"Insubordinate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became more and more revealed to his master, that sovereign left in his hands even such matters as despots are apt to guard most jealously. We have seen how, in spite of the murmurings of the whole of his capital, and the almost insubordinate attitude of his navy, he had persevered in the appointment of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, because the judgment of Ibrahim was in favor of its being carried out. This, to Roxalana, was gall and wormwood; well she knew that, as long as the Grand Vizier lived, her sovereignty ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... Pembrose declared was a step forward in civilization, it was a step in the organization and discipline of labour. Of course the unruly and the insubordinate would cry out. But the benefits were plain enough, space, light, baths, association, reasonable ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... matter. We are expected to degrade ourselves by meaningless and humiliating gestures. The N.C.O.'s are almost as bad. If you answer a sergeant as you would a foreman, you are impertinent; if you argue with him, as all good Scotsmen must, you are insubordinate; if you endeavour to drive a collective bargain with him, you are mutinous; and you are reminded that upon active service mutiny is punishable by death. It is all very unusual ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... coadjutor who could not share with him the burden of the general execration—thus he stood exposed to the wantonness, the ingratitude, the faction, the envy, and all the evil passions of a licentious, insubordinate people. It is worthy of remark that the hatred which he had incurred far outran the demerits which could be laid to his charge; that it was difficult, nay impossible, for his accusers to substantiate by proof the general condemnation which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... It taught the people to regard their wishes and wants as the supreme criterion of right. The rapid vicissitudes of power, in which each party successively appealed to the favour of the masses as the arbiter of success, accustomed the masses to be arbitrary as well as insubordinate. The fall of many governments, and the frequent redistribution of territory, deprived all settlements of the dignity of permanence. Tradition and prescription ceased to be guardians of authority; and the arrangements which proceeded from revolutions, from the triumphs of war, and from ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... ought to go into society, or that she needed a chaperone. Society had lost all its charms for him; and he intended to marry his daughter early, and so give her the best of protection. Neither did it seem necessary to him that she should be consulted in any way about her marriage. However insubordinate she might as a child have been to others, to him, whenever they were brought into direct contact, she had always been perfectly submissive, and he expected her to continue so. To such a length had his confidence in the success of his plans gone, that he had never in any way hinted them to his daughter—the ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... regimental as a yellow flap-eared mongrel wot's bin enticed away from its rightful owner," said the insubordinate Chippo. "There ain't nothink in King's Regs. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... face of; take the law into one's own hands; kick over the traces. turn restive, run restive; champ the bit; strike &c. (resist) 719; rise, rise in arms; secede; mutiny, rebel. Adj. disobedient; uncomplying, uncompliant; unsubmissive[obs3], unruly, ungovernable; breachy[obs3], insubordinate, impatient of control, incorrigible; restiff|, restive; refractory, contumacious, recusant &c. (refuse) 764; recalcitrant; resisting &c. 719; lawless, mutinous, seditions, insurgent, riotous. unobeyed[obs3]; unbidden. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... especially the more often conquest becomes the cause of the amalgamation of people into a state, the more often individuals strive to attain their own aims at the public expense, and the more often it becomes necessary to restrain these insubordinate individuals by recourse to authority, that is, to violence. The champions of the social conception of life usually try to connect the idea of authority, that is, of violence, with the idea of moral influence, but ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... was. What was hatefulest and most unendurable of all was the bondage of truce in which the Atterburys held him. Wesley was no coward, and he ached to meet Jack face to face, arm to arm, and settle with that thoughtless insubordinate a rankling list of griefs heaped up in moments of over-vivacious frankness. He would make Jack smart for his arrogance, his insolence, his cursed condescension so soon as they were back among ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... The clerks in the various departments did not hold their positions from the heads of those departments, but from outside politicians who had no connection with the Government business, and as a consequence they were saucy and insubordinate. They found it to their interest to delay and obstruct the procedure of business in order to give the impression that they were overworked, and in that way make their positions more secure and if ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... mistake not, was never known again in Illinois. The convention system was afterwards seen to be an absolute necessity to prevent the disorganization of parties through the restless vanity of obscure and insubordinate aspirants. But the eight who "took the stump" in Sangamon in the summer of 1836 were supported as loyally and as energetically as if they had been nominated with all the solemnity of modern days. They became famous in the ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... again from the comfortable camp, the porters would rather remain where they are and enjoy themselves, and when the horn sounds they go sullenly and slowly to their loads. After half an hour's march they halt, throw down their loads, and begin to whisper in threatening groups. Two insubordinate ruffians lie in wait with their rifles aimed at Stanley, who at once raises his gun and threatens to shoot them on the spot if they do not immediately drop their rifles. The mutiny ends without bloodshed, and the men ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default, systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in contact with an alien government ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... that all chance of saving the Lion had been lost after the second night, when she had beat in her larboard streak, and six feet water in the hold; that the crew had been very insubordinate, and had consumed almost all the spirits; and that not only all the sick had already perished, but also many others who had either fallen over the rocks, when they were intoxicated, or had been found dead in the morning from their exposure during ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... seamen. I merely desire that some of the responsibility for their faults and training should be laid on the shoulders of those critics who shriek unreasonably of their weaknesses, while they do nothing to improve matters. Many of these gentlemen complain of Jack's drunken, insubordinate habits, while they do not disapprove of putting temptation in his way. They complain of him not being proficient, and at the same time they refuse to undertake the task of efficient training. They cherish the memory of the good old times. They speak reverently of ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... of democracy. Communism, equal rewards for all, would lead to the tyranny of the many over the few, and would stifle all motives to excel. Well might the Fabians ask: "Since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or compulsory labour, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce just distribution without Communism and maintain the incentive to labour without mastership?"[1066] Unfortunately for the Socialists, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the bits of business which the energetic Jones transacted before he sailed in the Ranger to harass England. He wrote, as usual, innumerable letters, proposing, condemning, recommending. He had trouble with an insubordinate first lieutenant. He began, too, his social career in France. It was then that he met the Duchesse de Chartres, great-granddaughter of Louis XIV. and mother of Louis Philippe, who at a later time called Jones the Bayard of the Sea, and whom Jones at that time promised "to lay an English frigate ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... immoral and outward honors for the virtuous antedate history. Decorations, tattoos, songs, for the conspicuously brave and efficient, death or some lesser penalty for the cowardly, the traitorous, the insubordinate, figure largely in primitive life. These honors are capricious, uncertain, and transitory; but they are undoubtedly more stimulating to the savage, who lives in the moment, than they are in the more complex existence of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... — The first attempt at mutiny being thus happily suppressed, it is to be hoped that Curtis will succeed as well in future. An insubordinate crew would render ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... returned from the Ohio, he went, with a royal commission, sent him a year before, to command at Detroit.[45] His late chaplain, the very intelligent Father Bonnecamp, speaks of him as fearless, energetic, and full of resource; but the Governor calls him haughty and insubordinate. Great efforts were made, at the same time, to build up Detroit as a centre of French power in the West. The methods employed were of the debilitating, paternal character long familiar to Canada. All emigrants with families were to be carried thither at ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Roderick watched her keenly. Mr. and Mrs. Scobel went back to their business of getting the children together, and the pots, pans, and baskets packed for the return-journey. The children were inclined to be noisy and insubordinate. They would have liked to make a night of it in this woody hollow, or in the gorse-clothed heights up yonder by Stony Cross. To home after such a festival, and be herded in small stuffy cottages, was doubtless trying to free-born humanity, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... squabbles—and indeed it is very difficult when a quarrel of this kind arises, taking it up at the point where it breaks out, to judge it upon that only, since the stream of ill-will may have run underground for a long time—suffice it to say, that Roldan and his men grew more and more insubordinate; were not at all quelled by the presence of the Adelantado on his return from Xaragua; and finally quitted Isabella in a body. The Adelantado contrived to keep some men faithful to him, promising them, amongst other things, two slaves each. Negotiations then took place between the Adelantado ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... imperial track in which he had acquitted himself so well. All would seem to have been in order in the centre of the kingdom; the Borders were as quiet as it was possible for the Borders to be; and only the remote Highlands and islands remained still insubordinate, in merely nominal subjection to the laws of the kingdom. James, we are told, had long intended to make one of the royal raids so familiar to Scottish history among his doubtful subjects of these parts, and accordingly an expedition was very carefully prepared, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... dear. In the course of a few months Alva, finding them still resolute in their refusal, quartered the regiment of Lombardy upon them, and employed other coercive measures to bring them to reason. The rude, insolent, unpaid and therefore insubordinate soldiery were billeted in every house in the city, so that the insults which the population were made to suffer by the intrusion of these ruffians at their firesides would soon, it was thought, compel the assent of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... comparatively wealthy since relieved from the pressure of war, the population became restless, jealous, and insubordinate. The man whose fortune was only made, as it were, yesterday, deemed himself as great a man as the highest and noblest born aristocrat; while the man who had squandered away his patrimony, sought to restore himself from his fallen position ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... early in January, 1863, and was then recalled to join Grant. This was a mortification to McClernand, who had hoped for a command independent of Grant. In his subsequent conduct he seems to have shown incapacity; he was certainly insubordinate to Grant, and he busied himself in intrigues against him, with such result as will soon be seen. As soon as Grant told the Administration that he was dissatisfied with McClernand, he was assured that he was at liberty to ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... relates various matters of interest. The conquest of Mindanao has been practically effected. The numbers and power of the Chinese in the islands have been greatly reduced. A rising of the Zambales has been quelled. Insubordinate Spaniards have been punished; "on New Year's day, I had the entire city council arrested for an act of disobedience to me." Tello is improving the city, and is striving to secure a good water-supply. He has imprisoned Dasmarinas, for ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... continued. "The whole camp turned out to save the lake, to stem the flood. But you were not here. Your companions in our troop worked till they were dog tired. But where were you? Helping? No, you were off on some vagabond journey—disobedient, insubordinate." ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of the reason, or affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek text]), or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is superfinite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... drive him out of the court, or have done so, he goes at once to our mistress with a complaint, and she's a regular bulwark for him; she'll bother the governor himself. And then the government clerk can get drunk or anything else, and not be afraid of anybody, unless he is insubordinate ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... room in the fort had already been taken possession of, by the nabob's soldiers and officers. At eight o'clock, they returned with the news that they could find no place vacant, and the officer in command at once ordered the prisoners into a small room, used as a guardroom for insubordinate soldiers, eighteen ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... medieval hero, who saw that "to rob and pill was a good life," he is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who would otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the poor without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart's knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the other duties—which indeed are not duties at all when they conflict with it, but plain wickednesses—behaved ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... campaigns, she unexpectedly revealed herself one of those Nuns fond of drums and bugles, who seem to have been created to follow the armies in action, to pick soldiers during the vicissitudes of battles, and, better than a General, to tame with one word the rough and insubordinate troopers; a genuine martial and bellicose Nun, whose wrinkled and pitted face, looked like an image of the ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein. There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... of course, her guardian was bound to resist. The fight between her will and his was natural and necessary. It was the clash of two generations, two views of life. She was not merely the wilful and insubordinate girl she would have been before the war; she saw herself, at any rate, as something much more interesting. All over the world there was the same breaking of bonds; and the same instinct towards violence. "The violent taketh by force." Was it the instinct that war leaves, and must leave, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of life. Even if we insist that the interests connected with getting a living are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those connected with enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it were admitted that there is something engrossing and insubordinate in material interests which leads them to strive to usurp the place belonging to the higher ideal interests, this would not—barring the fact of socially divided classes—lead to neglect of the kind of education which trains men for the useful pursuits. It would rather lead ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... fears entertained for, dined with. Smith, N.B., his magnanimity. Smithius, dux. Soandso, Mr., the great, defines his position. Soft-heartedness, misplaced, is soft-headedness. Sol, the fisherman, soundness of respiratory organs hypothetically attributed to. Soldiers, British, ghosts of, insubordinate. Solomon, Song of, portions of it done into Latin verse by Mr. Wilbur. Solon, a saying of. Soul, injurious properties of. South, its natural eloquence, facts have a mean spite against. South Carolina, futile attempt to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... in front of the arsenal, all covered me with rifles. The captain turned to a trusty and told him to call the warden. The warden came out, and the captain told him I was trying to run double on my extra, and said I was impudent and insubordinate and refused to fall in. The warden said, 'Drop that and fall in.' I told him I wouldn't fall in. I said I hadn't run double, that I hadn't got my extra, and that I would stay there till I died before I would be robbed of ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... circumstances, in a decent little house which had been acquired by the sale of those wretched portraits and holy pictures; that Clara ... or Katya, whichever you choose to call her, had astonished every one ever since her childhood by her talent, but was of an insubordinate, capricious disposition, and was constantly quarrelling with her father; that having an inborn passion for the theatre, she had run away from the parental house at the age ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... than his friend by several years. He was of an unruly and insubordinate temper, and did as little work as he pleased at home. He often remarked that he would like to see who could make him do what he ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... But King Kudjoh was growing old in the service of his people; and, as he could no longer give his personal attention to public affairs, dissensions arose in some of the remote provinces. With impaired vision and feeble health he, nevertheless, put an army into the field to punish the insubordinate tribes; but before operations began he died. His grandson, Osai Kwamina, was designated as legal successor to the throne in 1781. He took a solemn vow that he would not enter the palace until he secured the heads of Akombroh and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... explain to me why it is that you—a Parisian artisan, the type of a class the most insubordinate, the most self-conceited that exists on the face of earth—take without question, with so docile a submission, the orders of a man who plainly tells you he does not sympathise in your ultimate objects, of whom you really know very little, and whose views you candidly own you think ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as far as I can toll you, is this:—The men at the collieries have been as troublesome and insubordinate as ever, seeming to think opposition to Lord St. Erme an assertion of their rights as free-born Englishmen; and at last, finding it impossible to do anything with them as long as they did not depend immediately upon himself, he took the pits into his ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that he should consider the holding of this opinion as a tendency toward insubordination. It was also inevitable that the sergeant major should order a course of special fatigues calculated to subdue the spirit of the insubordinate private. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... not contend I was quite right in acting in this insubordinate manner, but we strongly objected to being put under the guard of other commandos by some one irresponsible general. I went on that night till we reached the Biggarsbergen, and next day sent out scouts in the direction of the Drakensbergen to inquire for the scattered ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... countess, and endeavoured to unite these isolated effects, formed an infantry, an artillery, seized upon two fortresses, threatened in all directions the Russians, scattered in small bodies over the wide plains of Poland, prepared for war, disciplined the insubordinate patriotism of the insurgents, and contended successfully against Souwarow, the Russian general, subsequently destined to threaten the republic ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... those days, when the schoolmaster had made but little progress, in the Navy especially, and not much on shore, it was difficult to obtain good and steady warrant officers, and I was especially troubled with a drunken boatswain, gunner, and carpenter. Drunk or sober, they were constantly insubordinate, setting a bad example to the crew, and quarrelling with each other. I determined, however, to master them, and compel them to do their duty, or get them dismissed from the service. As I was the only ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... had no knowledge that there was such a place as Durazzo who was responsible for bringing this comfortable official out of his bed in the early hours of the morning causing him—albeit reluctantly and with violent and insubordinate language—to conduct certain investigations ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace |
