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... There was absolutely no feeling of philanthropy. There was no effort to prevent crime through the education or regulation of the lower classes; there was no attempt to reform the criminal when convicted. The public fear of the criminal classes was expressed in the cruel and ineffective code which punished almost every offense with death. The corruptions which pervaded the administration of justice made it almost impossible to punish the wealthy and influential. When Smollett declared that the miserable fate of Count Fathom would deter his reader from similar ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to move to the neighbourhood of Tel el Nejile, where it would be on the flank of any counterstroke from the hills; while orders were issued for the main pursuit to be pressed so that Junction Station might be reached with all speed. The Hebron group made an ineffective demonstration in the direction of Arak el Menshiyeh on the 10th, and then retired north-east so as to prolong the enemy's line ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... advantages in the way of local knowledge and with all manner of excitement, founded on fact, going a-begging, nothing really thrilling or convincing ever quite materialises. The heroine, Armenian and beautiful, is as ineffective as the hero, who is French and heroic, both of them displaying the same unfortunate tendency to be carried off captive by the other side and to indulge in small talk when they should be most splendid. And the majority of the other figures follow suit. On the face of it the volume ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... and leaders: Communist party ineffective; conservative religious leaders; Muslim Brotherhood (operates in exile in Jordan and Yemen); non-Ba'th parties have little effective ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... They pulled up at what caused me a shudder. I thought, if this was the best inn, what must the worst be like! However, I bowed my head to fate in the form of a rafter lintel, and passed in. A dim light, which came in part from a hole in the floor, and in part from an ineffective lamp, revealed a lofty, grotto-like interior. Over the hole hung a sort of witches' caldron, swung by a set of iron bars from the shadowy form of a soot-begrimed rafter. Around the kettle crouched ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... giving of money. In the month of August Meilhan was chased from his lodgings by his landlord, Lescure, on suspicion of having had intimate relations with the landlord's wife. The intervention of the Mayor was ineffective in bringing about a reconciliation between Meilhan and Lescure. Meilhan begged Mme Lacoste to intercede, and where the Mayor had failed ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... not actually have gained it. But both that important point and the bridge on the Block House road were utterly ignored, and Lee's approach to Spottsylvania left entirely unobstructed, while three divisions of cavalry remained practically ineffective by reason of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... but left these grounds, cracked with the summer heat, unsatisfied and thirsty; and how the big winds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here with difficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from the North and West and East. They were ineffective, sluggish currents. There was no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realize—far more clearly than in my sister's fanciful explanation about "layers"—that here were many contrary influences ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... candle under his bed by mistake. The stately new buildings were designed by Mr. Sidney Smirke, A.R.A., in 1848. The red brick and stone harmonise pleasantly, and the overhanging oriels and angle turrets (Continental Tudor) are by no means ineffective. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... crystallized in words. The ready association of thoughts with definite words connotes a relatively high degree of intellectual advancement. Language forms are the short-hand of thought; without facile command of language, thinking is vague, clumsy, and ineffective. Conversely, vague ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... the one following. Ayrault also killed two huge monsters, and Cortlandt killed one and wounded another. Their supply of prepared cartridges was then exhausted, and they fell back on their revolvers and ineffective spreading shot. Resolved to sell their lives dearly, they retreated, keeping their backs to the wind, with the poisonous dragons in front. But the breeze was very slight, and they were being rapidly blinded and asphyxiated by the loathsome fumes, and deafened by the hideous roaring and snapping of ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... two young men in gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn, cryptic messages for the young men—from Tom's mother and Henry's father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages with incidental admonitions of his own—kind, gentle and gorgeously ineffective. Then he would return to his office with a serene sense of a duty well done, and meet and feast upon the eyes of Mary, his wife, keen, hungry eyes, filled with more or less sinful pride in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... later French came forth from his room, haggard and trembling, to find every bottle empty, Mackenzie making ineffective attempts to prepare a meal, and Kalman nowhere to ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... most part, Fownes spoke in the West of England dialect; but whenever he became interested, this instantly slipped from him, as did his still more ineffective attempt to move and act the rustic. Indeed, the ease of his movements and the straightness of his carriage, with a certain indefinable precision of manner, led to a common agreement among his fellow-labourers that ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... to a natural intuition, and to render peculiar modes of thought and representation in them more universally comprehensible, that by this historico-critical aspect many an objection might be removed, many offensive things effaced, and many a shallow scoffing be made ineffective, there appeared in some men just the opposite disposition, since these chose the darkest, most mysterious, writings as the subject of their meditations, and wished, if not to elucidate them, yet to confirm them through internal ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and women were confined in the almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss Dix, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... its proper function our R or condensing quality is an essential factor in the work. But if it be allowed to take the form of doubt or unbelief, then it renders the flow of the current from the Spirit ineffective to the extent to which the doubt is entertained; and if doubt be allowed to degenerate into total unbelief and denial of the Power of the Spirit, we thereby cancel the originating force altogether. To put it in terms of the electrical ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... There is no further mention of a difference between the destinies of France and Corsica. To compare the pamphlet with even the poorest work of Rousseau, as has often been done, is absurd; to vilify it as ineffective trash ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... recounting the exploits of their ancestors, and urging every motive calculated to excite desperate valour and contempt of death. Some very remarkable instances of the powerful effect produced by the eloquence of these Rautis are recorded, showing that they constituted a by no means useless or ineffective part of a native army. The islanders almost universally have a taste for oratory, by which they are easily affected; and they hold those who excel ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... gloomy, but impressive Gothic It was built by David II., in the fulfilment of a vow made to St. Monan on the field of battle at Neville's Cross. One would have judged the king to be thankful for small mercies, for certainly St. Monan proved but an ineffective patron. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... text with the above as a guide will show that this collection of episodes, chaotic as it seems, makes no ineffective play. With a genius—and a genius Johannes Brun was—as Falstaff, one can imagine that the piece went brilliantly. The press received it favorably, though the reviewers were much too critical to allow Bjornson's mangling of the text ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... we will go back to the point we passed. You may say, in the case of Sikes and the peer, that the logic of the Determinist is sound, but ineffective: ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Always a figure of comedy, never ready in time, always ineffective, never fully able to use the weapons of so-called "civilization." Let it always be remembered that in the Gallipoli peninsula, when the Turks at first were taking no prisoners, but killing the wounded after their own familiar fashion with mutilation, for the sake of such spoil ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... battalion commander spurred away towards a bedraggled party of some fifty dismounted men, some with horses meekly drooping at their master's heels, several without even the shadow of a steed. Truman had "fallen out" his utterly ineffective to form a guard for the sick and unhorsed, Davies's two patients among them, and one of those now, in weakness and excitement, crying like a child. A gray-haired lieutenant was with the party striving ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... with the assistance of favorable opportunities. Aristocratic government proceeds with the dexterity of art; it understands how to make the collective force of all its laws converge at the same time to a given point. Such is not the case with democracies, whose laws are almost always ineffective or inopportune. The means of democracy are therefore more imperfect than those of aristocracy, and the measures which it unwittingly adopts are frequently opposed to its own cause; but the object it has in view is ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... ordinary human passions, are not hostile to the gods of heaven and earth. The Hebrews adopted the Babylonian cosmogonic myth,[1783] but it became a mere literary attachment to the conception of the supreme god Yahweh, and was otherwise ineffective. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... and after it evening preparation, when Mr. Tinkler presided in a feeble and ineffective manner, perpetually suspecting that the faint sniggers he heard were indulged in at his own expense, and calling perfectly innocent victims to account ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the Western figures of the two pitchers. Lovett and Hodson both excelled Stivetts against the Eastern teams, by .714 and .500, respectively, against Stivetts' .417; but against the Western teams, Stivetts led by .763 to Hodson's .600 and Lovett's .500. Staley was very ineffective against the batsmen of both sections. Lampe pitched in but one game, and that one a defeat by Pittsburgh; Stephens pitching, too, in but one game but it was a victory over Washington. Here are the sectional records for the season, together with the column giving the ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... is the concept that poverty or at least extreme poverty, can be banished from the world. It cannot. It is impossible for the effective to produce and save as fast as the ineffective will waste and destroy if they can get at it. No truth in the Bible is more profound than the saying: "The poor ye ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... efficient, it is to be noted that different experiences may vary in their value. Many of these, from the point of their value in meeting future problems or making adjustments, must appear trivial and even useless. Others, though adapted to meet our needs, may do this in a crude and ineffective manner. As an illustration of such difference in value, compare the effectiveness and accuracy of the notation possessed by primitive men as illustrated ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... The village was fortunate in being practically screened from direct observation by a slight rise in ground between it and the enemy, and the indirect machine gun fire which raked the streets at odd intervals was curiously ineffective, for the majority of shots went high, though on occasions one had to abandon respect and lie flat in the mud, until ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men who choose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar, was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter, Pierce's Supererogation, is about as rambling, incoherent, and ineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for. It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints on literary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with their well-known criticism and recommendation of classical forms, and Foure ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... sword-point. The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditation will be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convince you how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, how miserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from the captaincy of your own soul. It should convince, too, the most common-sense of philosophers of the distinction between real time, the true stream of duration which is life, and the sequence of seconds so carefully measured by the clock. ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the spanker to be set; which being done, brought the brig once more to the wind, and extricated her from her dangerous situation. Then he ordered a new main-topsail to be at once brought on deck and bent; having no fancy for leaving the brig all night under such low and ineffective canvas as the spanker—a sail that, with the heavy sea then running, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... June 14, 1907 they were allowed only 36 per cent, Poland's delegation was cut down from 37 to 12 per cent, Caucasus' from 29 to 9, Siberia's from 21 to 14, and Central Asia's from 23 to 1. In fact he did everything to make the Duma ineffective and a laughing stock. But that was not enough, his pride was hurt and he wanted to be revenged, and the number of people arrested, imprisoned, exiled, and executed for political crimes was greater ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... correspondence with her friends she had quietly endured the idea which would continually crop up that she had been jilted. She never denied it; but it was the false accusation rather than the loss of all that her marriage had promised her which made her feel the Matterhorn and the Campanile to be equally ineffective. Then there gradually came to her some comfort from a source from which she had certainly not expected it. On their travels they had become acquainted with a Mr. Western, a silent, shy, almost middle-aged ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... assumed a more despotic power over their own subjects. Old constitutional forms which had imposed some check on the will of the sovereign, like the Estates of Wuertemberg, were contemptuously suppressed; the careless, ineffective routine of the last age gave place to a system of rigorous precision throughout the public services. Military service was enforced in countries hitherto free from it. The burdens of the people became greater, but they were more fairly distributed. The taxes were more equally levied; justice was made ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... when they learned that though prisoners, Mr. Holwell and the gallant few who had stuck to their posts had been assured of good treatment. During the day the vessel dropped still lower down the river to Budge Budge, running the gauntlet of a brisk but ineffective fire from Tanna Fort, now in the ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... for my energies—the girl of limited income in these days is as ineffective as a jellyfish, if ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... antiquated; much more appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. As for the various ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... What we need therefore is to break with the assumption that we know all that it is necessary to know, and that we have done or are doing all that it is necessary to do. It is indeed the mark of an ineffective religion that the notion of necessity is adopted as its stimulus, rather than the notion of aspiration. The question, "Must I do this?" is a revelation of spiritual poverty and ineptitude. "I press on," is the motto of a ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... General Hill occupied all the places on the south of Madrid, and which occupation enabled him to cover the right of the allied army. These successes, however, were far from completing the recovery of Spain, and the situation of Lord Wellington in the Spanish capital was yet very critical. So ineffective was the aid which the natives afforded, and so great the military power which yet remained to be subdued, that a triumphant result was still uncertain. In a little time, indeed, Lord Wellington saw himself menaced by the three armies of the south, the centre, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... so keep her course that it was as if he could, at the best, but stand aside to watch her and let her pass; he only made a vague demonstration that was like an ineffective gesture. "I'm sorry to say any ill of your friends, and the thing was a long time ago; besides which there was nothing to make me recur to it. But I remember the man's striking me as a decided ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... power. He had stepped forward alone, and stood looking up at his guest, still framed in the sheltering trellis, and his blurred eyes cleared and grew keen as he looked, regarding him indifferently, like some refractory but mildly amusing animal. His guest's defiant eyes avoided his, and the ineffective, swaying figure seemed to shrink and droop and grow smaller, but it was a dignified figure still and a dangerous one. There was the snarling menace of impotent but inevitable rebellion about it, of men who fight on with their backs against the wall; a menace ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... Hector steered, and the ladies sang,—Mr Sudberry assisting with a bass. His voice, being a strong baritone, was overwhelmingly loud in the middle notes, and sank into a muffled ineffective rumble in the deep tones. Having a bad ear for tune, he disconcerted the ladies—also the rowers. But what did that matter? He was overflowing with delight, and apologised for his awkwardness by laughing loudly and begging ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... attitudes make such influences vivid and overpowering. Every one knows, too, those often clever linguistic forms which are to aid the suggestion. They are to inhibit the opposing impulses. The mere use of the imperative, to be sure, has gradually become an ineffective, used-up pattern. It is a question for special economic psychotechnics to investigate how the suggestive strength of a form can be reinforced or weakened by various secondary influences. What influence, for example, belongs to the electric sign advertisements in ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Longstreet on the other. But the position at Fredericksburg was less strong for defence than that at the Second Manassas, for not only was Jackson's line within three thousand yards—a long range but not ineffective—of the heavy guns on the Stafford Heights, but on the bare plain between the railway and the river there was ample room for the deployment of the Federal field-batteries. At the Second Manassas, on the other hand, the advantages of the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself—erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but, ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... preparation. Two battalions of the Royal Scots carried a couple of the enemy's trenches in fine style and stuck to them, but the rest of the Brigade lost a number of good men to no useful purpose in their push against H.12. One thing is clear. If the bombardment was ineffective, from whatever cause, then the men should not have been ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... are generally dependent upon their relations to one another for their value. Taken alone, they are ineffective fragments of knowledge, just as a common soldier or an officer in an army is ineffective in battle without definite relations to a multitude ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... political unit, and to the Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots, as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... A three or four mile advance should be easy enough, but, in the West, that would mean just three or four miles of land; nothing more. But here, those three or four miles—nay, two or three miles—(so ineffective in France) are an objective in themselves; they give us the strategical ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... opinion. That the notion of regarding form as a vessel—a notion oftener acted upon than openly professed—is a mischievous one will hardly be denied, and if it were denied, we could not here discuss so wide a question as that of "What is form?" The comparatively ineffective treatment of the violin and violoncello also lays the composer open to censure. Notwithstanding its weaknesses the work was received with favour by the critics, the most pronounced conservatives not excepted. That the latter gave more praise to it than to Chopin's previously-published compositions ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... possible, they would be propitious to human happiness. But the constant agitation in society of such projects may be no nullity—may have, for a season, an indisputable and very pernicious influence. As systems of doctrine they may not be ineffective, nor undeserving of attention; and in this light M. Reybaud, in the work we now bring before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... shot had been fired most ineffectively, and I heard expostulations and angry words used to the captains of the guns; while at every ineffective shell that burst far away a derisive yell rose from the crowded junk—the shouts increasing ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... physical universe. In reality, a written description arranges its parts in our mind only when the impression of the first features of which it is formed are remembered sufficiently, so that we can easily join the first to those which complete and end it. In short, a piece of description is ineffective if we cannot hold in mind all its details at one time. It is necessary that all the details coexist in our memory just as the parts of a painting coexist under our eye. This becomes next to impossible if the description of one definite object last over fifteen minutes of reading. The longer it ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... was even constrained to hope that, by the same Great Influence, a spark of magnanimity had been awakened in Christie's abandoned soul; and once, when Eliza reported that her "pa" had given her a nickle, he almost believed that those seemingly ineffective words of his had, thanks to that same all-powerful intervention, made an impression. He became positively hopeful that this might be the case, when nearly a month had passed, and no further harm had ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... peddler in the South, school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote "Little Women." "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... and continued to fire by platoons, with as much regularity as on parade. A few minutes of this work, however, compelled different corps to fall back, and the vain conflict was continued for four hours, on our part almost entirely by a smart but ineffective fire of musketry; while the French sent their grape into our ranks almost with as much impunity as if they had been on parade. It had been far better for our men had they been less disciplined, and less under the control of their officers; for the sole effect of steadiness, under ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... another; and this (as no change is supposed in the permanent circumstances of international demand) could only be when the money had diffused itself so equally that prices had risen in the same ratio in all countries, so that the alteration of price would be for all practical purposes ineffective, and the exports and imports, though at a higher money valuation, would be exactly the same as they were originally. This diminished value of money throughout the world (at least if the diminution was considerable) would cause a suspension, or at least a diminution, of the annual supply ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the same hands." [ "Pour leur representer la gehenne o estoient les consciences de la Colonie, de se voir gouvern par les mesmes personnes pour le spirituel et pour le temporel."—Le Clerc, I. 478. ] In 1642, partial and ineffective measures were taken, with the countenance of Richelieu, for introducing into New France an Order less greedy of seigniories and endowments than the Jesuits, and less prone to political encroachment. [ 1 ] No ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... send for persons and papers, to administer oaths, or to compel witnesses to testify, any further attempt upon the part of the Commission to inquire into the salvage matter would have been futile and ineffective. If any further action is to be taken to ascertain whether or not the financial interest of the United States has been sacrificed by the manner in which the salvage was disposed of, the inquiry must be ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... clouds are to be found several thousands of feet lower. If a pilot be above them they help him to dodge writs for trespass, which Archibald the bailiff seeks to hand him. When numerous enough to make attempts at observation ineffective, they perform an even greater service for him—that of arranging for a day's holiday. And at times the R.F.C. pilot, like the man with a murky past, is constrained to have clouds for a covering against attack; ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... until within a hundred yards, when the smaller opened with a shot to which the larger replied. The battle was now between two ironclads. If the shots of the Monitor glanced harmlessly off of the Merrimac those of the latter were equally ineffective against the Monitor. The latter had the advantage of being so much smaller that many of the shells of the Merrimac missed her altogether. Those which impinged against the pilot house or turret did no harm, while the lesser boat was able to dart ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... it is no evil. It is a most serious evil; of little comparative moment, it may be, when only occasional and transitory, but highly injurious if habitual. It renders the speaker unhappy, and his address ineffective. If perfectly at ease, he would have every thing at command, and be able to pour out his thoughts in lucid order, and with every desirable variety of manner and expression. But when thrown from his self-possession, he can do nothing better than mechanically ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... counteracting or embellishing contrivance, "make-up" is curiously ineffective. Many Napoleons have appeared on the stage, only one of them by a writer capable of even suggesting the distinguishing qualities of the man of genius. In most cases there have been advance paragraphs about the pictures, miniatures, statues, statuettes, medallions, bas-reliefs, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is likely to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is possible to suggest that the Hague Tribunal is conceivably the germ of such an overriding direction and supreme court as the peace of the world demands, but in reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere legal automatic machine. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... limited supply of ammunition and the uncertainty of resupply, the necessity for securing fire superiority in order to advance within the shorter ranges, and the impossibility of accomplishing this at ineffective ranges, make it imperative that fire be not opened as long as the advance can be continued without demoralizing losses. The attack which halts to open fire at extreme range (over 1,200 yards) is not likely ever ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... off their clothes. For one thing, all their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their garments, and for another, most of those hailing from beyond the Danube have never been accustomed to disrobing. In the midst of the confusion, two half-sick steward lads were making ineffective efforts ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... to the drawing-room. Chelsea managed better here. It was sallow and ineffective. One could visualize the ladies withdrawing to it, while their lords discussed life's realities below, to the accompaniment of cigars. Had Mrs. Wilcox's drawing-room looked thus at Howards End? Just as this thought entered ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening. Even the interests of business give ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... very obnoxious, though they could not be stopped. Even a sign, over the door-bell, "No begging; no slumming," was quite ineffective ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... essentially solitary in mind. "When I am alone," he once wrote, "I am at my best; and at my worst in company. I am happy and capable in loneliness; unhappy, distracted, and ineffective in company." And again he wrote, "I am becoming more and more afraid of meeting people I want to meet, because my numerous deficiencies are so very apparent. For example, I stammer slightly always ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it could use a disintegrator ray was from a fixed generator in the nose of the structure, as it dropped in a straight line toward its target. But since they could not sight the widely deployed individual gunners in our line, their scouting was just as ineffective as our attempts were to ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... facts that its means of communication and its capacity for the movement of great armies were ill-developed; and that it was far behind all its rivals in the control of industrial machinery and applied science, upon which modern warfare depends, and without which the greatest wealth of man-power is ineffective. At the opening of the twentieth century Russia was still pursuing the policy of Eastward expansion at the expense of China, which the other Western powers had been compelled to abandon by the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... place of chief delight, for it ran all across the back of the house, with a row of low windows wreathed in ivy and commanding a wide view across the meadow lands beside the river. There was a modern cooking stove at one end of the room, a cheap, hideous, ineffective affair, but at the other was still the old fireplace, with its swinging crane, its warming cupboards, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... upstairs and introduced her to his wife. Mrs. Selwyn was a slender, colourless woman, possessing the remnants of what must at one time have been an ineffective kind of prettiness. She was a determinedly chronic invalid, and rarely left the rooms which had been set aside for her use to join the other ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... sturdily practical one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest, perhaps, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... helping along by steady self-suggestion. He will be helped more if he understands that his mind is working wrongly. But the full truth is that both mind and body are in disorder; the function of the disturbed brain cells accompanies the ineffective will, and to reenforce the will means to bring into equilibrium again the disturbed brain cells. For the psychotherapist the temptation of giving the attention to the mental symptoms only is strong. The more firmly the physician sticks to the standpoint of psychophysiology, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... guard to slip over the entire point and protect it until the time came to use it. When people talk glibly of "idle" savages they ignore the immense labor entailed by many of their industries, and the really extraordinary amount of work they accomplish by the skilful use of their primitive and ineffective tools. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... all their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their attire, and for another, most of those hailing from beyond the Danube have never been accustomed to disrobing. In the midst of the confusion, two half-sick steward lads were making wholly ineffective efforts ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... up the fleet just when the boarding was at its height, and her arrival caused a wild scene. Work and discipline were forgotten for a while: men set off flares which were absurdly ineffective in daylight; they jumped on the thofts of boats, ran up the rigging, and performed all sorts of clumsy antics out of sheer goodwill, as the beautiful steamer worked slowly along, piling up a soft, snowy scuffle of foam at her forefoot. The spare hands who had been brought ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... issues: toxic and hazardous waste disposal is ineffective and poses health risks; water pollution from raw sewage; limited natural fresh water resources; ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... tour de force, in emulation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto. The hero, whose birth is enshrouded in mystery, the restless ghost groaning for the vindication of rights, the historical background, the archaic spelling of the challenge, are all ineffective fumblings towards the romantic. The Old English Baron is an unambitious work, but it has a certain hold upon our attention because of its limpidity of style. It can be read without discomfort and even ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... President was in constant opposition, that prevailed in the end, and with a decisiveness that proves it to have been feasible and sound from the beginning. Mr. Lincoln's most ultra prescription—his Emancipation Proclamation—was ineffective. If it was intended to eradicate slavery altogether, it was too narrow; if to free the slaves of Rebels only, it was too broad. So with his other propositions. His thirty-seven-year-liberation scheme, his "tinkering off" policy (as he called it) for Missouri, ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest two hundred thousand years ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... ineffective against such soft flesh, where they don't meet enough resistance to go off. But we'll attack ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... assistant to the prosecutor was perfunctory and ineffective. The charge of the judge was neutral. The jury left the room, and were out eight and one-quarter minutes. As they filed in, the foreman sent a triumphant telepathic message to David ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... remarks, which are not essential to the main objects of the paper; but when you come to positive business at Vladivostock, all that you say is most excellent and important. I believe the Siberian railroad—like the line to Samarkand—is only a single line. Such a line 5,000 miles long is a very ineffective instrument for military and commercial purposes. How much can it carry, allowing for return trains, chiefly empty? Where is Russia, with a debt equal in charge to our own, to find forty millions sterling ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... snake, put a spoke in one's wheel; break the neck, break the back; unhinge, unfit; put out of gear. unman, unnerve, enervate; emasculate, castrate, geld, alter, neuter, sterilize, fix. shatter, exhaust, weaken &c 160. Adj. powerless, impotent, unable, incapable, incompetent; inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, disabled &c v.; armless^. harmless, unarmed, weaponless, defenseless, sine ictu [Lat.], unfortified, indefensible, vincible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the trenches, carrying them at the bayonet's point. Next to the 18th came the 87th and 84th, with the Guards close behind. For a short time the enemy clung to the line of intrenchments, but their fire was very ineffective. By this time the Highland division was already in their camp, and soon losing heart they too fled, and the whole Egyptian army were in full rout. With hardly a moment's delay, the cavalry were pushed on in pursuit, ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... letter has been read and forgotten. Sometimes the booklet never arrives. Where possible it is much better to make the booklet of such a size that it may be enclosed in the same envelope with the letter. Then you catch the prospect when his interest is at the highest point. It is embarrassing and ineffective to refer to "our booklet, mailed to you under separate cover." Put the book with the letter. Or, if you must send the booklet under separate cover, send it first and the letter later, so that each will arrive at about the ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... hill top, dear?" he said. "You need have no fear. Only to-night I felt that I must say these things to you, even though the passion which they represent remains as ineffective forever as the words themselves. I have a feeling, you know, that after ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... caissons, forges were there in interminable array, having apparently been parked away in that remote corner the day before and then forgotten there. There was not so much as a sentry to guard them. It sent a chill to her heart to see all that artillery lying there silent and ineffective, sleeping its neglected sleep in the concealment of those deserted alleys. She was compelled to retrace her steps, therefore, which she did by passing through the Place du College to the Grande-Rue, where in front of the Hotel de l'Europe she saw a group of orderlies holding ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... is regarded with affection. Here is the old belfry, which has been so clamorous, standing apart, like those of Ghent, Dunkirk, and a few other towns; an effective structure, though fitted by modern restorers with an entirely new 'head'—not, however, ineffective of ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... Fair Penitent" was entirely ineffective, and did neither me nor the theater any service; the play itself is a feeble adaptation of Massinger's powerful drama of "The Fatal Dowry," and, as generally happens with such attempts to fit our old plays to our modern stage, the fundamentally objectionable ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... that irritate the eye with iteration of the same form. The citadel has no character of massiveness, no grand donjon to distinguish it from the rest of the fortifications, and the cathedral has only two mean little donkey's ears of towers that are most ineffective, peeping over the walls of the south-western angle of the town. In looking out for a study for a picture one has to get where some of the sugar-loaf towers are eclipsed, and there is only one point in the whole circumference where a really satisfactory ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... Address (1865) show even better than his Gettysburg Address the influence of the Bible on his thought and style. One reason why there is so much weak and ineffective prose written to-day is because books like the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress are not read and reread as much as formerly. Of the North and the South, he ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... last thing they aim at is to be "natural." To be unnatural rather is their object. Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... would be very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to impose absolute control by any means. For as I said before, even an ultimately developed psychodynamics can't do everything. Ordinary propaganda, for instance, is quite ineffective on people ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... that matter, his natural delicacy and his deference to Percy had always checked him from sounding the subject closely. He might be, as he had said, keen as a woman where his own instincts were in action; but they were ineffective in guessing at the cause ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... But ineffective as the guns were, they were silenced forever as a frightful beam of destruction stabbed relentlessly through the control room, whiffing out of existence the pilot, gunnery, and lookout panels and ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... How ineffective it all is. Whoever by worrying all night succeeded in bringing about the kind of weather he wanted? More than that, it is fatal to successfully accomplishing those things that do lie within our power. The worry over catching a train or doing ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... journalism, to be reminded of the real scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means, by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... were not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another. However, all turned out well, and there we were, in a compartment of a French railway-train, smelling of stale tobacco, with ineffective zinc foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of white frost on the window-panes, which my sisters and myself spent our time in trying to rub off that France might become visible. But the white web was spun again as fast as we dissipated it, and nothing was to ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... but it would be effective. What is done now is cruel, and not only ineffective, but so stupid that one cannot understand how people in their senses can take part in so absurd and cruel a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... can't take any chances against an antagonist that won't play the game my way. I had to find your vulnerable point to defend myself, and, in finding it, I find that there's no need to defend myself any longer, because it makes all your weapons ineffective. I believe the trouble with you, Mr. Knowles, is that you've never realized that politicians are human beings. But we are: we breathe and laugh and like to do right, like other folks. And, like most men, you've thought you were different from other men, and you aren't. So, here you are. I ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... Rapid and white she ran homewards in a straight path, under a blue sky and upon the plain of a blue sea. She carried Singleton's completed wisdom, Donkin's delicate susceptibilities, and the conceited folly of us all. The hours of ineffective turmoil were forgotten; the fear and anguish of these dark moments were never mentioned in the glowing peace of fine days. Yet from that time our life seemed to start afresh as though we had died and had been resuscitated. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the proposition may appear startling and indeed absurd; yet hard facts, I venture to believe, will enforce the conviction on unprejudiced minds that the warfare of the present when contrasted with the warfare of the past is dilatory, ineffective, and inconclusive. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... issues: toxic and hazardous waste disposal is ineffective and presents human health risks; water pollution from raw sewage; limited natural fresh water resources; ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency. |
