"Irreducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And the irreducible minimum has yet to be reached. For many years my exacting personal needs demanded the luxury of coffee. Pure and unadulterated, I quaffed it freely, and (being no politician) neither did it enhance my wisdom nor enable me to see through anything with half-shut eyes. Yet did it make ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the letters into his pocket, and followed his luggage up to his room, which was a perfect example of its kind, containing the irreducible minimum of furniture an hotel guest could require, and having, as its sole wall decoration, a notice imploring you to switch out the electric light when you did not actually require it. He was disappointed, though not annoyed. The excuses appeared genuine, if rather ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate Valence—all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate—will for ever be finding ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... contributions to the Central Exchequer. These contributions are in no case to be subject to increase in the future, but on the contrary to be reduced gradually and to cease at the earliest possible moment compatible with the irreducible requirements of the Government of India. The Act of 1919, it is true, transfers to the Indian Legislature no direct or complete statutory control over revenue and expenditure, and powers are still vested in the Government of India to override the Assembly ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... at his wrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myself within reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I will not talk about Myself for more than thirty minutes by my wrist-watch'; then reduce it to twenty-five; then to twenty—and so on to the irreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularity increases with leaps and bounds at each reduction—provided, of course, that he finds anything else ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... of this chapter boils down to an irreducible minimum some of the most important subjects with which a Reserve Officer or an applicant for a commission in the Officers' Reserve Corps should be familiar. It emphasizes those things with which a reserve officer ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... metal skin, with built-in jato rocket tubes besides their engines. On the ground they were quite helpless. In the air they were unbelievably clumsy. They were actually balanced and steered by vanes in the blasts of their jets, and they combined the absolute maximum of sheer thrust with the irreducible minimum ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... questions can be satisfactorily answered, then society is better enabled to arm herself against his invasion, in fact having successfully diagnosed his case she may be led on to discover the means whereby criminals may be reduced to their irreducible minimum, both as regards number and as regards their ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... lunch, the principal of Teague's School of Engineering suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled "No Smoking during Lectures" and proceeds to feed us with the irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know more about the examiner's mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... attempt to inculpate himself. He was chained to life—a "prisoner of consciousness." Where was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable SELFNESS, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... not get away much before noon, because first there was a great deal to be done. To begin with the loads had to be arranged. These consisted largely of ammunition, everything else being cut down to an irreducible minimum. To carry them we took two donkeys there were on the place, also half a dozen pack oxen, all of which animals were supposed to be "salted"—that is, to have suffered and recovered from every kind of sickness, including the bite of the deadly tsetse fly. I suspected, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard |
