"Negligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... groups and leaders: various Arab nationalist movements with almost negligible memberships may be functioning clandestinely, as well ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... life, the furniture and decorations and architecture of our houses, or the clothes and buckles and brooches of our dress, bore no relation to the feelings and sentiments of those that used them. That is not a tenable proposition. The external fabric of life is not a negligible quantity but a real factor. On the one hand, it is hardly credible that an unromanized folk should adopt so much of Roman things as the British did, and yet remain uninfluenced. And it is equally incredible that, while it remained ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... surface-velocity increases with the distance from the epicentre, until, at the antipodes of that point, it is again infinite. But, as the depth of the focus is always slight compared with the radius of the earth, the small circular area surrounding the epicentre is practically negligible, and we may regard the surface-velocity of the waves that traverse the body of the earth as a quantity that continually increases with the distance ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln are still vital to the life of to-day, and of the statesmen there are a few, like Franklin, Hamilton, Webster, Calhoun and Clay, whose influence is still felt in our national life, but the remainder are negligible, except that you must, of course, be familiar in a broad way with their characters and achievements to understand your ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... States did not have at hand exactly the munitions needed, if the transportation system had not been built to launch an army into Cuba, it was popularly supposed that the wealth of the country rendered such trifles negligible, and that, if insufficient attention had been given to the study of such matters in the past, American ingenuity would quickly offset the lack of skilled military experience. The fact that American soldiers ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... certainly not embraced it," replied Harley, quietly, "nor has it hitherto come within my experience. But since I have lived much in the East, I am prepared to learn that Voodoo may not be a negligible quantity. There are forces at work in India which we in England improperly understand. The same may be true ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... hare. But a hare is a gentle and altogether negligible wild-person. This hare, however, was fighting, and fighting like several furies, and grunting, and making all sorts of unharelike motions and commotions against another beast; and that other beast was most ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... doctor, "based on so summary an examination are necessarily inexact, yet the value of a first impression is not negligible. The best I can say is that there is probably no immediate danger, but Mr. Cumberland is seriously ill. Furthermore, it ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... warriors and old men, their faces relaxed into holiday expressions. Toward the river end of the gauntlet were stationed the youngest, the most vigorous, the most fun-loving of the women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really little children. Every woman and child in the two rows was armed with a savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of their speed and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... one danger which Mrs. Wibberley-Stimpson foresaw. At any time she might encounter the Duchess of Gleneagles or Lady Muscombe in Society. However, she decided that the risk was almost negligible. After all, their respective circles could not be said to intersect and, if she ever should come across either of these distinguished ladies, it would be easy to deny all recollection of ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... they did not expect, I can only say that the question of perspective, of the relative importance of things, has all along received my careful attention. Thoroughness is very alluring, but life is short and some things must be taken for granted or treated as negligible. Otherwise one runs a risk, as German experience proves, of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... which they never took altogether seriously. There is a certain pleasure in believing that you believe in a cause, that you are fighting, or will fight, for it,—or at least could fight. There is a by no means negligible satisfaction in the thought that you are ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... here on the Moon surface was negligible—a scant one five-thousandth of the atmospheric pressure at the sea level on Earth. But within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth pressure must be maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive tendency, with no external pressure to counteract ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights, and she was not crying now. Her eyes were brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them. All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... way this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of those times, as an example of that classical renaissance which the romantic period fostered, they may not be altogether negligible. ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Her theory of the universe, as the girl who watched her now was beginning to find out, was impregnable and unapproachable. Events which conflicted with it were either not events, or they were so exceptional as to be negligible. If she were hard pressed she emitted a pathetic peevishness ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... did not maintain a violent bombardment at many points along the entire front. Especially frequent and severe was the gunfire which the Germans directed against the Dvina sector of the Russian positions. But, just as in the past weeks, the result, though not at all negligible as far as the damage inflicted on men, material, and fortifications was concerned, was practically nil in regard to any change in the location of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... trance the bodily processes are so near to absolute suspension that the air and food consumed are practically negligible. On this reasoning, partly, was based my defiance of Warden Atherton and Doctor Jackson. It was thus that I dared challenge them to give me a hundred days in the jacket. And they did not dare accept ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of water with an enema bag is very impractical when a person is eating normally. But on a light cleansing diet or while fasting the amount of new material passing into the colon is small or negligible. During the first few days of fasting if two or three enemas are administered each day in immediate succession the colon is soon completely emptied of recently eaten food and it becomes progressively easier to introduce larger amounts of water. Within a ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... them, not by their uniforms but by their type. Despite their costumes, which were negligible, they were eloquent of college campuses in every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin-hipped, alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a dazzling sunlight made that beautiful countryside ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence—but I couldn't get up any real sentiment of offence. He did not despise me for anything I could help, for anything I was—don't you know? I was a negligible quantity simply because I was not the fortunate man of the earth, not Montague Brierly in command of the Ossa, not the owner of an inscribed gold chronometer and of silver-mounted binoculars testifying to the excellence of my seamanship and to my indomitable pluck; ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... standard of size. My own little offerings were thoughtfully chosen. A match-box, a lace handkerchief or two, a cigarette-holder, a pencil and note-book, Gems from Wilcox, and so on; such gifts not only bring pleasure (let us hope) to the recipient, but take up a negligible amount of room in one's bag, and add hardly anything to the weight of it. Of course, if your fellow-visitor says to you, "How sweet of you to give me such a darling little handkerchief—it's just what I wanted—how ever did you think of it?" you do not reply, "Well, it ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... of John is a surprise after the others. Matthew, Mark and Luke describe the same events in the same order (the variations in Luke are negligible), and their gospels are therefore called the synoptic gospels. They tell substantially the same story of a wandering preacher who at the end of his life came to Jerusalem. John describes a preacher who spent practically his whole adult life in the capital, with occasional visits to the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Jack MacRae came down to Vancouver and quartered himself at the Granada again. He liked the quiet luxury of that great hostelry. It was a trifle expensive, but he was not inclined to worry about expense. At home, or aboard his carriers in the season, living was a negligible item. He found a good deal of pleasure in swinging from one extreme to the other. Besides, a man stalking big game does not arm himself ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of the Treasury's war record. Other departments of State had swollen to amazing dimensions during the war. The Treasury, while its work had been multiplied a hundredfold, had increased its personnel by only a negligible percentage. It was the cheapest of all the departments, the most efficient, and the most powerful. The War Office, the Admiralty, and perhaps one other department presided over by a personality whom the Prime Minister feared, did certainly defy and ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... impressions has poured in upon me—to say nothing of the anxious consideration beforehand of topics of conversation, and modes of investigation! To stay in a new house crushes me with fatigue—and even a little party like this, which seems, I daresay, to some of you, a negligible, even a tedious thing, is to me rich ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... made a big hole in the strengths. Officers were always getting killed—often, alas, their own fault, through excess of zeal; and men used perpetually to lose their lives through getting out of the trenches in order to stretch their half-frozen limbs. Sickness was, strange to say, almost negligible. There were far more cases of arthritis and other things due to cold wet feet than anything else; and the men were extraordinarily healthy, comparatively speaking, considering the desperately uncomfortable ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... in the neighborhood of Perthes, a less important engagement took place. The Germans, under General von Einem, opposed General Langle de Cary and his French forces. The results of this engagement were negligible. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Committee, pointed out from the start that the reopening of the Exchange hung upon a favorable swing in the balance of trade. When the indebtedness of the United States to Europe could be offset by our exports the danger of reestablishing our market would become negligible, and this shrewd adviser predicted that the desired reaction in foreign exchange was much closer at hand than was generally supposed. The most valuable of his admonitions, and the words which did most to strengthen the ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... a woman's natural instincts to select her mate. There are fools who envy the noble and the wealthy. They are little to be envied, those poor pawns in the game of statecraft, moved hither and thither at the will of players who are themselves no better. The human nature of them is a negligible appendage to the names and rent-rolls that predetermine their place upon the board of worldly ambition, a board befouled by blood, by slobberings from the evil mouth of greed, and ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... tribulations, and a wasting frame seemed only to sharpen the wits of the indomitable warrior. New Songs (1844) contains, along with negligible cynical pieces, a number of love songs no whit inferior to those of the Book of Songs, romances, and scorching political satires. The Romanzero (1851) is not unfairly represented by such a masterpiece as The Battlefield of Hastings. And from this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... say of him now, in the land of his exile and temporary adoption, "Ah, Lord," or "Ah, his glory!" Only in his duplicated domestic circle was he in anywise missed; polities had shifted the ground from under him, and he had become negligible. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling of a complication. Denouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and no native word has as yet, by common consent, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... remembered that "women are of no great account" is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the amount of current stored in the battery and the strength of the current from the generator. When the battery is "full," this regulator is "open" and permits no current to flow. Then the dynamo is running idle, and the amount of power it absorbs from the gasoline engine is negligible. When the "level" of electricity in the battery falls, due to drawing current for light, the regulator is "shut," that is, the dynamo and battery are connected, and ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... extraordinary rich spring of life in him, really amazing, the way he can give himself to things. But there are so many things in life that he simply doesn't know. Either he is not aware of their existence at all, or he dismisses them as merely negligible—things which are vital to the other person. In a way, he is not clever enough, he is too intense ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... this pleasant theory after Mr. ASQUITH had dealt it a few of his sledge-hammer blows. "So far as we know," he said, "the influence of the Reichstag, not only upon the composition but upon the policy of the German Government, remains what it has always been, a practically negligible quantity." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. But I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the story, the happy little strokes of humour and irony, the apt, pert thumbnail-sketches of the subsidiary characters, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... which he had been invited and his excuse pleaded a sudden business trip. Days lengthened into weeks, and when he did not return there was a ripple of surprise and conjecture at his abrupt evanescence, but the varied festivities of the approaching holiday season ousted him from his rather negligible place in ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... Bellamy declared restlessly. "England has been ill-governed for a great many years, but we are not yet a negligible Power." ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... secret discomforts in the young man's soul; and while he sported with Fanny he did not forget business. The tenant of Beechcote was, ipso facto, of some social importance, and Diana was reported to be rich; the Roughsedges also, though negligible financially, were not without influence in high places; and the doctor was governor of an important grammar-school recently revived and reorganized, wherewith the Birches would have been glad to be officially connected. ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... France, as compared with Italy, is a fact of deep and permanent importance. In years to come the French will grow more and more negligible, numerically, in world politics, but the French spirit is immortal and unconquerable. It will penetrate the hearts of the best men for ever, and ideas characteristically and originally French will continue to ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... foe. Against no other social evil was the testimony of Jesus so trenchant and uncompromising. Nothing more clearly evinces his unerring vision of moral realities than his judgment upon this encroaching passion. In his day it was an evil almost negligible compared with what it is to-day. It was because he foresaw the conditions which prevail to-day that his words were so hot against the rule of Mammon. The church is face to face with the danger which he discerned, ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... proportions.[266] In the language of a recent opinion: "It is beyond serious question that a tax does not cease to be valid merely because it regulates, discourages, or even definitely deters the activities taxed. * * * The principle applies even though the revenue obtained is obviously negligible, * * *, or the revenue purpose of the tax may be secondary, * * * Nor does a tax statute necessarily fall because it touches on activities which Congress might not otherwise regulate. As was pointed out in Magnano Co. v. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest training camp that was to fit them for France ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... have a very negligible reputation for industry in this menage. How do you think I spend ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... is perhaps the "furthest" of the Unthinkable in literature), and (not, it may be owned, quite inconsistently) hints that the connection was merely Platonic throughout. These things are explicable, but better negligible. For my own part I have always thought that the loves of Tristram and Iseult (which, as has been said, were originally un-Arthurian) suggested the main idea to the author of it, being taken together with Guinevere's falseness with Mordred in the old quasi-chronicle, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... closely written pages of manuscript. In his pocketbook were sixteen hundred dollars, and a document indicating a credit for a very much larger amount at the United Bank of New York, in favor of Merton Ware and another. The remainder of his belongings were negligible. He stood at the window and looked out across the city, the city into whose labyrinths he was so eager to penetrate—the undiscovered country. By day and night its voices were in his ears, the rattle and roar of the overhead railway, the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... must be held to include invention; but invention is only one of the less important elements of imagination; and it is the element which seems to be more or less negligible when the other elements are amply developed. La Fontaine, one of the most individual of French poets, devised only a few—and not the best—of the delightful fables he related with unfailing felicity. ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... (I didn't doubt that for an instant.) He went on to remark that he knew many men in many walks of life, and only two of them owned a trousers-press, and they shared it between them. Yet the inventor of this apparently negligible article had made a small fortune out ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... violence sprung up; but the output of envelopes, planes and cars was by this time so good that a ship could be replaced at a few hours' notice, and the cost compared with building of additional sheds was so small as to be negligible. ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... itself, ripping asunder the veil which the years between have woven and refashioning the dead past for us as vividly as though it had never died. Even the very atmosphere of the moment rushes back, and thoughts and feelings we had begun to believe inert and negligible reassert themselves with the old irresistible force with which they swayed ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... importance. She has developed a certain antagonism to France by her Morocco policy, and may, therefore, become eventually a factor in German policy. The petty States, on the contrary, form no independent centres of gravity, but may, in event of war, prove to possess a by no means negligible importance: the small Balkan States for Austria and Turkey; Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, and ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... the density, the gain is effected in the same manner, namely, by avoiding violent shocks, which strain the glass much beyond its limit of elasticity. If the frequency could be brought high enough, the loss due to the imperfect elasticity of the glass would be entirely negligible. The loss due to bombardment of the globe may, however, be reduced by using two electrodes instead of one. In such case each of the electrodes may be connected to one of the terminals; or else, if it is preferable to use only one wire, one electrode may be connected ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... for instance, is a vital compelling force in one individual, and is so weak or deficient in another as to be a negligible quantity, what is the explanation of this difference? What influence has developed the sentiment in one, and retarded or eliminated it in the other? On what does it depend? What causes it to come to life in the human soul? What good is it, when it ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... the first theory, then, we can readily see that ancient texts are not essential to its acceptance. In any case the entire body of Arthurian texts prior to the twelfth century is so small as to be almost negligible. The statement that "hardly any ancient traditions" of the Arthurian legend exist in Brittany is an extraordinary one. In view of the circumstances that in extended passages of Arthurian story the scene is laid ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Round Table. On three legs. Hasn't even as much stability as the Canada First minority—most of whom are not in Quebec. These are the negligible but uncomfortable extremists." ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... made off. Winter had done all the talking, but Theydon was far too disturbed to pay heed to the trivial fact that Furneaux, after one swift glance, seemed to regard him as a negligible quantity. It was borne in on him that the detective evidently believed he had something of importance to say, and meant to render it almost impossible that he should escape questioning while his memory was still active with reference ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... knows no laws except those of which Prussia is sole beneficiary. Only that which is profitable to Prussia is good; the rest, all the rest, is a negligible quantity. Moral precepts, religious brotherhood, higher education by force of example, a sense of justice applied to the fair apportioning of influence, vested rights, and a reasonable idea of reciprocity—all ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... generous, well-chosen dietary, Jan's development during all this time was largely influenced by two factors—the constant companionship of Finn, and the fact that all the human folk with whom he came into contact, barring a largely negligible ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... anatomical connection between the organs of hearing and those of speech; and the structure and functioning of each are such as to preclude any direct pathological relation. The number of the so-called deaf and dumb, moreover, who are really dumb is very small—so small actually as to be negligible. Almost all who are spoken of as deaf and dumb have organs of speech that are quite intact, and are, indeed, constructively perfect. It comes about, however, that dumbness—considered as the want of normal and usual locution—though organically separate from deafness, is a natural ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... The Grants were Virginians, like Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligible quantity. Two of the group—Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant's mother—had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy. These were eye-witnesses, and with their ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... with dignity, "that I consider Germany best-fitted to carry out the plan. I think you will agree with me that, if a single nation is to undertake it, it must be one of the five great nations. In world-politics, the others are negligible. Well, let us see. France, a nation of peacocks, excitable, impressionable, easily angered, making much of trifles, jealous of their dignity, a dying nation which grows smaller and weaker every year. England, also a degenerate nation, soaked in gin, where a hundred thousand men are unemployed, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... like a log and was awake, anxious to turn out, at the peep of dawn. But Gates was ahead of me when I reached the deck. Our anchor had just been hoisted, and every sail was set, though nearly limp with a negligible breeze. ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... compulsory upon all normal people; and until the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired, clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances, most of them ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... of the storm. Nobody ate. Nobody drank. Everybody shuddered and tried by every means to avoid catching father's rolling eye and thereby attracting the direct blast of the tempest. Rosalie, who of course, being a completely negligible quantity in the rectory, is not included in the everybody, simply stared, more awed and enthralled than ever before. And with much reason. As he declaimed of the glories of the colleges of Cambridge there was perceptible ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... either his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and, succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over dead flats of commonplace. Let me tell you next that the instances you will find in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible; and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared with a passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Take this, for ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine out of ten ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... same point of entry in the larva's throat. Between the two opposite slants of the sting, which is itself very short, what can the distance be? Two millimetres (.078 inch.—Translator's Note.), perhaps less. That is very little. No matter: let the operator make a mistake of this length—negligible, you may tell me—let the sting slant towards the head instead of slanting towards the thorax; and the result of the operation will be entirely different. With a slant towards the head, the cerebral ganglia are wounded and their ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... disguises Kathlyn and Bruce made a handsome pair of high caste natives. The blue eyes alone might have caused remarks, but this was a negligible danger, since color and costume detracted. Kathlyn's hair, however, was securely hidden, and must be kept so. A bit of carelessness on her part, a sportive wind, and she would be lost. She had been for dyeing her hair, but Bruce would not hear of ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... head. She had the appearance of having suddenly become oblivious to him—not finding him a culprit, she had brushed him aside as negligible. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Baines? I don't remember to have ever read anything on the niceties of the art of scouring clubs. It is a subject on which the writers of golfing articles—prolific enough, as Heaven knows, about other and more negligible aspects of the game—seem to have adopted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible factor, the atmosphere, the conditions, the associations, that help greatly to breed incorrigibles, truants, and laggards in our schools; that develop juvenile delinquents, hasty marriages, and early divorces; that send into ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... of different sorts of people, some sailing about upon floating masses of irresponsible property, some buoyed by smaller fragments, some clinging desperately enough to insignificant atoms, a great and varied multitude swimming successfully without aid, or with an amount of aid that is negligible in relation to their own efforts, and an equally varied multitude of less capable ones clinging to the swimmers, clinging to the floating rich, or clutching empty-handed and thrust and sinking down. This is the typical aspect of the modern community. It will serve as a general description ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... perhaps suggested details in Shakespeare's plays. Of plays so influenced, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and Henry VIII are the chief. But the debt is negligible at best, so far as the general student ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of victory, and very cock-a-hoop now that Russia and Roumania were knocked out, and Italy, so they said, so thoroughly defeated as to be quite a negligible factor in the future. Our enemies could not conceal their joy at the good news their wireless brought them. They crowed over us, and at mealtimes the Captain explained how, with the "three and a half ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... it, however, except mathematically; because she's altogether too full of too many new and untried mechanisms, too many extrapolations beyond all existing or possible data. Theoretically, she is sound, but you know that theory can go only so far, and that mathematically negligible factors may become operative at those velocities. We do not need a crew for a short trip. We can take care of any minor mishaps, and if our fundamental theories are wrong, all the crews between here and Jupiter wouldn't do any good. Therefore we ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... invasion were attempted, the attacking fleet could cripple or destroy the defending fleet and then institute a blockade. In modern times an effective blockade, or at least a hostile patrol of trade routes, could be held hundreds of miles from the coast, where the menace of submarines would be negligible; and this blockade would stop practically all import and export trade. This would compel the country to live exclusively on its own resources, and renounce intercourse with the outside world. Some countries could exist a long time under these conditions. But they would exist ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... significance; mine, perhaps, a special one. Here was a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to make himself understood or even to know what persons were saying; his education was extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write, for a period of years, to the largest body of readers ever addressed by an American editor—the circulation of the magazine he edited ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... less per capita than, for instance, the Steel Construction Workers' Union of Earth. Granted, there are more death claims, but these are more than compensated for by the fact that the claims for disability and hospitalization are almost negligible." ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... Webster Publishing Company were by this time getting into a very serious condition indeed. The effects of the panic of the year before could not be overcome. Creditors were pressing their claims and profits were negligible. In the following letter we get a Mark Twain estimate of the great financier who so cheerfully was willing to undertake the solving of Mark Twain's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it impossible to fix his mind on the play; the cues of the first act eluded him, and the characters and dialogue were too commonplace to make the story negligible. ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... deduction on Sarah's part, however, was made rather negligible by experiments presently carried out by the porter, Fairlow, with the aid of a piece of string. He showed that a person outside the shut door could quite easily pull the bolt ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... jealous, didn't do John Berridge the honour to be, to the extent of the least glimmer of a spark of it, but was so happy to see his immortal mistress do what she liked that he could positively beam at the odd circumstance of her almost lavishing public caresses on a gentleman not, after all, of negligible importance. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... What a negligible fraction of my few pages would this one lazy day of mine occupy! But then, will not this peaceful day, on the desolate sands by the placid river, leave nevertheless a distinct little gold mark even upon the scroll of my ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... all, the Chinese people, four hundred millions of them, are a negligible quantity. The ultimate decision rests with a dozen high officials. It simply remains to influence these officials, and the thing is done. They are of three types: those, like the Vice-president, open ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... inactivity might rescue her from the tornado which had swept her off her feet. In any case, she must fight her own battles, irrespective of the cabal entered into in Paris. Captain James Devar was an impossible ally; the French Count was a negligible quantity when compared with an English viscount whose ancestry threw back to the Conquest and whose estates covered half of a midland shire; but there remained, active as ever, the self-interest of a poor widow from whose despairing grasp was ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... creative energy but which it can never exhaust, or touch the limit of? The body of this being would be in fact its own "objective mystery," while our "objective mystery" would be recognized as disappearing in the same reality. Does this hypothesis reduce the tragedy of life to a negligible quantity, or afford a basis upon which any easy optimism could be reared? It does not appear so. Wherever personality existed, there the ultimate duality would inevitably reign. And just as with "the invisible companions" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... that, notwithstanding the splendid verse and the abounding wisdom of the speeches, the personages do not seem to be made of genuine human stuff. As a great thinker's comment on the Revolution the Natural Daughter is almost negligible. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... also the noble, patriotic and self-sacrificing work carried on in the House at Question-time. (Loud cheers.) But he was sorry to say that there still remained a considerable and, alas! not wholly negligible number of persons in the country who hugged the quaint superstition that a Cabinet Minister could be earnest, capable and diligent. It was these benighted folk whom they desired to reach and convert. Not till every Englishman had been convinced that England was rotten could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... planning nothing, Stephen, nothing to meet this. You are fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the private jealousies that centre about us, feuds, cuts, expulsions, revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. You treat us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in the woodwork of a house that ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... justified in looking upon the problem of the girl before that age as almost identical with her brother's. Yet we must be reasonably cautious, since our knowledge is small, and there is some by no means negligible evidence of fundamental physiological differences between the sexes before puberty, relatively slight though these may be. Therefore, though on the whole we need make few distinctions between the girl and her brother, and though we are doubtless ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... adherents of the papal power were strong and influential, and the personal character, whatever might be said of his political principles,—the personal character of Pio Nono was singularly winning, and this was by no means a negligible factor in the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... Thomas, however, never did realise what a deadlock is; he goes on till he gets what he wants. So you see them in pairs, taking up a stolid position at the counter, obstinately stating and re-stating their demands in a composite language of which the foreign element is almost negligible, until the merchant or his wife gives in and produces the article required. I know one simple soldier who managed to reconcile himself to the confirmed habit amongst the French people of addressing each other in the French language, but could never understand their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... silence was better than the banal platitudes which were all she had to offer. Her range was so restricted, his—who had travelled the world over—must be so great. With the exception of one subject her knowledge was negligible. But he too was an artist—hopeless to attempt that topic, she concluded with swift contempt for her own limitations; to offer the opinions of a convent-bred amateur to one who had studied in famous Paris ateliers and was acquainted with ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the other hand, had they drunk whisky, I should have drunk whisky with them. From this it must not be concluded that I was merely weak. I didn't care. I had no morality in the matter. I was strong with youth, and unafraid, and alcohol was an utterly negligible question so far ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... lying down, soiling themselves and disarranging the bedding, which would, of course, entail trouble on the stable attendants. To such men, the good effect of liberty on legs and health is, of course, a negligible quantity. It is evident that the benefit of a loose box is nullified, if the animal in it is tied up. When we visit horses in their stable and find that they exhibit terror at our approach, we may conclude that their fear is due to bad management, ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... towards its equilibrium position at a rate depending in general terms on the elastic forces brought into play, directly, and on the effective moment of inertia of the rod, inversely (see Rayleigh, Sound, vol. ii. chap. viii.) If the mass of the arrow is negligible compared with the bow, the rate at which the arrow moves is practically determined by that attained by the end of the bow, which is a maximum in ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... bowed to him, but the General (who was wearing three stars on his green frockcoat) not only made no response to my salutation, but scarcely even looked at me; so that all at once I felt as though I were not a human being at all, but only some negligible object such as a settee or window; or, if I were a human being, as though I were quite indistinguishable ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... been for some time a negligible factor in the thought of most historians, except to be mentioned only to be condemned. So far as the history of the Negro is concerned, moreover, the field has been for some time left largely to those sympathetically inclined and lacking scientific ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... what she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a piteous idem in the column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the column of negligible quantities.... To die! Evidently, one does without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep, into swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... detected in the pleasure a child has in an actual walk. But the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets in the action itself. Small children's experiences are and should be pretty much continuous flows of more or less equally important episodes. Their stories should follow their experiences. They should have no climaxes, no sense of completion. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... flung on such a subject as the Nibelungenlied;[107] the amount of work expended on the subject by Germans during the century in which the poem has been known is enormous, and might cause despair, if happily it were not for the most part negligible. The poem served as a principal ground in the battle—not yet at an end, but now in a more or less languid condition—between the believers in conglomerate epic, the upholders of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... controversy about mere words. It is not so. These heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors—a matter common to it with the merest prose, plus a poetic form, as the one heresy says: a poetical substance plus a negligible form, as the other says—are not only untrue, they are injurious to the dignity of poetry. In an age already inclined to shrink from those higher realms where poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should count, that his life is negligible? Though Rodin has followed Flaubert's advice to artists to lead ascetic lives that their art might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colourless as it may seem to those who better love stage players and the watery comedies of society—this laborious life ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... manifestations of the "spirit" which was incarnated in herself and her helpers, and left behind her when she died, an immense personal fortune, and hundreds of prosperous churches. "Matter" does not seem to be altogether negligible, even for pure spirits who do not believe in its existence, and consider it an ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... been subjected to militarism or to the dominance of a military caste; we are both so situated geographically as to be dependent on sea power rather than on large armies, and not only do navies not endanger the liberty of peoples but they are negligible quantities politically. Great Britain had in 1914 only 137,500 officers and men in her navy and 26,200 reserves, a wholly insignificant number compared to the millions that formed the army of Germany and gave a military color to the whole life and ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... Darkness is coming down and the captain says that if we are not attacked within the next half-hour he will consider us practically safe. The danger of a night attack is almost negligible. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... feeling—the sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your life, been a sort of dream city? I didn't attach much importance to my superior years. I was forty-five, and she, poor thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she was older ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... might they protest against the desecration caused by the crawling of fifty house-flies on the dome of St. Paul's. These mountains and glaciers are so vast, and men with their railroads so small, that the latter are negligible in the presence of the former. No disfiguring effect whatever is produced by these mountain railways; the trains have even ceased to emit smoke since they were worked by electricity. I quite agree with those who object to "funiculars." The carriages on these are hauled up long, straight gashes ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the advice of the experts of the period, two lockups were installed, one without light. Experience soon convinced us that they could be dispensed with, and both were torn out. An honor system was substituted, to manifest advantage, and failures to return when boys are permitted to visit parents are negligible in number. The three months of summer vacation are devoted to berry-picking, with satisfaction to growers and to the boys, who last year earned eleven thousand dollars, of which seven thousand dollars was paid to the boys who participated, in ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... the flames were extinguished, or the amount of damage done. The British boast of successful air raids upon Cuxhaven, Zeebrugge, Essen, and Friedrichshaven. But if we take German official reports we must be convinced that the damage done was negligible in its relation to the progress of the war. In their turn the Germans brag mightily of the deeds of their Zeppelins over London, and smaller British towns. But the sum and substance of their accomplishment, according to the British reports, has been the slaughter and mutilation of a number of civilians—mostly ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... the memories of those who, by a rather extraordinary chance, would not doubt that psychology studies our thoughts. But whatever may be the number of these deeply ignorant persons, they constitute, I think, a negligible quantity; and, after these preliminaries, we must come to a real definition and not juggle with the problem, which consists in indicating in what the spiritual is distinguished from the material. Let us leave on one side, therefore, the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... although a corporate was stronger than an individual interest and rested on some public guarantee, the complaints of these townships, composed as they were of burgesses, were merely part of the civic question, and must have been negligible in comparison with the protests of the federate cities of Italy and the Latins. We cannot determine what grounds the Italian Socii had either for fear or protest. It is not certain that land had been assigned to them in usufruct,[445] and such portions of their conquered territories as had ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... feast with its procession of candlebearers was established by the Church to replace the riot and revels of the Pagan Lupercalia, is now rejected by scholars. For, processions, with or without lights, were so common amongst Pagans and Christians that any connection between these two feasts is negligible. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... only solace was golf. His late father had given him an excellent education, and, even as early as his seventeenth year, I believe, he was going round difficult courses in par. Yet even this admirable gift, which might have done him social service, was rendered negligible by the fact that he was too shy and shrinking to play often with other men. As a rule, he confined himself to golfing by himself in the mornings and late evenings when the links were more or less deserted. Yes, in his twenty-ninth year, Ramsden ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... worked hard in a garage by day and evenings he cultivated his flowers, his garden, and his family. He had health, plus contentment a-plenty. His possessions were few and the care of them consequently a negligible effort. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... a "native," Oscar showed a lack of proportion. A native, in the sense that he used the word, is a South Sea Islander, indigenous but negligible. Oscar was fooled, you see, by the Judge's old-fashioned clothes, and the high surrey, and the horses with the flowing tails. His ideas of life had to do with motor cars and mansions, and with everybody very much dressed up. He felt that the only thing in the world that ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... ipso facto detached from practical life. In so far as he is an artist, for each and every creative moment he is inevitably a bad husband, if being a good husband means constant attention to your wife and her interests. Spiritual creation a deux is a happening so rare as to be negligible. ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... unpleasantness that would ensue had been enough to make him regard such an action as out of the question. The risk was too great to be considered for a moment; but here he was, in a position where the risk was negligible! ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and the United States greatly outweighs the losses. In other words, the submarine, as an element in the settling of the war in a manner favorable to Germany, has steadily lost influence, and, while it is not now a negligible factor, it is, at least, a minor one and growing ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... are only happiness!" That's the whole view of man in a nutshell. Even the highest type of woman such an imagination as this can conjure up——' She shook her head. '"You are only happiness, dear"—a minister of pleasure, negligible in all the nobler moods, all the times of wider vision or exalted effort! Tell me'—she bent her head and looked into her companion's face with a new passion dawning in her eyes—'in the building of that City of ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... food or waterborne diseases: bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever vectorborne disease: malaria animal contact disease: rabies note: highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza has been identified in this country; it poses a negligible risk with extremely rare cases possible among US citizens who have close ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Below their negligible bodices hung draperies of brocade interwoven with metallic threads, of lace dyed the colors of exotic flowers, of tulle embroidered with iridescent beads. Parting into groups, they dotted the drawing-room with the gorgeousness of peacock blue and jade green, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... amiability, because she wasn't cold, and she'd been having a pretty good time. Her other (practically negligible) motive was that Penny might be reminded, by her withdrawal, of his forgotten promise to teach her to float—and be sorry. Altogether, George would have been showing only a natural and reasonable sense of his obligations ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... which he shared with five other rebels-convict, all of whom were to join in this bid for liberty, a ladder had been constructed in secret during those nights of waiting. With this they were to surmount the stockade and gain the open. The risk of detection, so that they made little noise, was negligible. Beyond locking them all into that stockade at night, there was no great precaution taken. Where, after all, could any so foolish as to attempt escape hope to conceal himself in that island? The ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini |
