"Selective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (1) Pictorial and Presentative. It presents to the author's mind, and through him to the minds of his readers, all the elements of human experience and life (drawing from his actual experience or his reading). 2. Selective, Associative, and Constructive. From the unorganized material thus brought clearly to the author's consciousness Imagination next selects the details which can be turned to present use, and proceeds to combine them, uniting scattered traits and incidents, perhaps from widely different sources, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and for the total population. Sex ratio at birth has recently emerged as an indicator of certain kinds of sex discrimination in some countries. For instance, high sex ratios at birth in some Asian countries are now attributed to sex-selective abortion and infanticide due to a strong preference for sons. This will affect future marriage patterns and fertility patterns. Eventually, it could cause unrest among young adult males who ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of Burbank's methods with man development, we perceive again how the principle of discriminative-selective training is applied to accomplish the growth of certain characteristics needed to assure a man's success. The plant wizard in his initial tests gave to his undeveloped prune trees particular food and conditions and treatment selected for the purpose of imparting ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... this term 'natural selection' is overlooked when people talk glibly about 'natural selection' of ideas. Darwin used the term 'natural selection' because he thought he saw an analogy between the tendency of nature and the selective purposes of intelligent beings. It was because nature, working without intelligence, produced the same kind of result as man does by intelligent selection, that he ventured to use this term 'selection' of the ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... observed that a storm-bound club could not presume to be selective, and they were all very much obliged to him for such a curious chapter from the domestic histories of ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... flock beneath the outstretched and low-hanging boughs as chickens huddle beneath the mother hen for protection and warmth. Where tender nurslings of this sort are scattered wide in other portions of the pastures to find them grouped here by the score means that some selective thought has brought it all about. I cannot, of course, say that the seedlings consciously choose. Nevertheless, somehow, that spirit of protecting love of which I am, myself, definitely conscious when I come near an apple tree has somehow drawn beneath it these plants of other ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... once in a thousand times. So they thrived, the handful who survived. But the white technicians they had kidnaped to run the ships didn't. For they set up a color bar in reverse. The lighter your skin, the lower you were in the social scale. By that kind of selective breeding the present Khatkans are ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... what he wants and breeds that kind. Similarly the horse-raiser will breed for race horses or dray horses as the case may be, and the system works with almost mechanical certainty. He gets what he wants and would never think of raising scrubs and taking a chance on results. The effect of selective breeding and culture is beyond dispute, and to many it seems obvious that all that is needed to perfect the human race and wipe out misery and crime is to supervise human breeding in the same way, so that the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... beings with each other, and the effect and interplay of emotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been obscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body on the soul and of the soul on the body. It came upon me with a shock of surprise that ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... very few lines in Statius that attain to real grandeur. In the lack of such lines, and in the lack of real breadth of treatment lies Statius' chief defect as a narrator. All that dexterity can do he does; but he lacks the supreme gifts, the selective eye and the penetrating imagination of the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Selection. These we may call its active properties—the summing up of what it does. But what any power does depends on what it is, for the simple reason that it cannot give out what it does not contain; therefore at the back of the initiative and selective power of the Spirit we must find what the Spirit is, namely, what are its substantive properties. To begin with it must be Life. Then because it is Life it must be Love, because as the undifferentiated Principle of Life it cannot do otherwise than tend to the fuller development of life ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... opposition to Darwin) that he had added nothing to Lamarck, it is very interesting to observe that the possibility of a fifth alternative, in addition to the four he has stated, has not dawned upon Dr. Whewell's mind. The suggestion that new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present—and which we call "spontaneous," because we are ignorant of their causation—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... one of the majors who wore the boots of the cavalryman, said, nastily, "Indeed? I recognize now that when I addressed you both as gentlemen, I failed to realize that in the West gentlemen are not selective of their company and allow themselves to wallow in the gutter with ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... profligate schemes and ideas fell to nought before the inexorable in her nature. And the inexorable in her nature was highly exclusive and selective, an inevitable negation of looseness or prostitution. Hence men were afraid of her—of her power, once they had committed themselves. She would involve and lead a man on, she would destroy him rather than not get of him what she wanted. And what she wanted was something serious ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... have said in the seventh essay, the fact of evolution is to my mind sufficiently evidenced by palaeontology; and I remain of the opinion expressed in the second, that until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation; ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... born to preferment and others to ignominy in order that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles, some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process—as heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding this process. That it is incapable of doing this is not to be hazarded. Not only is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... an historian so diffuse, and so little selective, it would obviously be difficult to give any suitably brief specimen that should seem to present a considerable historic action in full. We go to Froissart's account of the celebrated battle of Poitiers (France). This was fought ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... better. But you have relied, for the most part, on external means to accomplish such changes. You have spoken of extending or limiting the powers of government, of socialism, of anarchy, of education, of selective breeding. But you have not spoken of the Spirit and the Life, or not in the sense in which I would wish to speak of them. MacCarthy, indeed, I remember, used the words 'the life of the spirit.' ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... feature, then, great or small as it may be, which distinguishes natural species of animals. Can we find any approximation to this in the different races known to be produced by selective breeding from a common stock? Up to the present time the answer to that question is absolutely a negative one. As far as we know at present, there is nothing approximating to this check. In crossing the breeds, between the fantail and the pouter, the carrier and the tumbler, or any other variety ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... or emotional actions. Later he sought causes of these results. Here we have involved increased knowledge as a basis of human action and the use of that knowledge through discriminating intelligence. The intellect thus represents the selective and directive process in the use of knowledge. Hence, intelligent behavior of the individual or of the group comes only after accumulated knowledge based on experience. The process of trial and error ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Alice Drysdale Vickery gave striking expression to one phase of this subject at a recent discussion of the London Sociological Society. She urged that without economic independence the individuality of woman could not exercise that natural selective power in the choice of a mate which was probably a main factor in the spiritual evolution of the race. The American Journal of Sociology, Sept., 1905. ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanistic law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him as a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate and significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the film dramas of the moving picture houses. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... without fun. The world is, of course, the comparatively passive feminine world, but few modern books (if any) have treated of that world so happily, with such complete acceptance, unbiassed and unprejudiced, yet with such selective tact and variety of gaiety. She comes to the complete understanding of Henrietta by illuminating all the facets in her character and all the threads of her destiny, and this is an unusual achievement, ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... definite substances and leaves the unnecessary ones in solution, there is soon a cessation of the inward movement of the unimportant constituents of the soil solution. This process is often spoken of as selective absorption; that is, the plant, because of its vital activity, appears to have the power of selecting from the soil ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... one-millionth of a second. Therefore if waves strike this wire a million times a second they will reinforce one another and influence the coherer; whereas a less or greater frequency will leave it practically unaffected. By adjusting the receiving circuit to the transmitter, or vice versa, selective ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... many existing forests where absence of small trees will permit clean cutting without sacrifice, but the same condition is likely to occur eventually in stands following selective logging if the second cut is long delayed. Although a good representation of all ages under the diameter limit remains, the density of this may become too great to allow further reproduction, and in time the dominant trees will shade out all smaller growth. To allow this ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... their relations are alone at the focus of attention and which is ordinarily termed reasoning. Thus the outward form only of language is constant; its inner meaning, its psychic value or intensity, varies freely with attention or the selective interest of the mind, also, needless to say, with the mind's general development. From the point of view of language, thought may be defined as the highest latent or potential content of speech, ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... the Discovery, Extradition or Deportation of the Deserter.—The nation-wide registration of males between certain ages, under the Selective Service Act, was widely utilized by social workers in finding deserting men, with the hearty co-operation usually of the draft boards. This fact forms no argument for universal registration as it was carried on in Germany before the war; no system which meant such cumbersome machinery or so ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... action, and the intellectual strain of it; for the movement of a fencer is perfect in practised monotony; but the movement of the hand of a great painter is at every instant governed by direct and new intention. Then imagine that muscular firmness and subtlety, and the instantaneously selective and ordinant energy of the brain, sustained all day long, not only without fatigue, but with a visible joy in the exertion, like that which an eagle seems to take in the wave of his wings; and this all life long, and through long life, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... he wasn't the master's pick, by the reading-matter here. Probably clapped on to him by the owners—shifted from one of their others at the last moment; a queer trick. Listen." He picked up the book and, running over the pages with a selective ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... draperies, gestures, tones, and elocution which would be incongruous in a drama approaching more closely to the evolutions of ordinary experience, become, in the ideal drama, artistic modes of expression; and it is in these that Ristori displays a fine selective instinct, and a rare ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... from a single group or class. If we would prevent the growth of class distinctions and would constantly refresh our leadership with the ideals of our people, we must draw constantly from the general mass. The full opportunity for every boy and girl to rise through the selective processes of education can alone ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... and feeding of the young, the guardian-service of the queen; and far beyond that it would spread to the blue glory of the summer sky, the fresh winds, the endless beauty and sweetness of a thousand thousand flowers. It would treat of the vast fecundity of motherhood, the educative and selective processes of the group-mothers; and the passion of loyalty, of social service, which holds the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the conditions of our natural resources. We'll ask the Congress for $157 million beginning in 1985 to acquire new park and conservation lands. The Department of the Interior will encourage careful, selective exploration and production on our vital resources in an Exclusive Economic Zone within the 200-mile limit off our coasts—but with strict adherence to environmental laws and with fuller ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... of great feats of musical execution is already on the way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... that without a preliminary hypothesis he would see nothing at all except dire confusion. But an assumption such as that of "animism," has the selective power of a magnet, drawing to itself all congruous facts and little filings of probability, until it so bristles over with evidence that a hedge-hog ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... independent business of his own? But when in his follow-up letter he stated his proposition, offering state rights to his machine for $5,000, he shot over the heads of 99 per cent of the men who had answered his first letter. His inquiry letter had completely failed of its purpose. It was not selective, it was general. ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... original literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided. That majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern life ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his Adagia in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... "clean" bomb. So they were able to bring a loudspeaker van to its edge and boom at him to come out. He allowed them to do that for some inscrutable reason; perhaps to demonstrate that his powers were selective. Then it seemed he got tired of the farce, and cruel fingers twined themselves into the nerve centers of the President of Italy and the Prime Minister of the government of United Europe. He made them dance a horribly twisted pas de deux on the banks of ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... scientific use of the imagination we may hope to penetrate this mystery. The cloud takes no note of size on the part of the waves of aether, but reflects them all alike. It exercises no selective action. Now the cause of this may be that the cloud particles are so large, in comparison with the waves of aether, as to reflect them all indifferently. A broad cliff reflects an Atlantic roller as easily as a ripple produced by a seabird's wing; and in the presence of large reflecting ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When once liberated it becomes a new selective principle to which all others are subordinated. What, then, are the social conditions which promote or ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... of all that the United States has done to assist in bringing the war to its successful close, from the adoption of the selective draft down thru the management of the training camps, the operation of the railroads, conservation of food and fuel, to the knitting of a pair of socks and the sale of a thrift stamp, what shall be said of the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... damage if it did. The luna is as harmless as it is lovely. In this case the moths weren't active agents. They were important only as clues—and bait. Their enormous size showed Professor Moseley's line of work; the selective breeding of certain forms of life to two or three times the normal proportions. Very well; I had to ascertain some creature which, if magnified several times, would be deadly, and which would still be capable of entering a large keyhole. Having ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Selective Service act was introduced in Congress and passed in May, without very serious opposition. At the very start the American people had accepted a principle which had been adopted in the crisis of the ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... Allen, I have recently learned, advances in Science in Arcady the theory that there is a natural selective cause fostering the bright blooms of alpines. The selective cause is, however, by him referred to the greater abundance of butterfly relatively to bee fertilizers. The former, he says, display more ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... five characters in four hours of a single night, the two girls and "Pa," and Alf and Keith, the sailor and almost gentleman who was Jenny's lover, seemed to me out of place. The little scene in the cabin of the yacht between Jenny and Keith is a quite brilliant study in selective realism. Take the trouble to look back on the finished chapters and see how much Mr. SWINNERTON has told you in how few strokes, and you will realise the fine and precise artistry of this attractive volume. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... human societies, and no doubt human reason might devise superior means of bringing about the selection of individuals which society must maintain. To some extent it has done this through systems of education and the like, which are, in the main, selective processes for picking out the most competent individuals to perform certain social functions. But the natural competition, or struggle between individuals, has not been done away with, especially in ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... unusual brilliance when heated in a flame—it is easy to understand the reason for this. For example, when a number of substances are heated to the same temperature they may radiate the same amount of energy and still differ considerably in brightness. Many substances are "selective" in their absorbing and radiating properties. One may radiate more luminous energy and less infra-red energy, and for another the reverse may be true. The former would appear brighter than the latter. The scientific worker in light-production has been searching for such ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... the 19th April 1897. He read a paper 'On a complete Apparatus for studying the Properties of Electric Waves' at the meeting of British Association, held at Liverpool, in 1896. He then communicated a paper 'On the Selective Conductivity exhibited by Polarising Substances,' which was published by the Royal Society, in January 1897. He next delivered his 'Friday Evening Discourse,' at the Royal Institution, 'On Electric Waves,' on the 29th January 1897. "There is, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... commend this state of mind to students of species, with respect to Mr. Darwin's or any other hypothesis, as to their origin. The combined investigations of another 20 years may, perhaps, enable naturalists to say whether the modifying causes and the selective power, which Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily shown to exist in nature, are competent to produce all the effects he ascribes to them, or whether, on the other hand, he has been led to over-estimate the value of his principle of natural selection, as greatly as Lamarck overestimated his vera ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... recognisable persons, of whom any one may be chosen for a time as the centre of interest, and any one may become a subordinate character in some one else's adventures. One Saga plays into the others, and introduces people incidentally who may be the heroes of other stories. As a result of this selective practice of the Sagas, it sometimes happens that an important or an interesting part of the record may be dropped by one Saga and picked up casually by another. Thus in the written Sagas, one of the best stories of the two Foster-brothers ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... no more wars. It must be acknowledged that the elimination of war was the direct result of non-violence practiced on a general scale. But we can take a more objective view of war today. What was so terrible about it? War had a profound selective value, perfectly in accord with the teachings of Darwin and Mendel and others. Without war the mass of useless, incompetent mankind, without training or intelligence, is permitted to grow and expand unchecked. War acted to ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women, but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of the old sorts still exist that a selective and varietally aware home gardener can make do. Since I've become water-wiser, I'm interested in finding and conserving heirlooms that once supported large numbers of healthy Americans in relative self-sufficiency. My earlier book, being a guide to what passes for ordinary vegetable ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... tongue horny; but in the lories it is moist and much more like the same organ in the humming-birds and sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and brilliantly coloured flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for the most part to the selective action of these aesthetic and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... gives an idea of the selective method that has been followed. There has been no slavish or unconscious imitation. On the contrary, there has been a constant conscious effort to follow the best model that the civilized world afforded. Of course, it may be doubted whether in fact they have always chosen ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... rooting the joint grass out of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped between ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... this atomic attraction is known as affinity. There is not the least possible doubt that affinity is a form of universal attraction, except that the affinity of atoms is selective. This affinity of atoms for each other gives rise to the combination of atoms known as molecules and ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... it is unsuitable? Conceivably the two agencies may be supplementary. Possibly we may call on our fellow of the natural world for aid in spiritual work. The complete ideal, at any rate, of good conduct unites the swiftness, certainty, and ease of natural action with the selective progressiveness of spiritual. Till such a combination is found, either conduct will be insignificant or great distress of self-consciousness will be incurred. Both of these evils will be avoided if nature can be persuaded to do the work which we clearly intend. That is what goodness calls on ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... tiresome. But all the events on the lonely island are admirably harmonized and have a cumulative effect. The second part,—after the rescue,—written to take advantage of the popularity of the first, is vastly inferior. The artistic selective power is not exercised. This same concrete imagination which sees minute details is also evident in his contemporary Swift, but with him it works at the bidding of a far more fervid ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most remarkable when such a poet is young. The faults are the opposites of the classic poet's excellences: want of measure, want of proportion, want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop. And these frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition, huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in effects and phrase, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... to see that our actual procedure in knowing is the reverse of this, that causal explanation is the analysis of a continuum, and that 'phenomena,' 'events,' 'effects,' and 'causes' are all creations of our selective attention; that in selecting them we run a risk of analyzing falsely, and that if we do, our 'inductions' will be worthless. But whether they are right or wrong, valuable or not, real reasoning from 'facts' can never be a ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... (173) This selective mental process is helped by the score described in the last chapter; and the quantity of each color chosen for the group is easily indicated by a variable circle, drawn round the various points on the diagram. ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... communal Guild of St. George, with its rigid government and restraints upon the personal liberty of its members. Ideally beautiful, admittedly, was the plan and scheme of the little state, with its disciplinings, exactions, and devout selective creed. But the age is a practical, unimaginative one, and whatever compacts men make, even for their highest welfare, there are, it is to be feared, few so loyal, tractable, and docile as to place ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord |
