"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a peculiar genius for organization, not only in elaborating minute detail, but in the grasp of a coherent whole. She knows the art of giving a brain to a machine, of transmitting power to the uttermost cog-wheel, and at the same time of concentrating responsibility in a supreme centre. She has a small navy, but very effective for its purpose, built, trained, and manned on methodical principles, for defined ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand machinery ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... I regarded the next process (akin to being passed through a mangle) as child's play. To my amazement, after a few minutes amongst giant cog-wheels, I again found the light on the down-going staircase, which precipitated me to the spot from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... was done with my recital he sat with his eyes wide open, seeming to wonder whether my reason had slipped a cog. ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... It was just that unvarying smooth routine, that endless grinding away at the same familiar things that to-day, when everything about him spoke of change and growth and freedom, was making him restless and perturbed. He was just a cog in the ever-turning wheel. He was a slave to his desk, and not the less a slave because his chains happened ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... knife containing several implements, including a corkscrew and an attachment for extracting stones from horses' feet, a piece of string, a watch spring, twenty or thirty shot, a button, a magnet, a cog-wheel, a pencil, a match-box, a case of foreign stamps all stuck together with salt water, a whistle, a halfpenny with a hole in it, and a soaked and swollen cigar which the Captain ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... adaptable; she would be a tremendous social success with a little expert coaching, and he——? A petroleum engineer, a mere cog in the wheel of a great corporation, without prospects other than might lie in the success of his present doubtful mission, could be of no future interest ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... known as the battle of Sluys, when Philip the Sixth sat on the throne of France. The English fleet consisted of only 260 ships fit for warfare. The French, whose fleet amounted to no less than 400 sail, lay securely, as they thought, in the harbour of Sluys. Edward embarked on board the cog Thomas, commanded by Richard Fyall, and attended by several noblemen. A cog was a craft larger than those usually designated ships—the cog John, which is spoken of, had a crew of eighty-two men, and probably she carried besides a considerable number of knights and soldiers. Many ships of the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... day wasn't fascinatin'. No; I'd had about all of Barnes I could stand. A few more of his cheerin' observations, and I'd want to jam his head into his typewriter and then tread on the keys. Nor I wasn't goin' to be fed on any more cog-wheel statistics by the ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... "Well, the cog-wheels was wrong," said William doggedly. "See? An' this ratchet-wheel isn't on the pawl prop'ly—not like what this book says it ought to be. Seems we've got to take it all to pieces to get it right. Seems to me the person wot made this clock didn't know much about clock-making. ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... be diminished by trials. Her husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible chance of a breakdown should be removed. When she was absent, he tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel. Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a noiseless, smooth practical success, and infinite ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled cog- wheels—at right angles, and moving ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... child at bay she means, to smash and kill. The pity of it! Never was there a more generous, soft-hearted, kindly people. Germany, the land of the Christmas tree and folk songs, and hearthsides and gay childish laughter, turned into a relentless fighting machine! But each individual is a cog firmly fixed in the machine, which will go ever on as long as the ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... men in the compartment, soldiers and workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some important errand. Each had news to tell—tales of the fighting, or of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had been getting ready, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... originate from any feeling of regard for the children, for they were allowed to climb, and push, and run over the sky-lights, and over the engine, and I every moment expected that some of them would be provided for either by the cog-wheels or the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... enemy on the run. Take it all together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a certificate of character. In the last election (1901) she laid loud claim to having built many new schools, though she ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... cog this time," said the doctor. "He sent that as a night message, but it was delivered as a straight message through error. He has got further north than I expected. We will turn out our pilot and take off. We should make Wilmington by daybreak. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... life is a very good life, Sir. I am insured at the Pelican, Sir. I am threescore years and six,—six; mark me, Sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre—correspondents can do, Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir; I smell a rat: I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us: you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know better, Sir. They begin to smoke your flams, Sir. Mr. Liston may be born where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the table, the dice as yet not appearing from under the box. The 'Dribble' was, when with an air of easy but ingenious motion, the caster poured, as it were, the dice on the board—when, if he happened to be an old practitioner, he might suddenly cog with his fore-finger one of the cubes. The 'Long Gallery' was when the dice were flung or hurled the whole length of the board. Sometimes the dice were thrown off the table, near a confederate, who, in picking them up, changed one of the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... up Sandow's exercises again. On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential. (He feels his trouser pocket) Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch in track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick. Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous. Might be the fellow balked ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... be content. Mother I am going to the market place, Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, Cog their hearts from them, and come back beloved Of all the trades in Rome.—[That he will—] Look I am going. Commend me to my wife. I'll return Consul [—That he will—] Or never trust to what my tongue can do, I' the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a cog," Opdyke returned profanely. "Being interpreted, my reverend sire thinks I'd do better work at the School of Mines and then in Europe. I'm sorry, too, confound it, even if I know his head is level. I'd been looking forward to the pleasure of romping along ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions, etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence. After such a piece of spiritual felo-de-se, the man is nothing but one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel. Thenceforth he merely hangs together;—simple cohesion is the utmost approximation to action which can be truly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... gray, filled with troops, seemingly endless columns of infantry on foot, all moving with us, along parallel roads, toward the firing-line. And most of these troops and supply columns belonged to my own division, one small cog in the British ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... a whip, snip, high cum diddledy, The cog-wheels of life have need of much oiling; Smack, crack,—this is our jubilee: Huzza, my lads! we'll keep the ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... archaeology, however, the tedious details of construction are so placed in the foreground that the final picture is hardly noticed at all. As well might one go to Rheims to see men fly, and be shown nothing else but screws and nuts, steel rods and cog-wheels. Originally the fault, perhaps, lay with the archaeologist; now it lies both with him and with the public. The public has learnt to ask to be shown the works, and the archaeologist is often so proud of them that he forgets to mention the purpose ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... at that! It would be so, of course. Look—they have tracks, and a regular trolley system, with cog rails alongside, and the car just winds itself up! They have a motor underneath, I'll bet, and just run it up in that way. They have never done that on Earth because of the cost of running the car up without too much power. I think I see the solution—the car has electro-dynamical ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... a question of time when vice should get its clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast her off into some corner, there to drag out to the end, in sordid obscurity, her ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... silent courtship wins securer joys, Taints by degrees, and ruins without noise. While parliaments, no more those sacred things Which make and rule the destiny of kings. Like loaded dice by ministers are thrown, And each new set of sharpers cog their own. Hence the rich oil that from the Treasury steals Drips smooth o'er all the Constitution's wheels, Giving the old machine such pliant play[6] That Court and Commons jog one joltless way, While Wisdom trembles for the crazy car, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... one mortal happy, here and there Thou hollow skull, that grin, what should it say, But that thy brain, like mine, of old perplexed, Still yearning for the truth, hath sought the light of day, And in the twilight wandered, sorely vexed? Ye instruments, forsooth, ye mock at me,— With wheel, and cog, and ring, and cylinder; To nature's portals ye should be the key; Cunning your wards, and yet the bolts ye fail to stir. Inscrutable in broadest light, To be unveil'd by force she doth refuse, What she reveals not to thy mental ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... moves. Chirm, chirp. Church-giebe-house, grave. Claes, clothes. Claithing, clothing. Clamb, climbed. Claught, catch up. Clinkin, smartly. Clinkumbell, the bell-ringer. Clymmynge, noisy. Cockernony, woman's hair gathered up with a band. Cofte, bought. Cog, basin. Cood, cud. Coost, cast. Corbie, raven. Core, company. Cotter, tenant of a cottage. Coulier, ploughshare. Cour, stoop. Couth, couthy, sociable, affable. Crack, chat, instant. Craig, rock. Cranreuch, hoar-frost. Craw, crow. Creeshic, greasy. Croon, loll, murmur. Crouche, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... his leader and one for the possible dangers on his flank, was a mere automaton. There was no opportunity for displaying initiative—he was a cog ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... more precisely, a cog in the great fighting machine that was producing death and destruction to Belgium. Just as the Germans have put men through a certain mold and turned out the typical German soldier, in like manner through other molds they have turned out according to pattern the German secret service ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... activity; he finds in such behavior the same pleasure that attends the fulfillment of any of his native or acquired reactions. Society has been variously pictured as a force holding the individual in check, as an organism of which he is a part, as a machine of which he is a cog. Society consists rather as the collective name for the cooeperative and associated activities of human beings who find such activity, by nature and by habit, interesting ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of press by which great pressure can be applied, some working by various arrangements of cog-wheels, screws, and levers, others by ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... the mayor and the judge on the hay-market question that has made every decent organization in the city look to you to begin the fight for a clean-up reorganization. They have all rallied to your support. Show your colors, boy, and, God willing, we will smash this machine to the last cog and get on ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... were piled high with the frame and roof of the merry-go-round. There were posts, boards, long iron rods, greasy cog wheels and all sorts of queer things. But what interested the children most were the wooden animals that made up the more showy part of the merry-go-round. There were horses, lions, tigers, camels, elephants, zebras, an ostrich ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair • Laura Lee Hope
... Mollenhauer, a rich coal dealer and investor, were supposed to, and did, control jointly the political destiny of the city. They had representatives, benchmen, spies, tools—a great company. Among them was this same Stener—a minute cog in the silent machinery of ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... entails, but in its ruthless denial of life to millions of men. The most cruel of all denials is to deprive a human being of joyous activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the assertion that an imposed drudgery is intolerable—that labor at a subsistence wage as a cog in a meaningless machine is no condition upon which to found civilization. That is a new kind of revolt—more dangerous to capitalism than the demand for higher wages. You can not treat the syndicalists like cattle because forsooth they have ceased to be cattle. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... page). The roll A has a series of boxes on its periphery m m, with movable bottoms which serve as moulds. The peat is carried into these boxes by the rolls c c. The iron projections n n of the large roll B, which work cog-like into the boxes, compress the peat gently and, at last, the eccentric p acting upon the pin z, forces up the movable bottom of the box and throws out the peat-block upon an endless band of cloth, which carries ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... 'tis no such matter, change your hue, I may cog and flatter, so may you; Religion is a widgeon, and reason is treason, And he that hath a loyal heart ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... and sniffing. Then Number two, in a broken voice: "You silly fool, why did you go laughing like that right under his snout? You might have known he'd cog it." ("Cog." I had not heard the word since 1876.) "There'll be an awful row to-morrow. Look here, I shall go ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... new books and new subjects, or went on contentedly with the old. "The pleasure," he said, "was in the teaching, in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels turning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change their subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest first, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it." The charm of Philip was the charm of extreme ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost without exception, in those successful men of business whom I have had the honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Department of the War Office. It was evidently a body which worked methodically, carefully, and with due consideration of every step it took. Its affairs were likely to prove efficiently organised. I looked forward to finding myself part of a machine which ran smoothly, whose every cog fitted exactly into the slot designed for it. No part of the War Office was likely at the moment to adopt a German motto; but the Chaplains' Department was plainly inspired by the spirit of Goethe's Ohne ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... cog the dice to my advantage any more than you!" said Perion. He drew the sword of Charlemaigne and brandished it and cast it as far as even strong Perion could cast, and the sea swallowed it. "Now God alone is arbiter!" cried Perion, "and I am ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... the truth to the bottom. In fact a great deal of the friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted piece of mechanism, the ratchets of selfishness and cog-wheels of vanity in Shank fitting easily into the pinions of good-will and modesty which characterised his friend, so that there was no jarring in their intercourse. This alone would not, perhaps, have induced the strong friendship that existed ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... walking; it is not skating, which it seems to resemble; it is more like that of a person walking with two crutches besides his two legs. The machinery is simple enough: a strong spiral spring, three or four cog-wheels and pinions, a fly to regulate the motion as in a musical box, and the cams before mentioned. As a toy, it or she is very taking to grown people as well as children. It is a literal fact, that the police requested ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... people individually prosperous and happy. In the same way, on a smaller scale, many people deplore the necessity of competition among organizations, saying that it is ruthless and selfish; that it stamps out the individual; that it makes every man a mere cog in a money-getting machine; that it brings about strife, hatred, jealousies, and sometimes murders; that, if it were not for competition, all men would ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... your content: What, man! I know them, yea, And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple: Scambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander, Go anticly, show outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dangerous words, How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst, And this ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... COGGLE, OR COG. A small fishing-boat upon the coasts of Yorkshire, and in the rivers Ouse and Humber. Hence the cogmen, who after shipwreck or losses by sea, wandered about to defraud people by begging and stealing, until they were restrained ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Roasters Association Home coffee mill, employing an improved set screw operating on a cog-and ratchet principle, was introduced ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... self-control slipped a cog. He took the hands. "I can show you how to thank me," he said, quite hoarsely for a mere collector ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... storm adding to the gloom. The men tramped wearily, hanging their heads, ashamed and humiliated by the retreat, the necessity of which they could not grasp, having, as they thought, successfully repulsed the enemy. It was difficult to make them understand that our regiment was only a cog in the huge wheel of the Austrian fighting machine and that, with a battle line extending over many miles, it was quite natural that partial successes could take place and yet the consideration of general strategy ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... imperceptible degrees that she was scarce aware of it, Stella took her place as a cog in her brother's logging machine, a unit in the human mechanism which he operated skilfully and relentlessly at top speed to achieve his desired end—one million feet of timber in ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... memory remained with Beauty Stanton. She was a part of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life. She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... the ashment came, the best paving surface known to man. And what was Mars but mines? With all their grand talk, who wanted to leave Mother Earth? What was Venus but a sanctuary, a vacation spot, and what was Mars but mines? When a big cog like the Chief could send a lonely man all the way to Dubbinville because of a neighbor's summons, how could they expect little cogs to grow up to ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... these plain warnings, for some of them are laying themselves open to grave consequences by reason of their wilful folly. We urge upon our readers to refrain from this dabbling in the phenomena of the Astral Plane. Some writer has well compared "Psychism" to a great machine, in the cog-wheels of which persons may become entangled only to be afterward drawn into the machine itself. ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... informed, able machine, who held his desk regardless of changes of administrative heads. Old Kauffman instructed his new chief gradually in the knowledge of the department without seeming to do so, and kept the wheels revolving without the slip of a cog. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... away. He sourly realized that he was only a cog in the big machine; that for a moment he had threatened to develop a rough edge and start a squeak, but the big file had been used on him. It had been used on many another of the State House cogs, as he well knew. Responsibility as to his party! Safety and sanity in regard to financial interests! ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... a-lookin' through the railin's. 'Now, Mrs. Bowlin',' says I, 'it'll just be the ruin of you an' the death of me if you keep on makin' a picter of yourself like that lonely Indian a-sittin' on a pinnacle in the jographys, watchin' the inroads of civilization, with a locomotive an' a cog-wheel in front, an' the buffalo an' the grisly a-disappearin' in the distance. Now it'll be much better for all of us,' says I, 'if you'll git down from your peak, and try to make up your mind that the world has got to move. Aint there some ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... and she began to doubt; and as time flew on and matters evinced a disposition to grow worse instead of better, she gradually, like the sundial in the moonlight, awakened to the fact that there was something wrong; a cog loose somewhere in the complicated machinery of fate—the fate which had always been her tried, trusted ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... Up to that moment he had thrown himself so zealously into the impersonation of his latest role as to be able to stand indifferently well in the shoes of the man whom he had supplanted. But at this crisis the machinery of dissimulation slipped a cog. Where the ordinary deck-hand would have gone about his errand heedless of the presence of the two women passengers, the proxy John Wesley Gavitt must needs take off his cap and apologize for ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... was able to record in imperishable words the thoughts that welled up in his mind, and would have been lost if Tertius had not been at his side. The power generated in the boilers does its work through machines of which each little cog-wheel is as indispensable as the great shafts. Members of the body which seem to be 'more feeble, are necessary.' Every note in a great concerted piece of music, and every instrument, down to the triangle and the little ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... all winter. The snowfall for the season had been heavy and the cold, especially in the mountains, had been intense. It was the eighth of March, I think, and the very first signs of spring had just put in their appearance. We decided that we would walk to the Half-Way House on the Cog Road, or at least as far as we could. We didn't know how much snow there was, or where it began, but we were all feeling good and anxious for another real hike. We were all three dressed in our Sunday ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... are still dealing with the Otto cycle engine, the cam or side shaft will revolve at precisely half the speed of the crank shaft. This 2 to 1 motion is obtained by means of toothed wheels, or a screw gear. In the former case, where plain or bevel cog-wheels are employed, the one fixed on the crank shaft must be exactly half the diameter of the one on the side shaft, i.e., it must have one half the number of teeth. On the other hand, if a screw gear is used, the relative diameters of the two wheels may vary, but the pitch ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... construction than either. The boiler was of cast-iron. The engine was provided with a single cylinder six inches in diameter, with a fly-wheel working at one side to carry the crank over the dead points. Jonathan Foster described it to the author in 1854, as "a strange machine, with lots of pumps, cog-wheels, and plugs, requiring constant attention while at work." The weight of the whole was ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow—Hopkins, you said?—along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... travelling, but nothing "irreparable," and you have Mandane. For the rest, with the rare and slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a petulant hero—a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and there is nothing ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... touching, yet nought o' the faun— A warmth is express'd in the shake o' his han'; His cog and his bed, or ought in his biel, The lonely will share ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... That I, forsooth, am stern and love them not? By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours. Because I cannot flatter and look fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, But thus his simple truth must be abus'd With ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... little drum p is a pinion, which works into the teeth of the cog-wheel r. The shaft of r is extended through the dial of the instrument, and carries an index. The dial is marked off for volts; g g and h h are standards for ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... an awful feeling that sandwiched the gaps of new-born exultation at finding ourselves real soldiers—that feeling of a merged identity; the individual Smith sold for glory at $11 per mensem, and lost, lost in an aggregate: become only a cog in a little machine connected with a larger machine that forms part of the great machine called an army. One thing saved us the full horror of this discovery: we were not bothered with corps, divisions, brigades, or even greatly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... During this time the larger lion had been an indifferent and surly spectator. The tamer approached, touching him with the rod, when he jumped forward with a growl, half crouching. Quickly the tamer caught hold of his upper jaw and tore it open, as great, rebellious cog-wheel growls issued from the mighty throat. Then he spurned him with his foot, bowed to the audience, went to the door, let himself out like a flash, the two animals making a bound against ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... above the heads of venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious." Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the heroine of Hyperion, whose tragic fate a few years later shocked the world. He used to sit withdrawn ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... The cog railroad running nearly to the top has been badly damaged a number of times in recent years and the occupants of the meteorological observatory on or near the summit have had ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... "A cog what?" asked Bill Cobb in a voice so low that he thought only his brother Jim could hear; but his question reached the ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... thought the employer of Shine McManus, none other than the fat gentleman with the purple jowls, otherwise Izzy Marx, known to his friends as "Easy Marks." McManus was a not unimportant cog in the secret-service department maintained by ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... below, when through the carelessness of the operator the brake of the great drum slipped, and on being applied again with reckless force, broke, and the car was off, bringing destruction to half a dozen men at the bottom of the shaft. Quick as a flash of light, Kalman sprang to the racing cog wheels, threw in a heavy coat that happened to be lying near, and then, as the machinery slowed, thrust in a handspike and checked the descent of the runaway car. It took less than two seconds to see, to plan, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... hardly be expected to understand how it can be cured by a process of mental adjustment. Suggestion to that effect can scarcely fail to appear to him faddish and unpractical. But once a person has grasped the idea that "nerves" are merely a slip in the cog of hidden mental machinery, and has acquired at least a working-knowledge of "the way the wheels go round," he can scarcely fail to understand that the only logical cure must consist in some kind of readjustment of ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... lured a man to his tent, and fed him, and wined him, and fleeced him while he was drunk." He took a goblet of claret from the lackey who brought his salver, emptied it, and went on, hoarse with passion. "To the marrow of your bones you are false, all of you! You do not cog your dice, perhaps, but you bubble your friends with finesses, and are as much sharpers at heart as the lowest tat-mongers in Alsatia. You empty our purses, and cozen our women with twanging guitars and jingling rhymes, and laugh at us because we are honest ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... servitude, and Dicky was never the perfect official. Initiative was his strong point, independence his life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel. Ismail had discovered this, and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom wrote a line. By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at last than the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the highest officials ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... doomed black dozen— No stealing away—nor cog nor cozen! You five, that were thieves, deserve it fairly; You seven, that were beggars, will live less sparely; You took your turn and dipped in the hat, Got fortune—and fortune ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... special; and where the track swerved to right or left around the hills, the pursuing smoke trail rose above the intervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of a great machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction, a small accident to a single cog may spell disaster. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... designs produced by it. The machines are too expensive to be obtained by anyone but a government or a great banknote company and there are very few men who thoroughly understand operating them. A turn of a screw or a variation of a single cog will change the result entirely. Finally the work of the lathe is often reversed, so that the line which is cut by the graver and should print in color prints white, and vice versa. It would not be possible to imitate this by ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... Promised Land presents itself as a tremendous enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects, technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... insect race, Combined, can in an age deface.' Fortune, by chance, who near him pass'd, O'erheard the vile aspersion cast. 100 'Why, Pan,' says she, 'what's all this rant? 'Tis every country-bubble's cant; Am I the patroness of vice? Is't I who cog or palm the dice? Did I the shuffling art reveal, 105 To mark the cards, or range the deal? In all the employments men pursue, I mind the least what gamesters do. There may (if computation's just) One now and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's position with a loyal constituency, and he had grown ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... letters of recommendation from men and women eminent in literary and scientific realms, and commendatory reviews in periodicals of high standard are, I think, sufficient cause for the belief that "The Tyranny of God" forms a necessary cog in the machinery ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... bigger than a pumpkin? I guess you didn't. If a man's got a good stomach he isn't a grouch, and he won't stick a knife into your back; but if he eats from habit—or necessity—he isn't a beautiful character in the eyes of nature, and there's pretty sure to be a cog loose somewhere in his makeup. I'm a grub-scientist, David. I warn you of that before we get off at Thoreau's. I love to eat, and the Frenchman knows it. That's why I can smell things in that cabin, forty ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... from my foolish dream of winning my spurs; nay, perchance never had I sunk lower in my own conceit. Till this hour I had been, as it were, the hinge on which my share of the world turned, and now I was no more than a wheel in the carriage of a couleuvrine, an unconsidered cog in the machine of war. I was to be lost in a multitude, every one as good as myself, or better; and when I had thought of taking service, I had not foreseen the manner of it and the nature of the soldier's trade. My head, that I had carried high, somewhat drooped, as I saluted, imitating ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... Service, were moved to make him an offer. This offer he stolidly considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority, an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to school himself to the knowledge that he was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... were the Secretaire, Monsieur Richard, the Cook, and the plantons. The first I have described sufficiently, since he was an obedient and negative—albeit peculiarly responsible—cog in the machine of decomposition. Of Monsieur Richard, whose portrait is included in the account of my first day at La Ferte, I wish to say that he had a very comfortable room of his own filled with primitive and otherwise ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to re-cog-nize me," she persisted, throwing a bitter emphasis on the middle of the word. "He ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of education and public health followed one after another as the individual human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism. This regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed, with "gimme, gimme;" "more, ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... woman of condition, (Who, to approve her disposition As much superior as her birth To those composed of common earth, With double spirit must engage In every folly of the age) The honourable arts would buy, To pack the cards, and cog a die. 200 The hero—who, for brawn and face, May claim right honourable place Amongst the chiefs of Butcher-row:[194] Who might, some thirty years ago, If we may be allow'd to guess At his employment by his dress, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... dim their hopes. The Blues had not yet found themselves. There was a cog missing somewhere in the machinery. Technically, their playing was not open to much adverse criticism. Their passing was accurate and their tackling fair, but they were too mechanical and automatic. They needed ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... a cog in his machinery. He published a list of twenty-seven medicines, by name, and told what they contained. One preparation, he said, contained alcohol, opium, and digitalis. He believed he had been extremely careful in this list. He had consulted the highest medical authorities, physicians, and chemists. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Once the older Provinces in the East were brought into Confederation it was wise to look forward to a Canada stretching from ocean to ocean, and to take the necessary legal steps to secure the broad acres of the West as part of the Dominion. But just when everything seemed to be going well a cog in the diplomatic equipment of the Canadian Government power-house slipped and taking advantage of the occasion, one Louis Riel, the son of the old hot-headed agitator on the Red River, threw a wrench into ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... "a big comet will hit this law-ridden, man-regulated earth—or the earth will slip a cog and go wabbling out of its orbit into interstellar space and side-wipe another planet—or it will ultimately freeze up like the moon. And who will care then how Valerie West loved Louis Neville?—or what letters in a forgotten language spelled 'wife' and what letters spelled 'mistress'? After ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue, where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he was only a small cog—indeed, an almost invisible cog—in a large advertising machine. His best was, for all practical ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the question I want your opinion on is this: Wouldn't it be perfectly fair for A to—well, slip a cog ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... whose lip had the curve that betokens self-reliance and strong decision,—"very fair. All the better for not flying too high. Narrow, of course. He seems to think the Almighty has nothing grander to do than to finger every little cog of the tremendous machinery of the universe,—that he measures out the ocean of his purposes as we drop a liquid from a phial. To me it ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various |
