"Ineptitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all converged in an opposition to Steele. His presence in the Indian country seemed to block the advancement of everybody. Cooper resented his authority over himself and Stand Watie interpreted his waiting policy as due to inertness and ineptitude. So small a hold did the Federals really have on the Indian country that if Steele would only exert ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... permitted himself to jest, and when he did his humour was as like unto humour as water is like unto wine. Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude of his witless wit be rather ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the divine right of the Republican party to conduct all American wars and transact all other American business of importance. But doubtless the Colonel had forgotten all this in 1917, and many other good Americans had also forgotten what was notorious in 1898 and the ineptitude of the Republican War Department, which, as Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt said under date of May 21, 1898, had "no head, no energy, no intelligence." But the old myth sedulously cultivated by Republicans continued ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... coming. If anything, they increased in frequency, indiscretion, and length as his continued frustration in securing a field command was added to his helpless wrath at the generalstaff's ineptitude. "... They have got hold of that odd female scientist, Francis," he wrote, "and have made her turn over her formula for making grass go crazy. It's to be used as a war weapon, but how or where I don't know. Just the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... in the phrase: "Did ums." I did not even invent it. I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it soothes the Child. When he is howling, and I say "Did ums" with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying. Possibly enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him. Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him. But may not even this be useful to him? He has got to meet ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Ineptitude garbed as woman! Must I then teach thee the elements of thy business? Hast thou not observed the pump? Go to it, and draw water. Cause the water to flow into buckets. Carry these buckets—need I go on? Will not Nature herself teach thee what to do ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... law, in its 'inadequacy' and 'ineptitude' defend the just? How has it attempted to clear Pompilia's fame? By submitting, as its best resource, that wickedness was bred in her flesh and bone. For himself he cannot judge, unless by the assurance of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living. There is no getting away from that. But if egotism means selfishness, the serious student of the craft of daily living will not be an egotist for more than about a year. In a year he will have proved the ineptitude ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... of Austria-Hungary against Servia might bring Russia into the field'.[67] Both stories cannot be true: the German Government have, not for the last time in the history of these negotiations, to choose between ineptitude and guilt; the ineptitude of not recognizing an obvious fact, and the guilt of deliberately allowing Austria to act in such a way that Russia was bound to come into ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... appear, too little religion—and not too much—leads to these unholy follies. There is a religious instinct in man. True religion satisfies it fully. Quack religion, pious tomfoolery, and doctrinal ineptitude foisted upon a God-hungry people end by driving some from one folly to another in a pitiful attempt to get away from the deceptions of man and near to God. Others are led on by a sinful curiosity that outweighs ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Novi-Bazar was threatened with the fate which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative that something must happen if the Balkan race was ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... slightly behind him, even as the dentist approaching his victim keeps the horrible forceps. "Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties—I see!" And thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly assisting at the promulgation of this ineptitude. "There's no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question—raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham—of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I've an appointment, ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... As a fact, these four departments had elected a group of men, of whom Laferre, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, is a good type, with his absorbing interest in the destruction of Christianity, and his ignorance and ineptitude in any other field than that ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... peerless maid, How can I fitly sing The priceless decorative aid To dialogue you bring, Enabling serious folk, whose brains Are commonplace and crude, To soar to unimagined planes Of sweet ineptitude. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... ever witness such an exhibition of ineptitude and spiritual asthenia? We can conceive a man rejecting all revelation. It is possible even to conceive a man denying the Divinity of Christ. But we know nothing that would ever enable us even to conceive that Infinite Wisdom and Infinite ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... Manfred cannot be blamed for this withering sterility, this dead-sea of ineptitude. There must be some form of literature found, loose and lax enough to express the Moral Idealism of the second-rate mind; and Poetic Drama lends itself ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to {spam} news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... in a sort of subjection to his Ministers, and dull to the biddings of honor, may give himself up as a slave to the imperious domination of the House of Austria, and kiss the hand which oppressed his Father: I pardon it to his youth and his ineptitude. But is that the example for me to follow? No, dear Sister, you think too nobly to give me such mean (LACHE) advice. Is Liberty, that precious prerogative, to be less dear to a Sovereign in the eighteenth ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... insist upon the ineptitude of the expression "the economic and social equalisation of classes;" the General Council of the International dealt with that long ago.[35] We would only remark that the above quotations show ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... common Head and Centre. They who had hitherto laughed, now raged when they saw this great result, and attacked with the utmost fury what they called the "new dogma." Both sectarianism and the schools of sophistry descanted loudly, although certainly not learnedly, on the ignorance and ineptitude of the institution which so powerfully opposed them. All this was only idle clamoring. It never hindered the Holy Pontiff from prosecuting calmly the important work which heaven had inspired ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... intended to be a compliment to the heads of various states. To allay the sensitiveness of the French, Morier suggested to the Foreign Secretary that the King should make a point of visiting France first; but, owing to the ineptitude of President Grevy, this suggestion was rendered impracticable. When the King did visit Paris, after a sojourn at Berlin, where he received the usual compliment of being made titular colonel of a Prussian regiment, a terrible scene ensued by which Morier's sagacity was justified. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... accessible. It was her duty to guard the house in the absence of its mistress. He might have gone there on some pretext and talked awhile, and looked into her elvish eyes and listened to that Southern voice, rich and clear as a bell. Almost he yielded. He thought of the ineptitude of the whole undertaking and, in particular, of those slippery stairs; one might break one's neck there at such an hour of the night. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas |
