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More "Irresponsibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism. In such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone is a stranger. In such a country it is not strange if men in moral matters feel something of the irresponsibility of a dream. To plan plans which are continually miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing by the assistance of you know not whom, to crush you know not whom, this must be a demoralising ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... really a serious matter. Mrs. Conroth was quite as excited as Betty. Both became vociferous in acclaiming the captain's irresponsibility, and both accused him of having caused ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Pollyooly, and he had a spare bedroom. But for a while the Honourable John Ruffin hesitated; the artist was a man of an uncommonly mercurial, irresponsible temperament. Was it safe to entrust two small children to his care? Then he reflected that Pollyooly was a strong corrective of irresponsibility, and took a ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... well—that is, soberly and substantially—in soft wools or strong silks, as she possibly did not find it easy to do in her youth. She was stately, if somewhat stiff, in her deportment. At present she felt intoxicated at the prospect of enjoying for ten days the irresponsibility ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... I believe, one of Leonora's priests—a man of the world—who suggested that she should take him to Monte Carlo. He had the idea that what Edward needed, in order to fit him for the society of Leonora, was a touch of irresponsibility. For Edward, at that date, had much the aspect of a prig. I mean that, if he played polo and was an excellent dancer he did the one for the sake of keeping himself fit and the other because it was a social duty to show himself at dances, and, when there, to ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... there is not an original thought, sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poetic substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope." And he has still less to say in favour of Pope as a man. He denounces him for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility to suggest that "perhaps ... there is a natural connection between the two kinds of this dexterity of fingering—that of the artist in words, and that of the pickpocket or the forger." If Pope had been a contemporary, Mr. Saintsbury, I imagine, would have stunned him ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... work, and his eyes troubled him with spots and dashes and blurs till he had taken counsel with the sideboard, and the Melancolia both on the canvas and in his own mind appeared lovelier than ever. There was a delightful sense of irresponsibility upon him, such as they feel who walking among their fellow-men know that the death-sentence of disease is upon them, and, seeing that fear is but waste of the little time left, are riotously happy. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... returned not only to his original enterprise but to schemes for removing other checks on the power of the sovereign which had come into being in the last two centuries—notably the feudal independence of the Dere Beys, and the irresponsibility ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... know who and what it was to be a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, "anyway." That indeed—he did her perfect justice—was of the very essence of the newness and freshness and beautiful, brave, social irresponsibility by which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... time. Ah, my dear young friends! 'they promise them liberty.' It is a fine thing to get out of your father's house, and away from the restrictions of the society where you are known, and loving eyes—or unloving ones—are watching you. It is a fine thing to get into the freedom and irresponsibility of a big city! 'They promise them liberty,' and 'they themselves become the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... and practical irresponsibility of money have ruined many a man, and the misuse of wealth has left unused immense opportunity for good. It has coined a word that has become abhorrent, and "Capitalism" has, in the minds of the suspicious, become the all-sufficient ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... remarkable family—remarkable in their unparalleled irresponsibility. They had a house in Grosvenor Place and another in Devonshire. The latter, like the Featherstones, was gorgeous in its external aspect, but thoroughly unstable in its foundations. The instability of ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... urgent claim on her devotion no longer existed. Mrs Verloc, who thought in images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse. She did not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of the late Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs Verloc breathed these two would have ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... space reserved for dancing, and as Paul drank his first glass of champagne the bubbles rose and raced merrily through his thin blood, lifting him out of his squalid reality into an echo world of irresponsibility. The crowds on the floor were swirling to a delirious dance tune while above their heads shot up the white arms of women and the black arms of men, to keep dozens of multi-colored toy ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... matter-of-course probity in all money concerns had made him something of an autocrat in connection with these trusts. If Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the bother of thinking too. He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations. His fellow trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas, his cousins-in-law Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's husband, all trusted him; he signed first, and where ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... absorbed the attention, and spoiled the means, the minds, and the souls of the masses. The sight daily in every great English-reading city when the sporting editions of the newspapers appear, ought indeed to arouse every follower of Christ. But the habit of irresponsibility that has grown up in most "Christian" circles has still to be fought against everywhere, and The General's persistent testimony against it, indeed the whole theory of a Divine Army and of War, must remain for ever one of the strongest features of his life's ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... echoed the statement. Then Aunt Abigail was appealed to, for just one more, and complied without any pretence of reluctance. Aunt Abigail was enjoying herself hugely, and it was characteristic of her amiable irresponsibility that it never occurred to her that there might be undesirable consequences, from thus stimulating the vivid imaginations of a ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... order a new piano in the morning, buy his wife a sealskin jacket in the afternoon, and by the next day be deeper in the mire than ever, and wonder how he got there. And there is Jones's young wife, a charming woman, who is dragging her husband into debt with the same kittenish irresponsibility. She will leave Jones on the pavement with a remark that suggests that she is going into the shop to buy some pins, and will come out with a request for L10 for some "perfectly lovely" thing that has caught her eye. And Jones, being elderly, and still a little ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... to come sooner or later between public opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the individual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... His irresponsibility enchanted her in spite of herself—Ned had judged the situation rightly when he said: "It is the circus aspiring to the academy and the academy spying the circus." His epigram occurred to him as he ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... hard at Elsie, reproachfully yet lovingly. It was so good to see the girl that the plans she had laid as she came on from Massachusetts escaped her. She spoke at random, and might have imparted the same impression of mental irresponsibility that she had given ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... the chauffeur inquired respectfully; all the employees of the Julia Carter Sykes establishment respected Molly, as well they might. A sudden, happy irresponsibility flooded Molly's tired mind, and she smiled into the man's face—the old, not-to-be-resisted ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... good care, or ought to take good care, that they shall answer to us for their insanity, and we imprison them in what we call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad, because lunacy ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... maintain, but the very irresponsibility of which I have spoken. Why, gentlemen, I foresee the day when these people themselves shall come to us Southerners of their own accord and ask to be re-enslaved until such time as they shall be fit for freedom." Old Horace was ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... complain of the irresponsibility of the papal acts, and Popes themselves had to allow that there were spheres outside their legislative interference. Thus Urban II acknowledges that in matters on which our Lord, His Apostles, and the Fathers have given definite decisions, ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... not in the chronicles, as Stradella's and Ortensia's are, as well as Pignaver's. The Venetian nobleman 'sent certain assassins,' and that is all we know; and as for the names and faces and figures I have given to the Bravi, I found them beyond the borders of truth in the delicious Gardens of Irresponsibility, where many strange people dwell together, who might be real, and may be alive some day, but who have not yet made up their minds to exchange the flowery paths of fiction for the stony roads and dusty lanes of this ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... few years' experience with commission government revealed certain patent defects. The division of the work among five men was frequently found to introduce dissensions and irresponsibility. Commissioners were often lacking in the technical ability required to manage such difficult matters as fire and police protection, public health, public works, and public utilities. Some one then proposed to carry ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... ruptured and so the integrity of the nation be the more imperiled. Withal there was a spreading and deepening and most reasonable disgust at the reckless ranting of a little knot of antislavery men having their headquarters at Boston, who, exulting in their irresponsibility, scattered loosely appeals to men's vindictive passions and filled the unwilling air with clamors against church and ministry and Bible and law and government, denounced as "pro-slavery" all who declined to accept their measures ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... for it is a subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care (which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the evening, while Mendouca was reading in his cabin, my friend Pedro joined me on deck, and, with many expressions of poignant distress at his father's behaviour to me, endeavoured to excuse it upon the plea of irresponsibility already urged by Mendouca himself; the poor lad assuring me that even he was not always safe from the consequences of his father's violence. And during the half-hour's chat that ensued I learnt enough to convince me that Mendouca was in very truth afflicted ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... bad, and momentarily attractive. But she only said "No," apparently from habit, picked up her doll, and the boy clambered to the front of the wagon. The incomplete episode terminated at once with that perfect forgetfulness, indifference, and irresponsibility common to all young animals. If either could have flown away or bounded off finally at that moment, they would have done so with no more concern for preliminary detail than a bird or squirrel. ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... agility only to be acquired in the hot fear of death. A report rang out and echoed among the hills. A bullet went 'splat' against a rock near at hand, making a frayed blue mark upon the grey stone. The man dodged from side to side in the panic-stricken irresponsibility of a rabbit seeking covert where none exists. There was not so much as to hide his head. Conyngham looked up towards the foe in time to see a puff of white smoke thrown up against the steely sky. A ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... the whole endless hour was a seesaw between the past and the present, between his new dignity and his old irresponsibility. He tried—at first with boisterous familiarity, then with ponderous condescension—to draw his friends out. What would Eleanor think of them—the idiots! And what would she think of him, for having such asinine friends? ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... here as a sign of the mental cloudiness which led British Ministers for the first eighteen months of the war to plod along with the most haphazard arrangements known even to that age. The contrast between the boyish irresponsibility of military management in England and the terrible concentration of power in the hands of Carnot at Paris, after July 1793, goes far to explain the disasters to the Union Jack after the first few months of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the staff, and given a second lieutenancy in a volunteer regiment, and for two years he pursued the little brown men over the paddy sluices, burned villages, looted churches, and collected bolos and altar-cloths with that irresponsibility and contempt for regulations which is found chiefly in the appointment from civil life. Incidentally, he enjoyed himself so much that he believed in the army he had found the one place where excitement is always in ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... stony stare gave way to a look of intelligence and recognition. Then, through the beard of a season's growth and behind the haggard mask before me, I saw at once the circus-rider of Turin and Paris. I remember being scarcely excited or surprised at the meeting, for a great sense of irresponsibility came over me, and I involuntarily accepted the coincidence as a matter of course. He tried in vain to speak, but held up his right hand, and feebly made with his fingers the sign of the letter which had played such a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... upon what he fancied he knew about his distinguished guest. Among those who crowded the place were several men of education, in the Honduranean sense,—about equal to that of a poorly trained American child in the fourth grade. But there was not one of them that did not show a monkey curiosity and irresponsibility in handling every article in my pack; my sweater—"Ay que lindo!" my papers—"How beautiful!" an extremely ordinary shirt—"How soft and fine! How costly!" and "How much did this cost?—and that?" Suaza displayed my medicine-case to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... stationing his Brigadiers and Colonels under the name of Supervisors, Inspectors, &tc. in the different States. Let us deserve well of our country by making her interests the end of all our plans, and not our own pomp, patronage, and irresponsibility. I have hazarded these hasty and crude ideas, which occurred on contemplating your report. They may be the subject of future conversation and correction. Accept my ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... such jumps of date. The others watched him while he did so—or contemplated in silence some "guest" of the hostelry, when such a personage entered the place with an air of appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and found no one but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... thought for a minute, and demonstrated her irresponsibility with a little shrug. "Then I'm very sorry," she said. "But, monsieur, you haven't ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... exemption, freedom, irresponsibility, immunity, liberty, license, release, exoneration, excuse, dispensation, absolution, franchise, renunciation, discharge; exculpation &c. 970. V. be exempt &c. adj. exempt, release, acquit, discharge, quitclaim, remise, remit; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... they have: an honorable name, a lifetime of devotion, the full ten talents. For these, you have returned dishonor, unchastity and self-indulgent hypocrisy. You have begged extenuation on the basis of nervous ill- health and temporary irresponsibility, both of which you have brought upon yourself by violating the laws of right-living. It is your soul that is sick. You are not fit to live free and equal with righteous men and women. You have had love and mercy-they ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... side of his character—his uncompromising dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the Memoirs of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom Browning came in contact. These Memoirs constitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the flitting thought that it was Peter's feeling for her that made it so. She thought perhaps that it was the old childish happiness that she had known in the valley, the freedom and leisure and irresponsibility of the old days. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... openly, and if there was any difference in them concerning it, the difference was in his greater forbearance toward the unhappy man. They both spoke of his wrong-doing as if it were his infirmity; they could not do otherwise; and they both insensibly assumed his irresponsibility in a measure; they dwelt in the fiction or the persuasion of a mental obliquity which would account for otherwise ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... had got into that corner of his nature where youth and its irresponsibility loitered yet. For a moment he was shaken, and then, looking into the faces of the Elders, said: "Friends, I go again upon paths that lead into the wilderness. I know not if I ever shall return. Howsoe'er ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a "worse cropper" might not possibly be a less serious ill than persistent slacking and irresponsibility; but now that the bad news was out, Ralph was fast regaining ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunken, your incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties. The salient characteristic of your civilisation is its irresponsibility. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; the well-being of the labourer is no one's concern. You depend on variations of supply and demand which you can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a harvest, the modification of a tariff in some remote country dislocates ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... country, whereas he took care that there should be no responsibility but to himself. He viewed them, in fact, in the light of instruments which he might break as he pleased. I found this single index sufficient to disclose all his future designs In order to make the irresponsibility of his Ministers to the public perfectly clear, he had all the acts of his Government signed merely by M. Maret, Secretary of State. Thus the Consulship for life was nothing but an Empire in disguise, the usufruct of which could not long satisfy the First ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... watched so patiently and heroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven little English children in a squalid Paris pension, now lapsing back into the old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had she weakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of the two, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? And what was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would it lead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Kirk Presbytery of Muirtown increased the gaiety of nations, and there might be persons—far left to themselves, of course—who would describe its members as wearisome ecclesiastics. Carmichael himself, in a mood of gay irresponsibility, had once sketched a meeting of this reverend court, in which the names were skilfully adapted, after the ancient fashion, to represent character, and the incidents, if not vero, were certainly ben trovato, and had the article ready for transmission ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... nonsense which is a fair target for ridicule. The heaviest charge brought against American humour is that it never keeps its target well in view. We laugh, but we are not purged by laughter of our follies; we jest, but our jests are apt to have a kitten's sportive irresponsibility. The lawyer offers a witticism in place of an argument, the diner-out tells an amusing story in lieu of conversation. Even the clergyman does not disdain a joke, heedless of Dr. Johnson's warning which should save him from that pitfall. Smartness ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... with that of a man no less remarkable than herself, a hero of chivalry, a marvel of courage, of fascination, and of irresponsibility. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... not at all well adapted for commencing their life's work as industrials. The general incoherency and restlessness peculiar to that age frequently lead to a change of employment every few months, while their general irresponsibility and want of self-control lead to frequent disputes with foremen and other officials in factories and shops, in consequence of which the unfortunate child is constantly out of work. In proportion to the joy and pride caused by the realised capacity to earn money ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... marked by blistered pages. She was a pretty, cuddling, helpless little thing, deplorably babyish for a senior; but irresistibly appealing. Everyone teased her, and protected her, and loved her. She was irrevocably predestined to bowl over the first man who came along, with her ultra feminine irresponsibility. Rosalie very often dreamed—when she ought to have been concentrating upon Latin grammar—of that happy future state in which smiles and kisses would take the place ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... social and literary environment. Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time. There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets, whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were high, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... I was told, need not concern himself strenuously over worldly duties; when I had neglected or carelessly performed my tasks, I was not chastised. Human nature finds such instruction very easy of assimilation. Under Master's unsparing rod, however, I soon recovered from the agreeable delusions of irresponsibility. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... often hinted by men that women are made good conversationalists by a sense of irresponsibility. But I am inclined to think that a little gossip now and then is relished by the best of men as well as women. The tendency to gossip with which men constantly credit women, and in which tendency the men themselves ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... legacies; in marriage in our own country; in voting and in jury and militia service; in the right to admission and practice in the professions and many public offices; in the enforcement of laws relating to education and to child labor, as well as to various matters in the criminal code; the irresponsibility of children under ten for crime or misdemeanor; the determination of the ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... taken since those olden times, when the philosophic visionary devised his Utopian society with all the freedom, because with all the irresponsibility, of dreams! He so little contemplated any practical result, that he did not even venture to bring his new commonwealth on the old soil of Europe, lest it should appear too strange, and be put out of countenance by the broad reality: but he carried it out to some far-off island in the ocean, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... stimulation had worn off. The acuity of hearing was no longer so pronounced and the sense of refreshment, although still present, was not intense. We were already becoming adjusted to the new condition. The feeling of inertia and irresponsibility became gradually replaced by a general sense of calmness. To me, it seemed as if I had entered a world of new perspectives, a larger world in which space and time were widened out immeasurably. I could scarcely recall the nature of those impulses that had ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the "outsiders," had to take up arms. Suddenly all the underlying ideas of that outer, greater English life beyond politics, beyond the services, were challenged, its tolerant good humour, its freedom, and its irresponsibility. It was not simply English life that was threatened; it was all the latitudes of democracy, it was every liberal idea and every liberty. It was civilisation in danger. The uncharted liberal system had been taken by the throat; it had to "make good" ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host, who, far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr. Dorset, however, his wife's attitude was a subject of such evident concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery—which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... a half in my hand, I would be a little rattled if a gag was put on me. To the devil with Red Shirt! Although he had not mentioned the name "Porcupine," he had given me such pointers as to put me wise as to who the objective was, and now he requested me not to blow the gaff!—it was an irresponsibility least to be expected from a head teacher. In the ordinary run of things, he should step into the thick of the fight between Porcupine and me, and side with me with all his colors flying. By so doing, he might be worthy the position of the ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... in moral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. The violence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; and a balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility. Epicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise, and passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping to distinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might be rational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, and intellectual ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fine, waxen features, a little tossing mane of flaxen hair, eyes a most lovely and perfect blue, with no more depth in them than in the blue of china, and an expression of the sweetest and most innocent inanity and irresponsibility. Nobody ever expected anything of this little Floretta Vining. She was always a negative success. She smiled around from the foot of her curving class, and never had her lessons, but she never disobeyed the ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... circumstances, and would not have it on my conscience that I indirectly offered encouragement even to a forlorn and shipwrecked brother to abandon hope of becoming the prime minister of the Commonwealth, and to enter upon a life of reckless irresponsibility such ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Council replied that such a matter of procedure concerned themselves alone. Howe replied by introducing into the Assembly a series of twelve resolutions, embracing a general attack on the Council for its secrecy, its irresponsibility, and its ecclesiastical and social one-sidedness, and ending by an appeal to His Majesty 'to take such steps as will ensure responsibility to the Commons.' Eloquent though his speech was in defence of these resolutions, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... emptiness of their purses. To Douglas, whose whole upbringing and subsequent life had been amongst the dreariest of surroundings, there was something about it all peculiarly fascinating. The air of pleasant abandonment, the subtle aroma of gaiety allied with irresponsibility, the strange food and wine, well cooked and stimulating, delighted him. His sole desire now was for a companion. If only those men—artists, he was sure they were—would draw him into their conversation. He had plenty to say. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... responsible for his faults; but there is a sense in which we are none of us responsible for ours, and when we are once permanently committed to this view of ourselves, there is no health in us. To treat the married vagabond as not responsible, is only to increase his irresponsibility. ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... been driven and exiled from the city of Rome: that talkative and turbulent men, sowers of discord, twice and even thrice re-elected tribunes by the vilest intrigues, lived in the enjoyment of regal irresponsibility. "Does that Aulus Verginius," said he, "deserve less punishment than Appius Herdonius, because he was not in the Capitol? Considerably more, by Hercules, if any one will look at the matter fairly. Herdonius, if nothing else, by avowing himself an enemy, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... of these two classes, except perhaps in the irresponsibility of its author. It is compounded of gossip,—the flying gossip or dust of Peking. Take it lightly; blow off such dust as may happen to stick to you. For authentic information turn to the heavy volumes written by the ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... passions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prostitution. (4) There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the result of the common sexual irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women. (5) There is need of more general following of a definite moral standard regarding sexual relationships. (6) There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning all sexual processes. (7) There is ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... that any change which depressed his party, might eventually abrogate his privilege. For the first time in the person of an imperator was seen a supreme autocrat, who had virtually and effectively all the irresponsibility which the law assigned, and the origin of his office presumed. Satisfied to know that he possessed such power, Augustus, as much from natural taste as policy, was glad to dissemble it, and by every means to withdraw it from public notice. But he had passed his ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I interfere"—and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so. Still, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... successful a trip in Florida as I have had in Texas and Oklahoma. The first six days were of the usual Presidential tour type, but much more pleasant than ordinarily, because I did not have to do quite as much speaking, and there was a certain irresponsibility about it all, due I suppose in part to the fact that I am no longer a candidate and am free from the everlasting suspicion and ill-natured judgment which being a candidate entails. However, both in Kentucky, and especially in Texas, I was received with a warmth and heartiness that surprised ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... to talk to the prosecutor's medical representatives or to allow himself to be examined by them. Mr. Jerome therefore was compelled to enter upon an elaborate and expensive preparation of the case, not only upon its merits, but upon the possible question of the criminal irresponsibility of ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... laborers. One was a hodcarrier, and a strapping fellow. When he arrived at the institution, he was at once placed in the violent ward, though his "violence" consisted of nothing more than an annoying sort of irresponsibility. He irritated the attendants by persistently doing certain trivial things after they had been forbidden. The attendants made no allowance for his condition of mind. His repetition of a forbidden act was interpreted as deliberate disobedience. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... average one thousand immigrants per week landed at the port of Boston in the past calendar year, is it not well to consider carefully how we double, and more than double, the popular vote, with all its dangers and its ingredients of ignorance and irresponsibility. Last of all, it must be considered that the lives of men and ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... room—the bucket and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless, that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael's "Madonna of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche to be dreaded,—are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility of animals and the passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material impoverishment and political ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... hobnobbing with the wreckers on the shore. But nothing of this affected his love for the man. He loved him as Vanbrugh Neal had loved him; because of a certain charm, a certain indestructible youth and irresponsibility at the very heart of him, which redeemed ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with a half-dollar, and the treasures of her knowledge were revealed to me. The beauty and her party were to remain a fortnight Among her companions there were no males, except a youthful irresponsibility. Exultemus! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... now she knew that, though he basked under therule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work. He liked to see things fall into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... longer than a year reckoned from the day of their entering on their functions;(4) and they ceased -de jure- to be magistrates upon the expiry of the year, just as the interrex on the expiry of the five days. Through this set termination of the supreme office the practical irresponsibility of the king was lost in the case of the consul. It is true that the king was always in the Roman commonwealth subject, and not superior, to the law; but, as according to the Roman view the supreme judge could not be prosecuted at his own bar, the king might doubtless ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Mr. Wedmore chose to take was that of utter contempt, complete irresponsibility. When his son had finished speaking he waited as if to hear whether there was any more to come, and then abruptly turned his back upon him and began to ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master's horses up the stony hill. Mr. Beebe recognized him at once. Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... it's a joke, do you?" snorted the irate manager, exasperated by this further evidence of irresponsibility. "Well, you'll not think so any longer. I'll attend to that. You turn your samples in and go to the cashier with your expense account. You're fired! Maybe you can understand that! ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Feeding together in a large room must be a little humiliating Fish, they seemed to say, are not so easily caught as men Florid man, who "swelled" in, patronizing the entire room Hated a fellow that was always in high spirits Irresponsibility of hotel life It is a kind of information I have learned to dispense with It's an occupation for a man to keep up a cottage Let me be unhappy now and then, and not say anything about it Live, in short, rather more for one's self than for society ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... heard it picturesquely expressed, "The mask should be torn from the villain's face. Why should a man be allowed to stab his neighbour in the dark!" As a matter of fact, I am convinced that anonymity makes, not for irresponsibility but for responsibility, and that there are many men who, though truculent, offensive, and personal when they write with the "I," will show a true sense of moderation and responsibility when they use the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... seemed to ease the tension. Marguerite sighed a sigh of relief. After all, what was more natural than that Percy with his amazing fund of pleasant irresponsibility should thus greet the man who had once vowed to bring him to the guillotine? Chauvelin, himself, accustomed by now to the audacious coolness of his enemy, was scarcely taken by surprise. He bowed low to His Highness, who, vastly amused at Blakeney's sally, was inclined ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... nothing is more certain than that confusion and chaos must be the inevitable outcome of any attempt to reduce to practice such opposite principles as are involved in Representative Government and Executive irresponsibility. Such an attempt in England would very soon produce revolution. Such an attempt in France did actually produce revolution in 1830, when Charles the Tenth was deposed for his persistent endeavours to maintain an unpopular ministry in power. No country in the world would long continue ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... from the courts in England, and marry his second wife. The case could then only come before him as a suit against the validity of the second marriage, and the accomplished fact was always a powerful argument. Moreover, all this would take time, and delay was as dear to Clement as irresponsibility. But Henry was determined to have such a sentence as would preclude all doubts of the legitimacy of his children by the second marriage, and was as anxious to shift the responsibility to Clement's shoulders ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... Augustin, given over to the irresponsibility of his eighteen years—a heart spoiled by romantic literature, a mind impatient to try every sort of intellectual adventure in the most corrupting and bewitching city known to the pagan centuries, set amidst one of the most ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... amusement; he finished grimly, read and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker analysis, which dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he fancied with a lifting of his brows, be classified under three general headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic attitude ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... by their old-fashioned in-board overhang. But I had no very clear notion of what I was doing; and my feeling, so far as I had any feeling, was less that I was moving of my own volition than that I was being moved by some power acting from outside of me—the sensation of irresponsibility that comes to one sometimes in ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... conspicuous; only Gretchen was frankly curious and made no effort to disguise it. A strange sense of the unreality of the whole scene, himself included, crept over the young man; he felt like a man in a play who can murder or make love with equal irresponsibility. He was about to indulge in the latter diversion, when suddenly the mysterious door opened, and the Frau Professorin entered with much dramatic eclat, leading a lovely dark-eyed young girl by the hand. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... Under emergency situations, when passengers aboard a commercial vessel find indications of total irresponsibility or incipient insanity on the part of a ship's officer, they are considered correct in assuming command for the time needed to protect their lives. We were poisoned by food prepared in your kitchen, and were nearly killed by radioactivity ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... Congress still sits. The President sees fit to send me here, without order from the Departmental Governor. Hombre! what will follow? Quien sabe?" He shrugged his shoulders with that expressive Latin gesture which indicates complete irresponsibility ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he says, "such a procedure presupposes a certain relation of guardianship, on the part of the one who speaks untruth, over him whom he deceives, and a relative irresponsibility on the part of the other,—an incapacity to make use of certain truths except to his actual moral injury. And in each case all depends on the accuracy of this assumption." It is appalling to find a man like Rothe announcing a principle like this as operative in social ethics! Every man to decide ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... brother and uncle, he would have been duller than he was not to get a "hunch," as he would have called it, of what it meant to be a Holiday of the authentic sort. Larry's example was particularly salutary. The younger Holiday could not help comparing his own weak-willed irresponsibility of conduct with the older one's quiet self-control and firmness of principle. Larry's love for Ruth was the real thing. Ted could see that, and it made his own random, ill-judged attraction to Madeline Taylor look crude and cheap if nothing worse. He hated to remember ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... particularly in a world still full of hostilities. The stability of the Army came first; changes would have to be made slowly, without risking the menace of disruption. An attempt to mix the races in the Army seemed to most officers a dangerous move bordering on irresponsibility. Furthermore, the majority of Army officers, dedicated to the traditions of the service, saw the Army as a social as well as a military institution. It was a way of life that embraced families, wives and children. The old ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... heptameters and hexameters rhyming together, and the swift transition from one form to another in the same speech, possibly help towards the lyrical effect aimed at; the nature of the plot licenses a deviation from the ordinary dramatic rules; but such metric irresponsibility would be out of place in any ordinary play. There is a rare daintiness in some of the lines; they are truly poetic; but we must remember that goddesses and the legendary dwellers about Mount Ida may be permitted to speak in a language ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... hide-and-seek, in which the four happy children and the men all joined with equal irresponsibility, and games of blind-man's-buff, that threatened the breaking to pieces of the house. Through it all, old Jim and the preacher, Mrs. Stowe and Miss Doc were becoming more and ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... of other evils, which have no less absorbed the attention, and spoiled the means, the minds, and the souls of the masses. The sight daily in every great English-reading city when the sporting editions of the newspapers appear, ought indeed to arouse every follower of Christ. But the habit of irresponsibility that has grown up in most "Christian" circles has still to be fought against everywhere, and The General's persistent testimony against it, indeed the whole theory of a Divine Army and of War, must remain for ever one of the strongest features ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... low ideals of home life and of personal obligation, which were imbibed in youth, can be traced much family irresponsibility. It is by no means the rule, however, for children always to follow in the footsteps of weak or vicious parents; and it is the experience of social workers that such children, taught by observation to avoid the faults seen ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... sustain his power by ministering to that love of change, which allows nothing to remain sacred and established. Hence, two opposite evils are combined in action—the reality of despotism with the form of democracy; the power of a tyrant with the irresponsibility of a multitude. But, in judging of Pericles, you, my son, should strive to guard against political enmity, as I do against personal affection. It cannot be denied that he has often made good use of his influence. When Cimon brought the remains of Theseus to Athens, and a temple was erected ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... degrade to the lowest depths. Yet the slaves were not considered altogether as chattels, convertible at the will of their masters. In the second stage, however, the bondage of the Negro reached the darkest age of irresponsibility to law and cruelty absolutely intolerable. A few officials and planters protested, and travelers who saw the horror appealed for mercy in behalf of the unfortunate.[6] A change in the attitude of the planters toward the slaves was finally ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... old childish diminutive for his name seemed to him natural as her familiarity, and he moved a little sideways to make room for her with an instinct of pleasure, but the same sense of irresponsibility that had characterized his reflections. Nevertheless, he looked critically into the mischievous eyes, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... knew that any change which depressed his party, might eventually abrogate his privilege. For the first time in the person of an imperator was seen a supreme autocrat, who had virtually and effectively all the irresponsibility which the law assigned, and the origin of his office presumed. Satisfied to know that he possessed such power, Augustus, as much from natural taste as policy, was glad to dissemble it, and by every means to withdraw it ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower myself from the edge of the wharf to the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... this first attempt may be described. My whole being was steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, the scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty. For utter surrender to in indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood is on him—the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full. It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years. What I am certain of is that I was very far from thinking of writing a story, though it is ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Ireland speak. All the real amiability which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them. Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in fiction, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... years' experience with commission government revealed certain patent defects. The division of the work among five men was frequently found to introduce dissensions and irresponsibility. Commissioners were often lacking in the technical ability required to manage such difficult matters as fire and police protection, public health, public works, and public utilities. Some one then proposed to carry over into city government an idea from ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not tempered by his occasional amusement at her—an amusement which Mrs. Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous, though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a rule, from the uproar ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... pleased her that its chatelaine was inclined to dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs. Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility—almost of defiant irresponsibility. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... builders—you've never understood a teacher's responsibility. You make the big noise in the Federation; but we hold it together for you. I'm not particularly disturbed by the superficials I've seen here. The indecent dress of these people, their indolent villages, their congenital irresponsibility—all that disgusts me, but it has not affected my analysis. There's something else here—something far more terrible and more dangerous for us. I can't put it in words. It's horrible and it's deadly; it's the reason why our men have deserted. They've had attractive women on other worlds—in ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... would condemn him unsparingly, if it found out, and he could not justify his own conduct, even to himself; but Lalage never seemed to consider the moral aspect of the question, that curious element of irresponsibility, almost childishness, which he had marked at the very outset, was now more noticeable ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was shown, and after some difficulty in dealing with the first question the jury found the prisoner guilty, while he was at the same time declared insane. Therefore Oxford, like every other prisoner shielded by the irresponsibility of madness, was delivered up to be dealt with according to her Majesty's pleasure, which signified his imprisonment so long as the Crown ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... gay again with reborn irresponsibility. Then he told her of his opportunity to go abroad, and that he was almost ashamed to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... deals between Citizen Kerensky, the Cadets, and the leaders of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties, we received the opposite result from the officially announced purpose. A power was created around which and in which we have open and secret Kornilovs playing leading parts. The irresponsibility of the Government is offically proclaimed, when it is announced that the Council of the Russian Republic is to be a consultative and not legislative body. In the eighth month of the Revolution, the irresponsible Government creates ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... This characterless irresponsibility of the average unmarried mother is known to every social worker. The difficulty is dwelt upon in the reports of rescue homes and police-workers. I have read many separate articles which refer to it. "Temperamental instability," as it is fittingly called, inevitably makes capable motherhood ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... race is deprived of the opportunities which are necessary to cultivate those innate powers which are intended by God to be developed in the rounding out of good citizenship. In fact, the denial of freedom to any race, along any of the walks of life, has a tendency to teach that race irresponsibility; for responsibility must rest with the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... to be examined by them. Mr. Jerome therefore was compelled to enter upon an elaborate and expensive preparation of the case, not only upon its merits, but upon the possible question of the criminal irresponsibility of ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... curiosity, and partly by the invaluable Mat Paine. The most capacious punch-bowl was put in requisition; and that born gentleman, Mr. Lowme, seated opposite Mr. Dempster as 'Vice', undertook to brew the punch, defying the criticisms of the envious men out of office, who with the readiness of irresponsibility, ignorantly suggested more lemons. The social festivities were continued till long past midnight, when several friends of sound religion were conveyed home with some difficulty, one of them showing a dogged determination to seat himself ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... desire for new experience implies motion, change, danger, instability, social irresponsibility. The individual dominated by it shows a tendency to disregard prevailing standards and group interests. He may be a complete failure, on account of his instability; or a conspicuous success, if he converts his experiences ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... children, because if you had thought even of me a little this would not have happened. I'm very, very sorry for it. I believe it happened from your weakness and foolishness, or you could not have behaved with such irresponsibility, but I'm trying to look at it quite calmly. I therefore propose to do nothing at all for three months. If I acted on your suggestion you might regret it ever after. If in three months you write to me again in the same strain, still ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... "consultative voice." Provision was made for a ministry, and under the letter of the constitution no act of the government was binding unless performed on the warrant of a minister. But in point of fact the principle of irresponsibility permeated the Napoleonic regime from the First Consul himself to the lowliest functionary. The conferring upon Napoleon, in 1802, of the consulship for life, and the conversion of the Consulate, in 1804, into the Empire, but ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... terrible mistake, then?" What his tone expressed was not willful mockery, but a kind of persistent irresponsibility which Rowland found equally ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... It does not. Can anybody bring them to account? It is next to impossible to do so. If you undertake it you will find it a game of hide and seek, with the objects of your search taking refuge now behind the tree of their individual personality, now behind that of their corporate irresponsibility. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... made answer with a smile of good-humored tolerance. But Mike was only warming up; the hot blood was stinging his quick brain, and his sharp tongue galloped on with unbridled irresponsibility. With the deep ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... changes of the social and literary environment. Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time. There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets, whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by the chilly caution of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... husbands—who look out their trains for them, put them in the care of guards, and shield them from all contact with sulky porters and extortionate cabmen. Olive, who had always to take her own ticket and fight her own and her mother's battles, now tasted the joys of irresponsibility with Avenel. He compounded with Customs officials, who bowed low before him, he took part in the midnight scramble for pillows at Modane, emerging from the crowd in triumph with no less than three of the coveted aids to repose under ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... how I can account for a strain of compassion which mingled with this sense of irresponsibility in me; perhaps it was my feeling of security that attuned me to pity; but certainly I did not look at this young girl long without beginning to grieve for her, and to weave about her a web of possibilities, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pantheistic idolatry which kneels only to "Natural Laws"; and spring as suppliants to Him, who made Law possible. We take our portion of happiness and prosperity, and while it lasts we wander far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... upon Him, kept my thoughts strenuously away from that which discomposed me, and never turned my eyes towards the Hall-pew from the moment I entered the pulpit. And partly, I presume, from the freedom given by the sense of irresponsibility for the result, I being weak and God strong, I preached, I think, a better sermon than I had ever preached before. But when I got into the vestry I found that I could scarcely stand for trembling; and I must have looked ill, for when my attendant ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... is based the conception of irresponsibility for crimes and the extenuating circumstances admitted by all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater or less according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances in which the man was placed whose action is being judged, and according ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... me, don't lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I interfere"—and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... course," Miss Sarah ignored sweetly the interruption, "when she has to leave girlhood behind. And lest that sound bromidic and trite, I will add that I do not mean the trivial material things of immaturity, but rather the happy irresponsibility which has no place in ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... of her gown, put her feather-crowned head through the gap in the fence and drew her august person after, and Jeffrey followed her. He had a gay sense of irresponsibility, of seeking the event. He was grateful to Madame Beattie. They went on, and as it was that other night, some withdrew to leave a pathway and others stared, but, finding no specific reason, did not hinder them. Madame Beattie spoke once or twice, a brief mandate ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master's horses up the stony hill. Mr. Beebe recognized him at once. Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on the ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... paper, with the shadows of wild geese passing. The trees are phantoms. And then it comes—that first call of a bird, startled at discovering day! Just one call—and now, here, there, on all the trees, the sudden answers swelling, of that most sweet and careless choir. Was irresponsibility ever so divine as this, of birds waking? Then—saffron into the sky, and once more silence! What is it birds do after the first Chorale? Think of their sins and business? Or just sleep again? The trees are fast dropping unreality, and the cuckoos begin calling. Colour is burning up in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sprang full armed from her brain. Winsome had that strange irresponsibility sometimes which comes irresistibly to some men and women in youth, to say something as an experiment which she well knew she ought not to say, simply to see what would happen. More than once it ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... watch, only don't nutter the nest too soon; I rely on your sense and experience for that. But I should think you've plenty of bloodhounds and trackers of your own in reserve, ha ha!" Pyotr Stepanovitch blurted out with the gaiety and irresponsibility of youth. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... He did not testify to the truth, but pleaded ignorance in extenuation of an exasperating habit of asking questions. There was, however, a humor and a method in his innocence that arrested attention. He was a formidable adversary in discussion from his very irresponsibility; and he was especially successful with the more rhetorical sophists because he chose his own weapons, and substituted critical analysis, question and answer, for the long speeches to which these teachers were habituated by their profession. He appeared to be governed ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... is a fair target for ridicule. The heaviest charge brought against American humour is that it never keeps its target well in view. We laugh, but we are not purged by laughter of our follies; we jest, but our jests are apt to have a kitten's sportive irresponsibility. The lawyer offers a witticism in place of an argument, the diner-out tells an amusing story in lieu of conversation. Even the clergyman does not disdain a joke, heedless of Dr. Johnson's warning which ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... If only the people whose envious tongues were now wagging could see Kitty as she was, could understand what a gulf lay between her and the ordinary "fast" woman, there would be an end of this silly, ill-natured talk. Other women might be of the earth earthy. Kitty was a sprite, with all the irresponsibility of such incalculable creatures. The men and women—women especially—who gossiped and lied about her, who sent abominable paragraphs to scurrilous papers—he had one now in his pocket which had reached him at the House from an anonymous correspondent—spoke out of their own vile experience, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the receipt of Mr Parmenter's cablegram, and the casting of the vast mass of metal which was to form the body of the great cannon, were those of doubt and hesitation, mingled, possibly, with that sense of semi-irresponsibility which will for a time overcome the most highly-disciplined mind when some great task has been completed ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... all had an excellent opportunity to come to know the Filipinos. Their dignity of bearing, their courtesy, their friendly hospitality, their love of imposing functions, and of fiestas and display, their childishness and irresponsibility in many matters, their passion for gambling, for litigation and for political intrigue, even the loves and the hatreds of some of them, had been spread before us like an open book. It is a fact that except for the inhabitants of Cebu, Bohol and Batangas, the people wanted what we had to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... be granted, condemned the President of the republic to the legal nothingness of a constitutional kind, of a constitutional king at that, without throne and crown, without sceptre and without sword, without irresponsibility, without the imperishable possession of the highest dignity in the State, and, what was most untoward of all—without a civil list. The d'Hautpoul Ministry numbered only one man of parliamentary reputation, the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... for one brief day I was a small and insignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted and unclassified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you were not brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense of irresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through the buckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in the world at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could have danced and glorified God on a curbstone, if such a manifestation of heathen ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... have been perfectly possible for the world to get on and do business without the modern corporation—without the invention of a fictitious person clothed with the enormously powerful attributes of immortality and irresponsibility. That is to say, men can act together or in partnership, but they are mortal, and at their death their personal powers end. The corporation may be immortal, and its powers, as well as its acquisitions, increase forever. Men are liable with all their estates for their contracts and obligations. ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... rock with an agility only to be acquired in the hot fear of death. A report rang out and echoed among the hills. A bullet went 'splat' against a rock near at hand, making a frayed blue mark upon the grey stone. The man dodged from side to side in the panic-stricken irresponsibility of a rabbit seeking covert where none exists. There was not so much as to hide his head. Conyngham looked up towards the foe in time to see a puff of white smoke thrown up against the steely sky. A second report, and the ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary." ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... himself, have given you the best they have: an honorable name, a lifetime of devotion, the full ten talents. For these, you have returned dishonor, unchastity and self-indulgent hypocrisy. You have begged extenuation on the basis of nervous ill- health and temporary irresponsibility, both of which you have brought upon yourself by violating the laws of right-living. It is your soul that is sick. You are not fit to live free and equal with righteous men and women. You have had ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... it is very little affected by what we are pleased to call our civilization. Indeed, it is hardly to be believed that one of the primitive lords of creation, stalking about in the condition of gorgeous irresponsibility incident to the Stone Period, would have lowered himself to the level of the kid-gloved example of the present stage of evolution who fishes in Maine. It cannot be supposed that the pre-historic gentleman would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... chief weaknesses in the colonial administration of the territory, particularly prior to 1900—-but only to a slightly less extent since—-have been decentralization and a lax civil service. The concomitants of these have been irresponsibility and inefficiency. The governor has represented the president without possessing much power; the department of war has had illdefined duties; the department of justice has, in theory, had charge of the general ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility—that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 'caprice and irresponsibility.... Those two words sum you up; your whole nature's contained ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... conscious that a certain gaiety, an irresponsibility and lightness had died out in her, perhaps permanently, yet leaving no void. What it was that replaced these she could not name—she only was conscious that if these had been subdued by a newer knowledge, ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... writers sometimes complain of the irresponsibility of the papal acts, and Popes themselves had to allow that there were spheres outside their legislative interference. Thus Urban II acknowledges that in matters on which our Lord, His Apostles, and the Fathers have given definite decisions, ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... would rent the house every winter. A pleasant feeling of irresponsibility was beginning to possess his jaded spirit. He made a little money occasionally, but he was no longer expected to hand anything over when the first of the month came round—a date that had haunted him like a nightmare for four long years. Pie ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... of the other categories of poetic substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope." And he has still less to say in favour of Pope as a man. He denounces him for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility to suggest that "perhaps ... there is a natural connection between the two kinds of this dexterity of fingering—that of the artist in words, and that of the pickpocket or the forger." If Pope had been a contemporary, Mr. Saintsbury, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Pignaver's. The Venetian nobleman 'sent certain assassins,' and that is all we know; and as for the names and faces and figures I have given to the Bravi, I found them beyond the borders of truth in the delicious Gardens of Irresponsibility, where many strange people dwell together, who might be real, and may be alive some day, but who have not yet made up their minds to exchange the flowery paths of fiction for the stony roads and dusty lanes of ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... you mean. She's so untrained in lots of ways. That's what I was saying to Stafford a little while ago. They live in a world of their own, the stage people. There's always a kind of irresponsibility. The habit of letting themselves go in their art, I suppose, makes them, in real life, throw things down so hard when they don't like them. Living at high pressure is an art like music. It alters the whole equilibrium, I suppose. A woman like Al'mah would commit suicide, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... not have it on my conscience that I indirectly offered encouragement even to a forlorn and shipwrecked brother to abandon hope of becoming the prime minister of the Commonwealth, and to enter upon a life of reckless irresponsibility such as mine. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
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