"Unworkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one of the new colonies of this period was provided with the accustomed machinery of representative government: in the case of Carolina, the philosopher, John Locke, was invited to draw up a model constitution, and although his scheme was quite unworkable, the fact that he was asked to make it affords a striking proof of the seriousness with which the problems of colonial government were regarded. In several of the West Indian settlements self-governing institutions ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... look with reverence, as well as pity, on many figures in history, such as Sir Thomas More's; on persons who, placed by no fault of their own in some unnatural and unrighteous position; involved in some decaying and unworkable system; conscious more or less of their false position; conscious, too, of coming danger, have done their best, according to their light, to work like men, before the night came in which no man could work; to do what of their duty seemed still plain and possible; ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... production of iron. It created a largely increased demand for the article for the purposes of the shafting and machinery which it was employed to drive; while at the same time it cleared pits of water which before were unworkable, and by being extensively applied to the blowing of iron-furnaces and the working of the rolling-mills, it thus gave a still further impetus to the manufacture of the metal. It would be beside our purpose to enter into any statistical detail on the subject; but it will ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... that, owing to the small value of human labour, they could get out as much of the metal as could now be done. They knew perfectly what was worth working and what was not; and I think it likely that what you have brought home, had been rejected by the ancients as unworkable[EN12]. Further search may lead to the discovery of workable stuff; but would doubtless require a good deal of time, unless ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... destined to be so severely tried. All that day and all night the slow process went on. Meanwhile—as the cable was not absolutely unworkable, despite the fault—the chief engineer, Mr Canning, sent a message to Mr Glass in Ireland, asking him to send out the Hawk steamer, in order that he might return in her to search for the defect in the shore-end of the cable, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which there occur in great abundance ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... text introduced by Wordsworth into his successive editions, in additional editorial notes at the end of each volume—to understand which the reader must turn the pages repeatedly, from text to note and note to text, forwards and backwards, at times distractingly—is for practical purposes almost unworkable. The reader who examines Notes 'critically' is ever "one among a thousand," even if they are printed at the foot of the page, and meet the eye readily. If they are consigned to the realm of 'addenda' they will be read by very few, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... shall presently see, when they involved imprisonment for debt. But the tentative efforts to introduce English civil law side by side with the old French code resulted in great confusion and much discontent. The land laws had become so unworkable under this dual system that they had to be left as they were. A Court of Common Pleas was set up specially for the benefit of the French Canadians. If either party demanded a jury one had to be sworn in; and French ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... communications in St. George's Channel while an invading party landed in the south of Ireland was a strictly strategic movement and would be as dangerous to England now as it was in 1690. When Grattan extorted from England's weakness the unworkable and impracticable constitution of 1782, the danger which had always been present became immensely increased. In less than three years from the period of boasted final adjustment, Ireland came to a breach with England on the important question of trade and navigation. Then, again, ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... made to secure a more equitable incidence of taxation. The plan was to divide up the land into equal squares, and to levy taxes in proportion to the fertility of each. This scheme proved for various reasons to be unworkable; and the bitter opposition with which, like all his other measures of reform, it was received by his opponents, did not conduce to success. Finally, he abolished all restrictions upon the export of copper, the result ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... long on natural potash. But she has made up for it by utilizing a by-product of her steelworks. When phosphorus occurs in iron ore, even in minute amounts, it makes the steel brittle. Much of the iron ores of Alsace-Lorraine were formerly considered unworkable because of this impurity, but shortly after Germany took these provinces from France in 1871 a method was discovered by two British metallurgists, Thomas and Gilchrist, by which the phosphorus is removed ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... years ago?-I think it would be about that time. It was about the time when we were getting a renewal of the lease. However, that obligation was found to be unworkable and was laid aside, and has never been ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid and unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write a pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstock himself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is a sufficient statement ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... (Logic, i., 157) considers the axiom (or rather axioms) here proposed as a substitute for the dictum de omni, to possess certain advantages, but to be "unworkable as a basis of the syllogism. The fatal defect consists in this, that it is ill-adapted to bring out the difference between total and partial coincidence of terms, the observation of which is the essential precaution in syllogizing correctly. If all ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of federation. During the early years of capitalism there was a strong tendency to concentrate all of the power of a given business at one point, and in the hands of one man. With the growth of large enterprises, however, such centralization became unworkable. Instead of a single generalissimo, business organized the general staff. The corporation with its board of directors (executive committee) helped to make the transition, and when the United States Steel Corporation was formed, at the peak of the period ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... inconvenience removed, but the measure was nearly wrecked by some theorists who wished to extend the principle of the Bill logically, as they said, but in a manner which would have made it virtually unworkable, without benefit to a single human being. ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... ostensible objectors to Mr. Hare's scheme, some profess to think the plan unworkable; but these, it will be found, are generally people who have barely heard of it, or have given it a very slight and cursory examination. Others are unable to reconcile themselves to the loss of what they term the local character of the representation. ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... arbitrary rules of the Netherlands Company's agents, scarcely at all restrained from Amsterdam. Unofficial residents, known as Burghers, came to be admitted to share in the management of affairs. It was for their benefit chiefly, that as soon as the Hottentots were found to be unworkable as slaves, Negroes from West Africa and Malays from the East Indies began to be imported for the purpose. In 1772, when the settlement was a hundred and twenty years old, and had been in what was considered working order for a century, Cape Town and its suburbs had ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... lives of others than the soldiers who died in hospital. Brave men arose, as in all such crises, to bear the consequences of other men's mistakes, and the burden of exposing them; and several physicians and surgeons died, far from home, in the effort to ameliorate a system which they found unworkable. The greatest benefactor in exhibiting evils and suggesting remedies, Dr. Alexander, lived to return home, and instigate reforms, and receive the honors which were his due; but he soon sank under the consequences of his labors. So did Lord Herbert, the Secretary of War, to whom, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Finance, working in a pronouncedly anti-Slav direction. The wheels still went round, but the machine of State made less and less progress: stagnation and aimlessness were everywhere apparent. On all sides it was recognised that the existing system had become unworkable, and that a catastrophe could only be averted by speedy reforms. To many far-seeing patriots the last hope of salvation for the State seemed to lie with the late Heir-Apparent, not perhaps as the ideal Prince, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... a sense that there is something perfect even though the steps toward embodying or approximating it will be many and arduous, perhaps discouragingly hard. They betoken the likelihood of appearing before men as the victims of ultimately unworkable dreams. In refreshing contrast is the seeming practicability of encouraging present tendencies. Your tendency is no far-off projection of mere thought; it is something solid and "real," here and now, respected at the bank, in the newspaper office, and other meeting ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... by, if things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that of one who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was originally drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is now in an inextricable tangle ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Geldart, Elements of English Law (London and New York, 1912), 9. As this author further remarks, "if all the statutes of the realm were repealed, we should have a system of law, though, it may be, an unworkable one; if we could imagine the Common Law swept away and the Statute Law preserved, we should have only disjointed rules torn from their context, and no provision at all for many of the most important ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... recover treble the amount of a bet made over and above L10. Six writs were served upon Lord George and six upon his partner, Mr. Bowes, in the year 1843, but the plantiff failed to prove the making of the bets and it is obvious that the statute was unworkable. The attempt to put it into force merely shows the condition of racing at the time and the opposition which men who were honourable in their motives had to meet with in their efforts to guard it against reproach, as far as their sporting ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... satisfactory result. But the curious thing about it was that, while these men revolved in their minds every conceivable plan with unflagging eagerness, and were compelled to give up each, after brooding over it for a considerable time, finding that it was unworkable, they were not dispirited, but rather became more intense in their meditations, and ingenious as well as hopeful in ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton |
