"Irresponsible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was evident that he had perhaps a hundred thousand roubles or not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to begin one thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself go altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had not been for the same ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dinner? Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the veranda by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I have had a variety of hair-breadth escapes from drowning. The very element which I loved so dearly, seemed the most desirous of making a victim of me; and I should have deemed it ungrateful, had I not known that the wild billows were unreasoning, irresponsible creatures; and I had too recklessly laid "my hand ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... men want the issue settled, and perhaps the irresponsible are eager for a little blood-letting; there are certain primitive instincts which are latent in us all, and the thought of war ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... "My reputation, which has suffered at the hands of irresponsible people, is not of the best, and places me at times in awkward positions. But I am beginning to live it down." The stranger looked contrition itself. "To prove my sincerity I desire to help you ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... the philosopher as to its final cause. Legally and politically, that is, conventionally, the differences are even greater on a comparison of nations and eras. In England we have seen senators of mark and authority, nay, even a prime minister, the haughtiest, [1] the most despotic, and the most irresponsible of his times, at an age which, in many states, both ancient and modern, would have operated as a ground of absolute challenge to the candidate for offices the meanest. Intellectually speaking, again, a very large proportion of men never attain maturity. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... and Volterra. Maso degli Albizzi was the ruling spirit of the commonwealth, spending the enormous sum of 11,500,000 golden florins on war, raising sumptuous edifices, protecting the arts, and acting in general like a powerful and irresponsible prince. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... approval of all, and a few moments later the men had saddled their ponies and were galloping away in the direction of sun-baked Cuivaca. They sang now, and were happy, for they were as little boys playing hooky from school—not bad men; but rather irresponsible children. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... admission. Those who had already scrutinized Miss Tuttle with the curiosity of an ill-defined suspicion now scrutinized her with a more palpable one, and those who had hitherto seen nothing in this heavily-veiled woman but the bereaved sister of an irresponsible suicide allowed their looks to dwell piercingly on that concealing veil, as if they would be glad to penetrate its folds and read in those beautiful features the meaning of an allusion uttered with such ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Irresponsible people! Wild and irresponsible people! To think that I trusted Itzy to wild, ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of professors and students, a large population of intelligent and well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we have at least ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... about Tewkesbury in one edition of the Acts and Monuments he omitted in another, patching it on to Bainham's story, thus stultifying himself as regards both stories,* and affording us another signal illustration of the irresponsible and unscrupulous way in which he could deal ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... this sort of deception that incited me to indignant defiance. The war I had to carry on by day against my troublesome passions, also put me on my guard at night, and I would not absolve myself with the excuse that sleep renders irresponsible. For I knew that it was I, myself, I, Lodovico Muralto, an honest, well-meaning fellow, who in the dream-life of night had done and felt all kinds of malicious wicked and low-minded things, and I ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... have suffered martyrdom at its hands. Years upon years have been found necessary to induce the masses to consider, much less adopt, schemes for their own advantage. A government of numbers, then, is not one of virtue or intelligence, but of force, intangible, irresistible, irresponsible—resembling that of Caesar depicted by the great historian, which, covering the earth as a pall, reduced all to a common level of abject servitude. For many years scarce a descendant of the colonial gentry ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... "Chess, rather. The game where chance hasn't a show—the game of the intelligent future. That very irregular and disconcerting move of his.... And he got taken, you might say. She's an irresponsible beast, your queen." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... include: a weakening of democratic institutions, political polarization, a politicized military, drug-related violence along the Colombian border, increasing internal drug consumption, overdependence on the petroleum industry with its price fluctuations, and irresponsible mining operations that are endangering the rain forest and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of figures, Daddy stooping with his rifle at the trail, Laddie and Dimples armed with axes and toy pistols, as tense and serious as any Redskins could be. The other two rather more irresponsible but very much absorbed all the same. The little line of absurd figures wound in and out of the furniture, and out on to the lawn, and round the laurel bushes, and into the yard, and back to the clump of trees. There Daddy stopped and held ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Lindsay, that a careful and rational diet is what a boy needs? Washy's constitution is superb. He has a remarkable stamina, and I attribute it entirely to my careful supervision of his food. I shudder when I think of the growing boys who are permitted by irresponsible people to devour meat, candy, pie—" She broke off. "What ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... life. But in his creed a girl's first duty was to be pretty and fascinating, and he was extremely proud of the beauty of his daughters. It was his plan to marry them to rich men who would maintain them in the irresponsible luxury ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... at which a Board of Directors were to be elected,—a strange situation confronted them, there being no man or set of men who were able to assume control, although there were no lack of cliques who were desirous of doing so, but these were largely irresponsible parties either lacking in the necessary capital or not command the confidence of those who did ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... some bother to get a captain," he said. "The job has not much attraction for a sober man, but Brown is not sober; he's frankly reckless and irresponsible. The strange thing is, I've known him make good where cautious men have failed. Then much depends on the engineer. I brought you across to ask if you ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... "The record is simply appalling. If this thing continues a lot of the little mushroom insurance companies will fail; it 's an ill wind that blows nobody good. The public will presently awaken to a realization of the danger of patronizing the irresponsible concerns which are trying to do business under the shadow of the old and ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... dear father should never have married. Though his nature was one of the sweetest I have ever known, and though he would at any call give his time to or risk his life for others, in practical matters he remained to the end of his days as irresponsible as a child. If his mind turned to practical details at all, it was solely in their bearing toward great developments of the future. To him an acorn was not an acorn, but a forest ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... fellow's departing, on business unknown, for Boston, US. Mrs. Jacox, the widow whose wrongs had made such an impression on Malkin, announced herself, in a thin, mealy face and rag-doll figure, as not less than forty, though her irresponsible look made it evident that years profited her nothing, and suggested an explanation of the success with which she had been victimised. She was stylishly dressed, and had the air of enjoying an unusual treat. Her children were of more promising type, though Earwaker would hardly have supposed ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Then, not knowing how else to turn them to account, commissioned the Indians to work them into a picket garden-fence. At all times the native found a father in the Company, and it was the worst thing that ever happened the region when the irresponsible free-traders with their demoralizing methods were allowed to enter and traffic ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... for the other,—so the bachelor joys are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... law, that in the eye of the law the husband and wife are one person, that person being the husband; that this falsehood itself, the deposit of barbarism, tends perpetually to brutalize the marriage relation by subjecting wives as irresponsible tools to the capricious authority of husbands; that this degradation of married women re-acts inevitably to depress the condition of single women, by impairing their own self-respect and man's respect for them; and that the final result is that system of tutelage ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... weakness I took the appointment of private secretary to Lord Ripon, and repented that I had done so at once, but I did not like to say so. I went out, and saw at Bombay that in my irresponsible position I could not possibly hope to do anything really to the purpose, in the face of vested interests out there; so seeing this was the case, and also observing that my views were diametrically opposed to those of the official classes, I gave it up. It certainly was ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... it was your name, pardner," Morgan returned, conciliating him as he would an irresponsible child. "Why, I'd walk a mile to write my name next to yours any day. There was ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... contrast between (a) overworked Commander, weighed down with responsibilities, absorbed day and night in momentous matters of large principle, nevertheless infallible on smallest detail and now in possession of gas helmet, one, and (b) very junior subaltern, free to enjoy the open-air irresponsible life of the trenches, yet neglecting even the few small matters entrusted to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... husky tones of Sister Magdalen's late favorite; when dignity was required she became the escaped nun; and in her rage she would burst into the melodramatic frenzy dear to the McMeeter audiences; but Colette, the heedless, irresponsible, half-mad butterfly, dominated these various parts, and to this charming personality she returned. Through his own sad experience this spectacle interested him. He subdued her finally by a precise ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... law but the petty charter which has been more than once alluded to in this Comedie Humaine as the ladies' Code, laugh at the statutes framed by men. They say everything, they do not shrink from any blunder or hesitate at any folly, for they all accept the fact that they are irresponsible beings, answerable for nothing on earth but their good repute and their children. They say the most preposterous things with a laugh, and are ready on every occasion to repeat the speech made in the early days of her ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... attributed to that state of being was held sufficient to bear him blameless, and he was always discharged on his promise not to do it again. I do not know whether this was intended as a sort of indulgence to newly-arrived voyagers, or whether, in the eye of the law, a new-chum was held to be an irresponsible being, who had not yet arrived at the moral manhood of a New Zealander. Certain it is, it was fact, and was largely ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... my grandson," Then, clasping the little fellow to his heart, he said, "I'll never part with him!" The mother recovered, and was taken home with her child and forgiven. Such is often the work of the good foster mother. In all the successes of the irresponsible committee and of the responsible State Children's Council the greatest factor has been the character of the good women who have been mothers to the little ones. The fears that only self-interest could induce ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... dedicated to him the beautiful Ossianic one-act opera Uthal. The direct results of his teaching at the conservatoire were the steady, though not as yet unhealthy, decline of French opera into a lighter style, under the amiable and modest Boieldieu and the irresponsible and witty Auber; for, as we have seen, Cherubini was quite incapable of making his ideals intelligible by any means more personal than his music; and the crude grammatical rules which he mistook for the eternal principles of his own and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... continually in the field, reporting every fact to the Secretaries at the office, who in turn report to the churches, is certainly much better prepared to direct the gifts of the benevolent in ways that shall not be unwise or irresponsible. As these circulars and letters of appeal are often referred by those who receive them to the Secretaries, it is but their duty to say that all funds diverted from our treasury to schools or churches in the South, under no watch and care, would without doubt go further and ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... of character anomalies and perverted sex feeling to prove a deep-seated abnormality of nervous constitution. He diagnosed it as a case of constitutional psychosis; the extent of the abnormalities showing the individual to be irresponsible. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly, deliciously, gay. There is one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles, and trills a rapid flurry of broken words and phrases, with the sudden, spontaneous, irresponsible mirth of a bird. But where she is most herself is in a manner of tragic comedy which has never been seen on the music-hall stage from the beginning. It is the profoundly sad and essentially serious comedy which one sees in Forain's ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... metaphor, we revel in the pleasant propulsion of the maelstrom's rim, unaware that every instant brings us closer to dangers, escape from which would demand herculean effort. Irresponsible emotions are, like those of the novel and the stage, when intensified to excess utterly incompatible with action. And just such a paralysis seems for six long weeks to have lamed the highest ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... landlord, who probably is ignorant of his very existence, and has never seen him perhaps in his life; and when it is considered that he is left to the sharp practice and pettifogging, but plausible rapacity of a dishonest agent, who feels that he is irresponsible, and may act the petty tryant and vindictive oppressor if he wishes, having no restraint over his principles but his interest, which, so far from restraining, only guides and stimulates them;—when we reflect upon all this, and feel, besides, that ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Not will, but the strongest craving, had led her. Jenny could perhaps hardly discourse learnedly upon such things: she must follow the dictates of her nature. But she never accused Pa of responsibility. He was an irresponsible. She had been left to look after him. She had not stayed; and ill had befallen. A bitter smile curved ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... duty of a Cabinet Minister to resign if he differs from his colleagues on any vital matter, whether relating to his department or not, and this usage is, in truth, the main safeguard for the preservation of genuine conjoint responsibility, and the main barrier against irresponsible action by a Prime Minister or a clique. When the practice of resignation in the sense of giving up office is replaced by the other kind of resignation—shrugging one's shoulders and letting things slide—the main virtue of Cabinet government has been lost. In the ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... hamlet Priscilla dropped suddenly from nowhere, trailing with her thunder-clouds of impulsive and childish ideas about doing good, and holding in her hands the dangerous weapon of wealth. It is hard to stand by and see one's life-work broken up before one's eyes by an irresponsible stranger, a foreigner, a girl, a young girl, a pretty girl; especially hard if one was born with an unbending character, tough and determined, ambitious and vain. These are not reproaches being piled up on the vicar's ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... listen half the time. I just stood and watched her as you'd watch one of those weird old women in one of Dickens' books come to life. What I remember of it all is that I am deceitful and fast, ungrateful, irresponsible, with no sense of decency, and when at last she pronounced sentence, what do you think it was? Confinement to the house for a week and if after that, I ever meet you again, to be packed off to a finishing-school in Massachusetts. She rapped her stick on the floor ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... notice. Slavery is always the same, whether in a Roman villa or on a Barbarian farm. The man, like the ox and the ass, is a part of the live-stock; a price is set upon his head; he is a tool without a conscience, a chattel without personality, an impeccable, irresponsible being, who ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... government of France was embarrassed with difficulties. A new ministry had been formed under the presidency of Prince Polignac, all the members of which belonged to that section which advocated irresponsible power in politics, and essential domination in religion. Nothing could exceed the unpopularity of these appointments. The press teemed with denouncements both of the men and their measures; and prosecutions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... enjoying good government and freedom: Persian rule was far less oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens had no self-government, no representation; they were at the mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them. Thucydides was a great master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of importance all the matter of his tale. Besides, he was the only contemporary historian, or the only one ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... compelled, on pain of being instantly garroted, to surrender their valuables, and even their invaluables, to the Property Clerk, Comic Headquarters, PUNCHINELLO Office, who should be held strictly irresponsible and be well paid ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... duties and humanities, while it purifies the air like electricity. There may be the sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually innocent and true to their highest instincts. We may call it an essentially heathenish intercourse, free and irresponsible in its nature, and practising all the virtues gratuitously. It is not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty society, a fragmentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date, still kept up at intervals, which, remembering itself, does not hesitate ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... waist and dared 'em to touch her. Waitstill Webb, the young sweetheart of the man that shot her husband, wuz with her. Good land! Arvilly didn't lay up nothin' aginst her or him; he wuz drunk as a fool when he fired the shot. He didn't know what he wuz doin'; he wuz made irresponsible by the law, till he did the deed, and then made responsible by the same law and shot. Waitstill wuz named from a Puritan great-great-aunt, whose beauty and goodness had fell onto her, poor girl! She stood by Arvilly. They wuz made friends on that dretful night when they had ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... good and pretty of you to say so, Maria," he said with a certain old-fashioned, stiff gallantry which, while it complimented her, treated her as a much younger and more irresponsible being than he was. As he spoke he took up the hand which lay in her lap and held it for a moment clasped in his. "And I can say you have been all that I could have wished as a wife and mother, you have never once failed me during the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... that both these transactions were audaciously entered upon by a body which had absolutely no revenues at all to pledge as security, which had not a dollar of property, nor authority to compel any living man to pay it a dollar. A more utterly irresponsible debtor than Congress never asked for a loan or offered a promissory note. For the security of a creditor there was only the moral probability that in case of success the people would be honest enough to pay their debts; and there was much danger that the jealousies between the States as ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... his head level. Whatever he felt and thought, he had nothing to offer on the altar of public suggestion. He knew that of all these irresponsible debaters he had the most to lose. Nor did he feel inclined to expose anything of the risk at which he stood. It was a depressing time for him, so depressing that he could see very little hope. His risk was enormous. He ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... material for this powerful indictment, etc., etc." (ran the article), "I met a party of irresponsible subalterns bent on the old, old army pastime of leg-pulling. For the sake of exercise and amusement I permitted them to conduct me on a wild-goose chase after an imaginary dump, which luckily led me to a sequestered little hotel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... the poor chaperon fares at such times. But they, secure of their fun, were by no means desirous to have it over, or even to have it begin. They dawdled through the thronged hotel office, where other irresponsible pairs were coming and going under the admiring eyes of the hotel loungers, and they wandered up and down the waste parlours, and sat on tete-a- tetes just to try them, apparently; and Miss Gage verified in the mirrors the beauty which was reflected ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... woodsmen, for he deemed them irresponsible; he found that writings and orders were too easily mislaid. Therefore, whenever he sent a messenger to town or a man down the line with a tote-team for goods, he scrawled on his back with a piece of chalk the peculiar hieroglyph ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... with delight. This kind of joke was adapted both to their prejudices and their lack of intelligence. They were as ignorant of the world as children, fully as gay, irresponsible, and kindhearted. But they had, too, a capacity for cruelty and frank sensuousness that belongs only to the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... and boundaries of the lazaretto of San Antonio, until their neutrality shall be established, and pending the further pleasure of the Council. And it is further decreed and declared that one Capitano Bunker, formerly of the Excelsior, but now a maniac and lunatic—being irresponsible and visited of God, shall be exempted from the ordinances of this decree until his reason shall be restored; and during that interval subjected to the ordinary remedial and beneficent restraint of civilization and humanity. By ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... knew they would invite trouble if they ventured to interfere with or annoy the meeting. He was ready, not only to preach the Gospel but to fight, as sometimes he felt it his duty to do. No man dared in the presence of Cartwright to interrupt the meeting, as in those times irresponsible parties hanging about such gatherings frequently attempted to do ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... I go to Father Sheridan with this story, and Edith says it's not true; suppose she says Lamhorn has a good reputation and that I'm repeating irresponsible gossip, or suppose (what's most likely) she loses her temper and says I invented it, then what am I going to do? Father Sheridan doesn't know Mrs. Kittersby and her daughter, and they're out of the question, anyway. But suppose ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... that we are wholly irresponsible, and we are glad of it. We do not care who knows it. We will not even hold ourselves responsible for the pictures in this book, or the hard-boiled eggs sold at points marked as meal stations in time tables. We have gone into this thing wholly unpledged, ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... hour at noon, and tried to keep the three in the afternoon; but the employer and manager cannot take irresponsible rest as can the employee. She felt like a most inexperienced captain on a totally new species of ship, and her paper plans looked very weak sometimes, as bills turned out to be larger than she had allowed for, or her patronage unaccountably dwindled. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... required for that, none can tell. In the meantime, new complications may arise. The principles of socialism and anarchy are not unlikely to pervade the South, and if the masses of blacks are ever exploited by a central, unknown and irresponsible committee of agitators, the results must be a new reign of terror. The labor agitators are moving southward. It has been said that colored people have no tendencies toward socialism and anarchy. I am no prophet, ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... girl's hasty temper could carry her. What burning, almost evil passion had flamed in her eyes while uttering these insults! How perfectly right his Majesty was to withdraw from all association with a woman of so irresponsible a nature! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... artistic warmth of which you are capable into the presentation of the story, and, without one word of comment from you, the children will feel the dramatic intensity of that vast concourse of animals brought together by the feeble utterance of one irresponsible little hare. Let them feel the dignity and calm of the Lion, which accounts for his authority; his tender but firm treatment of the foolish little Hare; and listen to the glorious finale when all the animals retire convinced of their ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... reached us of encroaching settlers advancing along the valley, and of savage, retaliating raids which could only terminate in armed encounters. Already crops had been destroyed, and isolated cabins fired, the work as yet of prowling, irresponsible bands, yet always traced in their origin to Black Hawk's village. That Keokuk could continue to control his people no longer seemed probable to me, for the Hawk was evidently the stronger character of the two, possessed the larger following, and made no attempt to conceal ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... as irresponsible as if she had been hanging up by the hair all this time in a giant's larder," whispered ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had fought on his side, as though he were preparing for himself a Greece in which he would take the first place. He did not choose his archons by their birth, or their wealth, but favoured his own friends and political adherents, to whom he gave irresponsible power; while by being present at several executions, and driving the opponents of his friends into exile, he gave the Greeks a very unpleasant idea of what they were to expect from the empire of Lacedaemon. The comic poet Theopompus therefore appears to talk at random when ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... The irresponsible pleasure of our first sail the next afternoon was never quite repeated. The boat shot from the landing like a high-strung horse given his head, out across the unbordered road of silver water, and in a moment, as we raced toward the low white clouds, we turned ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... and that of his social interest made him perceive how absurd it would be to go into clerical society after having taken for a wife a millionaire converted the day before. To be just, it must be added that the Countess's dry champagne was not altogether irresponsible for the persistency with which he teased his betrothed. It was not the first time he had indulged in the semi-intoxication which had been one of the sins of his youth, a sin less rare in the southern climates than the modesty of the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... pleasant, still the loss of her precious pin was enough to make her hate the name of Midvale Springs. Now if she had gained not even the amount of the coal bill by coming! By the last night Polly was in a fever; she could not sleep, while her irresponsible bedfellow lay beside ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible Government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... and demoralized crew to heavier exertions than could reasonably be required of the same number of able seamen. By law he had been intrusted with no discretion of judicious punishment, he therefore habitually left the whole matter of discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often of scarcely a superior quality to the crew. Hence ensued a great mass of petty outrages, unjustifiable assaults, shameful indignities, and nameless cruelty, demoralizing alike to the perpetrators and the sufferers; these enormities fell into the ocean ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rose and swelled and fell and rose again. Sticks and umbrellas were banged and rattled, handkerchiefs were waved, the thunder deepened. The motley crowd still surging about the hall took up the cheers, and for hundreds of yards around people were going black in the face out of mere irresponsible enthusiasm. At last Tom waved his hand—the thunder dwindled, died. The prisoner ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... soon appeared that Moore had violated this agreement by concealing a number of accounts, together with a quantity of pills, circulars, labels, and a set of plates, and, in the words of Comstock's complaint, transferred them "to James Blakely, an irresponsible person in Canada West." And Blakely evidently continued to collect such accounts for the benefit of himself and Moore. However, the Comstocks also entered the scene of strife, and sometime during the summer of 1862 ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... came soon to this first Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. Peel had announced, in a reasonable and {245} manful spirit, considering how the task of holding together a Ministry had been imposed on him and the temptation which it afforded for the attacks of irresponsible enemies, that he would not resign office on any side issue or question of purely factitious importance, and that he would hold his place unless defeated by a vote of want of confidence or a vote of censure. He challenged the leader of the Opposition to test the feeling of the House by ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the Committee is a much less inspiring document than the irresponsible and entertaining "Faults of the Fabian." It was largely concerned with a number of administrative details. New books and "short readable tracts" were to be written, and the format of our publications was to be changed. Groups were to be revived in all localities ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... foot in the stirrup and his right leg over Delia's back before Thor could formulate another question. As with head thrown back he continued his amused chuckling, there was about him, in spite of his sixty years, a something irresponsible and debonair that would have pleased Franz Hals or ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... studied the actual boy before us to find out what he is up to, and what end he has in mind. On the contrary, we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our own devising, and with what really amounts to spiritual brutality, we try to drive him towards it. We do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers, because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we define education in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... yet!" Adrian interjected languidly. "No getting into scrapes when I have him. The leash, young hound! the collar, young colt! I'm perfectly irresponsible at present." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she was at one again with the sunshine and the breeze and the birds, with the rapture of the day and the land, and she ceased to think why she acted, or whether it was right or wrong. The best and worst hours of life are in themselves irresponsible, the will hurled headlong forward by an impulse that ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... ability has led many hasty commentators to conclude that music is a wholly separate mental faculty to be found particularly in a more or less shiftless and irresponsible class of gifted but intellectually limited human beings. The few cases of men and women whose musical talent seems to eclipse their minds so that they remain in utter darkness to everything else in life, should not be taken as a basis for judging other artists of real genius and ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... by the laws which are recognized as determining human action. Now according as we regard human action, its two great determinants will be free will or necessity. But hypnotism entirely does away with free will: and for necessity, fatal or circumstantial, it substitutes the lawless and irresponsible imperative of a casual individual man, who (in fiction) usually ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that at this meeting was plotted the opposition to Lord Selkirk's enterprise which was to begin with deceit and perfidy and to culminate in bloodshed. Among the Nor'westers were men of great worth and integrity. There were, however, others in their ranks who proved base and irresponsible. During this conference at Fort William a bitter animosity was expressed against Lord Selkirk and the company which had endorsed his colonizing project. It was the Nor'westers' misfortune and fault that some of their number were prepared to vent this outspoken enmity in ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... visited, except by Captain Cook, their first discoverer, and isolated Spanish exploring expeditions; but of late whalers and sandal wood traders, both English and American, had been finding their way among them, and too often acting as irresponsible adventurous men of a low class are apt to do towards those whom they regard as an ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had any effect upon Edward. At the age of thirty he was as irresponsible as he was when he was thirteen years old. He promised his mother at Avignon most solemnly to reform, and at once got into mischief. "I am persuaded," Lady Mary said, "whoever protects him will be very soon convinced of the impossibility of his ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason. He was in love—he cried it passionately to himself. The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a tale unfold—one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Government of Berlin must recognise those treaty-obligations with which its own legal title to a voice in the affairs of Schleswig was intimately bound up, and that the King of Prussia, not a multitude of irresponsible and ill-informed citizens, must be the judge of the measures by which German interests were to be effectually protected. His words made no single convert either in the Prussian Parliament or in the Federal ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... that he could not move his artillery, and his defenses very slight, he could have made only a weak fight had Howe attacked him. Yet the legislature of Pennsylvania told him that, instead of lying quiet in winter quarters, he ought to be carrying on an active campaign. In most wars irresponsible men sitting by comfortable firesides are sure they knew best how the thing should ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... dying. I answered that he was in excellent and even offensive health, but that I was inquiring upon a question of principle. What would happen if England were invaded, or if I alone knew how to turn aside a comet or an earthquake. He waved away these hypotheses in the most irresponsible spirit, but he was quite certain that telegrams could not reach this particular village. Then something exploded in me; that element of the outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang up ungovernable, and I decided that I would not ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... permitted a dark hint or two to escape him concerning possible suits for defamation of character against irresponsible newspapers. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... understood to have delegated the whole or a share of its jurisdiction or control of these inshore fishing grounds to the colonial authority known as the Dominion of Canada, and this semi-independent but irresponsible agent has exercised its delegated powers in an unfriendly way. Vessels have been seized without notice or warning, in violation of the custom previously prevailing, and have been taken into the colonial ports, their voyages broken up, and the vessels condemned. There is reason to believe ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... fins or sweeps to guide its course, and the rudder could only induce it to submit itself lengthways to the stream after the lapse of some time. The fairway of the river was entirely taken up by this irresponsible Frankenstein of the Thames, which some one had started, but which now did as it liked. Some of the small craft got up into the willows and waited; some seemed to narrowly escape being crushed against a wall on the opposite bank. The bright white sails of a yacht shook and quivered ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... engagement at H—— is broken off! It must be a blow to poor Holt, but I never thought him suited to her. Who is, I wonder? What a madness it was to think that she and I could pull together. Imagine that little teasing, irresponsible child in such a box as this, bored to death by these interminable women! For all her naughtiness and her folly she was wiser than I. But ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... his work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his judgment. His dexterity in the disposing of his incidents is proved in every particular. While a first reading of the poem and a first comparison with the story of Atlakvia may suggest the blundering and irresponsible ways of popular reciters, a very little attention will serve to bring out the difference and to justify this poet. He is not an improviser; his temptations are of another sort. He is the poet of a second generation, one of those who ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... pit simply because he could not get on with a gang of dull pedagogues. Now and later he lectured Richard in a kindly if sententious way; and he must have fostered the boy's natural strong spirit of revolt. Adolph loathed authority, especially the authority of irresponsible court officials; and in some of his preserved letters he lashes these gentry, the scum of humanity and the parasites of courts, with scathing sarcasm. His sarcasm had no practical result, because the officials never saw it—if they had they would have shrugged ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... act against responsible persons under the pretext that their future sentiments or actions would have dangerous consequences for others; this would lead to arbitrary abuse of power. The insane, and habitual criminals make the only exceptions, for their abnormal and irresponsible cerebral organization is a perpetual ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... at all certain that there is any well marked boundary line between genius and some forms of imbecility. Many quite irresponsible idiots have marvelous verbal memories, and can repeat parrot-like, page after page of books of which they have no comprehension. Dr. Barr tells of cases of prodigies, musical, mathematical and mechanical, who except in their specialty were almost ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... acquired a remarkable reputation for their sturdiness and their power of recovery. But, while they are entirely irresponsible for their weakness, which can only be attributed to the small size and the defenceless character of their country, they cannot be considered as entirely responsible for their strength. A port like Antwerp, if at all accessible, is bound to prosper under any circumstances. A ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... you do. I am going to show you your own responsibilities, if that's a possible thing. I'm not going to let you throw them on George because he's a man and your kin; and I shan't let him throw them on an irresponsible agent because he has neither the time nor the inclination to do justice to himself, to you, nor to these people to ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... provided for," I replied; "though in general, no abolitionist can be more vehemently opposed to negro slavery than I am to this apprenticeship business. What is it but a slavery of the worst description? The master is endowed with irresponsible power, without the interest in the well-being of his slave, which the planter, the actual owner of ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... cause of free speech in Ireland with the result that most of the orators were doomed to the infirmaries connected with the local gaols. True to his principle made penal by the older and wiser law of libel, that is of applying individual and irresponsible judgment to, and passing final and unappealable sentence upon, the conduct of private individuals and of public men, he raged and inveighed with all the fury of outraged (and interested) virtue against Colonel Hughes-Hallett with the consequence of seating that M.P. more ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... curiosity. According to the representations of his friends, he is about to take a firm stand in the accomplishment of his leading measures; while, on the other hand, he is charged with weakness and subjection to the influence of irresponsible favorites. Our latest accounts from the Mexican capital predict that the Government will soon be in a state of great embarrassment. The American indemnity money was nearly spent, and there was already a deficiency ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... President Roosevelt issued a proclamation setting aside that part of the reserve north and west of the Colorado River as a Game Preserve. To further safeguard it and protect the cliff dwellings of the ancient inhabitants from the vandalism of irresponsible excavators, who ruthlessly knocked down the walls of buildings of permanent interest, President Roosevelt, on January 11, 1908, declared it a National Monument, and on June 23 of the same year, the Game Preserve ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... me. The name is perfectly immaterial. But since he escapes me and she is irresponsible—and punished—I regard as an accomplice of their infamy any man who makes allusion to it with either tongue or pen. And, my dear Varhely, I wish to act alone. Don't be angry; I know that in your hands my honor would be as faithfully guarded as in ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the curate, "you would admit, that such expressions are often either cuttingly ironical, or the result of fear. You will always find, sir, that the independent portion of the people have least of this forced dissimulation among them. A dishonest and inhuman agent has in his own hands the irresponsible power of harassing and oppressing the tenantry under him. The class most hateful to the people are those low wretches who spring up from nothing into wealth, accumulated by dishonesty and rapacity. They are proud, ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... distinctly loud in its lights and ragged in its music. No after-theatre corner of Broadway had a crisper American accent of vice, or displayed vice itself more delicately lacquered. The place was as openly innocent as a street, with a street's sightless and irresponsible gaze for what occurred in it. And nothing remarkable occurred, save the fungus growth of what ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son of Catherine the Great, Napoleon had known how to deal with the situation. But Paul grew more and more irresponsible until his exasperated subjects were obliged to murder him (lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead-mines) and the son of Paul, the Emperor Alexander, did not share his father's affection for the usurper whom he regarded ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... dramatic detail that has caught the imagination of historians and has led them, at least in some cases, to yield to a literary temptation. It is so dramatic—that scene of the four young men holding in their hands, during a moment of absolute destiny, the fate of a people; four young men, in the irresponsible ardor of youth, refusing to wait three days and forcing war at the instant! It is so dramatic that one cannot judge harshly the artistic temper which is unable to reject it. But is the incident historic? Did the four young men come to Sumter without definite ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... faith to King Artus and his circle, who embody the frivolous, irresponsible, though refined, conduct of the nobility, essentially the same nobility whom von Stein accused of injuring the nation and Immermann satirized and exposed in Muenchhausen. They decide to seek salvation in the primitive idealism of India, appointing Merlin their guide. Merlin, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... are gradually evolved and developed; while the animal, being hereditarily endowed with the faculties and functions necessary for the maintenance of life, has no occasion for the development of the higher faculties and powers and therefore remains an irresponsible automaton, which cannot be held accountable for ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... that Alessandro in his senses was as incapable of stealing a horse as any white man in the valley. Farrar knew it; everybody knew it. Everybody knew, also, about his strange fits of wandering mind; and that when these half-crazed fits came on him, he was wholly irresponsible. Farrar knew this. The only explanation of Farrar's deed was, that on seeing his horse spent and exhausted from having been forced up that terrible trail, he was seized by ungovernable rage, and fired on the second, without ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... sane,"—Dr. Brayle answered, coldly—"And highly nervous persons like Miss Harland are best without the society of clever but wholly irresponsible theorists." ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... whoever he might be, had always occupied from time immemorial. He was their lord and master, absolute disposer of their lives, liberties, and property; the sole fountain of law and right, incapable himself of doing wrong, irresponsible irresistable—a sort of God upon earth; one whose favor was happiness, at whose frown men trembled, before whom all bowed themselves down with the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... as with girls. So far as lay in his power, he had taught Cicely "to ride, to row, to swim, to tell the truth and to fight the devil," and the result was quite to the liking of Billy and Theodora. They enjoyed Cicely's irresponsible fun and her frank expressions of opinion; they enjoyed the atmosphere of ozone that never failed to surround her; they even confessed, when they were quite by themselves, to a sneaking sense of enjoyment in her rare ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... But eccentricity has often provided the best cloak for dark designs, and the outbreak of war proved that there was a method in the madness of the man whom the authorities persisted in regarding merely as an irresponsible degenerate of a non-political kind. To quote the press report of his exploits ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... shall come to an end by an almost imperceptible process? or that the slaves shall be defrauded of their just remuneration, less and less every month or every year? or that they shall be under the absolute, irresponsible control of their masters? Oh no! I place a higher value upon their good sense, humanity and morality than this! Well, then, they would immediately break up the slave traffic—they would put aside the whip—they would have the marriage relations preserved inviolate—they would not separate families—they ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... wouldn't mind my smoking a cigar?' asked Michael. He had pulled himself together for the entrance; now again there began to settle on his mind clouds of irresponsible humour and incipient slumber; and he hoped (as so many have hoped in the like case) that ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... form of government, speaking without reference to the new constitution which will be dealt with later on, is an irresponsible autocracy; its institutions are likewise autocratic in form, but democratic in operation. The philosopher, Mencius (372-289 B.C.), placed the people first, the gods second, and the sovereign third, in the scale of ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... ease their aching hearts by telling him what they had undergone since that day when they so blithely parted from him at the railway station at Havana, it was a really heartrending story of cruel oppression and shameful, irresponsible tyranny to which he felt himself obliged to listen. There is no need to give the full details here; it is sufficient to simply state that upon their arrival at Bejucal, the first station beyond Santiago, they were accosted by a sergeant, who ordered ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... that was a sufficient reason for disfavor. Society loves types, and resents the individual whom it cannot classify; and this feeling is so common and natural that it runs through all our lives and influences our opinion of things inanimate and irresponsible: —the book of such inconvenient size or shape that it will not fit the shelf in our book-case, how many an impatient toss it gets! The incongruous garment which suits no other garment we have, and seems out of place on every occasion, how we hate it! Although it may be of ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... as sole partner, while Foggatt, behind the scenes absorbed the larger share of the profits. In brief, my unhappy and foolish father was a mere tool in the hands of the cunning scoundrel who pulled all the wires of the business, himself unseen and irresponsible. At last three companies, for the promotion of which my father was responsible, came to grief in a heap. Fraud was written large over all their history, and, while Foggatt retired with his plunder, my father was ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... Utopians—a bold make-believe that all toil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all society to an equal participation in labour. But indeed this is against all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed the Olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagine as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxford no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it proved the least contagious ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... public opinion, and that intelligence which acts virtually as a bill of rights, even in the most despotic governments of Europe, not even excepting Turkey, perhaps, have produced a beneficial influence on the courts, the secrecy of their proceedings, the irresponsible nature of their trusts (responsible to power, and irresponsible to the nation), and the absence of publicity, produce precisely the effects that a common-sense view of the facts would lead one who ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Ambrose, in his Master's name, pronounced the forgiveness of Theodosius, and received him back to the full privileges of a Christian. When we look at the course of many another emperor, and see how easily, where the power was irresponsible, justice became severity, and severity, bloodthirstiness, we see what Ambrose dared to meet, and from what he spared Theodosius and all the civilized world under his sway. Who can tell how many innocent lives have been saved by that ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work—unless the two short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions—in which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... never our chance to see him. We know it from hearsay, and we mention it in connection with this sad infirmity of physical constitution; which puts it upon very nearly the ground of a temporary and almost irresponsible insanity. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the people, within all the sanctions of that instrument, and to bind the authorities, State and Federal, by the judicial oath it prescribes, to their recognition and observance. Is it probable, therefore, that the supreme and irresponsible power, which is now claimed for Congress over boundless territories, the use of which cannot fail to react upon the political system of the States, to its subversion, was ever within the contemplation of the statesmen who conducted the counsels of the people in the formation of this Constitution? ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... complained that he could not punish certain persons whom he knew to be murderers, though witnesses were afraid to appear. What he really wanted, it was implied, was power to put people to death on the secret information of irresponsible witnesses. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and women had been made the victims of brutal mobs, chased through the streets, killed upon the highways and butchered in their homes, did not call the best element in New Orleans to active exertion in behalf of law and order. The killing of a few Negroes more or less by irresponsible mobs does not cut much figure in Louisiana. But when the reign of mob law exerts a depressing influence upon the stock market and city securities begin to show unsteady standing in money centers, then the strong arm ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... is excusable—I recognize it & (ought to) concede it. We are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane & irresponsible. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... are colored to suit the aims and opinions of the editors and proprietors. Windy platitudes—at least for those who know facts and have studied principles—become gospel truth for the unthinking mass. Public Opinion is thus conscripted by an "irresponsible power." This irresponsibility of the Press is without doubt the greatest menace of the day. For, the opinions,—we mean to say—the propelling forces of the silent millions are at its mercy. . . . And these silent millions make and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any garment when it was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures whom I met in the ways and byeways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a tense, irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,—I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct to me from ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... moment in doubt, not knowing whether it would be safe to make another rejoinder. But he saw plainly that the "Vice" was in an irresponsible condition, and so silently, but with rage in his heart, he turned on his heels so that the spurs jingled, and went back ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... she had," Aunt Frances' tone was fervent. "I can't see any future for Barry, unless he marries Leila. If he were not so irresponsible, I might do something for him. But Barry is ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the weather, generally malign and irresponsible, favoured Priscilla. With the rising tide a light westerly breeze sprang up. She hoisted the sails and sat in the stern of the boat with an oar. She tucked the middle of it under her armpit, pressed her side tight against the gunwale, ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... prize,—having the best will of the actresses on whose shoulder the burthen was to lie. I hope they have been quite honest with him—knowing as I do the easy process of transferring all sorts of burthens, in that theatrical world, from responsible to irresponsible members of it, actors to manager, manager to actors, as the case requires. And it is a 'hope deferred' with Chorley; not for the second or third time. I am very glad that he cares no more ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground. Suddenly, however, she came to a stop in her reflections. Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders—where did he stand? Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe? Was he inferior to such as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... little hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were, indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day, that state of things seems the realisation ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... fact all-powerful with the Prime Minister (Freycinet). The same post, however, brought me a letter from Lord Houghton, who was at Vichy, and who complained that it was an unhealthy state of things that Gambetta (who had talked freely to him while in Paris) "should exercise so much irresponsible power." ... The result of my attempts to stir up Gambetta upon our side was seen in the report by Bernhard Samuelson of Gambetta's conversation with him at Cherbourg on Monday, August 9th, and in an article ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... smiled. Evidently consistency was not to be expected of this young man. He was so young, and so irresponsible and passionate. She admired him for it; and not only for that; she admired him—she could not say exactly why, but she thought it was because he had such a beautiful, bumpy, intellectual forehead. And as she sat beside him and shook to that vibrating passion of his, she felt as if the ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Granted ten years' seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the time of night; anger would follow close on that—with Florinda, with destiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. "Surely there's enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares in gold!" Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look over your shoulder towards Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a dent in him. He has ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... residual; that deceitful brain, and that lying tongue, and that murderous hand had already begun to decay; and the informing fragment of eternal and universal energy was gone to its next manifestation and its next task, unconscious, irresponsible, and unchanged. The ineptitude of human judgments had been once more emphasised, and ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... The man you say! My maid said it was a silly boy and a giggling, irresponsible girl. How do I know what they did to Itzy? How do I know where they took him? Or in what company they had him? They might have let him get into a ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... summary shall be brief, and to the point.— The said right honourable Prime Minister Has thought it proper to declare my speech The jesting of an irresponsible;— Words from a person who has never read The Act he claims him urgent to repeal. Such quips and qizzings [as he reckons them] He implicates as gathered from long hoards Stored up with cruel care, to be discharged With sudden blaze of pyrotechnic art On the devoted, gentle, shrinking head O' the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... blank astonishment Princess Sonia did not know whether to laugh or cry. Was she alone with a monster who, after having played with her as a cat plays with a mouse, would suddenly turn and kill her? Or was this merely some irresponsible lunatic, whom chance alone had enabled to get into her rooms? Whatever the fact might be, the man's last words had made her aware that her bath really was getting cold. A shiver shook her ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... important than those of the United States. In spite of the plain fact that a separate Ireland would weaken civilisation and menace the world's peace by introducing a hostile and undependable wedge betwixt the two major parts of Saxondom, these irresponsible elements continue to encourage rebellion in the Green Isle; and in so doing tend to place this nation in a distressingly anomalous position as an abettor of crime and sedition against the Mother Land. Disgusting beyond words are ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... dropped something besides the candle. My match-box was gone—not my match-box, but my grandfather's which I had found lying on his table and carried off on this adventure, in all the confidence of irresponsible youth. To make use of it for a little while, trusting to his not missing it in the confusion I had noticed about the house that morning, was one thing; to lose it was another. It was no common box. Made of gold and cherished for ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... States would be sentimentally patriotic and irresponsible, that they would behave as though the New World was, indeed, a separate planet, and as though they had neither duties nor brotherhood in Europe. It is quite clear, on the contrary, that the people of the United States consider this war as their affair also, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... together with his vaulting ambition and love of display,—traits which even the merest novice could not fail to observe,—might render him capable of the most brilliant achievements, such as his exploits before the walls of Quebec and on the field of Saratoga, or of unwise and wholly irresponsible actions, of some of which, although of minor consequence, he had been guilty during the past few months. He disliked her form of religious worship, and she strongly suspected this was the reason he so openly opposed ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... was for the moment the object of enthusiasm of this irresponsible crowd, he could not doubt for an instant. That this same irresponsible enthusiasm was leading the crowd to treachery and ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... law, literature, and theology of the age, as they bore on the subject, have been brought before us. The last great display of the effects of the doctrines of demonology, of the belief of the agency of invisible, irresponsible beings, whether fallen angels or departed spirits, upon the actions of men and human affairs, is now to open before us. The final results of superstitions and fables and fancies, accumulating through ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... book is good for this but not good for that; may be praised for its plot, but certainly has not character enough to get long life. But when the difficulty of adjusting standards is increased by the irresponsible hullabaloo of commercial appreciation, no wonder that sensible people estimate foolishly, and critics of standing are induced to write for publication remarks that some day will (or should) make them sick. For the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Romanes's "Animal Intelligence" is not always a safe guide. It is like a lawyer's plea to the jury for his client. Romanes was so intent upon making out his case that he allowed himself to be imposed upon by the tales of irresponsible observers. Many of his stories of the intelligence of birds and beasts are antecedently improbable. He evidently credits the story of the Bishop of Carlisle, who thinks he saw a jackdaw being tried by a jury ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs |
