"Incontrovertible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... incontrovertible facts, and they find their application to the existing European situation in various ways, the most important of which will appear in the discovery that, valuable as conventions and covenants of nation with nation may be, and intolerable as any violation of them surely ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... be derived from the will of the nation as expressed by its representatives in cortes. The power of this body to interpret the laws regulating the succession, and to determine the succession itself, in the most absolute manner, is incontrovertible, having been established by repeated precedents from a very ancient period. [2] In the present instance, the legislature, soon after the birth of Joanna, tendered the usual oaths of allegiance to her as heir apparent to the monarchy. On a subsequent occasion, however, the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... what Mackenzie never found, what Fraser was not to find—that great river, now to be taken over with every right of double discovery by these messengers of the young republic. How swelled their hearts, when at last they knew this truth, unescapable, incontrovertible! It ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... honourable friend, you cannot limit the labour of adults unless you fix wages. This proposition he lays down repeatedly, assures us that it is incontrovertible, and indeed seems to think it self-evident; for he has not taken the trouble to prove it. Sir, my answer shall be very short. We have, during many centuries, limited the labour of adults to six days in seven; and yet we have not fixed ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... SOUL, and all the articles of the nature of metaphysics, must start by a sincere submission to the incontrovertible dogmas of the Church. Revelation is worth more, without doubt, than the whole of philosophy. Systems exercise the mind, but faith ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... nations around them, and will them and their increase as property to their children forever.—Levit. xxv: 44, 45, 46. All these nations were made of one blood. Yet God ordained that some should be "chattel" slaves to others, and gave his special aid to effect it. In view of this incontrovertible fact, how can I believe this passage disproves the lawfulness of slavery in the sight of God? How can any sane man believe it, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and German investigators. Nothing has been added to our original findings; nothing has been contradicted of what we have reported, and to-day, after nearly thirteen years, the truths that we uncovered stand incontrovertible; besides, they have been the means of driving out yellow fever from Cuba, the United States (Laredo, Texas, 1903 and New Orleans, La., 1905), British Honduras and ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... days of thought on the subject, I am obliged to repeat my assertion. Your own convictions in the matter, and your story of the shadow and the peaked cap may appeal to the public and assure you some sympathy, but for an entire reversal of its opinion you will need substantial and incontrovertible evidence. You must remember—you will pardon my frankness—that your husband's character failed to stand the test of inquiry. His principles were slack, his temper violent. You have suffered from both and must know. A poor foundation I found it for his defence; ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... is evidence incontrovertible that pure democracy, through direct legislation by the citizenship, is practicable—more, is now practiced—in large communities. Next as to ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... his new inspiration did not seem a mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed appear to be incontrovertible. ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters (in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense and kind heart, some ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... of observations and the arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics. Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and no discussions profitable. Huxley, however, not only entered into metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers. His views are to be found scattered through very ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... ordinary man will say, "If such ugliness as that exists, I don't want to see it. Why paint such subjects?" And at least the first part of this criticism seems to me to be quite incontrovertible. I can imagine no valid reason for the portrayal of so much ugliness; and, what is more important, I can find among the unquestioned masters no slightest precedent for the blank realism of this picture. The ordinary man's aversion to such ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... treat seriously a movement founded upon such arguments as these. They are in the main incontrovertible. We seem to be breathing the very atmosphere of Wagner, and it would be scarcely too much to say that the humanist movement of the Bardi salon was in its intention the forerunner of the German movement dreamed of by Herder, Schiller, Jean Paul, and accomplished by Wagner, who at last succeeded ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... Northcote to write the report which has lit up the flame; but more and more do the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties removable.' As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in the summer ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... (pontifex maximus) is the head of the church and the bar; he appoints the bishops and the judges; and in his twofold character of minister and lawyer, he is the expounder of the Koran, the source of all laws, civil and religious; his decisions serve as precedents, and are as incontrovertible as the Koran itself. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hook or crook, he should be so unfortunate as to be deprived of the use of both hands. She found room to gloat, of course, in the fact that he was obliged to stop up his ears in order to shut out the incontrovertible. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Government in any act of double dealing. But they had the Emperor Alexander of Russia to deal with. He offered to act as intermediary between Great Britain and France in order to bring about an honourable peace. The British Government refused, and it is stated on incontrovertible authority that Alexander was furious, and upbraided the British with having used troops, which should have been sent to Russia's aid, to crush Denmark. The outrage of attacking a small State which was at peace and with which she had no quarrel was powerfully denounced by Alexander. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... unfamiliar with the true facts of history have believed that Joseph was a purely apocryphal infant, or, as some have suggested, merely an adopted child; but that Napoleon did upon this occasion content himself with second place is an incontrovertible fact. Nor is it entirely unaccountable. It is hardly to be supposed that a true military genius, such as Napoleon is universally conceded to have been, would plunge into the midst of a great battle without first having ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... too great fondness for himself, for grief at parting and at giving him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears in ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... heard Matilda toss about, draw long, tremulous breaths; then from the couch of that elderly virgin sounded the incontrovertible tocsin of deep sleep. But for Mrs. De Peyster there was no sleep; ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... known, incontrovertible proof of the deceit and falsehood of the leading Christians of early times, of which every person in the least conversant with the ecclesiastical history of those times must be convinced—their pretended power of working miracles! On this subject I shall ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... to accept these principles as incontrovertible. Even if we take the great blockade of 1803-5, which has most firmly dominated thought on the subject ever since, it may be argued with some plausibility that the situation could have been solved more quickly and effectually by letting Ganteaume get ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... a question to be answered in a sentence," and Crane smiled a little, "but he gave us incontrovertible proof that the spirits of the dead return and communicate with their friends who ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... Masters laughed. "Incontrovertible. Mind you practice your own philosophy when you need it. All reverses should be temporary ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... finding some comfort and strength in the bald platitude: it was incontrovertible and at least gave him firm ground under his feet. "Nor can treason go unpunished, or how would the throne be safe for a day? But what the father cannot do, though a king, another can and must; and must," he reiterated, steeling ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... Creator denied to a blind man; and in the same way the man who knows most of the material world should see the most conclusive evidences of design and a Designer. The humblest blade of grass preaches an incontrovertible sermon. What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth? Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals? What ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... but people don't love me," said Phoebe, as if it were a fact, sad, indeed, but incontrovertible. "Only dear father ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... suspicious glances, as I sat apart, though among them. I felt that desperation and recklessness of poverty which only a pauper knows. There was a mighty patch upon one leg of my trowsers, neatly sewed on, for it had been executed by my mother, but still very obvious and incontrovertible to the eye. This patch I had hitherto studiously endeavored to hide with the ample skirts of my shooting-jacket; but now I stretched out my leg boldly, and thrust the patch under their noses, and looked at them so, that they soon looked away, boy though I was. Perhaps the gun that I clenched ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... smallpox no intelligent person acquainted with the facts can doubt. An overwhelming mass of incontrovertible evidence can be found in every medical library. The mortality statistics of different countries tell the same story. A single example shows the general experience: In seven provinces of the Philippine Islands there were 6,000 deaths ...
— Health Work in the Public Schools • Leonard P. Ayres and May Ayres
... abroad—amazing thought!—it must be that he loved her. As she so concluded, a delicate, throbbing fire fluttered in her side, and stole up to burn unreproved and undetected in her cheeks. Her reasoning was no reasoning, of course; but she knew nothing of knightly honour or the dramatic sense, so it seemed incontrovertible. At this discovery she was as full of shame as if she had done a sin. A sin indeed it seemed almost to be in her, that one so high should stoop to one so low, and she not die at once. Sacrilege—should not one die rather than suffer a sacrilege to be thrust upon one? So Clytie may have felt, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... it assumed as an incontrovertible principle, that in this country the people are the superintendants of the conduct and measures of those by whom government is administered; of the beneficial effect of which the present reign afforded an illustrious example, when addresses from all parts of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... miss, but that the rain was altogether too mastherful for ye? Ye know, me dear, we can't (even the best of us) conthrol the illimints!" This incontrovertible fact Mrs. Connolly gives forth with a truly noble air of resignation. "Come down now, and let me get ye that palthry cup o' ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... methods—and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had been made—and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... of belief to be conceded to the Life of St. Frances, and other biographies or sketches of a similar kind. Some portions, and those the most really important and prominent, are well ascertained, incontrovertible, and substantially true. Others again, in all likelihood, took place very much, though not literally, in the way in which they are recorded. Of others, they were possibly, or even probably, the mere colouring ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... further recommend, that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United Stales be read in our Conventions; believing, that the truths contained in the former are incontrovertible, and that the latter guarantees in letter and spirit to every freeman born in this country, all the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, as he had done before, rather in the exciting struggle of ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... commenced a series of arguments, which he had thought incontrovertible. As each was brought forward, the Captain turned to his Bible, and produced a text, which with its context clearly refuted it. Text after text was brought forward. At first the General had been very confident of success; by degrees his confidence ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the bitterest revenge on you, what could be more terrible than cause you to be the executioner of your own son? The vengeance, however, to be complete, depends on his being able to place before you incontrovertible proof that you were the father of the victim. Send, therefore, a messenger to him, one from Gudenfels, who knows nothing of what has happened in this castle of Schonburg, and who is therefore unable to disclose, even if forced to confess, that Wilhelm is alive. Let the messenger inform my ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... their witticisms, but now Anton was very sorry to see that he was universally disliked. Even the quartette had given him up—at least there was decided enmity between him and both basses. Whenever Specht ventured upon an assertion that was not quite incontrovertible, Pix would shrug his shoulders and ejaculate "Pumpkins." Indeed, almost all that Specht said was met by a whisper of "pumpkins" from one or other; and whenever he caught the word, he fell into a towering passion, broke off the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... world to construct sound theories. Physical science at that time was the most uncertain of all knowledge, although there were great pretenders then, as now, who maintained it was the only certainty. But the speculations of scientists disgusted him, for he saw nothing in them upon which to base incontrovertible truth. They were mere dreams and baseless theories on the origin of the universe. They were even puerile; and they were then, as now, atheistic in their tendency. They mocked the consciousness of mankind. They annihilated faith and Providence. At best, they made all things subject to necessity, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... wherever it existed. He won many of his lawsuits by the straightforward method of showing that the one or two vital statements on which the whole case of the opposition rested were false, inasmuch as they were inconsistent with well-established and incontrovertible facts. An instance of this ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... little. Machiavelli always refused to write either of men or of governments otherwise than as he found them, and he writes with such skill and insight that his work is of abiding value. But what invests "The Prince" with more than a merely artistic or historical interest is the incontrovertible truth that it deals with the great principles which still guide nations and rulers in their relationship with ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... shown in nervous disorders, and are therefore likely to tell most heavily on those who engage in intellectual pursuits, and perhaps on women rather more than on men. The sterilising effects of women's higher education in America are incontrovertible, though this inference is hotly denied in England. At Holyoake College it was found that only half the lady graduates afterwards married, and the average family of those who did marry was less than two children. At Bryn ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the air of injured innocence. The Squire, however, with all his benevolence of heart, and his lurking weakness towards the prisoner, was too conscientious to swerve from the strict path of justice. There was abundant concurring testimony that made the proof of guilt incontrovertible, and Starlight Tom's mittimus ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... the while it is to be admitted that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed, no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the pacifists' quest ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... the former one; for by its aid was established nothing less than the inconstancy of matter. Hitherto science, dealing not with knowledge, but with opinions, had held the belief that the atom is the ultimate form of matter and that no chemical or physical force can divide it, a teaching held to be incontrovertible. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... The incontrovertible part was that things came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late '80's when the two Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile away to Stackpole Brothers' ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... trick upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... result on humans. I agree. Proven with full scientific rigor, no. In fact, at present, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood's of being so, yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes! But provable to the most open-minded, scientific sort—probably not for a long time. However, the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to find some quantifiable method of gauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable indicator, ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... present to set me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one in the company oblige me? I take that now for an incontrovertible"—he stammered over this word—"proof of the truth of the Bible. But I am wandering from my subject, which error, I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, to excuse, for I am no longer what I was in the prime of youth's rosy morn—come, I must get on! Change the slide, boy; I'm sick of it. I'm sick ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... where mischief makers were actively working in the German cause. Nor can there be any doubt that the brilliant campaign in Palestine prevented British and French influence declining among the Mahomedan populations of those countries' respective spheres of control in Africa. Indeed I regard it as incontrovertible that the Palestine strategy of General Allenby, even apart from his stupendous rush through Syria in the autumn of the last year of war, did as much to end the war in 1918 as the great battles on the Western Front, for if there had been failure or check in Palestine some British ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... no faith in medicine. He spoke of it as an art entirely conjectural, and his opinion on this subject was fired and incontrovertible. His vigorous mind rejected all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... his father's estates, according to the legal will, which I produced; that is to say, the three lordships of Pakratz, Prestowacz, and Pleneritz, without chattels or personal effects. Nothing could be more just or incontrovertible than this claim. What was my astonishment, to be told, in open court, that Her Majesty had declared I must either wholly perform the articles of the will of Trenck, or be excluded the entire inheritance, and have nothing further to hope. What could be done? I ventured to remonstrate, but the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... great truth in the Science of being, that the real man was, is, and ever shall be perfect, is incontrovertible; 200:18 for if man is the image, reflection, of God, he is neither inverted nor subverted, but upright ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... friendship dwindled into a ridiculously small compass. I cannot give you the particulars of the cross-examination, though it was conducted with great spirit and humour by Miss Broadhurst; but I can tell you the result—that Sir Arthur Berryl, by incontrovertible facts, and eloquence warm from the heart, convinced every body present that he had the best friend in the world; and Miss Broadhurst, as he finished speaking, gave him her hand, and he led her off ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... other communities have been heard to comment in resentful and carping tones. There has probably never existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the setting up of an unreal ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... here introduce a vast amount of incontrovertible evidence to show that, if the attendance of all the children in any commonwealth could be secured at such improved common schools as we have been contemplating for ten months during the year, from the age of four to that of sixteen years, they would prove competent to the removal of ninety-nine one ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... "The votes shall then be counted" are the words. Thus, when in 1876 it was doubtful whether Tilden or Hayes had been chosen President, a fierce controversy arose as to who should count the votes, the President of the Senate or Congress. While many regretted the absence of an incontrovertible provision, it was fortunate for the country that the Constitution did not provide that the vote should be counted by the President of the Senate, who, the Vice President having died in office, was in 1877 a creature of the partisan majority. It is doubtful, too, if the decision of such an officer ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... will believe me," he thought. "But will he dare to take any action in the matter without incontrovertible evidence?" ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... always fell into such a morass of pros and cons that his brain grew dazed, and he gave the problem up altogether. But the great, incontrovertible fact remained—he was headlong in love with Mollie, and had followed her to Washington expressly to ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... if you have already made up your mind, or can make it up on the instant: for in case you choose to remain here and carry on my business, I must secure you the means of exerting yourself usefully, by a number of arrangements and explicit incontrovertible injunctions in my will; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... waiter, and the ostlers acted as a sort of supernumerary police, to repress the multitude; while Peter held the real pony by the bridle, whose identity, which he frequently attested, was considered by all present as an incontrovertible evidence of the commission of ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... can be greater than this, and at the same time more incontrovertible? But it has nothing to do with memory; on the contrary, it is just because the clerk has no memory that his action of the second day so exactly resembles that of the first. As long as he has no power of recollecting, he will day after ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... increased humanity; and in part it may be so, for the nature of a people can never undergo a sudden and entire change. But I can myself vouch for the lenity which they displayed when they have had the power, and to wit great provocation, to have acted otherwise. The incontrovertible facts, too, remain that Mussulman Turkey has been the first to relinquish the unchristian custom of decapitating prisoners, and other inhuman practices, which the so-called Christians appear little inclined to renounce. This will, of course, meet with an indignant denial ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... of the marriage of Violet Dalston, then only eighteen years of age, with a Mr. Grainger; the birth of a son; and subsequent disappearance of the husband; concluding by an assurance to the jury that I should prove, by incontrovertible evidence, that Grainger was no other person than the late Sir Harry Compton, baronet. This address by no means lessened the vague apprehensions of the other side. A counsel that, with such materials for eloquence, disdained having ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... his own he did not sign. What he did do was to pass the book round to be countersigned by all who had formed the court in this mock trial, his object being to implicate every one there present in the judicial murder by the direct and incontrovertible evidence of his sign-manual. Now, Boers are simple pastoral folk, but they are not quite so simple as to be deceived by a move like this, and hereon followed a very instructive little scene. To a man they had been willing enough to give their verdict for the execution of Silas, but they were by ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... while existing eminences are being slowly lowered, others, in order to supply their place, are being slowly elevated; and that what is lost in beauty or healthiness in one spot is gained in another. But I cannot assent to such a conclusion. Evidence altogether incontrovertible points to a state of the earth in which it could be tenanted only by lower animals, fitted for the circumstances under which they lived by peculiar organizations. From this state it is admitted gradually to have been brought into that in which we now see it; and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... was beautiful.... The Prince paid us two visits, but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such entire reliance on your faith, such confidence ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... alliance between the two crowns; and declaring that his master would take proper measures against such hostilities. The Scots affirmed that the natives of Darien were a free people, who the Spaniards had in vain attempted to subdue; that therefore they had an original and incontrovertible right to dispose of their own lands, part of which the company had purchased for a valuable consideration. But there was another cause more powerful than the remonstrances of the Spanish court to which this colony fell a sacrifice; and that was the jealousy of the English traders and planters. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... and a complaisant judiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on the Continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were to propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, he would see ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... condition of the country too well—she knew the powerful influence of Mr. Folliard in his native county—she knew what the consequences to Reilly must be of taking away a Protestant heiress; the fact was there—plain, distinct, and incontrovertible, and she knew that no chance of impunity or acquittal remained for any one of his creed guilty of such a violation of the laws—we say, she knew all this—but it was not of the fate of Reilly she thought. The girl was an acute observer, and both a ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... recovering himself Dexter was about to dash at his assailant when he stopped short, for an idea that seemed incontrovertible struck him so sharply that it drove away all thought of the ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Binks, that the proposition is incontrovertible; any thing that is worth doing is worth ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced. The only natural passion is self-love or selfishness ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Paris, a dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself— illuminating like the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... they look amongst the most highly civilized peoples or amongst the lowest savages; whether they look into the past history of mankind or into its present condition, there is the stupendous fact of sin, and there is the incontrovertible fact that everywhere men ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... his grandchild.'" (Here Lionel sighed heavily—sigh like Sophy's.) "'You will rejoice yet more to learn that it has pleased Heaven to allow me and another witness, who, some years ago, had been misled into condemning Waife, to be enabled to bear incontrovertible testimony to the complete innocence of my beloved friend; nay, more—I say to you most solemnly, that in all which appeared to attest guilt, there has been a virtue, which, if known to Mr. Darrell, would make him ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Afraid of making admissions to their opponents, we believe that none of them have fully developed the phenomena of human spontaneity. Even Edwards ridicules the idea of the faculty or power of will, or the soul in the use of that power determining its own volitions. Now, we hold it to be an incontrovertible fact, and one of great importance, that the true determining cause of every given volition is not any mere anterior incitement, but the very soul itself, by its inherent power of will."(38) Surely, the author of such a passage cannot be accused of being ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... court whose "findings" are incontrovertible, and whose sessions are held in the chambers of our own ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates—and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... factor in happiness, money is of twentieth-rate importance or fiftieth-rate importance. But it cannot be argued whether money, in point of fact, does or does not of itself bring happiness. There can be no doubt whatever that money does not bring happiness. Yet, in face of this incontrovertible and universal truth, the whole public behaves exactly as if money were the sole or the principal preliminary to happiness. The public does not reason, and it will not listen to reason; its blood is up in the money-hunt, and the philosopher might as well expostulate with an earthquake as try ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three, or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon, has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to buds, to the blossoming ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... and Droctoveus; no one bears the name of the Clerk Alexander; no one, in find, came from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Compared with the MS. described by Mr. Thompson, they are only as straw to gold. I have seen with my eyes, I have touched with my fingers, an incontrovertible testimony to the existence of this document. But the document itself—what has become of it? Sir Thomas Raleigh went to end his days by the shores of the Lake of Como, whither he carried with him a part of his literary wealth. Where did the books go after ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the only rational procedure is to begin by determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that several copyists, independently reproducing an original free from errors, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... pronounced incurable by the best surgeons of France, Germany, and Switzerland; a leading physician testified to the recovery of a hopeless patient of his own; a burned foot, which was about to be amputated to prevent impending death, was healed without means. The evidence was incontrovertible, and the cases numerous. The cure was often contemporaneous with the confession of Christ by the unbelieving patient; but duration of the sickness varied with each case. Lunatics were commonly sent ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... completely impenetrable defense against attack is still not possible, total defensive strength must include civil defense preparedness. Because we have incontrovertible evidence that Soviet Russia possesses atomic weapons, this kind of protection becomes ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... opinion that consumption is incurable, there exists ample, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Its curability is established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Individuals have recovered in whom there was extensive destruction of pulmonary tissue, and, indeed, entire destruction of one lung. Numerous instances are on record in which persons have suffered from all ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... means to procure the best physique possible; a mind disciplined to meet to the greatest advantage all the vicissitudes of life; an intellect developed along the lines of its greatest possibilities; and an occupation chosen in accordance with the tastes and talents of the individual; it becomes an incontrovertible fact that the education is the controlling factor in the physical life ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Lindley combats very eagerly the doctrine that varieties of the apple and pear, or indeed of any tree, die naturally of old age; but the only incontrovertible fact which he adduces in support of his argument, is the existence of the French White Beurre pear, which has flourished from time immemorial. His denial of the decay of the Golden Pippin, the Golden {437} Harvey, and the Nonpareil, will not, I think, be allowed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... his young pupil. The first point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Foerster's attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Foerster's evidence appears incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its faults a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we are accustomed to say that modern civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has not to surmount the obstacle of an older society, firmly ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... great hope. From the first moment that she comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so incontrovertible did it seem. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... prosperity of the settlement in general. This abandonment, therefore, or rather intended abandonment of the old town, has been dictated by the soundest principles of policy and justice; but although the equity of the maxim that the interests of the few should cede to the good of the many, is incontrovertible, it is nevertheless to be hoped, that some means will be contrived of indemnifying the inhabitants of Launceston for the great injury which they will suffer from the removal of the seat of government ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... Urga a Mongol came to our camp in great excitement and announced that we had one of his horses. He said that five animals had been stolen from him and that the little brown pony for which I had traded with the lama was one of them. His proof was incontrovertible and according to the law of the country I was bound to give back the animal and accept the loss. However, a half dozen hard-riding Mongol soldiers at once took up the trail of the lama, and the chances are that there will be one less thieving priest ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... an excellent reason—to you it is, I believe, the incontrovertible reason—why you should once more give up and lose, and not take. But, deeper than that, to me more insurmountable than that, is the true reason, which is simply that that very thing—to lose, to do without—is your business in life, as you've said yourself. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... and spoke as follows:—Sir, I am very far from thinking the authority of these learned gentlemen, whose letters are produced, incontrovertible proof of the justness of an interpretation of an act of the senate, where that interpretation is not in itself warranted by reason, nor consistent with the preservation or enjoyment of property. Much less shall I agree to support their interpretation by a new law; or establish, by an act of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... few. The result, in any case, is the orthodox theory of rent. The labourer gets less than he would if the products of the soil were equally distributed. Both wages and profits must fall as more is left to rent, and that this actually happens, he says, with unusual positiveness, is an 'incontrovertible truth.'[285] The fall enables the less fertile land to be cultivated, and gives an excess of produce on the more fertile. 'This excess is rent.'[286] He proceeds to expound his doctrine by comparing land to a set of machines for making corn.[287] If, in manufacture, a new machine is introduced ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 1777 and to Dr. Dodd of 26 June were of the sort that an enterprising lady might well have wheedled copies from the Doctor. The important point is that the inclusion of the letters in the 1789 printing of the Enquiry provides incontrovertible proof of Miss ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds |
