"Imbecile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prejudice of the rest—the imagination, for instance, at the expense of the judgment: so that whilst they have acquired talents for show they have none for use. In the affairs of common life they are utterly ignorant and imbecile—or worse than imbecile. Early called into public notice, probably before their moral habits are formed, they are extolled for some play of fancy or of wit, as Bacon calls it, some juggler's trick of the intellect; they immediately take an aversion to ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... repeat two or three times things that Germinie had always grasped on the merest hint. She asked herself, when she saw how slow and torpid she was, if somebody had not exchanged her maid for another.—"Why, you're getting to be a perfect imbecile!" she would sometimes say to her testily. She remembered the time when Germinie was so useful about finding dates, writing an address on a card, telling her what day they had put in the wood or broached the cask of wine,—all of which were things ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... that the natural inferiority of the black man, connects him so closely with the animal creation, it looks passing strange to me that he should be made responsible for the violation of laws which he has been declared too imbecile to aid in framing or of comprehending. Nor is it less strange to see him enslaved and compelled by his labor to maintain both his master and himself, after having declared him incapable of doing either. Why not let him go then? Why hold with ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... louder; came in front of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just under Cora's window. There it fell silent a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and sang again: ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... guards are close at hand, and he is daring enough to make use of them if there is any resistance to that which he has undertaken. To the Directory, through their envoy Dottot, he says in substance, and not without vigour, "Do not sicken me with your imbecile arguments and lame, impotent conclusions. What I want to know is: What have you done with this France which I left you so glorious? I left you peace; I return and find war! I left you victories; I find reverses! I left you the millions ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... is to be done when our existence as a nation is at stake, and when we are opposed by a remorseless foe which would gladly ruin us irretrievably? There is no halting half-way. It was these endless scruples which interfered with the prevention of the war under the imbecile or traitorous Buchanan; it is lingering scruple and timidity which still inspires in thousands of cowardly hearts a dislike to face the grim danger and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... never mind the country. They are too weak to resist their own tyrants—and they are too weak to resist us. The country's always drivelling in the background. A country-party's sure to be a party of imbecile bigots. Nobody ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... "An imbecile without friends and twelve bajocchi in his pocket," he muttered, savagely. "Perhaps the night without food will restore his senses. Come, fool!" and he roughly pushed me into a dark little chamber adjoining. "Here, Valeria, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons than the obvious ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... dazzling wit, and a genius deep, if not sublime, and what wonder that we forget something of vanity and something of fretfulness,—effects rather of the frame than of the mind. The wonder only is that, with a body the victim to every disease, crippled and imbecile from the cradle, his frailties should not be more numerous, and his care, his thoughts, and attentions not wholly limited to his own complaints. For the sickly are almost of necessity selfish; and that mind must have a vast share of benevolence which can always retain the softness of charity ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feet to amble about and "set" to inanimate objects, accompanying herself with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance. A nervous affection has probably as much to do with these demonstrations as any imbecile intention in the poor old woman, but on the present occasion they are so particularly lively in connexion with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow to that in which Mr. Smallweed is seated, that she only quite desists when her grandchildren ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... present inmates, which two women were preparing, consisted of meat and vegetables, soup and sweet things; excellent meat, and well-dressed frijoles. A poor little boy, imbecile, deaf and dumb, was seated there cross-legged, in a sort of wooden box; a pretty child, with a fine colour, but who has been in this state from his infancy. The women seemed very kind to him, and he had a placid, contented expression of face; but ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... which I shall not name. The opera had been judged superannuated and had been "improved." A young composer had written a new score in which he inserted here and there such bits of Gluck as he thought worthy of being preserved. A costly and magnificently imbecile luxuriousness set off the whole piece. I may be pardoned the cruel adjective when I say that in the scene of Hate, so deeply inspired, and which takes place in a sort of cave, they relegated the chorus to the wings to make a place for dragons, ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... aims, the base successes—all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful allegory—of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason. What had this man done? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart? what fever ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Milan and his overthrow at Waterloo, with the subsequent dearth of national triumphs in every sphere, and with the inert, apprehensive, baffled existence of the Italians in the grasp of reinstated and reinforced imbecile, yet tyrannic governments, to appreciate the feelings of a young, well-born, gifted citizen, when suddenly checked in a liberal and progressive career, and remanded, as it were, from the bracing atmosphere of modern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... influence on their views of public duty; whilst, on the contrary, he had still oftener seen men of great and generous instincts transformed into vulgar self-seekers, by contact with women of narrow natures, devoted to an imbecile love of pleasure, and from whose minds the grand motive ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... drew a long sigh, her face became the face of an imbecile, stupid, without expression, her eyes half-closed, her mouth half-open. Her head rolled forward as though she were nodding in her sleep, while a long drip of saliva trailed from her lower lip. Vandover's father bent over ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... fore-finger and saying, "Tut, tut! I shall consider being very harsh, if you commit these outrages three more times.." To shake your fist at all, and then to shake your finger, seemed to Roosevelt almost imbecile. Cut off from serving the cause of American patriotism in any public capacity, Roosevelt struggled to take his part by writing. Every month in the Outlook, and subsequently in the Metropolitan Magazine, he gave vent to his pent-up indignation. The very titles of some of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... ponderously at his end of the table, and Mrs. Langton was being interested at hers by an account the judge's lady was giving of a protege of hers, an imbecile, who made his living by calling neighbours who ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... asserted Crestwick. "I was a bit of an imbecile, and she's really hard to beat. She says if the life here's too tough for me I'm to come back and live with them. That's considerate, because in a way she can't want me, though I haven't the least doubt she'd make Carew put up with my company. ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... of my mind during that evening service, I felt ill before I went to bed, and awoke in the morning with a headache, which increased along with other signs of perturbation of the system, until I thought it better to send for Dr Duncan. I have not yet got so imbecile as to suppose that a history of the following six weeks would be interesting to my readers—for during so long did I suffer from low fever; and more weeks passed during which I was unable to meet my flock. Thanks to the care of Mr Brownrigg, a clever young man in priest's orders, who was living ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... laugh. "See, I'm discovered even in this disguise." He nodded toward the old man as one might toward an imbecile who had shown a gleam of intelligence. "Lansing Hertford is my real name; named for a grandfather just as you are, Sandy Morley. You see I've patched the scraps together. It was your grandfather and mine who were good pals way back in the musty ages. Some ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... afraid it came from his horrid father. But Graydon is a good boy. He couldn't long follow the impulses of his father. I dare say he could be a sinner if he tried, too. I' hate an imbecile. An imbecile to my mind is the fellow without the capacity to err intentionally. God takes care of the fellow who errs ignorantly. Give me the fellow who is bright enough to do the bad things which might admit him to purgatory in good standing, and I'll trust ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the progress of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; our medical experts exert their utmost skill to save the lives of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from weak constitutions would have ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... like a tigress at bay, and before he could drag her aside they heard the iron-barred door of the elevator glide open and clang shut. And there they stood in the strange place, the old man staggered with the realization of the future, the old woman imbecile with fear. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... An imbecile repetition of speech kept recurring and even stirring his lips, "She'd make them all look like thirty cents." And he colored painfully at the crudeness of his obsessing thoughts, angrily, after a ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... of virtue, Imbecile, what you will; perhaps,' said Rigaud, pausing in his drink to look out of his glass with his horrible smile, 'you would have done better ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... "Oh, they were imbecile!" added Lady Garnett; "try the Moselle, my dear, and leave that terrible sweet stuff to Mary. Yes, I was glad to come away from Lucerne. Everything is very bad now except my Constant's vol-au-vent, which you don't seem to have tried; but lovers are the worst of all. Though I like that ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Mrs. Jo G. in an ominous murmur. Maud Grace's flat, expressionless face took on a really imbecile blankness. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... laundresses, one or two male sympathisers, and a couple of reporters. The Chairwoman conducts the proceedings with the greatest possible tact and grace, but is slightly hampered by the levity of a crowd composed of factory-girls, semi-imbecile larrikins, and professional laundresses, whose burning anxiety for reform masks itself under a surface frivolity. In the neighbourhood is a lorry decorated with clean shirts, and occupied by young washerwomen fired by an enthusiasm which manifests itself in bursts of shrill ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... enemies, and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand" she would ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... evils to choose the least. I should like to have my uncle—and Helen here immensely. But if the visit wasn't a success I should be proportionately disappointed and vexed. So is it worth the risk? Disappointments are sufficiently abundant anyhow. Isn't it slightly imbecile to run a wholly gratuitous risk of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and the depressions of the melancholic, with the hallucinations of persecution or the erotic insanities of the paranoiac. Still more the whole register of psychology has to be used, when we are to educate the idiot and the imbecile. But the disappearance of the disease or of the chief symptoms through the mental agencies is in all these cases out of the question. Only in incipient cases, especially of melancholia and mania, the psychotherapeutic work seems not ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... this resemblance which had overleaped three generations, which had passed from this withered centenarian's countenance, from these dead features wasted by life, to this delicate child's face that was also as if worn, aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each other, the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the race of which she, forgotten by the ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... sinister for Old France and for New. Marie de Medicis, "cette grosse banquiere," coarse scion of a bad stock, false wife and faithless queen, paramour of an intriguing foreigner, tool of the Jesuits and of Spain, was Regent in the minority of her imbecile son. The Huguenots drooped, the national party collapsed, the vigorous hand of Sully was felt no more, and the treasure gathered for a vast and beneficent enterprise became the instrument of despotism and the prey of corruption. Under such dark auspices, young ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... imbecile you are!" sighed Tchelkache, and he again turned his back on his interlocutor, thinking this time that he would not vouchsafe him another word. This robust peasant awakened something obscure ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... had told the Bishops to set their house in order, and some of the Prelates had been insulted and threatened in the streets of London. The vital question was, how were we to keep the Church from being liberalized? there was such apathy on the subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the true principles of Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and there was such distraction in the councils of the Clergy. Blomfield, the Bishop of London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... moment enough of air and sun for me. In fact, this is not a dream, who the devil would oppose it, if the king made me a marechal, as his father, King Louis XIII., made a duke and constable of Albert de Luynes? Am I not as brave, and much more intelligent, than that imbecile De Vitry? Ah! that's exactly what will prevent my advancement: I have too much wit. Luckily, if there is any justice in this world, fortune owes me many compensations. She owes me certainly a recompense for all I did for Anne of Austria, and an indemnification for all she has not done ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... said tensely, "and I should have struck those unspeakable young men with my umbrella. One of the things I have never been able to understand, Derek, is why you should have selected that imbecile Rooke ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to be got in Church and State; and all at one another, by substituting low ribaldry for argument, bad jokes for principle, and an openly avowed, vainglorious, imbecile vanity as a panoply to guard himself from the attacks of ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... head sadly. "I'm afraid I should have said, Mr. Burris, that we did once have one," he admitted. "He was, unfortunately, an imbecile, with a mental age between five and six, as nearly as we were ever able ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... But Matilda was watched by unfriendly eyes. Juliana Maria, the queen-dowager, had from her first arrival taken a dislike to her, and this aversion was increased when she saw that Matilda, Struensee, and Brandt, a young nobleman, exercised complete authority over the imbecile monarch, and directed the affairs of government at their pleasure. The queen-dowager had numerous and powerful friends, and these were likewise incensed at seeing Struensee at the head of the government, and a strong party was formed against ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most imbecile, at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but reason, no. These are not the eyes of an imbecile or an idiot, but they are the eyes of a child. It is possible that when she fully recovers we may find her mind a perfect blank—a virgin page on which the story of her new life will have ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... boys," said she, quite out of breath, and holding one little hand against her side, quite unheeding the speechless discomfiture of our party or the complete demoralization of Yuba Bill, whose features had relaxed into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness,—"you see, boys, I was mor'n two miles away when you passed down the road. I thought you might pull up here, and so I ran the whole way, knowing nobody was home but Jim,—and—and—I'm out of breath—and—that lets me out." And here Miggles caught ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... at home because the wind is in the east. "The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold." If the ploughman means to succeed he must count on suffering; and if the devil cannot find anyone on his side to oppose, he will raise up some imbecile Christian to do so, who by some sneer or cold criticism, will try to keep the plough idle. Instead of looking which way the wind blows, get ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... do not complain of these ancients so much because their logic is, by their own showing, utterly baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether, as because of their pompous and imbecile proscription of all other roads of Truth, of all other means for its attainment than the two preposterous paths—the one of creeping and the one of crawling—to which they have dared to confine the Soul that loves nothing so well as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sufficiently visionary to hold that all persons of every age, degree, and character, should be entitled to vote in all elections of all public officers. Idiots, infants, minors, and persons insane or utterly imbecile, have been, without scruple, denied the right as not having the sound judgment and discretion fit for its exercise. In many countries, persons guilty of crimes have also been denied the right as a personal punishment, or as a security to society. In most countries, females, whether married or single, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... how imbecile I am. If I could have gone out quietly by myself they never need have known. Now they'll have to. Alderson'll tell them. He'll tell everybody.... I don't care. It's their own look-out. They'll ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... imbecile voice of a man in love, "why do you tremble so when I am here to protect you? Don't you love ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... close there now," my friend remarked. "This fellow Merryweather is a bank director, and personally interested in the matter. I thought it as well to have Jones with us also. He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone. Here we are, and they are ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... building of wood with balconies looking over the Bosporus. She was alone with Lady Ingleton in the latter's sitting-room, which was filled with curious Oriental things, with flowers, and with little dogs of the Pekinese breed, who lay about in various attitudes of contentment, looking serenely imbecile, and as if they were in danger ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... "Imbecile!" replied his neighbor. "It's Prince Villardo whom we saw last night in the play!" And the alcalde, in the character of giant-slayer, rose accordingly in ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... dirty accident of your intrusion into an honest man's life could dissolve the divine compact of wedlock? Soil it—yes; besmirch it, render it superficially unclean, unfit, nauseous—yes. But neither you nor your vile code nor the imbecile law you invoked to legalise the situation really ever deprived me of my irrevocable status and responsibility. . . . I—even I—was once—for a while—persuaded that it did; that the laws of the land could do this—could free me from a faithless wife, and regularise her position in your household. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... failure! Drop into the greenroom then and you will find an astonishing change has taken place. The Star will take you into a corner and assert that, she "always knew the thing could not go, it was too imbecile, with such a company, it was folly to expect anything else." The author will abuse the Star and the management. The whole troupe is frankly disconcerted, like people aroused out of a hypnotic sleep, wondering what they had seen in ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... after him was to come a prince after their own heart, one of English sympathies and English instincts; one who even as a boy had won their hearts by his pluck, his frankness, and his wit, and who, as he grew up, developed into a manhood as vigorous and noble as that of his father was mean and imbecile. ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... health and mental faculties utterly broke down. But she lived on for another ten months. Aurore for the time was placed in a most exceptional position for a French girl of sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself and her own resources, uncontrolled and unprotected, between a helpless, half imbecile invalid, and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschartres. Highly susceptible to influences from without, her mind, during their sudden and complete suspension, seemed as it were invited to discover and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... truly unfortunate cases which, so far as present knowledge goes, cannot be guarded against. Eunice, age 31, mentally 2, is a low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... their poultry, their pigs,—all watched over and provided with accommodations of Dutch-like neatness. All this is characteristic of the people. It may be thought to detract something from the feminine graces which in other lands make a woman so amiably dependent as to be nearly imbecile. But it produces a healthy and blooming race of women to match the hardy Englishman,—the finest development of the physical and moral nature which the world has witnessed. For we are not to look on the English gentleman as a mere Nimrod. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... black-guardly, good-for-nothing!" and as he uttered these bold invectives, he advanced and shook his fist in Jean's face. "You see him, M. le Commissaire, you behold what a villain, what a desperate villain he looks? Listen, then, I hear screams, I meet this poor imbecile flying out in terror, I rush—I seize—I overpower—I make ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... broke down again and sobbed aloud, while the midshipman looked on, imbecile and helpless. "Pray, don't cry," said Foster again earnestly. "Who are you? where did you come from? Who and where is your father? Do tell me, and how I can help you, for ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... There are brave men, and likewise those that are cowards. Men may be divided into these two well defined classes. As upon a single large tree there may be two boughs one of which beareth fruits while the other doth not, so from the self-same line of progenitors may spring persons that are imbecile as well as those that are endowed with great strength. O thou bearing the sign of a plough on thy banner, I do not, in sooth, condemn the words thou hast spoken, but I simply condemn those, O son of Madhu, who are listening to thy words! How, indeed, can he, who unblushingly dares attach ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... profusely decorated with flags, flowers and bunting, and mottoes were festooned along the walls, one of which was "God Bless Our Homes," and another, "Imbecile Children Will Be the Product ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... ground for others, or tax payers to fill a treasury from which others may spend, or food for gunpowder, or voting material for demagogues. It is an object of exploitation. At one moment, in spite of its aggregate muscle, it is helpless and imbecile; the next moment it is swept away into folly and mischief by a suggestion or an impulse. Organization, leadership, and discipline are indispensable to any beneficial action by masses of men. If we ignore this fact, we see the machine and the boss evolved out ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... been sold for supplying the departments below the Loire, is shipped at Paimboeuf and taken out of the kingdom from there to be sold abroad." In the suburbs of Rouen they imagine that grain is purposely "engulfed in the swamps, ponds, and clay-pits." At Laon, imbecile and Jacobin committees attribute the dearness of provisions to the avidity of the rich and the malevolence of the aristocrats according to them, "jealous millionaires grow rich at the expense of the people. They know the popular strength," and, not daring to measure their forces with ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... just as care is taken not to wake a somnambulist abruptly. They had no mistrust of his motives, for the idea was simply untenable that Rouletabille was fool enough to hope to save himself from them by an imbecile subterfuge. No, they yielded to the impression his inspired countenance gave them, and several were so affected that they unconsciously repeated his gestures. Thus Rouletabille reached the edge of the court where judgment had been pronounced against him. There he had to mount a ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... the law excuses no one." As if it were in the nature of things possible that there could be an excuse more absolute and complete. What else than ignorance of the law is it that excuses persons under the years of discretion, and men of imbecile minds? What else than ignorance of the law is it that excuses judges themselves for all their erroneous decisions? Nothing. They are every day committing errors, which would be crimes, but for their ignorance of the law. And yet these same judges, who claim to be learned in the law, and who yet ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... Seminary. Professional schools include one dental and three medical colleges, and a law school; and there are also private and religious educational institutions. Columbus is the location of a state hospital for the insane; state institutes for the education of deaf mutes, blind and imbecile youth; the Ohio penitentiary; county, city and memorial buildings; five opera houses; and a board of trade building. There are five public parks and a United States military post, Fort Columbus. This post, known also as Columbus Barracks, was originally an arsenal, and now has quarters for ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... a flat with fire-escapes written all over the front of it. The street in front was being repaired. It had been said by imbecile residents of the vicinity that the paving was never allowed to remain down for a sufficient time to be invalided by the tramping millions, but that it was kept perpetually stacked in little mountains through the ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... display type to do justice to the biggest sensation that had come in its way for years, and the appearance of the paper created the most profound amazement throughout the town and district. Gable was described as a cunning scoundrel whose affectations of almost imbecile simplicity might easily have deceived intelligences less keen than those at the service of the Mercury, and neither Messrs. Billson and Hogan nor Master Mathieson hinted that their assailants were anything less than grown men of the largest size ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... natural to the soul of the poet, the painter or the musician. The men who would experience any fatigue in putting into practice the instructions given in this Meditation are naturally predestined, just as he who cannot perceive the connection which exists between two different ideas is an imbecile. As a matter of fact, love has its great men although they be unrecognized, as war has its Napoleons, poetry its Andre Cheniers and philosophy ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... willing to assume responsibility, and "Hodson's Horse," as the volunteer battalion was called, were the Rough Riders of the Indian mutiny. He took the aged king back to Delhi and delivered him to the British authorities alive, but almost imbecile from terror and excitement. The two princes, 19 and 22 years of age, he deliberately shot with his own revolver before leaving the courtyard of the tomb ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Castruccio Cesarini, traversing a length of way, arrived at last at a miserable lodging in the suburb of Chelsea. His fortune was now gone; gone in supplying the poorest food to a craving and imbecile vanity: gone, that its owner might seem what nature never meant him for: the elegant Lothario, the graceful man of pleasure, the troubadour of modern life! gone in horses, and jewels, and fine clothes, and gaming, and printing unsaleable poems on gilt-edged vellum; gone, that ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the dangerous saucy-wood potion was invariably administered to test their guilt or innocence. It frequently happened that accusations of witchcraft or evil practices were purchased from these wretches in order to get rid of a sick wife, an imbecile parent, or an opulent relative; and, as the poisonous draught was mixed and graduated by the juju-man, it rarely failed to prove fatal when the drinker's death was necessary.[F] Ordeals of this character occurred almost daily in the neighboring country, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... stop rocking your body in that inane way, and shaking your hand and your handkerchief, and saying those imbecile things, I shall go mad. I suppose this is the kind of sympathy a man gets from a woman ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and regulate their indiscreet shining. Darkness and silence are excellent for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... boy; water head; simple; old mother feeds it mouth to mouth[14]; "Die kind, leeraart, het ik nou al lang afgege aan de Heere Jesus!" (This child, Pastor, I have given to the Lord Jesus long ago.") She dotes on this imbecile, poor mother. Such a simple, homely, gladsome, believing old heart. "Ik ben velen een wonder geweest" ("I am a wonder unto many"); me certainly; daughter with sick girlie; "De Heere het haar ver ons terug gege" ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... Heer, believe me, nothing to your hurt. Oh! yes, I know that tales are told against me, who only earn an honest living in an honest way, to keep my poor husband, who is an imbecile. Once alas! he followed that mad Anabaptist fool, John of Leyden, the fellow who set up as a king, and said that men might have as many wives as they wished. That was what sent my husband silly, but, thanks be to the Saints, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... belong to their world. Your Tommies are wonderful in their kindness and chivalry—until I met them I had never seen an Englishman in my life—I had imbecile ideas—I thought they would be without manners—un peu insultants. I found I could walk among them, without fear, as if I were a princess. It ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... came up, and I should have told him the truth, and, if he didn't believe it, demanded to be taken to Scotland Yard, or for that matter to the nearest police station. But a delay at that moment seemed to me unendurable, and the sight of Marmie's imbecile face was more than I could bear. I let out with my left, and had the satisfaction of seeing him measure his length ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... compliments, expressed the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone, or the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial. Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... average historical novel, pretending to reflect history, are among its minor defects. It is a thing altogether wonderfully and fearfully made—the imbecile intrigue, the cast-iron characters, the plumed and armored dialogue with its lance of gory rhetoric forever at charge. The stage at its worst moments is not so unreal. Here art has broken into smithereens the mirror which she is supposed ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... ride. She come ready enough. She didn't have much fun, anyway, except sitting with him in the office such times as he was lookin' over his accounts and reckonin' his money. She liked that. She always liked to handle money. That proved her a Sands, even if she was imbecile! ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... forgiveness for printing. "That was very good indeed of Sala's" (some essay he had written). "He was twenty guineas in advance, by the bye, and I told Wills delicately to make him a present of it. I find him a very conscientious fellow. When he gets money ahead, he is not like the imbecile youth who so often do the like in Wellington-street" (the office of Household Words) "and walk off, but only works more industriously. I think he improves with everything he does. He looks sharply at the alterations ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... any other furniture; when he went out early every morning, and often forgot to return and give her her dinner during the day, and at night, when he came back, was like a madman, furious, terrible, or—still more painful—like an idiot, imbecile, senseless. She knew she had fallen ill in this place, and that one night, when she was very sick he had come raving into the room, and said he would kill her, for she was a burden to him. Her screams had brought aid; ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... remain as regular, her figure as plump, as before; but the mind will be gone, and with it everything that could make a man fall in love with her. Who has ever heard of a beautiful idiot, of anyone falling in love with an imbecile? The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, make beauty and love alike impossible ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... heiress. 'Once a great scientist had invented a new kind of underwear, and had endeavoured to make it a gift to humanity; and here was a man who had seized upon it and made millions out of it! Here was a "trance medium," who had got a fortune out of an imbecile old manufacturer; here was a great newspaper proprietor, who published advertisements of assignations at a dollar a line; here was a cigar manufacturer, whose smug face was upon every billboard—he had begun as a tin manufacturer, and to avoid the duty, he had had his ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... prisoner had undergone a woful change during his confinement. Had his own wife seen him at that moment it is doubtful whether she would have recognized her lord. Could it be possible that that frail, tottering, wasted form, and that blanched, sunken-eyed, imbecile-looking countenance were all that were left of the once formidable Robert Gourlay? The sight was one which might have moved his bitterest enemy to tears. His clothing, a world too wide for so shrunken a tenant, hung sloppy and slovenly about him, and it was remarked by ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... gasped Lord James. "You don't tell me the rascal was imbecile enough to keep those keys in his pocket?— certain means of identification ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... several years I spends in their s'ciety I never once detects Jerry in any look or word of kindness to Tom. Jerry bites him an' kicks him an' cusses him out constant; he never tol'rates Tom closter than twenty foot onless at times when he orders Tom to curry him. Shore, the imbecile Tom submits. On sech o'casions when Jerry issues a summons to go over him, usin' his upper teeth for a comb an' bresh, Tom is never so happy. Which he digs an' delves at Jerry's ribs that a-way like it's a honour; after a half hour, mebby, when Jerry ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... I have wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft, persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... imbecile, idiot, that I am!" he thought. "He was waiting to be questioned about this circumstance. He is so wonderfully shrewd that, when he saw me take the dust, he divined my intentions; and since then he has managed to concoct this ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... They had for their only ally, Lord Granville at Paris, and nothing can exceed the contempt with which the Palmerstonians treat this little knot of dissentients, at least the two elder ones, who (they say) are become quite imbecile, and they wonder Lord Granville does not resign. Palmerston, in fact, appears to exercise an absolute despotism at the Foreign Office, and deals with all our vast and complicated questions of diplomacy according to his own ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... such a genius show, to learn all permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections may ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... pig-headed! You are talking like an imbecile. Your secretary, Miss Dore, is a nice girl. But how would you feel if Percy were to come to you and say that he was engaged ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Cond, at this time fifteen years old. "Dieu soit lo! tout le ciel de nostre chere Patrie nous promet de fauorables influences, iusques ce nouuel astre, qui commence paroistre parmy ceux de la premiere grandeur."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 3, 4. ] In his eyes, the vicious imbecile who sat on the throne of France was the anointed champion of the Faith, and the cruel and ambitious priest who ruled king and nation alike was the chosen instrument of Heaven. Church and State, linked in alliance close and potential, played faithfully into each other's hands; and that enthusiasm, ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... is no index of intelligence unless age is taken into account. The question should be, not, "Is this child doing his school work well?" but rather, "In what school grade should a child of this age be able to do satisfactory work?" A high-grade imbecile may do average work in the first grade, and a high-grade moron average work in the third or fourth grade, provided only they are sufficiently over-age for the grade ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... bruised and held her white wrists. Even then she could not speak, though she smiled a little, faintly and forlornly and gratefully. She struggled to say one word, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and inarticulate mumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... he then becoming imbecile, that he had not thought the voice of the man who bid him enter was that of Phillis's brother? Was he so profoundly overwhelmed that such a simple reasoning was impossible to him? Decidedly, it was important for him to go away as quickly as possible; the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don't kill ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... resumed his grave, dignified air, in order to salute with a wave of his hand the phantom that had just appeared before him. It was the same that he had summoned one evening at the Hotel Steinbock, and treated there as an addle-brain, as a visionary, and even as an imbecile; but this time he gave him a more indulgent and gracious reception. He bore him no ill-will, he wished him well, he was under essential obligations to him, and Samuel ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... she exclaimed. "It is wicked for you to say such things. Do you suppose that Mr. Atkins would find it necessary to work as he is doing to beat a fool? And, besides, you're not complimentary to me. Should I, do you think, take such an interest in one who was an imbecile?" ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln |
