"Incompetence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... important military documents. The first chapter of the review was released for publication by The Associated Press on March 16 and appears below. It is one of those documents, rare in military annals, that frankly confesses a succession of initial reverses and official incompetence, only retrieved by exercise of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be seen, this massacre was due to the injustice, and to the subsequent incompetence, of one man, Chopart, the commandant. It led to lamentable consequences, in the utter destruction of the Natchez nation and the loss of one of the most interesting native ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... these fine tools at his disposal? By their very excellence to make more evident the faults of him who uses them without discernment or without conscience. The wheelwork of the great modern machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, incompetence or corruption may produce here disturbances of far greater gravity than would have threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of the past. There is need then of looking to the quality of the individual called upon to contribute in any measure to the workings of this mechanism. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... foresaw that the shabbiness would be made to rest anywhere rather than on the shoulders of Sir Timothy. If it should turn out that he had striven manfully to make things run smoothly;—that the Premier's incompetence, or the Chancellor's obstinacy, or this or that Secretary's peculiarity of temper had done it all;—might not Sir Timothy then be able to emerge from the confused flood, and swim along pleasantly with his head higher than ever above ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... progress to the African shore. The enemy hastened with the remainder of their fleet to protect Carthage, and the conflict was transferred to Africa. Regulus prosecuted the war with vigor, and, owing to the incompetence of the generals opposed to him, was successful to an extraordinary degree. Both he and the senate became intoxicated to such an extent, that when the Carthaginians made overtures for peace, only intolerable terms were offered them. This resulted in prolonging the war, for the Carthaginians called ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... made fires, and crouched over them. Others lay on the ground, and huddled together for warmth. Others dragged their feet wearily backwards and forwards. Many and deep were the curses poured out upon the intendance—or commissariat—whose utter incompetence, throughout the war, was one of the great reasons of the continuous bad fortune ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... the Office of Works, are all responsible to the public directly, through representative Ministers with seats in the House of Commons, the liability of whom to be examined by private members as to minutiae of their departmental policy is one of the most valuable checks against official incompetence or scandals, and is the only protection under the constitution against arbitrary rule. The whole administrative machinery of the forty-three boards in Ireland has been represented in Parliament by one member, the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, but he is supported ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... efforts; and the intendant declared that Frontenac allowed it to continue because he was making a personal profit from the traffic. Charges and countercharges went home to France with every ship. The intendant wrote dispatches of wearisome length, rehearsing the governor's usurpations, insults, and incompetence. "Disorder," he told the minister, "rules everywhere. Universal confusion prevails; justice is openly perverted, and violence supported by authority determines everything." In language quite as unrestrained Frontenac recounted in detail the difficulties with which ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... my trap, everything so far has been satisfactory and I have nothing to complain of. Only I am spending an awful lot of money. Incompetence in the practical affairs of life is never felt so much as on a journey. I pay more than I need to, I do the wrong thing, and I say the wrong thing, and I am always ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... being an interesting avocation rather than a career. Of it little has been permanent. His General Staff soon lapsed into incompetence; if it had not, it might have been the danger to American national life that the German General Staff was to German national life. Recently it was merged with the high command. As Secretary of State he was not creative, ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... the Mainzer Adelsverein and in 1842 sent two of their colleagues to Texas to seek out a site. The place chosen was ill-suited for a colony, however, and the whole enterprise from beginning to end was characterized by princely incompetence. Thousands of immigrants, lured by the company's liberal offers and glowing prospectus, soon found themselves in dire want; many perished of disease and hunger; and the company ended in ignominious disaster. The surviving colonists in Texas, however, when they realized ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... excluded from the Government as traitors. Their places were filled by Northern adventurers and by negroes. The Mississippi convention included seventeen negroes, and was called the "black and tan." Inexperience and incompetence were in control, leading to extravagance and dishonesty, but the conventions were generally superior to the legislatures which ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... covered; further, that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be obtained. So he cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to increase the day's travel. His sister and brother-in-law seconded him; but they were frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own incompetence. It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make the dogs travel faster, while their own inability to get under way earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling longer ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks into every opening, blocking and depressing it; as a "help" she becomes a byword, for she has grown up without learning to help herself or anybody else. If she is a Protestant she has no haven. Only people who have set themselves to help ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... possibly to conceal the shame of one who has been cowardly and base enough to recommend a book to the public for the purpose of putting money into his own pocket. Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows will show, and what literary trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they are safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recommend a general Anti-criticism, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... imagines oneself the actor or the unwilling auditor, that while such an exhibition of joy might perhaps pass, yet a similar incompetent attempt to express any of the last-named emotions would be only ridiculous? But between this single worshipper and the congregation the incompetence seems to me only a question of degree; while in the far more considerable respect of the sincerity of the feeling in the hearts of those expressing it, Law's singer has every advantage; indeed no objection on this score can ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... wife's thin voice more piping and discontented, and my stumbling horse more insecure, and I more determined (as I am at this moment) that somehow or other I would reach that blue hollow, and even stand on Long's Peak where the snow was glittering. Affairs were becoming serious, and Chalmers's incompetence a source of real peril, when, after an exploring expedition, he returned more bumptious than ever, saying he knew it would be all right, he had found a trail, and we could get across the river by dark, and camp out for the night. So he led us into a steep, deep, rough ravine, where we had ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... an exhibition of plebeian cunning. There were among the supporters of the consul those who realized what he himself could not: his military incompetence and the terrible necessity that, at such a juncture, there should be at least one soldier-consul. Varro had won on his merits as self-announced, on the strength of his own arraignment of his adversaries' shortcomings. He stood forth the incarnation of party ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... confusion of authority he saw an opportunity to make himself a power, and in its tropical wealth and beauty, in the laziness and incompetence of its inhabitants, he beheld a greater, fairer, more kind Sonora. On the Pacific side from San Francisco he could re-enforce his army with men and arms; on the Caribbean side from New Orleans he could, when the moment arrived, people his ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... right on Fifth Avenue than do we who live in the open, breathing God's fresh air and sleeping under the stars. My friend Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, often says that "adventures are a mark of incompetence," and he is doubtless right. If a man goes into the field with a knowledge of the country he is to visit and with a proper equipment, he probably will have very few "adventures." If he has not the knowledge and equipment he had much better ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... the arrangement, so to speak, of those relationships between the higher and lower worlds than I do now. Hence there is some darkness there that belongs to the subject, and some that belongs to the incompetence of the compiler. The result of the two together is a good deal of confusion to any student who has not the key to it. I am only concerned for the moment with one of these statements, with what are called "the remains of the Buddha"—not a very comfortable name, because it gives ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... England, fell into the hands of the Scots. In eight strenuous years the generalship of Bruce and his war-leaders, the resolution of the people, hardened by the cruelties of Edward, the sermons of the clergy, and the utter incompetence of Edward II., had redeemed a desperate chance. From a fief of England, Scotland had ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... for man in the form of science. Science is but organized knowledge, and it is this knowledge that has elevated man to the position where he is now, his own god. When difficulties confront him in this age, he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And, when he sets about to overcome these difficulties, he does not rely on divine revelation or supernatural aid or on miracles; he relies on his reason. He knows that when a problem eludes his mental capacity, it is not the supernatural which eludes him ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the others—none are so peculiarly foul as Bingley-on-the-Sea. The asphalte on the Bingley esplanade is several degrees more depressing than the asphalte on other esplanades. The Swiss waiters at the Hotel Magnificent, where Sam was stopping, are in a class of bungling incompetence by themselves, the envy and despair of all the other Swiss waiters at all the other Hotels Magnificent along the coast. For dreariness of aspect Bingley-on-the-Sea stands alone. The very waves that break on its shingle seem to creep up the beach reluctantly, as if it revolted them to have ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... after the first two couplets executed in the initial heat of enthusiasm, even my most strenuous efforts refused to produce another one. I began to read different poems in our books, but neither Dimitrieff nor Derzhavin could help me. On the contrary, they only confirmed my sense of incompetence. Knowing, however, that Karl Ivanitch was fond of writing verses, I stole softly upstairs to burrow among his papers, and found, among a number of German verses, some in the Russian language which seemed to have come from ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... largely, with a view to some great orders which he had in hand. The strike had thrown him terribly behindhand, as to the completion of these orders. Even with his own accustomed and skilled workpeople, he would have had some difficulty in fulfilling his engagements; as it was, the incompetence of the Irish hands, who had to be trained to their work, at a time requiring unusual activity, was a ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and lavish— Fierce to lure man's every sense— (Grim the Eunuch stood and tense) Laughingly the sparkling fountain Mocked his bleak incompetence. ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... looks down and blushes. On this behaviour alone I build my hope. He is modest, and has a docility which renders him susceptible of every impression." This is a melancholy confession, on the part of Petrarch, of his own incompetence to make the most of his son's mind, and a confession the more convincing ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... from one to the other with an apprehensive glance. His pale eyes had that dulness which betokens, if not an absorption in the things to come, that which often passes for the same, an incompetence to face ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... system. This principle is clearly set forth and elaborately illustrated by Mr. Buckle; and we the more readily refer to this author, because he stands high in the esteem of Mr. Wilson, who, in order to prove his own especial fitness for historical composition, and the incompetence of all who have preceded him in the attempt, refers to a passage in Buckle, containing an enumeration of the qualifications which he considers indispensable for the historian. This enumeration includes all the attainments that have ever been in the common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... would be better to drop the whole work, which, for want of proper expression, would be in danger of failing to produce the necessary effect. For if we yield in small and single things, if we make concessions to laziness and incompetence, we may be sure that we shall soon be obliged to do the same throughout; in other words, that we must give up every attempt at making a work like the present succeed. It appears to me preferable to find out with the utmost care ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... hunger's pangs. It must be owned that the work was carried on more smoothly when the black sheep were separated from the white, and when different days were assigned for attending to the residents of each of the respective wards into which the town was divided. The incompetence of the military in civil affairs added to the grievances of the people; complaint against the administration of the "Law" was as loud as the clamour against the "Law" itself. The bother entailed in the procuring of authority to purchase food, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Washington retired from his command of the Virginia Forces, spread over the world. A new statesman, one of the ablest ever born in England, came to control the English Government. William Pitt, soon created Earl of Chatham, saw that the British Empire had reached a crisis in its development. Incompetence, inertia, had blurred its prestige, and the little victories which France, its chief enemy, had been winning against it piecemeal, were coming to be regarded as signs that the grandeur of Britain was passing. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... humbly that I can learn nothing whatever about the fate of the learned scholars of science of whom you inquire, namely: Hong Foo, Hin Yang-Woo, Mong Shing, Yee Ho Li, Wong Fat, and Bao Hu-Shin. This inability may be in part due to incompetence of my unworthy self, but none of my many sources of information, including Soviet Minister of Police Morgodoff, who is on my payroll, can furnish any useful data whatever. I am informed, however, that the UEESR Government is deeply concerned about similar disappearances of some of the foremost ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper
... with the disgraceful exhibition of cowardice and incompetence which we have just witnessed, we have now to record a daring attempt, undertaken shortly afterwards, to strike at the very heart of the Athenian power. While the beaten crews of the Peloponnesian fleet were waiting to ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... some minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the logic of practical [v.04 p.0831] life, in order to reach conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... not pay—we ought not to pay—for incompetence, for impertinence, for disobedience of orders, for laziness, for shirking, for cheating, or for theft. To do so is a social wrong. It is the wrong that lies back, not only of sinecures and spoils, but of employing incompetent and wasteful cooks ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... forward without delay, but soon found its way rendered impassable by torrential floods which at this time swept down upon and devastated the province of Shantung, bridges, roads, and even villages being submerged and destroyed, with great loss of life, largely owing to Chinese official incompetence. The Japanese, after covering 20 kilometres in two days, reached a stream so swollen that crossing was impossible. The artillery had to return to Lung-kow. German diplomacy, meanwhile, exasperated at its inability to prevent ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... the seventh century and from the author whose name it bears. The tradition of Lismore and indeed of the Irish Church is constant in attributing it to him. Copies of the Rule are found in numerous MSS. but many of them are worthless owing to the incompetence of the scribes to whom the difficult Irish of the text was unintelligible. The text in the Leabhar Breac has been made the basis of his edition of the Rule by Mac Eaglaise, a writer in the 'Irish Ecclesiastical Record' (1910). Mac ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... all about you when you first got into trouble and I was told that the official report of your death was fictitious, invented by underlings too clumsy to capture you and fearful of the consequences of their incompetence. Also I heard unimpeachable testimony that you were alive later and had been seen in Rome with Maternus and outside Rome, the next summer, with the mutineers from Britain. I have often wondered how you got into such company. Tell me how you came to ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... did find) existing settlements of their own people already established as colonies by the Romans. The chiefs very probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but seem rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence. They learnt no new language, but continued to talk that of their original seat on the Continent, which language was split up into a number of local dialects, each of which was a mixture of original German and adopted Greek, Latin ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... 'ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant!" said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to apprehend the conditions of ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... are ruled, and whose foreskin overhung (the tip of his penis), had this blockage carelessly medicinally removed, and not wishing to be alone wanted them all to be circumcised. (We have tentatively restored the word BLOCKAGE, which the scribe's incompetence has omitted, and substituted medically removed for carried out by a doctor which was never there.) Who shall wonder that this kind of cutting caused an outcry by Epicureans and Pagans? It can be seen therefore, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... this point, Rodney pocketed the letter and elaborately looked at his watch. Although the action meant that he resigned Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted himself entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was profound though unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there was nothing else left for him to do. He was forced to go, leaving ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit he had done it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs of incompetence. Logically considered, the race was built straight and clean and healthy and happy. How, since then, it has developed in multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness and proportions, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is that Baha-'ullah was virtually the head of the Bābī community, and that Ṣubḥ-i-Ezel was wrapt up in dreams, and was really only a figurehead. In fact, from whatever point of view we compare the brothers (half-brothers), we are struck by the all-round competence of the elder and the incompetence of the younger. As leader, as teacher, and as writer he was alike unsurpassed. It may be mentioned in passing that, not only the Hidden Words and the Seven Valleys, but the fine though unconvincing apologetic arguments ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... criticism!"[37] Yet in one case he writes a score of pages of critical dialogue, in which the chief interlocutor is a painter who avenges his own failure by stringent attacks on the work of happier rivals of the year. And speaking in his own proper person, Diderot knows how to dismiss incompetence with the right word, sometimes of scorn, more often of good-natured remonstrance. Bad painters, a Parrocel, a Brenet, fare as ill at his hands as they deserved to do. He remarks incidentally that the condition of the bad painter and the bad actor is worse than that of the bad man of letters: ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... learning, and accuracy in the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the least controvert the impression given by the German press of political powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and controversy. A great scholar may be a booby in a drawing-room, and a lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of is a queer, unbalanced savage who nurses an insane hatred for me. I employed him once, but had to discharge him for incompetence, and he has threatened my life repeatedly. You may imagine the start it gave me to stroll into a cafe, at this distance from Kalvik, and find him seated ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... for the corresponding time the imported workmen have been here. In other words, the new men have, while shortening the time of completion, given twice as much work for exactly the same wage paid your Mexicans. In other words, too, your local laborers cancelled our agreement by their own incompetence." ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Addison and Steele. Swift and Johnson, Gibbon and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable, ineffective age. They emerged sudden from the impeccable greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast. So, while the highway drifted—drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius. The brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard might have relieved the gloom of the darkest era, and their separate masterpieces make some atonement for the environing cowardice ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... to considerable expense and trouble, not to say danger. He was aware of that, and yet he refused to pay his share. He accused me of incompetence. Very well. That presuggested that I must have made an error, and it was on that assumption that he said I did not know my business. Instead of giving me a chance to correct the error, which he declared I had made, he quit—cold. Now he is entitled ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... Faguet's criticism of modern democracy with the daily paper in his hand. He will then see, taking chapter by chapter, how in some aspects the phenomena of English democracy are identical with those described in the text, and how in others our English worship of incompetence, moral and technical, differs considerably from that which prevails in France. It might have been possible, as a part of the scheme of this volume, to note on each page, by way of illustration, instances from contemporary ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... perfection. There still is much for you to do. There always will be. Nevertheless in the ways just reviewed, and in various other ways not mentioned in this chapter, you have made yourself verbally rich. You are one of the millionaires of language. When you speak, it is not with stammering incompetence, but with confident readiness. When you write, it is with energy and assurance in the very flow of the ink. Where you had long been a slave, you have become a freeman and can look your fellows in the eye. You have the best badge of culture a human being ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... these absurd goings-on? Some disagreeable business that disturbs him, indeed! I suppose the unhappy creature has had a brief forced upon him by some evil-starred attorney, and is sinking into a state of imbecility from a dim consciousness of his own incompetence." ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... seem that Providence itself assumed the guidance of this longsuffering Union army, that had been so often led by incompetence in the field and paralyzed by interference at Washington. Even the philosophical historian, the Comte de Paris, admits this truth in ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the Ministers affected not to believe them, it was evident from the armament which they sent out that they did; for however incompetent that armament has been to the end, nobody could admit a doubt that it was intended to oppose men in arms, and to compel by force, the incompetence for its purposes proceeding merely from that blind ignorance and total misconception of American affairs which had operated upon the Ministers in ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... battle the siege of Stirling was renewed; but owing to the gross incompetence of a French engineer, who had come over with Lord Drummond, the batteries were so badly placed that their fire was easily silenced by that of the castle guns. The prince, in spite of the advice of Lord George ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... to know who John Hobb was, and the Doctor was forced to acknowledge him a quite mythical character, whose name in that part of the world stood proverbially for incompetence. After that when any of the four made a mistake he or she was promptly dubbed John Hobb. For once the unwritten law was unobserved, and it was long past ten when the party broke up, Eve and the Doctor having captured the best of a series of rubbers. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Gaul, I always hastened to say that I spoke his or her language only 'un tout petit peu'—knowing well that this poor spark of slang would kindle within the breast of M. Tel or the bosom of Mme. Chose hopes that must so quickly be quenched in the puddle of my incompetence. I offer no excuse for so foolish a proceeding. I do but say it is characteristic of all who are duffers at speaking a foreign tongue. Great is the pride they all take in airing some little bit ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties. ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Pierce well knew his own incompetence to restrain these strong and violent men. He did not know where his knight was to be found, and, if he had known, it was only too likely that these terrible intentions might be carried out before any messenger could reach him. Indeed, the belief ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reforming the abuses in the army and navy, dismissing incapable officials, and preparing to render some efficient aid to its hard-pressed ally. The proposal that Prince Ferdinand should assume the command of the army—whose efforts had hitherto been rendered nugatory by the utter incompetence of the Duke of Cumberland who, although personally as brave as a lion, was absolutely ignorant of war—afforded ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... his wish was so little gratified, that he elected to get well for the representation in order to conduct it himself, which he would not have done if it had been found necessary to cancel the performance on account of my incompetence. In this wretched position, vexed in mind, exposed to the severe climate, which even on summer evenings struck me as horribly cold, and occupied merely in warding off the most painful troubles of life, my time, as far as any professional ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling these that the London County Council was enabled to continue ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... control; and in his favourite part of the angels' advocate he finds palliations and makes allowances for all those defections in the servants of the public which goad men to fury and which, since the War came in to supply incompetence with a cloak and a pretext, have been exasperatingly on the increase. Thus, serene and considerate, has X. gone ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... showed how stubbornly he held to the conviction that it was his own land which he cultivated, however little profit he derived from his toil. For once the tchinovnik dared not interfere; public opinion had so strongly condemned their incompetence and dishonesty that the Russian official was glad to efface himself; the landowners, on the other hand, showed little enthusiasm. They knew what their revenues were, but not what they ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... moment, whether he to whom it was to be done was really needy, or were we the fit doer, or should it be done in this way or that. We hesitated, and the moment was gone. Self-consciousness had again demonstrated its incompetence for superintending a task. Many of us, far from regarding self-consciousness as a ground of goodness, are disposed to look upon ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... failure to secure relection. But here responsibility would end. When, on the other hand, the party selects, supports, and vouches for a candidate, the party constitutes a definite and permanent pledge to the voters. Thus the party is stimulated to select its candidates carefully, lest their incompetence or dishonesty fatally injure the reputation of the party. The past exploits of the party are appropriated for future campaigns; conversely, the failure or misbehavior of an officeholder will be pointed out ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... stubborn guerilla who defied her generals and defeated her armies in Spain. In 133 the terrible fate of Numantia, and in 132 the merciless suppression of the Sicilian slave-revolt, warned all foes of the Republic that the sword, which the incompetence of many generals had made seem duller than of old, was still keen to smite; and except where some slave-bands were in desperate rebellion, and in Pergamus, where a pretender disputed with Rome the legacy of Attalus, every land along the shores of the Mediterranean was subject to or at the ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... and emphasized. In riper culture the growing pressure of esthetic desire leads to the addition of many superficial modifications whose chief office is to please the fancy. In periods of deadened sensibility or even through the incompetence of individual artists in any period, such features may be ill chosen and erroneously applied, interfering with construction and use, and thus violating well founded and generally accepted canons of taste. In respect to primitive works ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... that carcass; and if he gets that chance, it may not be a whole one—do you care enough for him to run that dangerous risk?' But she obstinately kept her own counsel. The professional manner that he ridiculed so often was apparently useful in just such cases as this. It covered up incompetence and hypocrisy often enough, but one could not be human and straightforward with women and fools. And women and fools made up the greater part of a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random—amid laughing counter-charges of incompetence—had shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... inadequate to the task of closing this important debate on account of a severe indisposition which I labor under," were Randolph's opening words, but even this prefatory apology gave little warning of the distressing exhibition of incompetence which was to follow. "On the reopening of the court," records John Quincy Adams in his "Memoirs," "he [Randolph] began a speech of about two hours and a half, with as little relation to the subject-matter as possible... ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... probably, a reciprocal disapproval of our methods of carrying on a conspiracy; for, while he was most gravely disappointed at getting no result from his work and expenditure, no doubt owing largely to my incompetence for that kind of service, I was equally dissatisfied at being sent on an expedition which put my life in imminent danger, with the minor perils of torture and long imprisonment, provided with information utterly insufficient and needlessly ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... camouflage is most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere are now kept painted, by the busy work of numberless publicists, so as to be mistaken for Napoleons—at a distance....It becomes almost impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incompetence, because of the enormous public support created by hiding or glossing failure, and exaggerating or inventing success.... But the most insidious and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on the generals themselves: modest and ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... that while the crown did not interfere, the court would not touch the property of the convict: nothing but an attested copy of conviction, would be admitted as evidence of conviction. Nor would the proof of transportation, of itself, as the law then stood, prove the incompetence of a witness. His time might have expired; his expatriation might have been the condition of his pardon, or his offence might have been a misdemeanour, and not involve the corruption of blood;[127] ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... amusing pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment we look for a reform due to character and not to money, to statesmanship and not to interest or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, we remembered the maladministration and incompetence revealed by the Crimean War as part of a bygone state of things until the South African war shewed that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbons who have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... natives of both sexes and all ages, violence without judgment, and severity without reason. One French general after another was sent out to bring the rebellious Arabs and Kabyles into subjection, only to display his own incompetence for the inhuman task, and to return baffled and brutalized by the disgraceful work he thought himself bound to carry out. There is no more humiliating record in the annals of annexation than this miserable conquest of Algiers. It ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... I want to see, Mr. Van Nant," said Cleek, after the first formalities were over, and assuming, as he always did at such times, the heavy, befogged expression of incompetence. "I confess this bewildering affair altogether perplexes me; but you, I understand, were Mr. Carboys' close friend and associate, and as I can find nothing in the nature of a clue here, I should like, with your permission, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... others. On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... man had achieved his object. The woman desisted from further questioning. She sat quite still, conscious of the unpleasant fact that the man was laughing at her, and also perfectly aware that his incompetence was responsible for the fact that they were utterly lost amongst ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... director. There must be the same division and direction of labor and the same spirit of co-operation; there must be intelligence in planning schedules for traffic and overcoming obstacles of nature and human frailty and incompetence. The teamster, the longshoreman, the freight-handler, and the engineer must all feel the push of the economic demand, keeping them steadily at work. A strike on any portion of the line ties up traffic and upsets the calculations of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... little aloof from his immediate friendly purpose. He had wished as delicately as possible to rouse in Gwendolen a sense of her unfitness for a perilous, difficult course; but it was his wont to be angry with the pretensions of incompetence, and he was in danger of getting chafed. Conscious of this, he paused suddenly. But Gwendolen's chief impression was that he had not yet denied her the power of doing what would be good of its kind. Klesmer's fervor seemed to be a sort of glamor such ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... many scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability, ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or incompetence is not an ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... restored to the right of voting which it had enjoyed in 1789 before equality was a fundamental law, and which the Rights of Man enabled them to claim. And now the incident of Varennes supplied the enemies of the throne with a new argument. The wretched incompetence of Lewis had become evident to all, and to the queen herself. She did not hesitate to take his place, and when people spoke of the Court, it was the queen they meant. The flight, and the policy that led to it, and that was renewed ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... that night he began to wonder what work would fall to him. What work had it been the custom for the heir apparent to perform? What work had his father and grandfather and great- grandfather performed when their positions were his position to- day?... Vaguely he recognized his incompetence to administer anything of importance. Probably, little by little, detail by detail, matters would be placed under his jurisdiction until he was safely functioning ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... affairs of his department in as satisfactory a condition as the means at the command of the Congress would permit. He was not able, however, to arrange every thing as his judgment assured him was best, and was subjected to many annoyances and great inconvenience by the incompetence and mismanagement of other officials, whom he could not control. The management of the hospital supplies of the army was especially defective, and was the cause of much suffering to the troops. He made repeated efforts to effect a reform in this particular, but failing to accomplish ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... planned and toiled and fought, keeping his own counsel, bearing patiently the disappointment, the misunderstanding, the doubt, the criticism, the woe of millions who had no other hope but in his success and were often on the verge of despair. He beheld his plans defeated by the incompetence or errors of subordinates whom he trusted, and let the blame be laid upon himself without protest or murmuring. He knew better than any one else the terrible cost of life which his unrelenting purpose demanded; but ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... he had began to drink again—drink had always been his trouble, and at last everything had to be sold and he went away West, leaving her and her grandfather alone. Then commenced a sorrowful story—the story of incompetence struggling with greed and want. They would have starved she declared only for Charles Stuart. It was he was the good kind lad. He had met her on the street one day last autumn and for a long while he had done everything to help them. He had found a place where grandaddy ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Sea of his Soul was mov'd, And bubbled up with Jewels, and he said; "Oh Shah, I am the Slave of thy Desire, Dust of thy Throne ascending Foot am I; Whatever thou Desirest I would do, But sicken of my own Incompetence; Not in the Hand of my infirmer Will To carry into Deed mine own Desire. Time upon Time I torture mine own Soul, Devising liberation from the Snare I languish in. But when upon that Moon I think, my Soul relapses—and when look— I leave both ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... for the younger children. Her best jewels indeed had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nelly, who showed signs of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint guardian of Trix and Roger, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now that his mother's soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than ever by her widow-hood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet fulfilled them—anxiously and well—to the amazement of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that a just verdict is likely to be reached. But there can be neither doubt nor mistake as to the President's management of foreign affairs during the two years preceding the declaration of war against England; nor of the remarkable incompetence which he showed in rallying the moral and material forces of the nation to meet an emergency of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... at Richmond to transmit funds to its agents abroad. Bullock, especially, required large amounts in furtherance of his ship-building contracts and was embarrassed by the lack of business methods and the delays of the Government at home. The incompetence of the Confederacy in finance was a weakness that characterized all of its many operations whether at home or abroad[1048] and was made evident in England by the confusion in its efforts to establish credits there. At first the Confederate Government supplied its agents abroad with ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, 595 At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... at any rate, in the initiation of a project which Lord Cochrane, knowing that he would oppose it, had purposely kept secret from him, and assign the whole merit of its completion to the army which his vacillation and incompetence were holding ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... sensitive and receptive years of life, our boys have been trained in "how not to get there," in a variety of disconnected subjects, by men who have never "got there," and it would be difficult to imagine any curriculum more calculated to produce a miscellaneous incompetence. They have also, it happens, received a certain training in savoir faire through the collective necessities of school life, and a certain sharpening in the arts of advocacy through the debating society. Except for these latter helps, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of the peasant class. In this lies the main significance of the rising in Galicia in 1846. This was in its origin a Polish nationalist movement, hatched in the little independent republic of Cracow. As such it had little importance; though, owing to the incompetence of the Austrian commander, the Poles gained some initial successes. More fateful was the attitude of the Orthodox Ruthenian peasantry, who were divided from their Catholic Polish over-lords by centuries of religious and feudal oppression. The Poles had sought, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... knowledge to predict the result. By voting Polish, a locality can escape liability for the indemnity, and for the crushing taxation consequent on voting German, a factor not to be neglected. On the other hand, the bankruptcy and incompetence of the new Polish State might deter those who were disposed to vote on economic rather than on racial grounds. It has also been stated that the conditions of life in such matters as sanitation and social legislation are incomparably better in Upper Silesia than ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... find her a vision. Despair of the Prince; despair of the King; despair of the Queen, not unmixed with rage, to judge from her voice and gestures. Consultation of an astrologer. Flight of the Prince in search of his beloved. Universal bewilderment and incompetence, such as may be witnessed any day in the East when anything happens at all out of the ordinary way. At this point enter the comic relief, in the form of woodcutters. I am inclined to suppose, from the delight of the audience, that there was something genuine ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge him with incompetence and not, with dishonesty. And why not extend the same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the golden sash and rose-coloured wand which marked the rank about to be bestowed on me. I felt very deeply my own incompetence and ignorance; and even had I valued more the proffered honour, I should have been bound to decline it. But at the third word I spoke, I was silenced with a stern though perfectly calm severity. Flinging back the fold of his ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... a centurion in Sulla's army, and had received an allotment of confiscated land in Etruria; but, like others, had failed to prosper. The movement was one born of discontent with embarrassments which were mostly brought about by extravagance or incompetence. But the rapidity with which Manlius was able to gather a formidable force round him seems to shew that there were genuine grievances also affecting the agricultural classes in Etruria generally. At any rate there was now no doubt that a formidable ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence in the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... in to the same purpose. Bob listened with a rising indignation. This sort of talk was old, but he had not expected to meet it here; it is the talk of incompetence against authority everywhere, of the sea lawyer, the lumberjack, the soldier, the spoiled subordinate in all walks of life. He had taken for granted a finer sort of loyalty here; especially from such men as Ross and Charley Morton. His face flushed, and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the observer to piece out our imperfections with his thoughts. But this should come only after the resources of a patient and well-learned art have been exhausted; else what is felt as depth is really confusion and incompetence. The simplest thing becomes unutterable, if we have forgotten how to speak. And a habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... and vulgar reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with us, but such spirits ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... little respecting the so-called "automatic" powers and ways, even of higher animals, to dogmatize regarding the acts of lower animals, but we may safely assume that one apparent ground or distinction between instinct and reason may be found in the common incompetence of instinct to move out of the beaten track of existence, and in the adaptation of reason, through the teachings of experience, to new and unwonted circumstances. Let Dr. Carpenter speak as an authority on such a subject. "The whole nervous system of ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... avowed minister of the English Prince with whom they were always in secret communication, when opinion forced them to consent to his restitution, had tacked to the amnesty a clause as cowardly as it was unconstitutional, and declared his incompetence to sit in the parliament of his country. Burke on the contrary fought the whig fight with a two-edged weapon: he was a great writer; as an orator he was transcendent. In a dearth of that public talent ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... mansion. Nearly every reporter in Paris had called at the Grandidier factory and interviewed both workmen and master. Some had even started on personal investigations, in the hope of capturing the culprit themselves. There was no end of jesting about the incompetence of the police, and the hunt for Salvat was followed all the more passionately by the general public, as the papers overflowed with the most ridiculous concoctions, predicting further explosions, and declaring even that all Paris would some morning be blown into the air. The "Voix du Peuple" ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the English middle classes look upon the colonists with much interest, or regard them as, on the whole, their equals. The prevailing colonial political habits, as seen from England, suggested only unwarrantable wrangling indicative of political incompetence and a spirit of disobedience. Loyalty, to an {20} Englishman, meant submission to the law. To men trained in such different schools, words did not mean the same thing. The time had come when the two peoples were scarcely able to understand ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... man to know where he stands and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble. Now to all writers of the first order, these rules, and the need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... and did enjoy the office of Resident Engineer of said bridge during a period covering the greater part of the construction thereof, and received the full salary of said office, to and until said Blake took charge of said bridge, which had been imperilled by your incompetence; and said Blake, against your strenuous objections and opposition and at great personal risk, ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... plunder of property, theft of every kind, went on indiscriminately. To survive in the struggle of life a man required to possess wives and children and slaves—in the abundance of these lay his power. But if, through incompetence or sickness or misfortune, he failed he was regarded as the lawful prey of the chief nearest him. To weaken the House of a neighbour was as clear a duty as to strengthen one's own. Oppression and outrage were of common occurrence. ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... had they concealed from the nation their knowledge, if they had known it? There was, then, a double diplomacy, each striving to outwit the other. The Austrian Alliance was, then, no dream of faction; there was either incompetence or treason in official diplomacy, perhaps both. A projected congress was spoken of—could it have any other object than that of imposing modifications on the constitution of France?—And all felt indignant at the idea of ceding even one tittle of the constitution ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... a contention of the Anglo-Saxon race that the people should retain power to protect themselves against possible indifference, incompetence or outright meanness on the part of public officials, and if Anglo-Saxons refuse to commit their welfare unreservedly into the hands of fellow Anglo-Saxons, it seems clear that it is placing too great a strain upon human nature ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... then, did the choice lie? The answer is that Dilke, in his own words, "dreamed of a new Greece." He spoke of the lands then blighted by the Sultan's Government—of "rose-clad Roumelia and glorious Crete"—of countries held back by Turkish incompetence, that were by Nature incredibly rich—"the choicest parts of Europe, perhaps of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Britain comes into court, she will be pained to hear, not as Judge but rather as defendant. She comes to answer the charge that, having seized Ireland as a "trustee of civilisation," she has, either through incompetence or through dishonesty, betrayed her trust. We have a habit, in everyday life, of excusing the eccentricities of a friend or an enemy by the reflection that he is, after all, as God made him. Ireland is politically as Great Britain made her. Since ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... pretty well persuaded that the twentieth-century mania of us grown-ups for picking ourselves to pieces is nothing more than a development of this childish hunger to get the cover off things and see the works go round. Dinkie makes wagons and carts and water-wheels, but some common fatality of incompetence overtakes them all and they are cast aside for enterprises more novel and more promising. He announces, now, that he intends to be an engineer. And that recalls the time when I was convinced in my own soul that he was destined for a life of art, since he was forever asking ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... must be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied. It had been a Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland. Such a proof of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought out, proved beyond ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... upon you, milksops, and you cannot discriminate its genuine scents, and you swallow all sorts of filth, wherefore there is trouble in your heads. That's why you are not competent to do anything, and you are unhappy because of this incompetence. Taraska. Yes. He must be about forty now. He is lost to me! A galley-slave—is that my son? A blunt-snouted young pig. He would not speak to his ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... one of the positions on the new Interstate Railway Commission. I felt it a great honor to be asked to act as colleague with such men as Chief Justice Cooley, Mr. Morrison, and others already upon that board, but I recognized my own incompetence to discharge the duties of such a position properly. Though I had been, some years before, a director in two of the largest railway corporations in the United States, my heart was never in that duty, and I never prepared myself to discharge it. Thinking the matter ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... cruelty, injustice, and incompetence of many schoolmasters. I know a young man of twenty-eight, who told me, that, when at school in a certain large city in Peru, (let us say,) he never went into his class any day without feeling quite sick with nervous terror. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... in every shop window, and bars you out of the houses that line the streets. Here, everything needful is yours for the taking. If one is ignorant, or unable to convert wood and water and game to his own uses, he must learn how, or pay the penalty of incompetence. No, little person, I don't think the law of life is nearly so harsh here as it is where the mob struggles for its daily bread. It's more open and aboveboard here; more up to the individual. But it's lonely sometimes. I ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... growing out of it, are the shortcomings on the employment side that contribute to marital instability. Most of these can be referred back to lack of education or opportunity in youth, or to defects of character. Laziness, incompetence, lack of skill in any trade, lack of application, or, on the other hand, the possession by a man with no business "stake" in the community of a trade at which he can work wherever he takes a fancy to ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... was there crueller irony of fate than in this doctor's case. He was altogether unpopular with the authorities, and was at last dismissed for incompetence. When the news of his dismissal became known, a petition was drawn up in his lines, praying that he might remain. This was granted. The day I left hospital he was carried in, ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... sense of national coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice. After Fornovo, her sons scarcely dared to hold their heads up in the field against invaders; and the battles fought upon her soil were duels among aliens for the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... it, look at matters as they stand. Look at the incompetence of our public officers, look at our ruined carrying trade, at those vile enactions of fools, and worse than fools, the Navigation Laws of the United States, and tell me whether things are as they should be. Tell me ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... against the Jews with great pertinacity by their enemies, and the sovereigns were importuned to adopt a more rigorous policy. The inquisitors, in particular, to whom the work of conversion had been specially intrusted, represented the incompetence of all lenient measures to the end proposed. They asserted, that the only mode left for the extirpation of the Jewish heresy, was to eradicate the seed; and they boldly demanded the immediate and total banishment of every unbaptized Israelite ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... ennobling. The people listened, accepting the priest's opinion without question. And their submission was pathetic. It was the submission of a primitive people clinging to religious authority, and Bryden contrasted the weakness and incompetence of the people about him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he had left ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... and not the despotism of a German military caste or a Russian Bolshevik state. We are in this war to preserve the institutions that have made us great. The war has revealed to us their true greatness. All argument about the efficiency of despotism and the incompetence of republics was answered at the Marne and will be hereafter answered at the Rhine. We are not going to overcome the Kaiser by becoming like him, nor aid Russia by ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... tendency, living in a restricted social environment, and displaying the craving of that class of her sex for change, pleasurable excitement, and sympathy. In the satisfaction of her yearnings or ambitions are seen, perhaps more often than is typical, the gloomy aspects of marriage, and the incompetence of women ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... deteriorate whether before or after going to work is only to waste potential citizenship. Citizens who use themselves up in the mere getting of a living have no surplus strength or interest for overcoming incompetence in civic business, or for achieving the highest aim of citizenship,—the art of self-government for the benefit of ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen |
