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Collapse   /kəlˈæps/   Listen
Collapse

verb
(past & past part. collapsed; pres. part. collapsing)
1.
Break down, literally or metaphorically.  Synonyms: break, cave in, fall in, founder, give, give way.  "The business collapsed" , "The dam broke" , "The roof collapsed" , "The wall gave in" , "The roof finally gave under the weight of the ice"
2.
Collapse due to fatigue, an illness, or a sudden attack.  Synonym: break down.
3.
Fold or close up.  "Collapse the music stand"
4.
Fall apart.  Synonyms: break down, crumble, crumple, tumble.  "Negotiations broke down"
5.
Cause to burst.  Synonym: burst.
6.
Suffer a nervous breakdown.  Synonyms: break up, crack, crack up, crock up.
7.
Lose significance, effectiveness, or value.  "The stock market collapsed"



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"Collapse" Quotes from Famous Books



... foreign policy that would estrange the United States and perhaps even throw its support to Germany would not only lose the war to Great Britain, but it would be perhaps the blackest crime in history, for it would mean the collapse of that British-American cooeperation, and the destruction of those British-American ideals and institutions which are the greatest facts in the modern world. This conviction was the basis of Sir Edward's policy from the day that Great Britain ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... appearances, when you've got nothing to do but sit and watch your immediate neighbour. But on that earlier occasion our army had been successful; it seemed that the war would soon find its conclusion in the collapse of Germany, and good news from Europe smiled upon us every morning at breakfast. Now we were tired and over-wrought. Good news there was none—indeed every day brought disastrous tidings. We, ourselves, must look back upon a hundred ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... form decided on. At an appointed signal the end of the coffin, which is placed just within the opening in the shrine, is removed, and the body is drawn rapidly but gently and without exposure into the sarcophagus: the sides of the coffin, constructed for the purpose, collapse; and the wooden box is removed to be ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... and fought where it stood. The enemy, worn out by his exertions, stretched his line of communications to breaking-point, and it was said that his supplies of food and munitions had come temporarily very near to collapse. The Allies checked him. He could not even hold his own. In two days he was ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... Winesburg, Ohio could be described as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for precise locale and social detail than for a highly personal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we were to take ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... bystander discerning what was wrong. In the midst of this, the great stable of the convent, occupying the basement story and entered by the basement door, outside which all the disorder was, poured forth its contribution of cloud, as if the whole rugged edifice were filled with nothing else, and would collapse as soon as it had emptied itself, leaving the snow to fall upon ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear, but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... a life of gratified whims, to lose the very thing she wanted most of all—that for which she would willingly have given up every other desire her heart had ever coined—was a thought hardly to be endured. She felt that the world would surely collapse. It could not, would ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... who in the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him to sudden collapse. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... decisive series of blows, and the Acquatainians will collapse like a house of paper. Before the Star Watch can interfere, we will be masters of the Cluster. Then, with the resources of Acquatainia to draw on, we can challenge any force in the galaxy—even the Terran ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova

... cupful, then, her eye alert on the old man, crept back to David. When he saw her coming he sat up with a sharp breath of satisfaction, and she knelt beside him and held the cup to his lips. He drained it and sank back in a collapse of relief, muttering thanks that she hushed, fearful of the old man. Then she again took her seat beside him. She saw Daddy John get up and pile the fire high, and watched its leaping flame throw out tongues toward ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... implications of the facts force M. Garofalo to a series of eclectic compromises, which produce on the reader, after so many accusations and threats of repression, the depressing impression of a mental collapse, as ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... the roof and walks about there or, without stumbling, goes into the open. In short, he carries out all sorts of complex actions. Only it would be dangerous to call the wanderer by name, for then he would not only waken where he was, but he would collapse frequently and fall headlong with fright if he found himself ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... veered round suddenly and completely. People felt a sort of half-cowardly relief at beholding the prompt collapse of a miracle which was threatening to throw confusion into the self satisfied little fold of established truths. Poor Von Osten protested in vain: no one listened to him; the verdict was given. He never recovered from this official blow; he became the laughing-stock of all those whom he ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... Tom's face as the plate was set down before him, between his knife and fork, which he held erect, as if they had been sacred tapers. But the delight was too strong to continue smouldering in a grin—it burst out the next instant in a long-drawn "haw, haw!" followed by a sudden collapse into utter gravity, as the knife and fork darted down on the prey. Martin Poyser's large person shook with his silent unctuous laugh. He turned towards Mrs. Poyser to see if she too had been observant of Tom, and the eyes of husband ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... and feeble they might be, there was little fear of their being disturbed. Europe still respected the relics of a glorious past of six centuries of unceasing warfare against the Moslem; but the moment that past with its survivals became itself anathema the Knights and their organisation would collapse at once. The French Revolution meant death to the Knights of the Order of St. John as well as to other ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen

... the world of wings is to enter a new state of existence. The apparent loss of weight; the ability to attain full speed in a few seconds, and to stop suddenly in a headlong rush without fear of collapse; the power to steer instantly in any direction by merely changing the angle of the body; the altered and enormous view of the green world below—looking down upon forests, seas and clouds; the easy voluptuous rhythm ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood

... "arrangement" in each case was made with one of the single men to play M. le Mari,' said one of the leaders, to the writer, when he lay dying of fever in the Genil's stifling saloon at Duke of York Island. Who can wonder at the collapse of the 'colony,' when practices such as these were tolerated? But it is typical of the system, or rather want of system, of French colonisation generally. On March 16th the Genii left Barcelona with over two hundred and fifty colonists—men, women and children. Some of the Italians were from ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... Hotchkiss doubtfully, "why did he collapse when he heard of the wreck? And what about the telephone message the station agent sent? You remember they tried to countermand it, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... cliff, showing, Ugh-lomi thought, that he came from some place to the left, and keeping to the cliff's edge, they presently came to an end. They found themselves looking down on a great semi-circular space caused by the collapse of the cliff. It had smashed right across the gorge, banking the up-stream water back in a pool which overflowed in a rapid. The slip had happened long ago. It was grassed over, but the face of the cliffs that stood about the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... was Little-Lonely Leila now. Yet after her collapse at the boat, she had shown her courage. She had put away childish things and was developing into a steadfast little woman, who busied herself with making her father happy. She watched over him and waited ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... revolving shaft, the centrifugal force is manifested by the divergence of the balls, when the shaft is put into revolution; and the centripetal force, which in this instance is gravity, predominates so soon as the velocity is arrested; for the arms then collapse and hang by ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... in sweeping out or neutralizing the enemies that are still in the alimentary canal, flush the body with pure water, put it at rest—and trust the liver. Biliousness is a sign of an overworked liver. If it wasn't working at all, we shouldn't be bilious: we should be dead, or in a state of collapse. ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... of scientists of the first rank are a part of a large number. Many of them and many more, are given in Prof. Townsend's "Collapse of Evolution," McCann's "God or Gorilla," Philip Mauro's "Evolution At the Bar," and other anti-evolution books. Alfred McCann, in his great work, "God or Gorilla," mentions 20 of the most prominent scholars, who do not accept Darwinism. Yet ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... downfall of Napoleon's Empire or his own decease. England, Austria, and Turkey would have found it no impossible task to prevent its absorption by Alexander at the re-settlement of Europe, if indeed the collapse of Russia had not been followed by the overthrow of the Porte, and the establishment of a Greek, a Bulgarian, and a Roumanian Kingdom under the supremacy of France. By the side of the three absolute monarchs of Central and Eastern ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... of being nettled by the distance which existed between him and Diana. And certainly, to be sensible of his arm being arrested by an unseen obstacle when he thought to put it round his own wife's waist, to collapse in the mere idea of asking her to give him a kiss, never to have felt so fully the dissipated, degraded fool he had been, as he felt then, was not a pleasant sensation. It may sound immoral, but it seemed as if, had Gervase been more depraved, there would have been more hope for ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... to take charge of advance on Ladysmith. If under Providence we are successful there and at Kimberley, I think collapse of opposition possible. These proposals are subject to High Commissioner's views of state of Cape Colony, and to what ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... step, however, was to mitigate the severity of the conclusion that was liable to be formed upon the utter and hopeless collapse of all the possible arguments in favour of Theism. Having fully demonstrated that there is no shadow of a positive argument in support of the theistic theory, there arose the danger that some persons might ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... feeling; he simply must be happy, and he suddenly elopes, leaving all their anticipations bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who has nothing but her beauty to recommend her. Deserted thus by the ignis fatuus of youth, the collapse of the three old people is complete. Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way, and he wanders out into the winter's night, full of vague dreams of what he can still do in the world, if he can only break from his bondage and shatter his dream. He dies ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... to be in a deep sleep, the eyes are either closed or half closed, and the face is without expression. The body appears to be in a state of complete collapse, the head is thrown back, and the arms and legs hang loose, dropping heavily down. In this stage insensibility is so complete that needles can be run into any part of the body without producing pain, and surgical operations may be performed without ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... tremendous petillating roar of laughter, which ran along the line from end to end and back again—a roar of laughter so loud that hardly a man knew that the band was now playing in full force "God save the Queen," with an additional obbligato from the drums—that one known as the "big" threatening collapse from the vigorous action ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... Only his collapse as he faced Warden that day in the latter's office had prevented him killing the man. He had left the Dickman cabin lusting for Warden's life. The passion that had surged through his veins during the long ride to Warden's ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... whether it be due to a want of acquaintance with them or want of attention. It is as much, if not more, from these causes, then, that our girl has become ill than from the supposed overwork. Overwork might have been the immediate cause; that is to say, her collapse might have followed upon a little extra pressure or hurry of work; but the real cause will be found to lie in that steady neglect of the primary laws of health to which we have alluded, and upon which too much emphasis cannot be laid. Had it not been so, the fatigue engendered ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various

... big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances, lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports from camps ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... exhaustion or collapse due to overheating where there is not sufficient evaporation from the surface of the body to keep ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... lowest ebb of productive energy and wealth, its sole recuperative chance depending on the labor of its former slaves. To deport this labor, under the circumstances, would have been cruelly to deprive that section of its last vital resource, and to sink it to a state of industrial collapse and misery, by the side of which its condition at the close of the war might have seemed prosperity and paradise. Second, the nation itself could ill sustain the shock incident to such a huge amputation from the body of its ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke

... A dead silence had fallen on the crowded and heated store, and in the silence Stingaree was already taking an unguarded interest in Mrs. Clarkson's appearance, which as certainly betokened imminent collapse. "Now!" whispered Radford, and Hilda hesitated no more. She was wearing a black lace shawl between her appearances at the piano; she had the revolver under it in a twinkling, and pressed it to her bosom ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... withdrew. He was very proud of his general's commendation, but he was also on the verge of physical collapse. He obtained some food at a camp fire near by, ate it quickly, wrapped himself in borrowed blankets, and lay down under the shade of an oak. Langdon saw him just as he was about to close his eyes, and ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler

... come. It had come with an overwhelming rush of horror which, in the midst of her dressing, had sent her reeling and fainting upon the bed from which she had only just risen, and where for two hours she had subsequently lain in a state of collapse. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... when it would be impossible to tolerate it for another day, since social injustice was neither arrested nor even diminished thereby. And besides, if only one single old man died of cold and hunger, did not the social edifice, raised on the theory of charity, collapse? But one victim, and society was condemned, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... follow the balloon. Consequently the tireless though exasperated travellers broke through black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each was turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those green hills of Surrey saw the final collapse and tragedy of the admirable light grey suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park. His silk hat was broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his coat-tails were torn to the shoulder by ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... not to go too fast but to take a breathing-space between lashes so that he would not cut his body to pieces. He was afraid also, he said, that Sancho might become so enthusiastic over what he was doing, or so anxious to come to the end of the lashes that he might overtax his strength, collapse and die; and he begged Sancho particularly not to do that, for then he would have gone through all his suffering in vain. When Sancho had stripped himself to the waist, Don Quixote placed himself where he could hear the sound of the lashes, and counted them on his rosary ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... The sudden collapse of Mr. Mackerly, while in conversation with his son, was a great shock to the latter, who could scarcely believe that the news he had just been relating should have such an extraordinary effect upon his imperious and lofty father. Was it possible that the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various

... exultation! Deacons and Sunday-school teachers waltzed together until the long room shook, and the very bunting on the walls waved and fluttered with the gyrations of those religious dervishes. Nobody knew—nobody cared how long this frenzy lasted—it ceased only with the collapse of the musicians. Then, with much vague bewilderment, inward trepidation, awkward and incoherent partings, everybody went dazedly home; there was no other dancing after that—the waltz was the one ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... took a turn for the worse; during the afternoon she had been conversing spiritedly with her daughters; but this animation had subsided until she was overwhelmed by a mortal collapse. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... purchase. In the Civil War it was alternately held for the Parliament and the king, and in 1546 it was regarded as Charles's last hope in Somerset. Its resistance was stout; for 160 days Colonel Wyndham baffled the assaults of no less an adversary than Blake, and only surrendered on the total collapse of the Royal cause (p. 17). The grounds are entered under a gateway (Perp.), built by Sir H. Luttrell. The oldest part of the castle lies to the R. of this, flanked by two round towers (13th cent.), built by Reginald Mohun. (Note door and huge knocker, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... involved in the dislike (within reasonable limits) of death. Morality aims at a maximum of comfortable life and a minimum of death; if then, a minimum of death and a maximum of life were no longer held worth striving for, the whole fabric of morality would collapse, as indeed we have it on record that it is apt to do among classes that from one cause or another have come to live in ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... over Bombay some few years ago, that he arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of the general impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity every successive day, the only disagreeable contingency connected with it being the possibility of a collapse. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... pains very young children suffer uncomplainingly, particularly in great cities and factory towns, is a pathetic enough demonstration of what the word means to them. Mere children by the hundreds support families terrified by the thought of their collapse. The orphan forever dreams of the day when a home will be found for him. The child whose parents seek freedom, leaving him to school or servants, never fails to nourish a sense of injustice. Whatever one generation may decide as to ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], atrophy, collapse; disorganization; delabrement &c. (destruction)[Fr]. 162; aphid, Aphis, plant louse, puceron[obs3]; vinefretter[obs3], vinegrub[obs3]. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra[Lat]; jade, plug, rackabones ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... resembling sometimes a drunken orgy of demons, and sometimes a Spartan convent; all aimed at replacing the real human being, slowly formed by his past with an improvised robot, who, through its own debility, will collapse when the external and mechanical force that keeps it up ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... laugh or of bringing tears into her eyes, to make speeches at one another across the table, whatever Moliere might be able to do, when alone with his aged servant. Nor did it much help the matter, when, with a view to the treasury, which began to threaten a collapse, we made a law, like that of the Medes and Persians which altereth not, whereby it was provided, among other things, that no member should ever talk over five minutes, nor stop short of three, under any circumstances,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... of a thousand a day! This will never do. The swindle is awful. Barnum is a saint to us. I am bowed with a sense of guilt, ashamed to look an honest man in the face. But Nemesis is on our track; somebody will puncture our tent yet, and it will collapse like a torn balloon. I know I shall have to catch it; ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... back to the cottage, and managed to scramble in by the parlour window, only to sink once more into my armchair in a state of collapse. I had always entered so acutely into the joys and sorrows of others, their love affairs, their difficulties, their bereavements (I had in this way led such a full life), that I was surprised at this juncture to find my nervous force so ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... plain and clear to other people, and particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas. I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge of the true God. Yet I have also to admit that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... calm, there came a far cry of agony that shattered it instantly. Her taut nerves gave way like a broken bow-string. Her light body began to shake. She leaned against the cold rock wall in hysterical collapse. ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine

... also, "sometimes without cause, but sometimes with cause indeed; which made the rest to bear the burden the more easily." Some of the men were carried in by the Maroons. Indeed, the Maroons had saved the whole party from collapse, for they not only built them shelter huts at night, carried the weary, and found, or made, them a road to travel by, but they also bore the whole burden of the company's arms and necessaries. Their fellows who had stayed with Ellis Hixom had built the little ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield

... man, shockingly bedraggled, worn out almost to the point of collapse, utterly indifferent to his own danger, and taking a huge, childlike delight in my care for my personal safety, the picture of him as he stood and laughed all alone in the bare road amid the bursting shells seems to me curiously typical of the whole ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... there stupefied, pierced with a poisoned arrow, and almost in a state of collapse; then she lifted her hands and eyes for help, and saw Hope's study in front of her. Everything swam confusedly before her; she did not know for certain whether he was there or not; she cried to that true friend ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... of public appreciation of his work and recognition of his right to rank as America's greatest composer of music, MacDowell died to the world of men through a mental collapse brought on by over-work, and for two years, forgetting that there was such a thing as music, the great tone-poet dwelt in a soundless world. Sorrow for such a fate at the zenith of a career of so much promise was world-wide, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page

... away, all alone with Gray. I remained in bed that day with the room darkened. Mother and Cecile were troubled but could not bring themselves to believe that my collapse was due to your going. It was not logical, you know, as we all expected to see you in a week ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... you help as needed, but concentrate on cutting off their equipment. The first thing we must do is cut their communicators; otherwise they'll warn the rest. Then turn off their air supplies and collapse ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... reported that part of the wall had fallen on a sleeping sepoy, who was luckily saved by some beams catching and protecting him from being crushed by the debris. There was no apparent cause for the collapse, but the man is supposed ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon

... Massachusetts; the Democrat was Wade Hampton, a typical old-time southerner. Hayes could withdraw the troops, in pursuance of his conciliatory policy, but if he did the Republican governments would certainly collapse because they were unsupported by public opinion. Furthermore, the returning board which had declared Hayes the choice of Louisiana in the presidential election had asserted that the Republican Packard was elected. Blaine, in the Senate, championed the doctrine that Hayes could not forsake the southern ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... sources for it on Terra, up to the collapse of the Fenris Company," he said. "Too much isn't known about what's been happening here since, which is why I ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper

... years before, amongst the French troops would have been the Irish brigade, who were always yearning for the opportunity of making an attack on their native land. But half a century had caused strange changes; the Irish brigade had fallen with the collapse of the French monarchy; and some of the few survivors were now actually serving ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... of that time it had ever been waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had made in injecting nourishment, for that device had been resorted to to postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying not ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... believe, for only a brief period, for we cannot but think that the final results of this war—the fruit of the present system of production and distribution—will be the utter collapse of the system itself—making way for a New Society wherein the only aristocracy shall be that of Labor ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias

... the M.P. Woodhouse's business was the treatment and cure of sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and the new start which can be given by gold injections—and genius. He was wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... embodying injunctions and prohibitions will lose their purport if the distinction on which their validity depends does not really exist. And further, the entire body of doctrine which refers to final release will collapse, if the distinction of teacher and pupil on which it depends is not real. And if the doctrine of release is untrue, how can we maintain the truth of the absolute unity of the Self, which forms an item ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll be in Scotland before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed to founder and collapse—but only for a moment. It was after four in the afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago—moved me as few, rare things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the long road—Ismail's road—that ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... supplies of other minerals and metals. It also has a large agricultural sector featuring livestock and grain. Kazakhstan's industrial sector rests on the extraction and processing of these natural resources. The breakup of the USSR in December 1991 and the collapse in demand for Kazakhstan's traditional heavy industry products resulted in a short-term contraction of the economy, with the steepest annual decline occurring in 1994. In 1995-97, the pace of the government program of economic reform ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... 3520 foot-pounds. This may be only theoretical measurement, but the approximate superiority of 3500 lbs. against the tiger's weight, 450 lbs., would be sufficient to ensure the stoppage of a charge, or the collapse of the animal in any position, provided that the bullet should be retained within the body, and thus bestow the whole force ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... conception of the universe. They who would commend that view of the cosmos have not only to reckon with philosophical and religious idealism, but also with all the bright band of poets and artists and seers. Such an issue once resolutely forced would therewith collapse, for it would pit the qualitative standards against the quantitative, the imagination against literalism, the creative spirit in man against ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... water. Mines of any kind are exceedingly difficult to render efficient when the water is over 100 feet deep. On account of the tendency of all high explosives to detonate by influence or sympathy, and the liability of the cases to collapse by great exterior pressure, harbor mines are separated a certain distance, according as they are buoyant or ground, and according to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... brilliant and strong; Warred with the world to win his mistress; passed For Custom's doughtiest iconoclast; And pored forth love in paeans of glad song—! Look at him now! In solemn robes and wraps, A two-legged drama on his own collapse! And she, the limp-skirt slattern, with the shoes Heel-trodden, that squeak and clatter in her traces, This is the winged maid who was his Muse And escort to the kingdom of the graces! Of all that fire this puff of smoke's the ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... opinion undoubtedly was hostile—bitterly hostile. The Press was hostile; private opinion was hostile. But what of official Germany? Let my critics ask themselves what brought to a sudden stop, and, indeed, to absolute collapse, the European tour of the Boer delegates who were striving to obtain European intervention? They were feted in Holland; France gave them a rapturous welcome. They wished to come to Berlin, where the German people would have crowned them with flowers. But when they asked me ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... prematurely, cracked of their own dead weight, and, later, when the roof collapsed, owing to the deficient bracing of the centers, it carried with it each of the four floors to the basement, the beams giving way abruptly over the supports. Had an adequate tie of steel been provided across the supports, the collapse, undoubtedly, would have stopped at the fourth floor. So many faults were apparent in this structure, that, although only half of it had fallen, it was ordered to ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... the Southern people immediately after the War, when the people were stunned by their overwhelming defeat, and when there was still some apprehension of bloody vengeance to be visited upon the leaders of the rebellion—as was the case, for instance, in Hungary in 1849 after the collapse of the great insurrection—those measures would have been accepted as an escape from something worse. Even negro suffrage in a qualified form, as General Lee's testimony before the Reconstruction Committee showed, might then have been accepted ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... the wild steers that ran the wooded water-sheds, as untamed as the deer and the lynx. Even the storekeeper, Benwell, was pressed into the service. 'Rastus and the nester were the only men about the place, the deputy sheriff having been recalled to Noches on the collapse of Healy's story. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... excitement and fatigue he had lately been called upon to endure. At any rate, it appears fairly certain that the Elder Pliny did not perish, as is still sometimes asserted, by the direct effects of the eruption, but rather through an ordinary collapse of nature—syncope, perhaps. Three days later his body was found lying not far from Stabiae by his grief-stricken nephew, who describes his uncle's corpse as looking "more like that of a sleeping than of a ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... couldn't lie still. He lifted himself upon his elbow and looked at her with wondering eyes. She stood over him, looking on the verge of collapse. Slowly she came down to him, half kneeling, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... of dominion, for in his fingers now rests the power of cursing. It is sufficient now for him to point the finger at those he loves not, in order that they may wither away in the bloom of their youth. Whomsoever he now breathes upon, however distant they may be, will collapse and expire, and none can save them; and he has but to pronounce the name of his enemies, and torments will consume their inner parts. The destroying angel of Allah watches over his every look, so that on whomsoever his eye may fall, that ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai

... came almost as the result of her conscious wish, flowed another that she would gladly have suppressed: pity, nothing less, for the child who lay sobbing on the bed. A minute before she had seen in Gabrielle her most dangerous enemy in the world; now, even though she rejoiced in the girl's sudden collapse, she felt that she wanted to take her in her arms and kiss her and comfort her. For a moment or two she fought against it, but in the end, scarcely knowing what she had done, she found that she was fondling Gabrielle's hand and being shaken by the communicated ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... doctor, for she was on the point of collapse at recognizing them. But in a few seconds she recovered herself, though she was deathly ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux

... pass away. He lifted his head and glanced at the serpent still coiled upon the hearth. Its eyes were fixed upon him in a gorgon-like stare, and his doubts became positive certainties, as disgust became loathing. The battle had ended. The mystic had been defeated. This sudden collapse had come because the foundations of his faith had been honeycombed. The innocent serpent had been, not the cause, but ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... to that structure would collapse like a house of cards but for the original foundations which are as indestructible as Harvey's statement as to the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... now adopted by most of the States are eloquent testimony to the complete collapse of the legislature as an administrative body and to the people's general distrust of their chosen representatives. The initiative, referendum, recall, and the withholding of important subjects from the legislature's power, are among the devices intended to free the people from ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... structure of society and the processes that make it. Given that knowledge man could in time build his own world-order the way he desired it, a stable culture that wouldn't know the horrors of oppression or collapse. But you've hidden away the very fact that such information exists. ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... to shake. He looked like a man on the verge of a collapse. He was still, however, able to ask ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... often before, always with the same result of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying 'Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those who help themselves. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... it out of other ventures. But the collapse of the mine was a sad blow to me. As the president, I might have had something from the wreck, but I did not. I suffered with the rest. Now, may I ask what ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger

... legible and infallible signs, and it is given to me to interpret them, and I tell you: It is true, unerringly true, as every Alexandrian child has learnt from its nurse: When Serapis falls the earth will collapse like a dry puff-ball under a horse's hoof. A hundred oracles have announced it, it is written in the prophecies of the heavenly bodies, and in the scroll of Fate. Let them be! Let it come! The end is sweet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... together by Zweibruck and Daun; but nothing done. [Tempelhof, ii. 262-265.] At the eleventh hour, say the Austrian accounts, Zweibruck sent word, "Impossible to-morrow; cannot get in my Out-Parties in time!"—and next day, here is Friedrich come, and a collapse of everything. Or perhaps there never seriously was such a plan? Certain it is, Daun takes camp at Stolpen, a place known to him, one of the strongest posts in Germany; intrenches himself to the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... flowered china. Beside the window looking out upon a gray-brick wall almost within reach, a canary with a white-fluted curtain about the cage dozed headless. Beside that window, covered in flowered chintz, a sewing-machine that could collapse to a table; a golden-oak sideboard laid out in pressed glassware. A homely simplicity here saved by chance or chintz from ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... that seemed to shrink and collapse from this gigantic and appalling apparition, nevertheless threw its light, redly and steadily, upon another shape that stood beside, quiet and motionless; and it was, perhaps, the contrast of these two things—the Being and the Shadow—that impressed the beholder with the difference ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... horror as she swayed upon her feet. For a moment she seemed about to collapse. Then she groped her way towards the door and stood there, clinging to the handle. Slowly she looked around over her shoulder, her face as white as death. She moistened her lips with her tongue, her eyes glared at him. Behind, her brain seemed to be working. Her ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... house standing next to the altar—a very fine and rich stonework of late Gothic style by the builder of the City Hall, M. de Layens—has been slightly damaged by the collapse of the ceiling, which chipped off the upper phiales. These broken pieces have been collected without any substantial loss and can easily be replaced. The damage to the sacrament house can therefore be replaced. Close to the main portal of the cathedral, following ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... had not by any means been exhausted, but it was supplemented now by talk of Lakatos Pal's wealth. The old man had been ailing for some time. His nephew Andor's return had certainly cheered him up for a while, but soon after that he seemed to collapse very suddenly in health, like old folk do in this part of the world—stricken down by one or other of the several diseases which are engendered by the violent extremes of heat and cold—diseases of the liver for the most part—the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... relieved and sent far to the rear for a long rest. Even unwounded men cannot stand the strain of continuous battle for many weeks at a stretch. The nervous system, delicate and complicated, must have relief, or the physical organization will collapse, or the mind ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... Southern regiments disappeared in the deep woods, Dick and many of those around him sank exhausted upon the ground. Even had they been ordered to follow they would have been incapable of it. Complete nervous collapse followed such days and nights as those through which they ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... leisure recreation. That kept morale up. But they were certainly not to be allowed any position of dominance, either individually, or as a class. That, he said, was something else again. It was precisely the sort of thing that had led to the collapse and downfall of many ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole

... untrained effort: "Your convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be when you most need his help,—he may be having one of his 'bad days.' We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake, I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and the severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton

... the Greek mind, still in its full creative vigour, made its first response to the twofold failure of the world in which it had put its faith, the open bankruptcy of the Olympian religion and the collapse of the city-state. Both had failed, and each tried vainly to supply the place of the other. Greece responded by the creation of two great permanent types of philosophy which have influenced human ethics ever since, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... this year has filled me with unbounded optimism. I feel the elated certainty, as never before even in the moment of the most successful attack, that the Hun's fate is sealed. What is more, I have grounds for believing that he knows it—knows that the collapse of Russia will profit him nothing because he cannot withstand the avalanche of men from America. Already he hears them, as I have seen them, training in their camps from the Pacific to the Atlantic, racing ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... by the announcement in these columns last week that the collapse of a wooden house was caused by a sparrow stepping on it, we feel we ought to mention that, owing to a sudden gust of wind, the bird in question leaned to one side, and it was simply this movement which caused ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various

... which is the 'curse of every despotic state.' We should require a large native army and live under a perpetual threat of mutiny. In fact, the mutiny of 1857 really represented the explosion and the collapse of this policy. Finally, we should have to choose between Mohammedans and Hindoos, and upon either alternative a ruler not himself belonging to the religion comes into inevitable conflict with their ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... a confession to make to you about that," his companion returned; "you were in such a state of collapse Tuesday night I felt you were unfit to decide any question for yourself, and, as I had no anaesthetics at hand, I asked Mrs. Minturn to give you a Christian Science treatment while I performed my duties, and since then I have been trying to work, under ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... "A bullet has torn the fleshy part of the arm, but it would hardly account for his collapse. The man is thoroughly played out, and has had no sleep for some nights probably, and has been at high tension for a ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... forced to leave the country by notes no longer renewable, he would sink into the gulf where so many political carcasses may be seen,—carcasses of men who find no consolation in one another's company. Even this very evening he was in dread of a collapse of that threatening arch which debt erects over the head of many a Parisian. He had allowed his anxieties to appear upon his face; he had refused to play cards at Madame d'Espard's; he had talked with the women in an absent-minded manner, and finally he had sunk down silent and absorbed ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... the proof-sheets I examined. Nearly all Scene 2 is also missing. It and the rest of the play seem to be Fletcher's, who, as usual, spoiled Massinger's fine conception of Barnavelt, and makes him whine like Buckingham in Henry VIII. This moral collapse of all energy in the face of death in the two characters is significant. Massinger would have carried out the scene in quite another tone. Some of the Fletcher scenes in this play, in which he has an unusually large share, are surprisingly ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... man, his utter collapse and his evident fear of me, did not suit me. Treachery comes through that kind of fear; I meant to rule him in another and safer manner. I meant to be absolutely honest ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... that, in spite of blowing, the tube begins to collapse, I suspend operations, reheat the tube a little farther on, and so proceed. If by any chance any reader knows a good laboratory method of performing this operation, I hope he will communicate it to me. After all, the difficulty chiefly arises from laboratory heating ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... was an accident. I had been sitting up late at night writing personal reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln. I was writing against time. The presidential election was drawing nearer every day and the market for reminiscences of Lincoln was extremely brisk, but, of course, might collapse any moment. Writers of my class have to consider this sort of thing. For instance, in the middle of Lent, I find that I can do fairly well with "Recent Lights on the Scriptures." Then, of course, when the hot ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock

... out of harness, and had no longer the stimulus of the daily demand and habit of work, the collapse was such that I thought I was dying. I gave my share of the paper to Durand, to do as he pleased with, and went off to North Conway, in the mountains of New Hampshire, to paint one more picture before I died. I chose a brook scene, and Huntington and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James



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