"Insecurity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... episode seemed merely funny to me. But when one of the vagrant impulses of fear, common in that age of perpetual insecurity, moved within me, I was struck with my own loneliness. I was made suddenly aware of Lop-Ear's remoteness out there on that alien element a few feet away. I called loudly to him a warning cry. He awoke frightened, and shifted his weight rashly on the log. It ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... his cause. I wonder if this avowal will seem odd to Englishmen of the next century! To Englishmen of the present one, a Roman Catholic and a lover of priestcraft and tyranny are two words for the same thing; as if we could not murmur at tithes and taxes, insecurity of property or arbitrary legislation, just as sourly as any other Christian community. No! I never loved the cause of the Stuarts,—unfortunate, and therefore interesting, as the Stuarts were; by a very stupid and yet uneffaceable confusion of ideas, I confounded it with ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... drawn by four horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of travelling on foot—the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and admire the scenery was an unknown ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of uncertainty and insecurity. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... are prone to the same sort of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something. One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the utmost. Spy you insecurity?—a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no attack on his shores, there is no proof that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... insinuation, that death was a less severe enactment than perpetual imprisonment. He pointed out the impossibility and injustice of compelling the municipalities to take charge of the prisoners—the insecurity of those towns, as places of detention—the almost entire certainty, that the men would ere long be released, either by some popular tumult, or some party measure; and he concluded with a forcible and earnest peroration, appealing to the Senators, by their love of life, of their families, of their ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... very, very beautiful," she sighed, "but not like home. One tries to get used to it, and does for a time; but there is always that strange feeling of insecurity which will suggest what might happen—we so few, the people here so many, and always looking upon us as infidel intruders who have forced themselves up here to make a home in their very midst. I am too impatient," she added, with a sigh, as she turned ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... the fastenings. "Nothing. I can't see one thing. We simply lie open to each other, you and I. There isn't one new corner in either of us that she could reveal. It's only that I always have in this house the most awful feeling of insecurity." ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... too late, the insecurity of his position, and endeavored to provide a temporary remedy. There was a height near the city, called by the Moors Santo Albohacen, which was in front of the bridge. He ordered several of his most ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... on his wedding-tour with his fair young wife Pamella. Lord Cookburn looks jealously at Fra Diavolo, though he does not recognize in him a brigand. The English are robbed by Diavolo's band. Disgusted with the insecurity of "la bella Italia" they reach the inn at Terracina, where the dragoons, hearing the account of this new robbery, believe that it was Fra Diavolo with his band, and at ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... military stores and the non-combatant inhabitants of Dundee. This reply raised a new point. To send the whole of the rolling-stock—and nothing less would suffice—would be to expose it to the gravest danger, for the railway line was in hourly insecurity. Two hours after the despatch of his first telegram, therefore, Sir George White sent a second, which became the determining factor ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... of wealth to the country, is still in an extremely primitive condition. The ignorance and conservatism of the peasantry, the habits engendered by widespread insecurity and the fear of official rapacity under Turkish rule, insufficiency of communications, want of capital, and in some districts sparsity of population, have all tended to retard the development of this most important industry. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to inflict pain on respectable married women. On the whole, a policeman was not an ideal person to marry. The hours at which he came home were liable to constant and vexatious changes, so that there was a continual feeling of insecurity, which was bad for housekeeping; and if one had not stability in one's home all discipline and all real home life was at an end. There was this to be said for them—that they all loved little children. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the insecurity of life and property in the region adjacent to the Canadian border, by reason of recent assaults and depredations committed by inimical and desperate persons who are harbored there, it has been thought proper to give notice that after ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... he heard himself yelling at Moore, who in the insecurity of his tubbiness was jarred and almost overturned, "you're robbing them of their country. You're taking away the thing that keeps them from falling down on all-fours and going back to brute beasts. My God, Moore, you're a traitor! You ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... the Lady's daily employment; her spindle and distaff, her Bible, and a solitary walk upon the battlements of the castle, or upon the causeway, or occasionally, but more seldom, upon the banks of the little lake, consumed the rest of the day. But so great was the insecurity of the period, that when she ventured to extend her walk beyond the hamlet, the warder on the watch-tower was directed to keep a sharp look-out in every direction, and four or five men held themselves in readiness to mount ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... coal for munitions and transportation purposes, simply because sufficient tonnage could not be placed at their disposal. Our own food supplies were causing anxiety, and the maintenance of the forces at Salonika afforded constant proof of the insecurity of the Mediterranean as a sea route. But fatuous diversion of shipping represented quite a minor objection to this opera-bouffe proposal. For, allowing for railing troops from the Western Front to the Cote Azure and embarking them, and for the inevitable delays in landing a ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... freshness of the trail, and we can study his character and purposes. The large boots betoken a wood-man or ice-man: yet such a one would hardly have stepped so irresolutely where a little film of water has spread between the ice and snow and given a look of insecurity; and here again he has stopped to observe the wreaths on this pendent bough, and this snow-filled bird's-nest. And there the footsteps of the lover of beauty turn abruptly to the road again, and he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... unheard-of catastrophe had come about, and what was going to happen next? The first and universal feeling was one of amazement, which amounted almost to mental paralysis, and then came a sickening sense of insecurity. For two generations the Fleet had been trusted implicitly, and invasion had been looked upon merely as the fad of alarmists, and the theme of sensational story-writers. No intelligent person really trusted ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... of doors in the midst of pelting rain was by no means pleasant, although there was no perceptible variation in the usual temperature of the climate. Still there existed in the breasts of all so strong a feeling of insecurity so long as the "fort" remained unbuilt, that they determined rather to suffer the unpleasantness of being daily drenched to the skin than to protract the uneasy feeling of defencelessness which ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... and farmers turned to account, by disastrous monopoly and jobbing. To increase the difficulty, the assignats were falling into discredit, and their value diminished daily. More than eight milliards worth of them had been issued. The insecurity of this paper money, by reason of the revolutionary confiscations, which had depreciated the national property, the want of confidence on the part of the merchants, tradesmen, etc., in the stability of the revolutionary government, which they considered merely provisional, all this had ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... some economic progress in Iraq, and Iraq has tremendous potential for growth. But economic development is hobbled by insecurity, corruption, lack of investment, dilapidated infrastructure, and uncertainty. As one U.S. official observed to us, Iraq's economy has been badly shocked and is dysfunctional after suffering decades of problems: Iraq had a police state economy in the 1970s, a war economy in the ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... means on the best of terms. Spanish war-vessels in the West Indies had been overhauling American merchantmen in a high-handed way, which had already called forth the remonstrances of our Government; and the complaints from Cuba of the insecurity of property and life of American citizens had become more numerous than ever. Still, the result of the dispute was a surprise to the world; especially as the overt act of rupture had come from Spain, and not from ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... trust a woman," he answered coldly. "All the time I have the feeling of insecurity. I fear that it must sound ungallant if I tell you what is the sober truth—that your sex for the present has lost all charm ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gradually induced by a like motive to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful. It can be little doubted, that if the state of Rhode Island was separated from the confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government within such narrow limits, would be displayed by such reiterated oppression of the factious majorities, that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... was just telling your uncle, it is a mere matter of form to ask if I have slept. I seldom sleep, especially if I am up-stairs. The servants over my head, it may be,—or if not that, I have the feeling of insecurity,—stairs, you understand, in case of fire. Dear William had my rooms fitted up on the ground floor. 'Sophronia,' he said, 'you must sleep!' I suppose it is necessary, but I am so used to lying awake. Such frightful noises in the walls, my dear ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... "I should do away with all interest on money. Interest on money is the root and ground of the world's troubles. It puts one man in a position of safety, while another is in a condition of insecurity, and thereby it at once creates a radical distinction ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... independent or semi-independent tribes, behind whom looms the grim figure of Russia, daily advancing into clearer outline from the opposite or northwest quarter. It is to protect the Indian Empire, its peoples, its trades, its laboriously established government and its accumulated wealth from the insecurity and possible danger arising from a further Russian advance across the intervening space that the frontier which I am about to describe has been traced and fortified. Politicians of all parties have agreed that, while the territorial aggrandizement of Russia is permissible over ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... those who traced us; and though for the moment we were secure, because we never went abroad, and could not have been naturally sought in such a neighborhood, still that very circumstance would eventually operate against us. At length, every night I dreamed of our insecurity under a thousand forms; but more often by far my dreams turned upon our wrongs; wrath moved me rather than fear. Every night, for the greater part, I lay painfully and elaborately involved, by deep ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... early times. After the Romans left the island, the British, or more probably the Teutonic tribes settled along the south coast, continued the smelting and manufacture of the metal after the methods taught them by the colonists. In the midst of the insecurity, however, engendered by civil war and social changes, the pursuits of industry must necessarily have been considerably interfered with, and the art of iron-forging became neglected. No notice of iron being made in Sussex occurs in Domesday Book, from ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... whole mind and judgment carries you in either case to the pope—or to the devil. So I think. Don't let them bind you hand and foot. Resist. Be yourself. Also where (as in the medium-writing) you have the human mixture to evolve the spiritual sentiment from, the insecurity becomes doubly insecure.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... show how benevolent and beautiful this new feudalism of ours will be, Mr. Ghent says: "Peace and stability it will maintain at all hazards; and the mass, remembering the chaos, the turmoil, the insecurity of the past, will bless its reign. . . . Efficiency—the faculty of getting things—is at last rewarded as it should be, for the efficient have inherited the earth and its fulness. The lowly, whose happiness is greater and whose welfare ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... load my rifle again. While doing so, I could hear the savages chattering violently. They had evidently discovered the insecurity of their position, and felt that, if they staid there long enough, they would certainly be shot. I did not deem it prudent to remain where I was any longer, lest the enemy should take it into their heads to charge upon the gully. I retreated a few ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... she means to conquer; she all but succeeds, she just fails. Her campaign and its untimely end are to be pictured; it is an interlude to be filled with stir and glitter, with the sense of the passage of a certain time, above all with intimations of insecurity and precarious fortune; and it is to lead (this it must do) to a scene of final and decisive climax. Such is the effect to be drawn from the matter that Thackeray has stored up—the whole hierarchy of the Crawleys, Steyne, Gaunt House, always with ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... endless dialogue in the boat; the even more tedious happenings in the local law-court; the very externals—relaxing wind and fantastic landscape and volcanic phenomena—the jovial immoderation of everything and everybody: they foster a sense of violence and insecurity; they all tend to make the soil receptive to new ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... continued to be unchallenged until a time came[211] when the small holders, yielding to the pressure of debt and bankruptcy, sought their champions amongst the tribunes of the Plebs. The absolute control of the public domain by the State, the absolute insecurity of the tenure of its occupants, furnished an excellent opportunity for staving off schemes of confiscation and redistribution of private property, such as had often shaken the communities of Greece, and even for refusing to tamper with the existing law of debtor and creditor.[212] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... at the moment was one of considerable insecurity. By holding on to his mane and wriggling backward I hoped to stay on, provided he did not put down his head. If he did that, I was lost. Fortunately for me, however, Dr. Bell did not realize with what ease he could have dropped me at that moment, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... "praise-house," now used for commissary purposes. The chair is a composite structure: I found a cane seat on a dust-heap, which a black sergeant combined with two legs from a broken bedstead and two more from an oak-bough. I sit on it with a pride of conscious invention, mitigated by profound insecurity. Bedroom furniture, a couch made of gun-boxes covered with condemned blankets, another settee, two pails, a tin cup, tin basin (we prize any tin or wooden ware as savages prize iron), and a valise, regulation ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... first feel of insecurity behind, Torode slipped deftly out of the saddle. He still held the reins and endeavoured to drag the poor beast up. But Black Boy's heels were kicking frantically, now on thin air, now for a second against an impossible slope of rock which offered no foothold. For a moment ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... thought it no shame to dismount more than once. The rolling of a stone, or the parting of stirrup, girth, or crupper, would have involved the safety of one's neck. Nor did the very common sight of wooden crosses along the path, indicating sudden death by accident or crime, tend to lessen the sense of insecurity. The frequent casualties among these precipitous paths, together with the healthfulness of the climate, have made it a proverb, that it is a natural death, at St. Antonio, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks. But such was not our fate. We at length ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... disturbances occur with such frequency and violence as to influence their lives. There can be no question that wherever earthquakes occur in such a measure as to produce widespread terror, where, recurring from time to time, they develop in men a sense of abiding insecurity, they become potent agents of degradation. All the best which men do in creating a civilization rests upon a sense of confidence that their efforts may be accumulated from year to year, and that even after death the work of each man ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the Blue Book as a documentary "I told you so," and a proof that, whoever else was blinded, he foresaw. It contains, however, the following remarkable passage:—"Even were it not impossible, for many other reasons, to contemplate a withdrawal of our authority from the Transvaal, the position of insecurity in which we should leave this loyal and important section of the community (the English inhabitants), by exposing them to the certain retaliation of the Boers, would constitute, in my opinion, an insuperable obstacle to retrocession. Subjected to the same danger, moreover, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... the falling-off in the overseas trade of Amsterdam was to transform this great commercial city into the central exchange of Europe. The insecurity of sea-borne trade caused many of the younger merchants to deal in money securities and bills of exchange rather than in goods. Banking houses sprang up apace, and large fortunes were made by speculative investments in stocks and shares; and loans for ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... by the recent whitening and pointing of the masonry; but the not infrequent bulging piers, particularly those nearest to the transept crossing, give a suggestion of ungainliness if not of actual insecurity. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... keeping out of the market the goods of his competitors. The predominant character of such a society is vast and boundless wealth, but, on the other hand, a great instability of all relations, an almost continual, anxious insecurity in the position of each individual, together with a very unequal sharing of the returns of production among those ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... assertion of British sovereignty by which the prohibition was qualified was not likely to be specially impressive. The islanders acquiesced in the decision with stolid patience, but, undeterred by the consequent insecurity of tenure, settled as squatters in the unappropriated lands. As recently as forty years ago their title was still unrecognized, and the presence of thousands of settlers with indeterminate claims had become a dangerous grievance. In 1881 Sir William Whiteway, then Premier of the colony, paid a visit ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... a slight disposition to stretch his lean limbs unduly, and a feeling of insecurity attending his first efforts to stand, he was not aware of any inconvenience from his ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... to business and those other women let lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close resolves itself into a villa at Morningside Park and my father being more and more cross and overbearing at meals—and a general feeling of insecurity and futility." ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... by the fact that at the end of the sixteenth century, when some of the land came to be broken up, the produce per acre of wheat had gone up largely.[195] Marling and liming the land, too, which had been the salvation of much of it for centuries, had gone out partly because of insecurity of tenure, partly because in the unsettled state of England men knew not if they could reap any benefit therefrom; and partly because, says Fitzherbert, men were lazier than their fathers. There ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... say that all people who commit suicide are sane, no more than I say that all people who do not commit suicide are sane. Insecurity of food and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of insanity among the living. Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a class of workers who live from hand to mouth more than those of any other class, form the highest percentage of those in the lunatic asylums. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... to him that he believed it to be just. He had a tenderness and compassion of nature which restrained him from ever doing a hard-hearted thing; and, therefore, he was so apt to grant pardon to malefactors, that the judges of the land represented to him the damage and insecurity to the public that flowed from such his indulgence. And then he restrained himself from pardoning either murders or highway robberies, and quickly discerned the fruits of his severity by a wonderful reformation ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... cell, he began to think of Glory. By the broken links of memory he remembered for the first time, since coming into the monastery, the condition of insecurity in which he had left her. How uncertain her position at the hospital, how perilous her relations ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... new Liberalism parts with laissez-faire, and those who defend it. It assumes that the State must take in hand the problems of industrial insecurity and unemployment, and must solve them. The issue is vital. Protection has already made its bid. It will assure the workman what is in his mind more than cheap food—namely, secure wages; it affects to give him all his life, or nearly all his life, a market ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... a brighter outlook, a more confident hope of being able to keep his head above water. The experience of life suggests that hope is a better stimulus than fear, confidence a better mental environment than insecurity. If desperation will sometimes spur men to exceptional exertion the effect is fleeting, and, for a permanence, a more stable condition is better suited to foster that blend of restraint and energy which makes up the tissue of a life of normal health. There ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... seditious movements showed the insecurity of the situation. At the beginning of 1556 traces were detected of a plan for plundering the treasury in order to levy troops with the money.[176] The Western counties were discontented because Courtenay was removed from among them: he died subsequently in Italy. Sir Henry ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... slavery is surrounded with danger. [Applause.] Has the history of antiquity been written in vain? Does it not teach us that not only domestic and social pollutions are the inevitable results, but does it not teach us also that political insecurity and political revolutions as certainly slumber beneath the institution of slavery as fireworks at the basis of Mount AEtna? [Cheers.] It cannot but be so. Men no more than steam can be compressed without a tremendous revulsion; and let our brethren in America be sure of this, that the longer ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... entered a protest against the "spes ultima gregis," meaning myself, being left at home in times so perilous, and when all who could effect it were hurrying into garrisoned towns, and abandoning, for crowded lodgings, homes whose superior comforts were abated by their insecurity. The order for a general movement was consequently issued, and on the 22d of June we commenced our journey ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... by Persians, and the insecurity which prevails everywhere, the process of convincing the natives that a piece of printed paper is equivalent to so many silver krans, and that the silver krans will surely be produced in full on demand is rather a slow one; but the credit of the Imperial ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... on, scarcely able to keep down the rising tone of indignation at such seeming heartlessness, 'Ernest doesn't earn even that always. Sometimes he earns nothing, or next to nothing; and it's the uncertainty and insecurity that tells upon them even more than the poverty itself. Oh, Father, Father, you who have always been so good and kind, I never heard you speak so cruelly about anyone before as you're speaking now about that poor, friendless, helpless, penniless, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... destruction. Even after Hawke's decisive victory at Quiberon had completed the overthrow of the enemy's sea forces, a British transport was captured between Cork and Portsmouth, and an Indiaman in sight of the Lizard, while Wellington's complaints in the Peninsula of the insecurity of his communications are well known.[9] By general and permanent control we do not mean that the enemy can do nothing, but that he cannot interfere with our maritime trade and oversea operations so seriously as to affect the issue of the war, and that ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... their happening. Not that they omitted to do these things deliberately, but were lulled into a state of selfish inaction from which it needed such a tragedy as this to arouse them. It was a cruel necessity which demanded that a few should die to arouse many millions to a sense of their own insecurity, to the fact that for years the possibility of such a disaster has been imminent. Passengers have known none of these things, and while no good end would have been served by relating to them needless ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... think me very stupid," resumed the old lady after a slight pause, her face grown grave again, "but for weeks past, even before this happened, I've had such an odd sense of insecurity, a presentiment of trouble. I'm not given to feelings of that kind, which makes this one more noticeable. I can't explain it, but there it is—a kind of foreboding that ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... realization that this belief was mistaken has thrown a good many people into a state of very genuine bewilderment, but it is an uncertainty, not as to what is firm ground, but as to how to get out of a bog, once having gotten in. For the most part, however, the general feeling of insecurity is due not so much to having knowingly overstepped the law, as to a change in economic conditions. The spirit of the time is one of cooeperation and combination. It is manifested in the churches and colleges as well as in the marketplace. In the industrial arena, the tendency has been intensified ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... system of slavery avenged itself on the state. The advantages to the intellect of the free citizens resulting from the existence of a class maintained to relieve them from the drudgeries of life, were dearly purchased by the constant insecurity of their political repose. The capital of the rich could never be directed to the most productive of all channels—the labour of free competition. The noble did not employ citizens—he purchased slaves. Thus the commonwealth derived the least possible advantage ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... criminal establishment is just what it was forty years ago. In the next place, a police force is the consequence of a previous vast accumulation or crime, and is never established till the risk to life and insecurity to property had rendered it unbearable. Being always established by the voluntary assessment of the inhabitants, nothing can be more certain than that it never can be called into existence but by such an increase of crime as has rendered it a matter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... young man. Although he himself grieved for Gordon's wife, and Gordon himself filled him with covert anxiety, yet he was young and the girl was young, and they were both released from a miserable sense of insecurity and mystery, which had irritated and saddened them; their thoughts now turned toward their own springtime, as naturally and innocently as flowers bloom. There was grief, and the shadow of trouble, but of past trouble; their eyes looked upon life and love and joy instead of death, as helplessly ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... one career left to woman, but a general looseness of grammar, and a conscious insecurity in the matter of spelling, stand in the way of literary expression of the burning thoughts within her. All she can do is to moan over her lot and to take refuge in the works of Miss Hominy. There she learns the great theory ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... make an angry reply when he looked at McCarty, who suddenly leaned back against the tree. At the same moment a feeling of insecurity overtook him. He started again to make an angry answer and then all pugnacious thoughts left him. He sat down suddenly, his head swam on his shoulders and about him the woods danced in drunken reelings, sweeping grotesque ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... individuality, must create an opposition and so beget an enemy. Not only do nations issue forth invigorated from their wars, but those nations torn by internal strife win peace at home as a result of war abroad. War indeed causes insecurity in property, but this real insecurity is only a necessary commotion. From the pulpits much is preached concerning the insecurity, vanity, and instability of temporal things, and yet every one, though he may be touched by his own words, thinks that he, at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... urge their light and noiseless boats across the river, satiate themselves with plunder and murder in the British town, and return with their spoils to their own territory, where they were secure from British retaliation. The English general, knowing the insecurity of the mission-house, had urged Mr. B. to remove with his family to the protection of the fort; but his object was to benefit the Burmans, and to do that, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... its members, and the natural reaction of generous indignation in repelling them; while the city in its more stationary and native classes would very soon have manifested THEIR awful sense of things, of the hideous insecurity for life, and of the unfathomable dangers which had undermined their hearths below their very feet, by sacrificing, whenever circumstances allowed them, their houses and beautiful gardens in exchange for days uncursed by panic, and nights unpolluted ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Patricia turned her attention to the laughable parodies and excellent dances and necromancy that filled the first half of the program. It was all hugely diverting, and she laughed and applauded with the rest, but all the while at the back of her mind there was a little uneasiness, a sense of insecurity and disillusionment that flavored all the gayety with its fleeting bitterness. She was uneasy till she had found Elinor and in the telling of the insignificant incident had regained enough confidence to laugh at ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... and full of small villages, and the soil is so rich that little labour is required for its cultivation. It is, however, the chief district whence slaves are obtained, and a feeling of insecurity ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... gasp, and Frederick the Great found himself in so desperate a position that he had resolved on committing suicide. Again, after Jena, Berlin was occupied by the French, and for five years remained under the yoke. Insecurity has been for generations the law of Prussian existence. The Prussian State has known many ups and downs and has passed through many tragic vicissitudes. They managed to turn geographical and military necessities to the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... general air of slatty insecurity and the sight of a basket of ancient cobs in one corner, Kenny wished passionately that he hadn't always hated spiders, killed one with a shudder and pensively watched the sunset through the corncrib bars. It made him think of flamingoes in flight. One saw ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... past few years, Afghanistan is extremely poor, landlocked, and highly dependent on foreign aid, agriculture, and trade with neighboring countries. Much of the population continues to suffer from shortages of housing, clean water, electricity, medical care, and jobs. Criminality, insecurity, and the Afghan Government's inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose challenges to future economic growth. It will probably take the remainder of the decade and continuing ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that decimated towns and villages every few years, the flood of spurious and indecent relics, the degradation of the clergy and monks, the slavery of the serfs, the daily brutalities of the ordeal and the torture, the course and bloody pastimes, the insecurity of life, the triumphant ravages of disease, the check of scientific inquiry and a hundred other features of medieval life." ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rocks, from fire streams, from evil vapours, from sudden fissuring of the ground, and from other movements of those unstable territories, and from the greater lizards and other monstrous beasts which haunt them. These keep constant in the memory the might of the Holy Gods, and the insecurity of this frail earth on which we have our resting-place, and so the sojourners there become chastened in the spirit, and gain power over mysteries which even the most studious and learned of other men ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... and insecurity of their power, has always led petty chiefs to seek the support of some powerful suzerain. In 1876 the Mehtar of Chitral, Aman-ul-Mulk, was encouraged to seek the protection, and become the vassal of our vassal, the Maharaja of Cashmere. In accordance ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... we saw many things which drew our attention and excited our interest. Most of the villages along our route were surrounded by high mud walls, and had only one entrance by a great strong gate, which was shut at night, reminding us of the insecurity from which this part of India had emerged when it came under British rule within the memory of men then living. Villages thus fortified, if sufficient watch was kept, were quite secure against the sudden raids of Mahratta horsemen, or the attacks ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... gospel, however orthodox he might have been. In 1816 the situation of the working classes had become almost intolerable. Towards the end of the year wheat rose to a quarter, and incendiarism was common all over England. A sense of insecurity and terror took possession of everybody. Secret outrages, especially fires by night, chill the courage of the bravest, as those know well enough who have lived in an agricultural county, when, just before ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... means the only dangerous task she had to undertake in those years of civil war and insecurity. When Lucretius left her they seem to have been staying at the villa where her parents had been murdered; she had given him all her gold and pearls, and kept him supplied in his absence with money, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... approached more nearly, they discovered marks of recent additions to the defences of the place, which had been suggested, doubtless, by the insecurity of those troublesome times. Additional loop-holes for musketry were struck out in different parts of the building, and of its surrounding wall. The windows had just been carefully secured by stancheons ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... sent one way, silver another, and when the latter accumulated, as we were on the spot, my father dismissed his anxiety, and we were gradually becoming lulled into a feeling of repose, save when Bigley talked about his father, and then once more a little feeling of doubt and insecurity would slip in, as might have been the case in the olden times when the people near shore learned that some Saxon or Danish ship was ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... Here lay the insecurity of the orthodox champions. They stumbled on, fully accepting, when they could not help themselves, the progressive developments of thought, yet loudly condemning any one who was a little further ahead upon the road, until they had caught ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sisterly. Thus the bungalow caged through the opening of wintry weather these tenants of woe who had come like the birds for sunshine and summer only. Since the community continued in absolute ignorance that any crime had been committed, there was no sense of insecurity or apprehension of danger, other than might menace any country house, isolated and secluded in situation. The normal precautions were taken, the household was strengthened, and Mrs. Marable, Lillian's aunt, or rather her uncle's wife, who had come to her at the first news of her ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the same gentleman remarks:—"There is not the slightest feeling of insecurity—quite the contrary. Property is more secure, for all idea of insurrection is ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... inevitable, and proved, on the whole, benignant. It was simply the question whether the Romans should have civil wars and anarchies and factions, which decimated the people, and kept society in a state of fear and insecurity, and prevented the triumph of law, or whether they should submit to an absolute ruler, who had unbounded means of doing good, and whom interest and duty alike prompted to secure the public welfare. The people wanted, above all things, safety, and the means of prosecuting their various interests. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... provisions failing, he sent them back to San Domingo, and set out on his return by land. Roldan accompanied him a little distance on horseback, evidently disturbed in mind. He feared to return to Spain, yet was shrewd enough to know the insecurity of his present situation at the head of a band of dissolute men, acting in defiance of authority. What tie had he upon their fidelity stronger than the sacred obligations which they had violated? After riding ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... it was the battle-field of violent feuds between the Emperors and their vassals. The second half of that century was filled with the struggles between Henry IV. and Pope Gregory VII. The clergy, hitherto the chief support of German literature, became estranged from the German people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits. Williram's German had lost the classical correctness of Notker's language, and the "Merigarto," and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... to attend an evening mass at a distant church, had but just returned, and was changing her garments, which had been wetted by the storm. There were as yet no tidings of Gurth and his charge, which should long since have been driven home from the forest and such was the insecurity of the period, as to render it probable that the delay might be explained by some depreciation of the outlaws, with whom the adjacent forest abounded, or by the violence of some neighbouring baron, whose consciousness of strength made ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Sainte, L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) more mildly expresses it, in the laws. The application of this principle would, on account of the extreme changeableness of the laws of every state, lead to most extreme insecurity, and to a steady oscillation from one Utopia to another, from one revolution to another, if it were not, at the same time, recognized that each one had a just title to the acquisitions he had made, not because the law, for the time being existing, acknowledged the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Albanian attacks and the growing insecurity in Northern Epirus the Greek Government today ordered Greek troops to occupy the districts of Argyrocastro and Premeti. The official communique just issued declares this to be an entirely provisional measure ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... from house to house, seeking in vain from some safe retreat from the cold. The street pump, which had a small opening just over the handle, was an attraction which they could not resist. And yet they seemed aware of the insecurity of the position; for no sooner would they stow themselves away into the interior of the pump, to the number of six or eight, than they would rush out again, as if apprehensive of some approaching danger. Time after time the cavity was filled ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... can estimate the evil effect that corruption in politics has had upon the national character. When we add the indirect effects- the distortion of the public news-service, the protection of vice, the insecurity of justice-the moral evils of political corruption are seen to ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... whispering to him: "You will have to go through with this. You are in charge of this." He thought of HIS wife and child, innocently asleep in the cleanly pureness of HIS home. And he felt the roughness of his coat-collar round his neck and the insecurity of his trousers. He passed out of the room, shutting the door. And across the yard he had a momentary glimpse of those nude nocturnal forms, unconsciously attitudinizing in the bakehouse. And down the stairs came the protests ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... into another's hands and now the anchor was dragging. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a rift in his relations with Elizabeth; with a sudden surging doubt, not of Elizabeth herself but simply a feeling of insecurity with regard to their future. He only realised in those moments how much he had leaned upon her, how completely she seemed to have extended over him and his troubled life some sort of sheltering influence, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you. I certainly mean me. I mean the rich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful, the idle and the diligent, the luxurious and the austere. For, what with the limits of digestion, the practical impossibility of wearing two neckties at once, the insecurity of investments, the responsibilities of wealth and of success, the exhaustingness of the search for pleasure, and the cheapness of travel—the real differences between one sort of plain man and another are slight in these times. (And ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... by the British Euphrates expedition in 1841 to connect Aleppo with the sea by steamer through the nearest point on the Euphrates, Meskine, failed owing to the obstructed state of the stream and the insecurity of the riparian districts. The latter drawback has been minimized by the continued success of the Aleppo administration in inducing the Anazeh Bedouins to become fellahin; but river traffic has not been resumed. A railway, however, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a waltz, I believe," she said, striving to speak naturally; but her pulses had begun to stir again; the same inexplicable sense of exhilaration and insecurity was creeping ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... one shot expended, was getting cautious. Peeping round his sheltering tree, General D'Hubert could not see him at all. This ignorance of his adversary's whereabouts carried with it a sense of insecurity. General D'Hubert felt himself exposed on his flanks and rear. Again something white fluttered in his sight. Ha! The enemy was still on his front then. He had feared a turning movement. But, apparently, General Feraud was ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurity—inexplicable in a religion that explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... already manifest; its enabling the advocates of the hypothesis of a multiplicity of human species to perceive the double insecurity of their ground. When the races of men are admitted to be of one species, the corollary, that they are of one origin, may be expected to follow. Those who allow them to be of one species must admit an actual diversification into strongly-marked and persistent varieties, and so admit ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... of insecurity was felt, the india-rubber-like film giving way easily and springing up again, while the old muttering and murmuring noises thrilled beneath ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... advanced and stood calmly and fearlessly at the side of the two white men. Still there was ferocity in his look, and an indecision in his movements. He certainly might betray the adventurers at any instant, and they felt all the insecurity of their situation. But accident had brought Nick directly in front of the opening through which was obtained the view of the Hut. In turning from one to the other of the two soldiers, his quick eye took in this glimpse of the buildings, and it ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper |
