"Inbred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... involve Kardon. Actually the Lani were never in a position to develop that world. They'd probably have remained on Flora indefinitely. The old court records showed no tendency for their culture to expand. They were an inbred group, a static, balanced society in harmony with their environment. In nearly thirty-five hundred years their numbers increased only to a few thousand. Actually there is a good possibility that the race ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... well have heard, there come not seldom to our city magistrates from the Marches, who for the most part are men of a mean spirit, and in circumstances so reduced and beggarly, that their whole life seems to be but a petty-foggery; and by reason of this their inbred sordidness and avarice they bring with them judges and notaries that have rather the air of men taken from the plough or the last than trained in the schools of law.(1) Now one of these Marchers, being come hither as Podesta, brought with him judges not a few, and among them one that called ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... magazines must have large recourse to "big names," not because of inbred snobbishness on the part of the editors but because the "big name," besides carrying advertising value, is more likely than a little one to stand for material with a "big" theme, handled by a writer of experience. A surer touch in selecting and handling topics of nation-wide appeal is what counts ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... queer folk yonder at the patroon's," he said. "You are accustomed to the manners of your peers; you were bred in that land where hospitality, courtesy, and deference are shown to equals; where dignity and graciousness are expected from the elders; where duty and humility are inbred in the young. So is it with us—except where you are going. The great patroon families, with their vast estates, their patents, their feudal systems, have stood supreme here for years. Theirs is the power of life and death over their retainers; they ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... heroic expression; he made use of it because he must; and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the quality of imagination from Shakespeare's or those of art and intellect from Ben Jonson's. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... covenanted with God should be much respected by his subjects. They should love him. There is an inbred affection in the hearts of the people to their king. In the 12th verse it is said, that "the people clapped their hands for joy, and said, God save the king." They had no sooner seen their native king installed in his kingdom, but they rejoiced exceedingly, and saluted him with wishes of ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... some are scrubs, inbred, poor stuff. But a few fine ones turn up. Mostly when they do they're strays or bred from strays—escaped from horse thieves or Indians. If the mustangers here pick up any branded ones, they're returned to the owners, if possible, or sold at a yearly ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... of our most powerful journals have been for many years past very unfavorable exponents of English feeling on all subjects connected with slavery: some, probably, from the influences, more or less direct, of West Indian opinions and interests: others from inbred Toryism, which, even when compelled by reason to hold opinions favorable to liberty, is always adverse to it in feeling; which likes the spectacle of irresponsible power exercised by one person ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... unparalleled thing may sometimes inspire us with fortitude; but this will depend largely upon the antecedent moral trials of a man. It is a temptation when we look on what we accomplish at all in that light. The temptation being inbred, is commonly a proof of internal corruption. "If I take a step, suppose now, to the right, or to the left," Anthony had got into the habit of saying, while he made his course, and after he had deposited ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... daily more insatiate and implacable, they ranged themselves zealously under their Government; though they neither forgot nor forgave its transgressions, in having first involved them in a war with a people then struggling for its own liberties under a twofold infliction—confounded by inbred faction, and beleagured by a cruel and imperious external foe. But these remembrances did not vent themselves in reproaches, nor hinder us from being reconciled to our Rulers, when a change or rather ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... vast territories, with their increasing population, and of numerous Indian tribes. Among the component states, there is the greatest variety of customs, institutions, and religions. Then we have the deeper inbred differences of language and ancestry among us, our population being made up of the lineage of all nations. Our industrial pursuits, also, are various; and, with a great natural diversity of soil and climate, they must always continue to be so. Moreover, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the boy's astonished disappointment crushed out his inbred courtesy as host. His sister, mortified but self-possessed, broke the strained silence with a quiet question or two concerning the newly arrived troops; and the bandmaster replied, looking ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... highly moldable family is inbred and shaped into more and more exaggerated forms, it weakens and loses the ability to forage. Kale retains the most wild aggressiveness, Chinese cabbage perhaps the least. Here, in approximately correct order, ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... her, fighting with himself, and with that inbred antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both will and judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound unlikeness they were yet so ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that which all mortals most aspire to—either to be useful to his friends or to offend his enemies? Or, if it be to be thought a natural proneness, there is against that a much more potent inclination inbred, which about this time of a man's life solicits most—the desire of house and family of his own; to which nothing is esteemed more helpful than the early entering into credible employment, and nothing more hindering than this affected solitariness. And though this were enough, yet ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Some are born frigate-captains, partisan warriors, ever actively on the wing, and rejoicing in the comparative freedom and independence of their movements, like the cavalry raider and outpost officer. Of this type was Pellew, Lord Exmouth, a seaman inbred, if ever there was one, who in this sphere won the renown most distinctively associated with his name, while giving proof throughout a long career of high professional capacity in many directions. But while Saumarez, in his ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... exhibited of the state of society among the different ranks in China, a tolerable notion may be formed of the general character and complexion of the court. It is, as Lord Macartney has justly observed, "a singular mixture of ostentatious hospitality and inbred suspicion, ceremonious civility and real rudeness, shadowy complaisance and substantial perverseness; and this prevails through all the departments connected with the Court, although somewhat modified by the personal disposition of those at their head; but as to that genuine politeness, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... well-made boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend's simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill—for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael—repelling swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... exultant Mr. Savage his exasperating situation is his excuse. For, with the inbred and lethal instinct of a Theolog he was put upon the trail of a brother Theolog to bring in his scalp. To return without some scalp would be a disgrace. But on coming up with his reverend brother Bellamy, instead ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... but one bound from the table to the window. For I remembered the cloaked man who had crossed me in the Meadows the other night. Also my inbred, almost instinctive curiosity as to the purposes and antecedents of lurking folk of all kinds, pricked me. We were easy enough to get on with in Eden Valley once you knew us, but our attitude towards strangers ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... resist attempts of this kind. "Blackwood," however, was outdone in this rowdy style of reviewing by "Fraser's Magazine." From that periodical we learn that Cooper was "a passable scribbler of passable novels," a "bilious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," "a man of consummate and inbred vulgarity," "a bore of the first magnitude in society," who went about fishing for (p. 175) introductions. "But this," it concluded, speaking of his England, "was his last kick, and we shall not disturb his dying moments." Two years later the magazine seemed to think he had some power of kicking ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the last five minutes. I humbly ask your pardon. Set it down to the loyalty of an old family lawyer. Now, I am going to tell you the truth and take you into our confidence, for I know we are safe with you. The Kennedys are—always have been—just a wee bit queer. Old inbred stock, you know. They will produce somebody like poor Mr. Quentin, who was as sane as you or me, but as a rule in every generation there is one member of the family—or more—who is just a little bit—-" and he tapped his forehead. "Nothing violent, you understand, but just ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... either party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared, and the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile to one another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred unanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... infant—the primary cause we must ascribe to God as is most justly His due, who is the Ruler and Disposer of all things; yet He suffers many things to proceed according to the rules of nature by their inbred motion, according to usual and natural courses, without variation; though indeed by favour from on high, Sarah conceived Isaac; Hannah, Samuel; and Elizabeth, John the Baptist; but these were all ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... cow that have been too closely inbred in the same line for generations may prove sexually incompatible and unable to generate together, though both are abundantly prolific when coupled with animals ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... of the Negro are of two kinds—the inborn and the inbred. As they reveal themselves to us, this distinction may not be seen, but it exists. Inborn qualities are ineradicable; they belong to the blood; they constitute individuality; they are independent, or nearly so, of time and habitat. Inbred qualities are acquired, ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... remain down-hearted, but this is not the case at Paris. The supposed fear of Germany is only political bluff. France fears no Germans. She fears nobody. Perhaps she ought to fear—for the far future. But she has always had a belief in herself and her way of doing things and an inbred contempt for other races as for barbarians, and it has only needed this colossal victory in a world-war to set her on her pedestal of ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... could fail to understand either that Aldegonde, who followed right on his heels, would win or lose for as many. The pair were blood-brothers, sons of the great Hamburg, but one out of an imported dam, the other from a mare tracing to Lexington, and richly inbred ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... with fear and apprehension, whether I was myself a real partaker of those divine influences which I could so evidently discover in her. Sin appeared to me just then to be more than ever "exceeding sinful." Inward and inbred corruptions made me tremble. The danger of self-deception in so great a matter alarmed me. I was a teacher of others; but was ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... of the "adulteress" are successful men and women, aids in the progress of the world; those of the blood royal, in double or single doses, a menace to public morality. This much for your royal inbred custom. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... important results on the lives of these two young creatures. Isobel, in whom the love of Truth, however ugly it might be and however destructive of hope, faith, charity and all the virtues, was a burning, inbred passion, took to the secret study of theology in order to find out why Godfrey was so convinced as to the teachings of the Bible. She was not old or mellowed enough to understand that the real reason must be discovered, not in the letter but in the spirit, that is ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... them the like ornaments and dress. Tereus was inflamed upon seeing the virgin, no otherwise than if one were to put fire beneath the whitening ears of corn, or were to burn leaves and {dry} grass laid up in stacks. Her beauty, indeed, is worthy {of love}; but inbred lust, as well, urges him on, and the people in those regions are {naturally} much inclined to lustfulness. He burns, both by his own frailty and that of his nation. He has a desire to corrupt the care of her attendants, and the fidelity of her nurse, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... way the most town-ridden country in the world; our towns by a long way the smokiest and worst built, with the most inbred town populations. We have practically come to an end of our country-stock reserves. Unless we are prepared to say: "This is a desirable state of things; let the inbreeding of town stocks go on—we shall evolve in time a new type immune to town life; a ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... measure —the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... last word off his tongue with difficult triumph. "Unscientificness," was evidently the club his Western education gave him, with which to combat the inbred superstition of centuries. But Martin saw ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... pretender, charlatan, masquerader, mountebank, deceiver, humbug, cheat, quack, shyster, empiric. Imprison, incarcerate, immure. Improper, indecent, indecorous, unseemly, unbecoming, indelicate. Impure, tainted, contaminated, polluted, defiled, vitiated. Inborn, innate, inbred, congenital. Incite, instigate, stimulate, impel, arouse, goad, spur, promote. Inclose, surround, encircle, circumscribe, encompass. Increase, grow, enlarge, magnify, amplify, swell, augment. Indecent, indelicate, immodest, shameless, ribald, lewd, lustful, lascivious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and Federal laws competent to meet the novel industry, and with the inbred respect for equitable adjustments of rights between man and man, the miners sought only to secure equitable rights and protection from robbery by a simple agreement as to the maximum size of a surface claim, trusting, with a well-founded confidence, that no machinery was necessary to enforce ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... but merely remarks (5 p. 86) that the exact physiological basis of the dancing character is uncertain and the origin of this curious variation in behavior still more obscure. "Mouse fanciers have assured me," he continues, "that something like it may appear in strains inbred from the normal type, though I cannot find an indubitable case. Such an occurrence may be nothing but the appearance of a rare recessive form. Certainly it is not a necessary consequence of inbreeding, witness von Guaita's ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... I did not mean to be far behind any Border Fenwick when it came to making bows. Nor, as it happened, was I when all was done. This confidence was partly owing to full feeding on fine porridge and braxy, but more to that inbred belief of Galloway in itself which the ill-affected and envious nominate ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... she cried angrily. "You won't let me enjoy the least bit of a delusion. He might marry me if I were famous. But as I am now— He's an inbred snob. He can't help it. He simply couldn't marry a woman in my position. But you're overlooking one thing—that ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... he had dishonoured the Guard, brought the first blot of treachery upon its long and unblemished traditions. Hereditary instincts inbred and powerful were arrayed against him in the hearts of six of his judges; in the seventh, Count Sagan, he had to encounter the ill-blood of a profoundly vindictive nature whose purposes he had crossed and baffled, and who harboured towards him a ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... and good sense,—thanks, awfully! Nor you, my dear Bruno, although my inbred politeness forbids my ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... consumption had delayed the absentee, there was only time enough to mark the tardiness. It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day's buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day's harness heavy-footed, ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... counter to her husband's desire to "do the right thing," and retrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their own. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refused to receive anything in repayment ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Those who had sent the rustic evidently knew what they were about. He could shoot well, which was exhilarating. To redeem one's country's discredited bills, was quixotic. She rose to that, because she was French. But to fence with herself—well, that was quality. Instinctive, inbred, unconscious, and unregistered in any studbook of Burke or Gotha—but quality. And she recognized it, for there was deference in the silence which ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... second Gatewood stared—as though in the young girl before him the ghost of his ideal had risen to confront him—only for a second; then he bowed, matching her perfect acknowledgment of his presence by a bearing and courtesy which must have been inbred ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... goodness—qualities that hang not on any man's breath—form the essence of manly character, or, as one of our old writers has it, "that inbred loyalty unto Virtue which can serve her without a livery." He who possesses these qualities, united with strength of purpose, carries with him a power which is irresistible. He is strong to do good, strong ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... was abundantly grateful. All the Scot in him asserted itself in a fierce reticence, an inbred sense of privacy where a man's deepest feelings were concerned: and now, as he stood battling with his impatience to be gone, he was suffering acute discomfiture from the demonstrative leave-taking in progress between Maurice and his sister. For their sakes, at least, he would ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Demaratos heard this, he spoke as follows: "O king, since thou biddest me by all means utter the truth, and so speak as one who shall not be afterwards convicted by thee of having spoken falsely, I say this:—with Hellas poverty is ever an inbred growth, while valour is one that has been brought in, being acquired by intelligence and the force of law; and of it Hellas makes use ever to avert from herself not only poverty but also servitude to a master. Now I commend all the Hellenes who are settled in those Dorian lands, but this which ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... perhaps, this novel and spontaneous kindness added to my more than perfect willingness to endure a restful separation from my mule, which induced me to get down and enter that house with all my inborn and inbred love of cleanliness and daintiness ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... "social forces" has a real content. It represents reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and the theories of social ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... life and conduct of the Central Melanesian savage. To him the belief is no mere abstract theological dogma or speculative tenet, the occasional theme of edifying homilies and pious meditation; it is an inbred, unquestioning, omnipresent conviction which affects his thoughts and actions daily and at every turn; it guides his fortunes as an individual and controls his behaviour as a member of a community, by inculcating ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... idiosyncrasy, oddity; idiocrasy &c (tendency) 176; diagnostics. V. be in the blood, run in the blood; be born so; be intrinsic &c adj.. Adj. derived from within, subjective; intrinsic, intrinsical^; fundamental, normal; implanted, inherent, essential, natural; innate, inborn, inbred, ingrained, inwrought; coeval with birth, genetous^, haematobious^, syngenic^; radical, incarnate, thoroughbred, hereditary, inherited, immanent; congenital, congenite^; connate, running in the blood; ingenerate^, ingenite^; indigenous; in the grain ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to shreds, so be thou not * Of those whom lure of rank and title draws: Nay; 'ware of slips and turn from sin aside * And ken that bane and bale are worldly laws: How oft high Fortune falls by least mishap * And all things bear inbred of change ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... not unhappy; and there were inbred Lichfeldian traditions which prompted me to virtuous indignation over her defects in remorse and misery. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... he saw many things were without ground which he had received for truth, had yet work hard enough, as himself intimates, to get his conscience clear from all those roots and strings of inbred error. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
