"Idiocy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... filled with hostility to Cisy; but the young aristocrat's idiocy had disarmed him. However, as the other's gestures, face, and entire person brought back to his recollection the dinner at the Cafe Anglais, he got more and more irritated; and he lent his ears to the complimentary remarks ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... disease had greatly increased, and I was compelled to remain in bed a long while. I could, indeed, have triumphed over these physical sufferings however cruel they might have been, but in the frightful complications of my position I was reduced to a condition of idiocy; I saw nothing of what was around me; I heard nothing of what was said; and after this statement the reader will surely not expect that I shall have anything to say about the farewell of the Emperor to his old and faithful guard, an account of which, moreover, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... hebetude^, dull understanding, meanest capacity, shortsightedness; incompetence &c (unskillfulness) 699. one's weak side, not one's strong point; bias &c 481; infatuation &c (insanity) 503. simplicity, puerility, babyhood; dotage, anility^, second childishness, fatuity; idiocy, idiotism^; driveling. folly, frivolity, irrationality, trifling, ineptitude, nugacity^, inconsistency, lip wisdom, conceit; sophistry &c 477; giddiness &c (inattention) 458; eccentricity &c 503; extravagance &c (absurdity) 497; rashness &c 863. act of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the same lady to transmit my reply, which was as follows: His Majesty has every right in the world to judge me as seemeth well to him, nevertheless I venture to beg him not to think that I am an idiot. Now it would be idiocy on my part to proclaim political opinions. The Emperor shall know them when he deigns to put 300,000 soldiers ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... forth amidst the fair colors of earth, and mix their incoherent cries with the melodies of eternity, break with their inane laugh upon the silence which Creation keeps where Omnipotence passes most visibly, and scrabble over with the characters of idiocy the pages that have been written by ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... cities has produced the child criminal. He is clearly marked and well defined. He is often subnormal even down to idiocy. In most cases he is the result of heredity. Many times he may have fair intelligence, but this is usually attached to an unstable, defective nervous system that cannot do its proper work, and he has had no expert treatment and attention. He is always poor. Generally he ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... one can only remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we had, let me see,—the spare room curtains, the making of them and the cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I held fast, and every ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time he has never been of sound mind, his brain never recovering from that shock, a blow which actually broke in a portion of his skull. Since that time he has had recurrent times of violent insanity, with alternating spells of what seems a semi-idiocy. This man's mind never grew. In some ways his animal senses are keen to a remarkable degree, but of reason he has little or none. He can not tell you why he does a thing, or what will happen provided that he does thus or so. This I shall prove ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... throw the light directly into the Body Politic, whether the B.P. requests him to do it or not. Dr. P. confidently expects to make some most extraordinary discoveries of various diseases—of greed, foolish ambition, ossification of the heart, moral leprosy, chronic stupidity, latent idiocy, and that very common and often unsuspected complaint usually known as Humbug. (Humbugna Communis.) His fee in no case will exceed ten cents per week; and patients WILL BE illuminated ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... dinner. It was a fine arrangement, at all events, and pleased me most of all. I made the salad and arranged the table for her. Judging from what I saw and heard, Hang was having a glorious time. He had evidently frightened the old colored cook into complete idiocy, and was ordering her about in a way that only a ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... had the slightest suspicion of the avocations of the proprietor. Besides, even the humblest agent of police would be expected to possess a degree of acuteness for which no one gave M. Tabaret credit. Indeed, they mistook for incipient idiocy ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... only to look at the transparent pictures let into the walls of our new churches to appreciate the incurable idiocy of painters who insist on treating window panes from cartoons, as they do subject pictures—and such subjects! and such pictures! All turned out by the gross from cheap glass melters, whose thin material dots the pavement of the church with spots like confetti, strewing lollipops of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... ... ashamed to think of her. His conscience was stirring within him. But he consoled himself with the reflection that to-morrow it would all be over for ever, and he would take leave for good of this feather-brained lady, and would forget all this rotten idiocy!... ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... of Cockhoolet," as she was called; for that she had all the beauty and sweetness of the rose was generally allowed, although there were people who could not be made to see this—people who were probably idiopts; not idiots—although they might have a streak of idiocy in them, too, perhaps—but idiopts, or persons who were color-blind. None of the young men of the district ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... I got back to the big room. I moved his boots back from the fire, and trimmed the candle. Then, with sleep gone from me, I lay back on my divan and reflected on many things: on my idiocy in coming; on Alison West, and the fact that only a week before she had been a guest in this very house; on Richey and the constraint that had come between us. From that I drifted back to Alison, and to the barrier my comparative ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... partition divides Clara Morse's brains from idiocy. In my day, all such feeble watery minds as hers were regarded as semi-imbecile, pitied as intellectual cripples, and wisely kept in the background of society; but, bless me! in this generation they skip and prance to the very edge of the front, pose in ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... never of it—oh—I forget!" I groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily about anything, everything, till I felt ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Irishman," says Pinckney, "when you're not maundering over some such idiocy as this, you're the most entertaining good-for-nothing that ever graced a dinner table or spread the joy of life through a dull drawing room. Come home with me for ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... possible that he thought that the text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice? It was obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence of ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Assumption of the Virgin. On the tablet or panel of stone which forms the side of the tomb out of which the Madonna rises, is this inscription, in large letters, REST. ANTONIUS FLORIAN, 1834. Exactly in proportion to a man's idiocy, is always the size of the letters in which he writes his name on the picture that he spoils. The old mosaicists in St. Mark's have not, in a single instance, as far as I know, signed their names; but the spectator who wishes to know who destroyed the effect of the nave, may see his name inscribed, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... does not appear to be of such a character. He seems to exhibit loss of memory. Imbecility, idiocy, and lunacy exhibit marked tendencies, and have been made the careful study of many eminent men, and it is even now one of the disorders least understood by ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the new arrival in a strange land. It is but a step from a state of absolute greenness on one's arrival at a new port to a blase languor, wherein nothing can touch one further; and the step is easily and usually taken inside of a week. May the old settlers forgive us our idiocy! ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... regretfully that a fellow more or less had to; it was one of the beastly nuisances of being educated abroad. But from what we saw of the German temperament generally we were convinced that as a native demonstration it was sincere, and that its idiocy arose only, as Dicky expressed it, from the remarkable lack in foreigners of ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... possessed. He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... no further than the next inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and second dram, he left me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click-Clack, though one of the cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may remark, as at least curious, that though I have known idiocy in its unmixed state united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attachment, I never yet knew one of the half-witted caste who was not selfish and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the shifty breed had an expression on his face as he tried to put his torn garments to rights that savoured not a little of idiocy. He had been for the last three hours working himself into a mood of unconcern and even defiance, so that he might be able to repel the attacks of the outspoken Pepin. But now, at the very first words this terrible manikin uttered, he felt his heart ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... the centre of a contemplated empire." He declared that "it was not for these men that our fathers fought, not for them that the Constitution was adopted. Our fathers were not madmen: they had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy." He maintained with great vehemence that there was "no authority to throw the rights and liberties of this people into 'hotchpot' with the wild men of the Missouri, nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... off a mortgage to my grandfather, yes," he answered soberly, quite conscious of what he was doing and of its recklessness and, perhaps, idiocy. "And ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... I shall turn it against you. Yes, doubtless a head is as necessary to a nation as to an individual; if, however, the head becomes monstrous and deformed, the seat of intelligence will be turned into that of idiocy, and in place of a man of intellect, you have a hydrocephalus. Pray give heed to what Monsieur the Sub-prefect, may say in answer to what I shall ask him. Now, my dear Sub-prefect, be frank. If tomorrow, the deputation of this district should become vacant, can you find within ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... idiocy in the eyes of Mr. Atwater's daughter, as she watched them. They had brought to her mind the tricks of the Jongleur of Notre Dame, who had nothing to offer heaven itself, to mollify heaven's rulers, except his entertainment ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Wolf. "Of course! You just happened a round. Funny, as you Americans say. And the letter in your pocket—it happens that I lost that letter through the idiocy of one of my servants. You happened to find that also, of course. ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... the former place. Other inmates partook more of the low cunning, the artful, leading them to accomplish their ends by more adroit means, while a small number seemed bordering on insanity, two on idiocy. ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... altar to Materialism in the temple of the Soul. Each shall have its due, each shall glory in the sacred purity and strength of life; each shall develop and expand, but never at the expense of the other. I will have neither the renunciation which ends in a kind of idiocy dignified with a philosophic or a theologic name, nor the worldliness which ends in bestiality. I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms. In my heart are those stars ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... basis of prostitution must be found in moral idiocy. If by moral idiocy we are to understand a condition at all closely allied with insanity, this assertion is dubious. There seems no clear relationship between prostitution and insanity, and Tammeo has shown (La Prostituzione, p. 76) that the frequency of prostitutes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... than-that achieved by the Indian ascetic anchorite; no later monachism has so nearly succeeded in reducing the human mind to that condition of impassive quasi-somnambulism, which, but for its acknowledged holiness, might run the risk of being confounded with idiocy. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... testimony. All died with religious firmness and composure. The fate of their enemies is notorious; with a single exception, they met deaths violent, loathsome, and terrible. Maude died insane, Bagwell in idiocy, one of the jury committed suicide, another was found dead in a privy, a third was killed by his horse, a fourth was drowned, a fifth shot, and so through the entire list. Toohey was hanged for felony, the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... I paused. I had not meant to pause; I had intended to take her in my arms, to ask her if what I had just heard was true, to make her answer me. But now, as she stood there before me, so young, so girlish, so beautiful, the hopeless idiocy of the thing struck me with overwhelming force. It WAS idiocy. It ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is UPON THE LIVES OF THESE THAT I BASE WHAT I WRITE. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can do at ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the ranting idiocy of those with whom she has been brought in daily contact," said Robert; but even as he spoke he seemed to see the girl's dear young face, and his ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... emotions which had struck him as rather silly; now he plainly saw that this sentimental soul could never, never have been the friend of his father, who was so matter-of-fact, so narrow, so heavy, to whom the word "Poetry" meant idiocy. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... becomes a learned man. A great many confused, dreamy ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has little exact and reliable knowledge. The truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... host, who was of no party, supported his guest as long as possible, and then left him to his fate. The military M.P. fled to the drawing-room to philander with Mrs. Grey; and the man of science and the African had already retired to the intellectual idiocy of a May Fair "At Home." The novelist was silent, for he was studying a scene; and the poet was absent, for he was ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... monstrous bigness and extraordinary brilliancy. The circumstance was so inexplicable, the value of the stone was plainly so enormous, that Francis sat staring into the open casket without movement, without conscious thought, like a man stricken suddenly with idiocy. ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... munificence. . . . Bad ink, and the dregs of it at that, but the heart in the right place. Still very cordially interested in my Barrie and wishing him well through his sickness, which is of the body, and long defended from mine, which is of the head, and by the impolite might be described as idiocy. The whole head is useless, and the whole sitting part painful: reason, the recent ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obtaining a livelihood as a beggar in Egypt is to feign idiocy, which, I am told, is frequently done. Idiots are regarded as saints, and are never restricted in their movements, maniacs alone being confined, and they are often met with in the streets. My Swedenborgian ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... a moment to consider: "Well, I think is of the earth, earthy. There's a mixture of idiocy in it the Devil might fairly repudiate. Young gentleman, the English Statutes of Lunacy are famous monuments of legislatorial incapacity: and indeed, as a general rule, if you want justice and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... our interviews had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the meetings that do the real damage. Absence, as the poet neatly remarks, makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge's amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. As if the business of fishing for a girl's heart were not sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless obstacles! It was terrible to have to reestablish myself ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... the foundations of the enormous mathematical ability which became apparent long before the boy attained the age of three, but unfortunately for the level development of his mentality, the repulsive plainness of Senator Mills-Tweeper coupled with the innate idiocy of General Udby, completely overshadowed the girlish charm of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Had Rupert been consulted would he have liked playing the game at all—holding the cards in the wrong hand as he did from the very start without the slightest conception of what the game ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... a small round cave, the glow of a fire under a shaft that led all betraying smoke heaven knew where into the side of the hill, and two spruce beds with blankets. The permanent look of the place was the last straw on my own blind idiocy of never suspecting Macartney, and I burst out, "Why the deuce, with all you knew, couldn't you have brought Paulette ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... folded, and learned nothing,—they told us, nothing; for the instruction of the blind is not thought of in these parts. This seemed piteous to us, and made us reflect how happy are our blinds, to say nothing of our deafs and dumbs. Idiocy is not uncommon here, and is the result of continual intermarriage between near relations; but it will be long before they will provide it with a separate asylum ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy! She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set before him, and he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... and his industrious companions, Faust and Schoffer, ever have believed that, by the division of labor, their sublime invention would fall into the domain of ignorance—I had almost said idiocy? There are few men so weak-minded, so UNLETTERED, as the mass of workers who follow the various branches of the typographic industry,— compositors, pressmen, type-founders, book-binders, and paper-makers. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... But Smith's sister taught me to take a higher view of girls. I admit that they have defects—they can't help 'em. There are times when I doubt if even boys are perfect. I freely admit that there is a certain amount of idiocy in the ways and manners of girls in general. Far be it from me to deny that they squeak and squeal when there is no occasion for squeaking and squealing. There is no use in denying that they are afraid of mice. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... quality is so well wove In warp and woof, but there 's some flaw in it: I've known a brave man fly a shepherd's cur, A wise man so demean him, drivelling idiocy Had wellnigh been ashamed on't. For your crafty, Your worldly wise man, he, above the rest, Weaves his own snares so fine, he 's often caught ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling its way. And it was only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes, which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics. But a closer examination of his attire would have shown that even in the tropics it ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... sharply. "It's sheer idiocy. Haven't you heard the things people are saying? They are calling him a fool, and in the clubs they are betting that he will be a pauper within ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... Nervous System—General Paralysis.—General paralysis, or paresis, is a progressive mental degeneration, with relapses and periods of improvement which reduce the patient by successive stages to a jibbering idiocy ending invariably in death. Such patients may, in the course of their decline, have delusions which lead them to acts of violence. The only place for a paretic is in an asylum, since the changes in judgment, will-power, and moral control which occur early in the disease are such that, ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... Wawona to Yosemite Valley. The stages leave Wawona at eleven thirty a. m. to make the trip. On June sixteenth we took our places with some other victims of this piece of transportation idiocy, on an open four-horse stage for Yosemite. The going was very slow. It was hot and dusty, and we soon got irritable and uncomfortable. Why the traveling public should be subjected to this outrage is beyond me. We ground our weary way over the dusty road, oblivious to the scenery, ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... sleep; in fact, the very idea had been vaguely irritating. Had they not looked forward to this very thing for months—at least, so it seemed to them—and it was almost impossible for them to have patience with the idiocy of any one who could calmly suggest slumber at such a time. And Phil—for it was at him that this Parthian shot had been aimed—had evinced remarkable self-control, in that he had refused to argue, but had continued to smile in an aggravatingly superior manner, which had ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... returned. "That's proper pride. If any one can do a thing as well as you did that dance, it would be idiocy not ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... scarcely looked at him. She rose to go; but it seemed to her pitiful to leave Fanny Newt in such utter desolation of soul and body, in which she seemed to her to be gradually sinking into idiocy. She went to Fanny and took her hand. Fanny listlessly rose, and when Hope had done shaking hands Fanny crossed them before her inanely, but in an unconsciously appealing attitude, which Hope saw and felt. Alfred still sprawled ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... I do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... deliberate and well-digested scheme to break their spirit; to deprive them of courage and of manhood; to destroy their natural desire for an equal participation in the benefits of society; to keep them ignorant, and therefore weak; to reduce them, if possible, to a state of idiocy; to crowd them down to a level with ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two—1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even postulated as a datum, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually, he looked upon me as below notice; but, morally, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... outer wear was completed by a black cotton shirt, and the inevitable stiff-brimmed hat, without which no brown youth feels himself a man. Xavier's face wore an expression of blankness verging on idiocy; but he was by no means deficient in cunning. His full name was ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... first one of the ever-curious crowd was still several fields away, they looked up the word "wrench" in an English-German pocket dictionary; they then marched off to the switch station. Fortunately there was but one occupant, for neither Jock nor his companion could talk German, and the idiocy of not carrying a more serviceable weapon than a pocket dictionary never occurred to the mad Scot until his companion began to make weird gurgling sounds, evidently intended for the language of the Hun, addressed to ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... Williamson has seen it and Constance, and God knows who of the rest of them, who were so tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'—now that you've won your fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all—I come and tell you that you've earned the thing you've ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... laboratories to post up and enforce, appoint no censors, pass no votes of condemnation or exclusion, propose of themselves no law, so long must the antivivisectionist agitation, with all its expensiveness, idiocy, bad temper, untruth, and vexatiousness, continue, as the only possible means of bringing home to the careless or callous individual experimenter the fact that the sufferings of HIS animals are somebody else's business ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... trio was not his own. As the boy was under the impression that he had done a fine thing, which deserved praise, and not blame, he rebelled, and was impertinent. Melchior lost his temper, and said that he would box his ears, although he had played his music well enough, because with his idiocy he had spoiled the whole effect of the concert. Jean-Christophe had a profound sense of justice. He went and sulked in a corner; he visited his contempt upon his father, the Princess, and the whole world. He was hurt also because the neighbors came and congratulated his ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... smiles and tears. Not that he cried in public. My, but we were a tired crowd! However, it is always a blessing to get home, and this time it was a sort of wonder to ourselves that we got back alive. Casualties: Fanny's back jarred, horse incident; Belle, bad headache, tears, and champagne; self, idiocy, champagne, fatigue; Lloyd, ditto, ditto. As for the adventurer, I believe he will have a delightful voyage for his little start in life. But there is always something touching in a mite's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared—and at the mere thought his heart pounded—what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to accept the half of—nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a bushel that he might wave aloft ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... she answer to that? No, she did not want him to be ridiculous; and as he spoke she recalled the staggering, impotent figure of last night, in its unmanly feebleness and senseless idiocy. A sense of the difficulty of her task and the vanity of her representations came over Dolly; it gave her new food for tears, but the present effect was to make her stop them. I suppose despair does not weep. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... unreasonable, that, since a woman was only allowed one husband, a man should, under any circumstances, be permitted to have two wives; while Raoul, glancing towards her a look of verjuice, pitied the deplorable idiocy of the man who could be fool enough to avail himself ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... been conspiring," said the Duke, "and with conspicuous clumsiness. It appears, child, that it was their common idiocy which of late brought together some two hundred gentlemen in Lancashire. Being every one of them most unmitigated fools, they desired that sot at Avignon to come over once more and 'take back his own,' as the saying is. He would not stir without definite assurances. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the house, which is brilliantly lit up—our own lantern on the ground before us acting as a rival entertainment to the house lamps inside for some of the best insect society in Africa, who after the manner of the insect world, insist on regarding us as responsible for their own idiocy in getting singed; and sting us in revenge, while we slap hard, as we howl hymns in the fearful Igalwa and M'pongwe way. Next to an English picnic, the most uncomfortable thing I know is an open-air service in this part ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... at Constance with a pleasant smile. "There's both the sense and the nonsense of the Christian Science idiocy," he said; and half in response to his smile and half in nervous relief, ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more than certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... tramp on. After one hour of conversational deluge, he decided to let Pinky drive—to make him admit that he couldn't. He was wrong. Pinky could drive. He could not drive well, he wabbled in his steering, and he killed the engine on a grade, but he showed something of the same dashing idiocy that characterized his talk. It was Milt not Pinky, who was afraid of their running off the road, ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... profound knowledge from the multitude, because they rightly recognised the limitations of narrow minds and prejudiced opinions. What the fool cannot learn he laughs at, thinking that by his laughter he shows superiority instead of latent idiocy. And so it has happened that many of the greatest discoveries of science, though fully known and realised in the past by the initiated few, were never disclosed to the many until recent years, when 'wireless telegraphy' and 'light-rays' are accepted facts, though these very ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... idiocy," said Goody Kertarkut. "Poor things! they can't be kept from the water, nor made to take powders, and so ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... didn't explain, looked at me, and I thought she had explained. I forget now whether she did explain or not, rationally and satisfactorily, but it doesn't matter. There is no one like her, and I have reached a stage of idiocy concerning her which I would blush to describe. I see now that the feeling which a very young man, hardly out of boyhood, dignified with the name of love, is merely a kind of foundation that, when fallen ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... positively harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of absolute idiocy, were occasionally checkered by other acts of more intelligence, but not less startling. She had early shown a disgust to her father's old counsellors, and especially to Ximenes, who, she thought, interfered too authoritatively ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... even to think of for a moment, darkness, torture, utter despair, and then freedom and human tears, and this astounding roar of triumph, sympathy, and welcome! It was no wonder the scene unmanned him. The wonder was that he had not sunk into an unquestioning animalism—a mere brute state of idiocy—years ago. ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... might sound like pure idiocy to some people; but funnily enough it came into the head of Vance that when he had been teasing those twelve models of propriety, his sisters, a few days before, and had made their blue bead-like eyes swim with tears by taking away their playthings, he had used just those very same words to them. ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... the beginning of those parlous times when the Democrats, having come into power upon a wave of impassioned idiocy and jealousy, were beginning to make us poor at home and despised abroad. A schoolmaster president, with three cabinet officers plucked by the hair from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, had put a temporary end to all our best qualities as ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... respectable, and as a writer he was original. He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... progress and from self-expression, is very great, and is, of course, reformatory in its action; it is somewhat similar to that endured by other Egos, who are linked to bodies human in form, but without normal brains—those we call idiots, lunatics, &c. Idiocy and lunacy are the results of vices different in kind from those that bring about the animal servitude above explained, but the Ego in these cases also is attached to a form through which ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, a ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... have observed the difference between them. There is the same difference in their minds, though both are clouded. One is weak almost to the point of idiocy, though strong enough where her one settled idea is concerned. The other was once a notable character, but her fine traits have almost vanished under the spell which has been laid upon them by the immense disappointment which has wrecked ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... sixteen-year-old Pancha, wasn't she?" asked the colonel in low tone. He had no mercy whatever on Blake, and was outspoken in condemnation of what he called his idiocy. ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town.... The frenzy of the Poems [Keats's first volume, 1817] was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion.... We hope however that, in so young a person and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable.... Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but a clever man; Mr. Keats is a still smaller ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... purchase of his cloth a dream, or work of the devil? To add to the worthy tradesman's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wool and eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly appears in court to defend the accused, and having previously advised his client to affect idiocy and reply to all questions with the senseless utterance bee, he triumphantly wins the case; but the tables are turned when Master Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain no other response than bee from the instructed shepherd. The triumph of rogue over rogue is the only ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Sensibility or Disease, Appetite, Relaxation, Melancholy or Sullenness, Insanity, Idiocy, Rashness ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... governed for upwards of thirty years by such a person as old Fraser, it were no wonder if the greater part had become either rogues or fools: he was a ruthless tyrant, Belle, over his own people, and by his cruelty and rapaciousness must either have stunned them into an apathy approaching to idiocy, or made them artful knaves in their own defence. The qualities of parents are generally transmitted to their descendants—the progeny of trained pointers are almost sure to point, even without being taught: if, therefore, all Frasers are either rogues or fools, as this person ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked, with the engaging idiocy of a ...
— Options • O. Henry
... you do not violate it on pain of serious results to your master. I am tired of the charge of him anyhow; for who knows how soon his simple idiocy may turn to dangerous insanity? So the least provocation from you would cause me to send him to a pauper asylum for idiots!" she cried, warningly, as she hurried from the room to make sure that none of the officious servants should dare to ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... replied. "You say this is your uncle's house, and so it is. But to all effects and purposes it is your cousin's also. He has rooms here; has had them coming on for thirty years now, and they are filled with a prodigious accumulation of trash—stays, I dare say, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy—to which none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to. We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to reply, 'Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats. I must first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... members. Nor has "the judgment of their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote. No disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the Legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Margaret, just say, 'I love you, Mark Ratcliff,' and set me some atoning penance for my idiocy. You do not know what a curse that vile paper has been to me," and he shot the offending missive into the foolish little river and broke into vigorous and ungraceful language ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... of lunatics, promiscuously gathered from the poor and the reduced class, comprising all varieties of mental disease, from idiocy to madness, yet all of them held in such admirable order by the law of kindness, that to the casual observer most of them betrayed no symptoms of insanity, and of the rest, many appeared to be only very odd people, quietly pursuing their own harmless whims, I could not but feel ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... much better mannered. He is neater and a better listener to conversation. He puts his shoes under the table, does not throw them. But he has brought back also some of the nurses' exclamations of surprise—"Oh, I say!" "Not I!" "You don't say so!" "What idiocy!" and the like. No doubt those expressions sounded quite proper among the nurses, but on Tommy's lips they seem curiously more vulgar than his natural and rougher expletives. It is, besides, as if one were eavesdropping outside the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... three. You'll have to grow up, some day. In my opinion, forcing yourself to give up one of your hardest-held ideals—virginity—merely because of the utter bilge that those idiot head-shrinkers stuffed you with, is sheer, plain idiocy. I suppose that makes you like me even less, but I'm laying it right on ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... whether from the way of wearing it, or from the effect of the gold embroidery meandering over all, the effect was not distressing, but more like that of a gorgeous bird. The figure was tall, lithe, and active, the brown ruddy face had none of the blank stare of vacant idiocy, but was full of twinkling merriment, the black eyes laughed gaily, and perhaps only so clear-sighted and shrewd an observer as Tibble would have detected a weakness ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... organisation of each sex. There are, indeed, various laws of heredity which qualify this statement, and notably the tendency whereby extremes of variation are more common in the male sex—so that genius and idiocy are alike more prevalent in men. But, on the whole, there can be no doubt that the qualities of a man or of a woman are a more or less varied mixture of those of both parents; and, even when there is no blending, both parents ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... scarlet stockings, and a scarlet bonnet, proudly surmounted with a turkey's feather. Edward, whom he did not seem to observe, now perceived confirmation in his features of what the mien and gestures had already announced. It was apparently neither idiocy nor insanity which gave that wild, unsettled, irregular expression to a face which naturally was rather handsome, but something that resembled a compound of both, where the simplicity of the fool was mixed with the extravagance ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... virtue. A Santiago medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Ona acted as a vermifuge on royal infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They turn out their score or so ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... will question. But assuredly woman suffrage is not one of these. One by one classes of men have been granted the vote until women are the only remaining unenfranchised class. States have set up various restrictive qualifications so that criminality, idiocy, insanity, pauperism, drunkenness, foreign birth are accepted as ordinary causes of disfranchisement. Yet not one of these conditions is common to all the states. The foreigner votes on his first papers in eight states and a five years' residence will usually secure his naturalization ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... that was any proof of idiocy; but, to prevent the recurrence of any difficulty between his new assistant and the populace of small boys, he thought it best to take possession of the hall, and lock the door. He therefore signified to Mr. Boolpin ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... motion, or to turn round, as the name implies. The patient loses his balance, and is inclined to fall down. It often is followed immediately by severe headach. Vertigo is apt to recur, and thus often becomes frequent and habitual. After a time the mental powers become impaired, and complete idiocy often follows; as was the case in the celebrated Dean Swift. It frequently terminates in apoplexy or palsy, from the extension of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... name to the end; then when she had finished it she would begin over again. At last she could not write it any more. She would muddle everything—form other words, and exhaust herself almost to idiocy. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... advised me to give up all this idiocy,' Aratov said aloud, and he took up a book. He could not, however, read for long, and feeling a sort of heaviness all over, he went to bed earlier than usual, in the full conviction that he ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... chiefly the perils of such endeavor and the bathos of the failure. Wieland includes in the letter some "specimen passages from a novel in the style of Tristram Shandy," which he asserts were sent him by the author. The quotations are almost flat burlesque in their impossible idiocy, and one can easily appreciate Wieland's despairing cry with which ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... for 1945. The confidently asinine demeanour of this youth is hardly relieved by the absurdity of a watch suspended by a chain from the crown of his hat. That society protested against this aspect of idiocy is evinced by the harmonious costume for 1950, in which a complete revolution is to be noted. We hasten to observe that the latter plate—the one for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... if we could only get that fellow out of prison we could have him to dinner, and he would sing for us this evening! It is maddening to think that he may lose his voice in a damp hole through the idiocy of that thrice-confounded Legate!' ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... extremely rare. I met only one case, that of a child with an abnormally large head.[31] Idiocy also is very uncommon, only one case ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... peace which flows from auricular confession. I solemnly declare that except in a few cases, in which the confidence of the penitents is bordering on idiocy, or in which they have been transformed into immoral brutes, nine-tenths of the multitudes who go to confess, are obliged to recount some such desolate narrative as that of Miss Richardson, when they are sufficiently honest to say ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... never been able to like Orin, and since the time when he had not only utterly refused to share with John the burden of their father's debts but had scoffed at what he called his brother's "idiocy" in paying them, Milly had found comfort in having a definite and legitimate excuse for disliking him. She regarded him as greatly gifted; in the eyes of Feltonville people, Orin's talents, since they had received the sanction of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... drink it pass through the stage of idiocy into a deep sleep, which it is said can be reproduced once without an extra dose, by bathing in cold water. Confirmed awa drinkers might be mistaken for lepers, for they are covered with whitish scales, and have inflamed eyes and a leathery ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... know, of course, that the government is anxious; you know that Paris is preparing to stand siege if the Prussians double up Bazaine and the army of Chalons in the north. But you don't know what a pitiable fright the authorities are in. Why, Scarlett, they are scared almost to the verge of idiocy." ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... of any civilized nation to permit the slaughter of the wild birds that protect its crops, its fruits and its forests from the insect hordes, is worse than folly. It is sheer orneryness and idiocy. People who are either so lazy or asinine as to permit the slaughter of their best friends deserve to have their crops destroyed and their forests ravaged. They deserve to pay twenty cents a pound for their cotton when the boll weevil has cut ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday |
