"Bias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the password in the mechanics of patch-budding. In the first place, the knives should be of the finest quality so that they will hold a clean, fine edge. All cuts should be made with accuracy and precision, so that there are no rough edges and bias corners. The number of living buds will, under ordinary circumstances, be in exact proportion to the accuracy with which the bud patch fits the place made for it on the stock. The experienced pecan budder as he takes the bud off the stick can tell whether or not they will grow. If he tears ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... his discourse, that she should be of a jovial country-like humour, as gay and pleasing as a harmonious hornpipe of Saulieau or Buzansay. The veridical Triboulet did therein hint at what I liked well, as perfectly knowing the inclinations and propensions of my mind, my natural disposition, and the bias of my interior passions and affections. For you may be assured that my humour is much better satisfied and contented with the pretty, frolic, rural, dishevelled shepherdesses, whose bums through their coarse canvas smocks smell of the clover grass of the field, than with ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... insensibly become hard;—and, like some tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose by degrees that nice sense and perception with which God and nature endowed it:—Did this never happen;—or was it certain that self-love could never hang the least bias upon the judgment;—or that the little interests below could rise up and perplex the faculties of our upper regions, and encompass them about with clouds and thick darkness:—Could no such thing as favour and affection enter this sacred Court—Did Wit ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... racial antagonism. The author has endeavored to combine argument and evidence to refute the assertions of such writers as Schufeldt and agitators like Tillman and Vardaman. But although on the controversial order the author has tried to write "without bitterness and bias." The effort here is directed toward showing that humanity is one in vices and virtues as well as in blood; that the laws of evolution and progress apply equally to all; that there are no diseases peculiar to the American Negro nor any debasing ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... possess a passion warm and unreasoning. It was strong enough to induce the leaning toward him which, on Carrie's part, we have seen. She might have been said to be imagining herself in love, when she was not. Women frequently do this. It flows from the fact that in each exists a bias toward affection, a craving for the pleasure of being loved. The longing to be shielded, bettered, sympathised with, is one of the attributes of the sex. This, coupled with sentiment and a natural tendency to emotion, often makes refusing difficult. It persuades ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from church, as the sequel of my 'o'er ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... the several American newspapers. Had a redress of grievances been at this late hour offered, though the honour of the States was involved in supporting their late Declaration of Independence, yet the love of peace, and the bias of great numbers to their parent State, would, in all probability, have made a powerful party for rescinding the Act of Separation, and for re-uniting with Great Britain; but when it appeared that the power of the Royal Commissioners was little more than to grant pardons, Congress ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them. . . . He was indeed a very wise man, and of great parts, and possessed with the most absolute spirit of popularity, and the most absolute faculties to govern the people, of any man ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The bias was given by the recollection of a message from his father to Frampton. It would be less trouble to go home than to write, and, besides, Aunt Catharine was alone. She was his unfailing friend, and it would be a great treat ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... must time, my friend, be close pursued, or lost. Business is the rub of life, perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Friendship's summons will my Wilkes retreat, And see, once seen before, that ancient seat, 160 That ancient seat, where majesty display'd Her ensigns, long before the world was made! Mean narrow maxims, which enslave mankind, Ne'er from its bias warp thy settled mind: Not duped by party, nor opinion's slave, Those faculties which bounteous nature gave, Thy honest spirit into practice brings, Nor courts the smile, nor dreads the frown of ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... storm was not to stop me. The mind intent construes each natural act To a personal bias, and so catches judgments In every common course. In truth the flash, Though it seemed opening hell, was not so dreadful ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... a heroism that was not true. He supposed that she had seen his selfishness of motive, and that it was her time now to let him see that she had not much admiration for him, so that he might make his choice without bias. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... propaganda as it was presented and as it affected us in the campaign fighting the Bolsheviki in North Russia in 1918-19. We write this chapter with great hesitation and with consciousness that it is subject to error in investigation and sifting of evidences and subject to error of bias on the part of the writer. However, no attempt has been made to compel the parts of this volume to be consistent with one another. Facts have been stated and comments have been written as they occurred to the writers. If they were forced to be consistent with one ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... All bias and curved edges should have the first fold basted. In cloth or silk this first basting thread should match the material and not be ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... succession of Mr. Addington, that is to say, in June 1800," are the opening words of the Quarterly article—an extraordinary blunder for a contemporary to make. The Quarterly was, of course, bitterly adverse to Addington's administration, in politics; but though party bias is responsible for strange behaviour, we shall be safe in attributing to lapse of memory this censure of a minister for the act of his predecessor. St. Vincent was in active service, as Admiral in command of the Channel Fleet, ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... distinguished no less for the solidity of his literary attainments than for the liberality of opinion and the patriotism which condemns him to the penalty of exile in a "dear country's cause," who therefore will not be suspected of undue bias in favour of Russian systems, had written and published in an able article on Russia, treating inter alia of the rise and progress of her manufactures and commerce, to the following effect:—"The manufacturers of Russia commenced, as in other countries, with the beginning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... San Bias is the patron saint of the country, It is said he won for the Paraguayans a great victory in an early war. St. Cristobel receives much homage also because he helped the Virgin Mary to carry the infant Jesus across a river on the way ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... to formulate a proposition better calculated to taint the proceedings with a partisan bias than this one by Mr. Drake. The impeachment movement was in a very large sense, if not entirely, a partisan enterprise. It had its origin in partisan differences, and was based mainly on differences as to public policies at issue between ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... passed the power of language to portray the anger, disgust, and degradation which it produced in the Southern mind. To be summoned before the officer of the Bureau, confronted with a negro who denied his most solemn averments, and was protected in doing so by the officer who, perhaps, showed the bias of the oppressor by believing the negro instead of the gentleman, was unquestionably, to the Southerner, the most degrading ordeal he could by any possibility be ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... much on our concentration, that Nature usually, in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she create a policeman like Fouche, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them. "The air," said ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... convenient, seldom just. Ev'n in the most sincere advice he gave, He had a grudging still to be a knave. The frauds he learnt in his fanatick years, Made him uneasy in his lawful gears: At least as little honest as he could; And, like white witches, mischievously good. To this first bias, longingly he leans; And rather would be great by ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... wantonly on the brink of all that is most solemn and awful. It is not wonderful, therefore, that, in such society, the opinions of the noble poet should have been, at least, accelerated in that direction to which their bias already leaned; and though he cannot be said to have become thus confirmed in these doctrines,—as neither now, nor at any time of his life, was he a confirmed unbeliever,—he had undoubtedly learned to feel less uneasy under his scepticism, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... of Andean civilization; for we may have every confidence in the care and accuracy of Sarmiento as regards his collection and statement of historical facts, provided that we always keep in mind the bias, and the orders he was under, to seek support for the ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... afford the baggages one excuse for their weakness, besides those disgraceful ones of sex and nature!—O Belford! who can bear to think of these things!——Who, at my time of life especially, and with such a bias for mischief! ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... you had the Old World bias—the idea that it is justice for the Pot to call the Kettle black—the idea that a man can do anything, but that a woman is lost forever if she happens to make one mistake. That all belongs, of course, right back where you came from. ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... blamed while comparatively few are guilty. It is quite possible to be too much disturbed and alarmed by criticisms of the Church and her preachers. These criticisms do not all come from the sincerest friendliness; neither are they always absolutely without bias, or invariably founded upon extensive observation. The Church at her worst has always been better—she always will be better—than her enemies allow. The same is true of preaching. Still it is wise to ask ourselves, when a criticism is laid against either Church or preacher, whether ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... by either counsel for the state or for the defendant, or by any other party or, source directly or indirectly interested in this inquisition. You are the court's commission, and you must enter upon your duties free from any bias or prejudice, if any there be. You should assume your duties, and I know you will, with the highest motives in seeking the truth, and then pronounce your judgment without regard to the effect it may have upon the state or upon the defendant; in other ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... all his critical views. He not infrequently falls into those errors which we naturally expect to find in a man of intense feeling, of strong conviction, and of vivid imagination. If a positive idea takes possession of his mind, it is liable to give a strong bias to his thought, and in a degree interferes with that nice sense of proportion so essential to a great critic. On more than one occasion Mr. Ruskin has frankly admitted that his views and opinions were erroneous owing to being based on a partial appearance or influenced by pernicious ideas. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... free from the common sense and scientific bias towards substituting explanations for actual facts the more clearly we see that this continuous process of changing is the very essence of what we know directly, and the more we realize how unlike such a continuous process is to any series of ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... indeed as far as you may suppose from assuming that what you speak to me of as the 'political' bias is the only ground on which the work of our corps for the Allies should appeal to the American public. Political, I confess, has become for me in all this a loose and question-begging term, but if we must resign ourselves ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... dislike the author, dip your pen in honey rather than in vinegar or, wiser still, leave his work alone. You must be more than human not to be biassed and if, to contradict the bias, you praise the book against your judgment, you act wrongly as a critic. What is honesty? There is the crux. Courts of law are but man-made machinery and very imperfect, juries are often very stupid, even judges—but perhaps we ought to pause here. Consequently, if the author ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... this, but declined on the ground that there was too strong a personal hostility between both Darwin and Grant Allen and himself to make it possible for him to review the book without a bias ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... and priest, or, as Peter calls him, a preacher of righteousness. This text has been mangled in various ways, for the natural man cannot understand spiritual things. When, therefore, the interpreters, with unwashed feet and hands, rushed into the Holy Scriptures, taking with them a human bias and method, as they themselves acknowledge, they could not but fall into diverse and erroneous views. It has almost come to pass, that the more sublime and spiritual the utterances of Scripture, the more shamefully they have been distorted. This passage ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... absorbing interest in the fate of the lost tribes, maintaining by most elaborate arguments their identity with the inhabitants of Scandinavia and England. The English people have always had a strong biblical bias. To this day they live in the Bible, and are flattered by the hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxons and kindred tribes, who crossed over to Britain under Hengist and Horsa in the fifth century, were direct descendants of Abraham, their ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... to make up the whole adult man as we know him. There is all that he has learnt since his birth, all that he has been taught to do and trained to do, his language, the circle of ideas he has taken to himself, the disproportions that come from unequal exercise and the bias due to circumambient suggestion. There are a thousand habits and a thousand prejudices, powers undeveloped and skill laboriously acquired. There are scars upon his body, and scars upon his mind. All these are secondary things, things capable of modification ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... this book, (the labour of several years), from infidelity to either:—that the intrinsic worth and weight of my subject may commend these songs, both at home, and in the many Englands beyond sea, to those who, (despite the inevitably more engrossing attractions of the Present, and the emphatic bias of modern culture towards the immediate and the tangible), maintain that high and soul-inspiring interest which, identifying us with our magnificent Past, and all its varied lessons of defeat and victory, offers at the same time,—under the guidance from above,—our sole ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever Nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needless pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind: ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... misgives me less, when I resolve this way, than when I think of the other: and in so strong and involuntary a bias, the heart is, as I may say, conscience. And well cautions the wise man: 'Let the counsel of thine own heart stand; for there is no man more faithful to thee than it: for a man's mind is sometimes wont to tell him ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... know your country well." And indeed he could have told her the exact number of bushels of wheat to the acre in her own county of Monterey, its voting population, its political bias. Yet of the more important product before him, after the manner of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... words. When Dennis attacked Addison's "Cato," Pope thought himself free to strike; but Addison took occasion to express, through Steele, a serious regret that he had done so. True criticism may be affected, as Addison's was, by some bias in the canons of taste prevalent in the writer's time, but, as Addison's did in the Chevy-Chase papers, it will dissent from prevalent misapplications of them, and it can never associate perception of the purest truth and beauty with petty arrogance, nor will it so speak as to give pain. ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... obstinacy—engineers are men of the temperament, aside from the training, to minister to public needs and desires. Self-effacement is the engineer's chief characteristic. He views largely and without bias. He can see things from the other fellow's angle because he is not an engineer if he has not the gift of imagination. The successful engineer has this most precious of endowments, and, having it, cannot but be possessed also of kindliness and sympathy, ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... Good she covets, and that Good alone; To choose Thy will, from selfish bias free And to prefer a cottage to a throne, And grief to ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... me what those Scriptures mean that I may obey them. Save me from the bias of self-interest. Help me to live by the understanding I had with Thee at the outset of our walk together. What may I do to please Thee? My time and my energies are Thine, for I am bought with a price. Thou seest my possessions. What shall ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... Lord," said Colonel Archfield, bowing, "that I once incurred Mr. Holt's displeasure as a mischievous boy by throwing a stone which injured one of his poultry; but I cannot believe such a trifle would bias an honest man in a ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cultures, traditions, and creeds, all over the Mediterranean world. Centuries before, Alexander the Great had struck out the splendid idea of the marriage of East and West. He secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire, and making one Empire from the Adriatic to this side of the Sutlej or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of East and West in a way of his own. He took three hundred captive princesses and ladies, and married them in a batch to Macedonian officers—a very characteristic piece of symbolism. But his idea was greater and ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... impartiality, in spite of the fact that Jefferson daily betrayed his hostility to the Administration, which revealed but another of his superhuman attributes. But there is a psychological manifestation of mental bias, no matter what the control, and some men are sensitive enough to feel it. Jefferson was quite aware that Washington loved Hamilton and believed in him thoroughly, and he felt the concealed desire to side openly with the Secretary to whom, practically, had been given the reins ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Manila braid, or whatever material of the kind may be found most convenient, fourteen inches and seven-eighths long and ten inches and a half wide, which is sloped off on the corners, and trimmed with two strips of embroidery, separated by a bias strip of blue satin, which is turned down on the edges an inch wide on the wrong side, and gathered so as to form a puff. The embroidered strips are worked on a foundation of white cloth as shown by Fig. 2. For the corn-flowers use blue silk, and work them in chain stitch. The calyxes are worked ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... no fool, Puritan," Halfman shouted, "or Heaven would not have wasted its time in gracing you with such skill at sports. So great with the rapier, so wise on the bias. No, no; you are no fool. I am almost sad to think you quit us so soon, enemy ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is to bear them. Even the (so-called) "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence—about which so much nonsense has been written—is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor—he never understands a jest—his wife is a beast of burthen—heaven is a hunting-ground—his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, or sentiments. And yet he lives in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... opposition to the party which had nominated and elected him Vice President. The son, who is the author or editor of these volumes, appears to be forgetful of this fact; for on no other ground can we account for the bias which he exhibits from the first page to the last. His duty, he thinks, is to defend his father's administration, and this idea leads him into trouble at the very beginning. He says: "The Whig party of 1840 had nothing to do with bank, tariff, or internal improvements,"—when all the world knows ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw: Or if an unexpected call succeed, Come when it will, is equal to the need: —He who, though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence, Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes; Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be, Are at his heart; and such fidelity It is his darling passion to approve; More brave for this, that he hath much to love:— 'Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us; He knows each chord, its various tone, Each spring, its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... United States, as an Australian journalist, I found that her work, though good enough, was essentially woman's work, dress, fashions, functions, with educational and social outlooks from the feminine point of view. My work might show the bias of sex, but it dealt with the larger questions which were common to humanity; and when I recall the causes which I furthered, and which in some instances I started, I feel inclined to magnify the office of the anonymous contributor to the ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... he had often seen connexions of that sort, which having been planted in the infancy of the adherent, had grown up to a surprising pitch of fidelity and friendship, that no temptation could bias, and no danger dissolve. He therefore rejoiced in the hope of seeing his own son accommodated with such a faithful attendant, in the person of young Fathom, on whom he resolved to bestow the same education he had planned for the other, though conveyed in such ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... existing political independence of all Members of the League." These two Articles together go some way to destroy the conception of the League as an instrument of progress, and to equip it from the outset with an almost fatal bias towards the status quo. It is these Articles which have reconciled to the League some of its original opponents, who now hope to make of it another Holy Alliance for the perpetuation of the economic ruin of their enemies and the Balance of Power in their own interests which they believe ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... observation, and which appear to me all important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsel. Nor can I forget as an encouragement to it your indulgent reception of my sentiments on a former and not ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... Perhaps something happens to one early in life, and the mind takes a bias. My animosity to religion may have worn away some edge off her mind, don't you see? The moral idea that one lover is all right, whereas any transgression means ruin to a woman, was never invented by her. It came from me; it is impossible she could ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... familiar lesson that the opportunity to do ill deeds often makes ill deeds done. The path for entering on evil is made fatally easy at first; that gate always stands wide. The Devil knows how to time his approaches. A weak nature, with an evil bias in it, finds everywhere occasions and suggestions to do wrong. But it is the evil nature which makes innocent things opportunities for evil. Therefore we have to be on our guard, as knowing that if we fall it is not circumstances, but ourselves, that made stumbling-blocks out ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... of one of the enduring faiths because, having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, I think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... and with assuredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in Nature, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sort of things they are which I understand by Things Slowly Learnt. Some are facts, some are moral truths, some are practical lessons; but the great characteristic of all those which are to be thought of in this essay is, that we have to learn them and act upon them in the face of a strong bias to think or act in an opposite way. It is not that they are so difficult in themselves, not that they are hard to be understood, or that they are supported by arguments whose force is not apparent to every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... art of which he was wholly ignorant, while in very many of both classes his knowledge was accurate and profound. Most men who have attained to distinguished excellence, have done so by confining themselves to a single department—frequently being led to the choice by a strong, original bias. Even when this is not the case, there is some class of objects or pursuits, towards which a particular inclination is manifested; one loves facts, and devotes himself to observations and experiments; another ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good, and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So, again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is irrational when clearly contrary to sound reason, foolish when contrary to practical good sense, silly when petty and contemptible in its folly, erroneous when containing error that vitiates the result, unreasonable when there seems a perverse bias or an intent to go wrong. Monstrous and preposterous refer to what is overwhelmingly absurd; as, "O monstrous! eleven buckram men grown out of two," SHAKESPEARE 1 King Henry IV, act ii, sc. 4. The ridiculous or the nonsensical is worthy only to be ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes. The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of Captain Kidd, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... judgment and character, and puts the whole group at the mercy of the clique which is ruling at the moment. It produces the dominance of watchwords and phrases which take the place of reason and conscience in determining conduct. The patriotic bias is a recognized perversion of thought and judgment against which our education should ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... by the Government of this colony in relation to the admission of Chinese or coolie labour into the Northern Territory is, I understand, among the pressing subjects of the hour. Approaching the subject without prejudice or bias, it does not seem difficult to determine the principles by which the action of the State should be guided. If we have faith in the superior qualities of our own people we shall do well, even at the cost of considerable delay in material development, to reserve for our own race ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... misrepresentation do, at the time, induce people to form their judgment, to say the best, harshly, and but too often, incorrectly. It is for posterity to calmly weigh the evidence handed down, and to examine into the merits of a case divested of party bias. Actuated by these feelings, we do not hesitate to assert, that, in the point at question, Mr Vanslyperken had great cause for being displeased; and that the conduct of Moggy Salisbury, in cutting off the tail of Snarleyyow was, in our ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... cruelly given; but the searcher could not fail to find many passages guiltless of this charge. The characteristics of Johnson's prose style are colossal good sense, though with a strong sceptical bias, good humour, vigorous language, and movement from point to point, which can only be compared to the measured tread of a well-drilled company of soldiers. Here is a passage from the preface ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... exhibited each his peculiarity. Some of these, could we look within their mental structure and there take a just survey, would perhaps be found possessed of such a native taint, or bias, or disorder, that their wrong doings, for which they were in prison, would be regarded in the light of misfortunes ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... of the cut-and-dried flavor of the opinion of the average "reader"; he always put himself into the report, and, of course, that meant a warm personal touch. If he could not encourage the publication of a manuscript, his reasons were always fully given, and invariably without personal bias. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord—its various tone, Each spring—its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... nursery, they had also spent some months together at the abbey of St Cyr, in preparation for their solemn office. They were of marked but very contrasted characters. The elder inherited the strong will and dominant energy of her race. As yet, and for some time afterwards, without any religious bias, she contemplated her prospects with a quiet and proud consciousness of responsibility. The younger sister was of a softer and more submissive nature. She shrank from her high position, saying that an abbess had to answer to God for the souls of her nuns, and ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... probably be in those pages which treat of Liberia. The value of his evidence, as to the condition and prospects of that colony, must depend, not upon any singular acuteness of observation or depth of reflection, but upon his freedom from partizan bias, and his consequent ability to perceive a certain degree of truth, and inclination to express it frankly. A northern man, but not unacquainted with the slave institutions of our own and other countries—neither an Abolitionist nor a Colonizationist—without ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... human life—views which exclude God, immortality, and a world beyond—that is, they take as the whole of Browning the lesser part of his theory of life. This is not creditable to their understanding, though it is natural enough. We may accept it as an innocent example of the power of a strong bias in human nature. But it is well to remember that the romantic, Christian, mystic elements of human life are more important in Browning's eyes than the ethical or scientific; that the latter are nothing to him without the former; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Allowing for bias this is no unfair account of Marvell's method, and it was just because this was Marvell's method that he succeeded so well in amusing the king and in pleasing the town, and that he may still be read by those who love reading with a fair measure of ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... nine in the morning, and to watch the clock creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system has become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one can judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it; when any ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of green and some in different shades of brown. After the bristles are ready, the next thing is to make the stemming. Take a square piece of cambric and fasten it in a stretcher, then give it a thick coating of mastic varnish, and when the varnish is dry cut the cambric on a true bias into straight strips of different widths, from an inch to two inches, and half a yard in length. Lay one of these strips on a table or some smooth surface, add another coat of varnish, then cover it with glaucous green flock, care being taken to leave a narrow margin bare on one side ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... impossible to read without profit and instruction, for classing him among the Celt-haters; his determined scepticism about Welsh antiquity seems to me, however, to betray a preconceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as unmistakable as Mr. Davies's prepossessions. But Mr. Nash is often very happy in demolishing, for really the Celt-lovers seem often to try to lay themselves open, and to invite demolition. Full of his notions about an arkite idolatry and a Helio-daemonic worship, Edward Davies ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... distressed Michael would be if she said a word, if she flung her good name from her, which he had risked all to save. Some semblance of calm returned to her, as she thus reached the only conclusion which the bias of her mind would permit. The stream ran docilely in the little groove cut out ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... state the opposite sides of the case. How far these men are from being like your hired advocates and prosecutors, determined to acquit or convict, may appear from the fact that unless both agree that the verdict found is just, the case is tried over, while anything like bias in the tone of either of the judges stating the case would be a ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... character of Sir Thomas More stand out the best production of his time. The strong religious bias of the man made it inevitable that he should remain considerably under the influence of the old theological teachings, but in the intelligent man of the world, in the large-hearted philanthropist, in the honest patriot, appear the new and beneficent tendencies which were at work. Like all men who ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Middle Ages knit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantly impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All this is true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in his belief and not devout ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to be encountered. As such it will be considered further on. For the present the fact to be noted is that the authorized reviewers are both in honor and in duty bound to keep themselves absolutely clear of controversial bias. The movement is not a movement to alter in any slightest respect the dogmatic teaching of the Church, not a movement to unsettle foundations, not a movement toward disowning or repudiating our past, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... leads science on to greater victories. Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias: the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to enter; but Kepler sees these errors, and by wonderful genius and vigour ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... cultural anthropologists, cannot afford to reckon without. For the first and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have since died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own way. In spite of obvious limitations—bias and fallibility of both informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled techniques, and insufficient controls and checks—this saga must remain the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and thoughts of thousands ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... having the necessary strength, combined with lightness and flexibility. Upon this framework the cloth which forms the supporting surface of the aeroplane is secured, the frame being enclosed in the cloth. The cloth for each aeroplane previous to its attachment to its frame is cut on the bias and made up into a single piece approximately the size and shape of the aeroplane, having the threads of the fabric arranged diagonally to the transverse spars and longitudinal ribs, as indicated at 6 in Fig. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... his Elia, the character of the writer cooperates in an under current to the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... been taken to the fact that he starts upon his task with a definite bias in a certain direction. He candidly admits from the outset that his aim is to find a meaning for life, and in doing this he of course tacitly assumes that life has a deep and profound meaning. Strict scientists aver that the investigator must set out without prejudice, to examine ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... do not possess this faculty in any marked degree, need not be discouraged by their want of it, for visualization is not the only way of realizing that the law is at work on the invisible plane. Those whose mental bias is towards physical science should realize this Law of Growth as the creative force throughout all nature; and those who have a mathematical turn of mind may reflect that all solids are generated from the movement ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... young lady's guardian, and that the gentleman in the fur coat was (he had every reason to believe) a forger and a miscreant, he would not have been believed. His opinion would, not unjustly, have been looked on as distorted by what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls "the personal bias." He had therefore to put up with general ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... the complications of higher passion, nor any of the pomp which belongs, in mood, situation, or utterance, to the loftier phases of human suffering. The sorrow of those who most attracted his sympathy was not theatrical or imposing. It has been well said of him, that his "bias was towards all that was poor and unregarded." And thus, while those who painfully moved the charity and compassion of his genius were considered by him the victims of artificial civilization, his own feeling ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... have solved others of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater. Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. In fact, having ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... the prevailing disorders. In spite of a general loyalty the people {85} had been fretted into vexations and petty divisions, and for the most part felt deep-rooted animosity towards the executive authorities. Indeed, apart from the party bias of the government, its inefficiency and uncertainty had destroyed all public confidence in it. Under the executive government, the authority of the legislative council had been exercised by a very few individuals, representing a mere ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... laying down of definite rules. Reading that might be profitable for one might not be so for another. Reading that would be pleasant to one would be to another weariness. Every class of mind seeks naturally its own proper food, and the choice of books must ultimately depend upon a man's own bias—on his natural bent and the necessities of his life. There are, however, one or two directions that may be given, and which may be ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... always be either an artificial entity or one of the many varieties of nature spirits that is meant, for the elemental kingdoms proper do not admit of any such conceptions as good and evil, though there is undoubtedly a sort of bias or tendency permeating nearly all their subdivisions which operates to render them rather hostile than friendly towards man, as every neophyte knows, for in most cases his very first impression of the astral plane is of the presence all around ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... and impatience of restraint, had in them something noble;—assuredly the child was born of high rank. Such was her conclusion, and she acted upon it accordingly. The domestics around her, less jealous, or less scrupulous than Lilias, acted as servants usually do, following the bias, and flattering, for their own purposes, the humour of the Lady; and the boy soon took on him those airs of superiority, which the sight of habitual deference seldom fails to inspire. It seemed, in truth, as if to command were his natural sphere, so easily did he use himself to exact ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott |
