"Ineptitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... firm, with an agency at Naples. I have often heard the remark that Englishmen of business are at a disadvantage in their export trade because they pay no heed to the special requirements of foreign countries; but such a delightful illustration of their ineptitude had never come under my notice. Doubtless these alluring advertisements are widely scattered through agricultural Calabria. Who knows? they my serve as an introduction to the study ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note of their mood ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... frigid stuff! does he take us for interpreters of dreams?' Sir, I do not. When Xenophon related that vision of his which you all know, of his father's house on fire and the rest, was it just by way of a riddle? was it in deliberate ineptitude that he reproduced it? a likely thing in their desperate military situation, with the enemy surrounding them! no, the relation was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... has acquitted oneself without discredit, and I cannot say that of my part in the war, of which I now loathe the thought for other reasons. The battlefield was no place for me, and neither was the camp. My ineptitude made me the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot who formed the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would have gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling devil of them all, but never more loyally ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... desire a policy to be effected, elect men who will effect it." As a fact, these four departments had elected a group of men, of whom Laferre, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, is a good type, with his absorbing interest in the destruction of Christianity, and his ignorance and ineptitude in any other ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... refrained as much as possible from entering into the neighbourhood of the battles themselves, he took an important share in the direction of the campaign, and it was undoubtedly owing largely to his crass ineptitude in all strategical matters that many of the disasters came about. Although some of his moves were of the nature to render surrender or death inevitable to the actual combatants engaged in the grim struggle, a capitulation on the part of one of his officers was, in the eyes ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... Novi-Bazar was threatened with the fate which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative that something ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... time, a time of aimless, brutal incendiarism and mad turbulence on the part of the mob; a time of weakness and ineptitude on the part of the Government; a time of wickedness, folly, and misrule. Dickens describes it admirably. His picture of the riots themselves seems painted in pigments of blood and fire; and yet, through all the hurry and confusion, he retains the clearness of arrangement ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... forestalled all criticism by putting up Mr Redmond to move its rejection. A more humiliating attitude, a more callous betrayal, a more sorry performance the whole history of political baseness and political ineptitude cannot produce. The feeling that swept through Ireland on the morrow of this Convention was one of disgust and shame, yet the people were so firmly shackled in the bonds of the Party that they still sullenly submitted ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... presented the whole subject in a new light and showed that a natural history of mind might be written and that this method of study offered a wide and rich field for investigation. Of course those who regarded the study of mind only as a branch of metaphysics smiled at the philosophical ineptitude of the mere man of science. But the investigation, on natural history lines, has been prosecuted with a large measure of success. Much indeed still remains to be done; for special training is required, and the workers are still ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... because the age required more highly seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, Jonathan Wild. Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of furnishing ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... Ineptitude garbed as woman! Must I then teach thee the elements of thy business? Hast thou not observed the pump? Go to it, and draw water. Cause the water to flow into buckets. Carry these buckets—need I go on? Will not Nature herself teach thee what to do ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... wonderful and incredible signs, so as to be open to mechanics and common people, and they will thoroughly understand how firm and immovable is that Paracelsic Art against the triflings of the Sophists; though meanwhile that sophistical science has to have its ineptitude propped up and fortified by papal and imperial privileges.... So then, you wormy and lousy Sophist, since you deem the monarch of Arcana a mere ignorant, fatuous, and prodigal quack, now, in this mid age, I determine in my present treatise ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... the horrible forceps. "Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties—I see!" And thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly assisting at the promulgation of this ineptitude. "There's no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question—raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham—of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I've ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther comment the ineptitude of his ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... of taxing imports of German fabric gloves, or the rest of the ridiculous "litter of mice" that has thus far been yielded by the Safeguarding of Industries Act, is the crowning proof at once of the insincerity and ineptitude of tariffism where it has a free hand, and of the adamantine strength of the Free Trade case. If any further illustration were needed, it is supplied by the other tariffist procedure in regard to the ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... noses of everybody, and inquiring after the healths of the 'chief wives'. Silly fatuous geese!—and then talking the wildest piffle about the 'burning question of the hour' and making the seditious rotters groan at their ineptitude and folly, until they cheer them up sudden-like with a bit of dam' treason and sedition they ought to be jailed for. Jailed. I nearly threw a fit when the old geezer, in a blaze of diamonds and glory, brought up old Phossy and presented him to the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... to efficient living. There is no getting away from that. But if egotism means selfishness, the serious student of the craft of daily living will not be an egotist for more than about a year. In a year he will have proved the ineptitude of egotism. ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... introduction of the practice of inoculation met the same obstinate resistance as, more recently, that of vaccination startled the people. Thus objects of the highest importance to mankind, on their first appearance, are slighted and contemned. Posterity smiles at the ineptitude of the preceding age, while it becomes familiar with those objects which that age has so eagerly rejected. Time is a tardy patron of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... intended to be a compliment to the heads of various states. To allay the sensitiveness of the French, Morier suggested to the Foreign Secretary that the King should make a point of visiting France first; but, owing to the ineptitude of President Grevy, this suggestion was rendered impracticable. When the King did visit Paris, after a sojourn at Berlin, where he received the usual compliment of being made titular colonel of a Prussian ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... intelligent foreigner who should try to disentangle the causes of Egyptian unrest from the speeches delivered in both Houses this afternoon will be rather puzzled. From Captain WEDGWOOD BENN in the Commons he would learn that it was due to the ineptitude of the British Administration, the ill-treatment of the natives by the Army of Occupation, and in particular the unsympathetic attitude adopted by Lord CURZON towards the Nationalist leaders, one of whom, according to Captain BENN, "held in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... arranged a revolt of the caudrilleros (guards) of that suburb, hoping thereby to convince General Blanco that the rebellion was in full cry, consequent on his folly. No doubt, by this trick of the friars, many civilian Spaniards were deceived into an honest belief in the ineptitude of the Gov.-General. In a state of frenzy a body of them, headed by Father Mariano Gil, marched to the palace of Malacanan to demand an explanation of General Blanco. The gates were closed by order ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... with an oracular wink in his eye, says in a descriptive note that it is to be played in the spirit of parody (parodistisch). Unfortunately the audience cannot see the printed direction, and there is no parody in music except extravagance and ineptitude in the utterance of simple things (like the faulty notes of the horns in Mozart's joke on the village musicians, the cadenza for violin solo in the same musical joke, or the twangling of Beckmesser's lute); so the introduction is an honest musical description of things which ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... British government, not feeling strong enough to blockade Brest and the Spanish ports, was compelled to regulate its movements by those of its opponents. In the Channel it was saved from disaster by the ineptitude of the French and Spanish fleets. The only real success achieved by this numerically imposing force was the capture on the 8th and 9th of August of a large British convoy of ships bound for the East and West Indies carrying troops. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... took on a shade of dignity still more severe, as he wondered whether this reply was a snub or a mere ineptitude. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... his nose in the air. "There will be plenty for a change of setts without me. I am not good enough for Binning and his two young aristocrats, and I don't choose to make sport for the Philistines by an exhibition of my ineptitude. I have no pretentious to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... things of England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be brooked. England in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book—they had been driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent abroad for her signature, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... fruitless dedications, not to say flatteries, which are customary nowadays. I seek no protection; for a lie does not deserve it, and truth is indifferent to it. Let such as opine that the shadow of great personages can conceal the ineptitude of authors, make the most of this advantage.' Believing firmly in astrology, he judged that his own horoscope condemned him to ill-success. It appears that he was born under the influence of Saturn, when the sun and moon were in conjunction; and he held ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... ministers are unfitted by temperament and training to talk wisely on economic policies and programs, you are right. Do you suppose that we ministers do not know how we must appear to you when we try to discuss the details of business? While, however, you are free to say anything you wish about the ineptitude of ministers in economic affairs (and we, from our inside information, will probably agree with you), yet as we thus put ourselves in your places and try to see the situation through your eyes, do you also ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... felt angry and almost tricked, hostile to the working of sex, vulgarized by the sight of that other drawing together of two human beings. Oh! the ineptitude of the echoes we are! Now she was irritated with Craven because he had taken her hand. And yet she had been on the edge of a great experiment. She knew that Craven did not love her—yet. Perhaps he would never really love her. Certainly she did not love him. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... hill-sides—by forbidding access to such tracts and placing them under the "vincolo forestale." To denude slopes in the moist climate and deep soil of England entails no risk; in this country it is the beginning of the end. And herein lies the ineptitude of the Italian regulations, which entrust the collective wisdom of rapacious farmers with measures of this kind, taking no account of the destructively utilitarian character of the native mind, of that canni-ness which overlooks a distant profit in its eagerness to grasp the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the French army's line of march as it went through Prussia was due principally to the ineptitude of Murat, who had assumed command after the departure of the Emperor, and later to the feebleness of Prince Eugne de ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... overdone in public and underdone in private, and it was becoming clearer, though not yet sufficiently clear, that brilliant cavalry generalship was not the quality most required to control the gigantic machinery of a modern army. Nevertheless, the criticisms that were levelled against the ineptitude and mental inelasticity of the generals and the staff of the old army overshot the mark. No one ventured to bring such a charge against the staff-work of the French, and yet the French had been no more successful in Champagne than we had been in Artois. ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... is only momentary," replied Agaric eagerly. "It is due to purely accidental causes; it results from mere contingencies. Chatillon was a fool; he has drowned himself in his own ineptitude. Listen to me, Brother Cornemuse. We have not a moment to lose. We must free the Penguin people, we must deliver them from their tyrants, save them from themselves, restore the Dragon's crest, reestablish the ancient State, the good State, for the honour of religion and the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of the months of regret and sorrow that had followed upon his coming to America struck him with nausea. The thought of his long ineptitude for the life which he had adopted voluntarily gave him a feeling of self-contempt. The inertness of his ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... the controversy in an amiable manner, asserting, indeed, that for the consideration of as many brass cash as Sen had mentioned principles he would cause him to be thrown into prison as a person of unnatural ineptitude. Then, without rewarding Sen for the time spent in his service, or even inviting him to partake of food and wine, the insufferable deviser of very indifferent animated contrivances again sent him out, this time into the streets of Hankow with a number of delicately ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... interned in the body of finite man, and must clothe herself in the heart and mind of the human and take upon herself the nature of this creature man, made and fashioned to be a suitable instrument and habitation for her. To counterbalance the grossness and ineptitude of the creature's material body with its appetites, man is imbued with the knowledge of right, and with a secret longing for a happiness which is ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... procedure of the vitalized school until we have eliminated this expression. If we admit the validity of the contention as to this expression, then we may profitably resume the consideration of our analogy, for, in that case, we shall find in this analogy no ineptitude. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... good liar. But his very ineptitude helped him here. It tangled the words on his tongue, it brought a convincing dew upon his forehead. "I'd rather not talk about it," he finished. "But you ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay |
