"Improvidence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this day, other conditions had not become adjusted to it at the time of which we are speaking, so that there was often a surplus of workmen, especially in the lower grades of labor. This had a tendency to reduce wages, of course; and the want of employment, improvidence in the use of small wages, intemperance and other immoralities, ignorance and misfortune, all combined to keep part of the people in poverty. On the other hand, it was a time of great wealth and luxurious living, and these ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... the value of money but even hoard it up for some particular purpose; several of them have shown me their little treasure of a few shillings, and have told me it was their intention to save more until they had enough to buy a horse, a gun, or some wished-for article, but their improvidence has always got the better of their thriftiness, and this sum has eventually been spent in treating their friends to bread ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... quit the village without first satisfying myself whether what I had seen was a solitary instance or a sample of its general state, or whether the extremity of poverty I had just beheld had arisen from peculiar improvidence and want of management in one wretched family, I went into an adjoining habitation, where I found a poor old woman of eighty, whose miserable existence was painfully continued by the maintenance of her granddaughter. Their condition, if possible, was more deplorable."—Curwen, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... are quite ruined, and have sold all they had. The cattle disease forced them to borrow at these ruinous rates, and now alas, the Nile is sadly lingering in its rise, and people are very anxious. Poor Egypt! or rather, poor Egyptians! Of course, I need not say that there is great improvidence in those who can be fleeced as they are fleeced. Mustapha's household is a pattern of muddling hospitality, and Mustapha is generous and mean by turns; but what chance have people like these, so utterly uncivilized and so isolated, against Europeans ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... were many for flour and meat and clothing. Or fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways. ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... propensity is as subservient to the advancement of private interests in the one as in the other, and those who direct them both, being principally guided by the same views and influenced by the same motives, will be equally ready to stimulate extravagance of enterprise by improvidence of credit. How strikingly is this conclusion sustained by experience! The Bank of the United States, with the vast powers conferred on it by Congress, did not or could not prevent former and similar embarrassments, nor has the still greater strength ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... eternal babble of the economists about the improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity, their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.? All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... scarcely reappeared there when she was again thrown into prison for debt; but, by entering into an agreement to sing at the theatre every night, under surveillance, she was enabled to obtain her release. Her recklessness and improvidence had brought her to a pitiable condition; and in her latter days, after a career of splendor, caprice, and extravagance, she was obliged to subsist, it is said, by button-making. She died in frightful indigence, the recipient of charity, at a ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... immediate emancipation? I have clearly shown in the following pages that it would not. Facts prove the contrary. Yes, stubborn undeniable facts, that none but a knave or a fool will gainsay. We know that improvidence, idleness, vagrancy, and crime, are the fruits of emancipation; not only in the United States, but also in the West Indies. We have already stated on good English authority, (Lord Brougham), that ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... in which he has occasionally treated the memory of his mistress and benefactress. That he loved Madame de Warens—his 'Mamma'—deeply and sincerely is undeniable, notwithstanding which he now and then dwells on her improvidence and her feminine indiscretions with an unnecessary and unbecoming lack of delicacy that has an unpleasant effect on the reader, almost seeming to justify the remark of one of his most lenient critics—that, after all, Rousseau had the soul of a lackey. He possessed, however, many amiable and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... justifies him against Apollo's charge, affirming him to be free from those mental defects which chiefly betray men into sin, folly, improvidence, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... indignation and terror, they see plots on all sides, imagine invisible cords pulling in an opposite direction, and they call upon the people to cut them. With the full weight of their inexperience, incapacity, and improvidence, of their fears, credulity, and dogmatic obstinacy, they urge on popular attacks, and their newspaper articles or discourses are all summed up ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Madame la Vicomtesse was looking at me fixedly. I reviewed Nick's neglected childhood; painted as well as I might his temperament and character—his generosity and fearlessness, his recklessness and improvidence. His loyalty to those he loved, his detestation of those he hated. I told how, under these conditions, the sins and vagaries of his parents had gone far to wreck his life at the beginning of it. I told how I had found him again with Sevier, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sometimes ferocious, but really men; nice as to their honour, to the extent of poniarding any one who is wanting in respect to them. They are fully as ignorant as the people of the Monti; they have learnt the same lessons, and witnessed the same examples; they have the same improvidence, the same love of pleasure, the same brutality in their passions; but they are incapable of stooping, even ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... scenes realized the Emperor to be adopting. Who paid the piper never called one note of the tune. There was an ingenuousness about the proceedings on the part of our Government that was startling in its Micawberism and improvidence. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was particularly awkward to Symes because he had no assets. With the singular improvidence which distinguished him he had not provided for this exigency before leaving Crowheart. True, he had made a vague calculation which would seem to indicate that he had sufficient funds to last the ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... the consequences to which it exposed him. The people against whom it was directed were loyal—many of them had bled, all had toiled and suffered in the defence of the state. Need, in many instances, improvidence in several, had induced the families of these people to part with the furniture of their houses to supply those immediate wants, which the absence of the head of the family occasioned. No exception, no distinction ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... drawing near its close. The frequent opening and shutting of the door had replaced the heavy atmosphere with a stream of cold air, at first very refreshing, but soon uncomfortably cool, especially as the stove had for some time ceased to give out heat, the negro, with the improvidence that characterizes his race, having burned up the fuel as fast as possible, without taking into account the probability of detention. We began, too, to be dreadfully hungry, and not one of us had brought any lunch, as we had fully expected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Trim, and formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. In various places in his correspondence Swift criticises the failings of Dr. Anthony Raymond, who was, says Scott, "a particular friend." His unreliability in money matters, the improvidence of his large family, his peculiarities in grammar, his pride in his good manners, all these points are noticed in the journal and elsewhere. But when Dr. Raymond returned to Ireland after a visit to London, Swift felt a little ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... greater number of those remaining in the country had already disposed of their allotments to speculators and dissipated the money they had received for their land; having neglected to plant an ear of corn, or prepare the least provision for the present winter,—an improvidence of character peculiar to the natives, and which it was, she said, impossible to guard against without depriving them of all free-agency. Many, as she assured me, of these wretched people were at this time suffering from extreme want, and thousands ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life, and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. Nor is it in the long run for the benefit of the world that superior ability or superior energy ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... a groan. 'Put THAT down indeed, Alderman, and you'll do something. Married! Married!! The ignorance of the first principles of political economy on the part of these people; their improvidence; their wickedness; is, by Heavens! enough to— Now look at that couple, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... closely-rolled knitted balls—the boy's socks that she had so carefully made and darned. A pile of his clothing lay at her feet. He had carried nothing but his fiddle and the clothes he stood in, and if she had had more tears she could have wept for his improvidence, for the prospective tatters and rents that must needs befall him in that unknown patchless life to which he ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... The charge should fall exclusively upon the rent receivers, and in no case should the tiller of the soil have to pay this charge either directly or indirectly. It is continued by the inadequacy of wages, and the improvidence engendered by a social system which arose out of injustice, and ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... the seed of instruction in your son's and daughter's minds. It will flourish when that over-arching heaven shall pass away like a scroll, and the eternal sun which lightens it, shall set in blood." Says the Rev. Robert Hall, "I am persuaded that the extreme profligacy, improvidence, and misery, which are so prevalent among the laboring classes in many countries, are chiefly to be ascribed to ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... done? The Dolly would not sail perhaps for ten days, and how were we to sustain life during this period? I bitterly repented our improvidence in not providing ourselves, as we easily might have done, with a supply of biscuits. With a rueful visage I now bethought me of the scanty handful of bread I had stuffed into the bosom of my frock, and felt somewhat ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... numerous and more destructive ones engendered by the pestilential effluvia that float in the atmosphere of more favoured climes, the diversity of their maladies is, as might à priori be inferred, very limited. But, unfortunately, that improvidence which is so remarkable in their kindred tribes is also with them proof against the repeated lessons of bitter experience they are doomed to endure. Alternate excesses and privations mark their progress through life, and consequent misery in one or another shape is an active agent in ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... At the end of the day's work, primitive man followed primitive instinct. Gorged to repletion, they slept, or wasted their substance with the improvidence of jungle-beasts. And these were the men Chloe Elliston had pictured labouring joyously in the upbuilding of homes! Once more the feeling of hopelessness came over her—seemed smothering, stifling ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... her success, Miss Mitford was not out of her troubles. She writes to Mr. Harness saying: 'You cannot imagine how perplexed I am. There are points in my domestic situation too long and too painful to write about; the terrible improvidence of one dear parent, the failure of memory and decay of faculty in that other who is still dearer, cast on me a weight of care and fear that I can hardly bear up against.' Her difficulties were unending. The new publisher now stopped ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... master cannot divest himself of the idea, that in virtue of his rank he is entitled to deference and submission; and the workman conceives that, in virtue of his comparative poverty, he is entitled to assistance in difficulty, and to protection from the consequences of his own folly and improvidence. Each party expects from the other something more than is expressed or implied in the covenant between them. The workman, asserting his equality and independence, claims from his employer services ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... the crew of the Crisis had shipped with us anew, the poor fellows having already made away with all their wages and prize-money, in the short space of a month! This denoted the usual improvidence of sailors, and was thought nothing out of the common way. The country being at peace, a difficulty with Tripoli excepted, it was no longer necessary for ships to go armed. The sudden excitement produced by the brush with the French had already subsided, and the navy was ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... improvidence, although deprived of sufficient food. Three or four couples there have some four or ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... apt to have the readiest sense of the intention of Providence to care for him, to send him bread well buttered; the foolish and thoughtless depend on heaven to do their thinking, and many court bankruptcy while praying for solvency. But the improvidence of man does not disprove the providence of God. So far from encouraging sloth and recklessness this truth provokes to progress by the assurance of the cooeperation of infinite ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... began, to cut down the baggage of officers and men to the lowest point possible. Notwithstanding this I saw scattered along the road from Culpeper to Germania Ford wagon-loads of new blankets and overcoats, thrown away by the troops to lighten their knapsacks; an improvidence I had ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... are—and, in parts as well as plots, any one who cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident seigneur and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit and hill which want developing. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... disrespect to his memory to say that he had his foibles. It was no secret among our contemporaries at Cambridge that he was like too many other men of genius, a little deficient in economy—shall I say it? a little extravagant. The difficulties into which he brought himself by his improvidence were, however, always to him matters of jest and raillery; and often, indeed, proved subjects of triumph, for he was sure to extricate himself, by some of his many talents, or by some ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... without it, however great the wealth or exalted the position of the married pair may be, while the worst evils of life are lightened and made bearable by its presence. Marrying for love need not mean improvidence. Only an unreasoning passion based on selfishness will plunge the beloved into privation and want. The highest, truest love has its substratum of common sense, self-restraint, and thought ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... in some inexplicable manner, Goldsmith, the pilgrim of improvidence and knight errant from the Order of Chivalrous Carelessness, still pursued his medical studies, and carried this training for the vocation of a doctor to some kind of completion. Italy is supposed ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... country on both banks of the Swat River—then called the Subhavastu—but which perhaps applies more particularly to the upper end of the valley, was famous for its forests, flowers and fruit. But though the valley retains much of its beauty, its forests have been destroyed by the improvidence, and its flowers and fruit have declined through the ignorance, of the fierce conquerors into ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... for the community, than for them to drink it. All which it takes to support the paupers, and prosecute the crimes which ardent spirit occasions, is, to those who pay the money, utterly lost. All the diminution of profitable labor which it occasions, through improvidence, idleness, dissipation, intemperance, sickness, insanity, and premature deaths, is to the community so much utterly lost. And these items, as has often been shown, amount in the United States to more than $100,000,000 a year. To this enormous and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... vegetable life and growth on the earth would exterminate our own and all the animal races. The trees, the forests are essential to man's health and life. When the last tree shall have been destroyed there will be no man left to mourn the improvidence and thoughtlessness of the forest-destroying race ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... brought prosperity in place of waste and improvidence. Profits were devoted to the purchase of additional lines, thus enlarging their domain and strengthening their position. Prosperity increased with rapid strides; and the beneficial effects of extirpating wasteful rivalry and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... found our friend Pigewis, the Indian chief, at his old encampment. He received us most hospitably, giving us a good supply of dried sturgeon. Our hungry party put the liberality of the Indians to the test, but it did not fail; as I believe it seldom does, in their improvidence of tomorrow. I landed at Fort Douglas on the 4th, and could not but recount the mercies of God in my safe return. They have followed me through many a perilous, and trying scene of life; and I would that a sense of a continual protecting Providence in the mercy ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... come, which has pointed out to men the way of safety, and, if the flock are docile and obedient to the shepherd's call, will lead them to the promised land, where well-being may be attained without effort, where order, security and prosperity are the easy reward of improvidence. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... dress, of standard material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... an amnesty of forty years while the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness. But when you are deep in the heart of the country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no reflective mind ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... of the good; and even the Irish vices were the counterfeit of virtues, contrived so cunningly that it was hard to distinguish their true texture. The fidelity of the clansmen to their leaders was faultlessly beautiful; extravagance appeared like generosity, and improvidence like unselfishness; anarchy disguised itself under the name of liberty; and war and plunder were decorated by poetry as the honourable occupation of heroic natures. Such were the Irish with whom the Norman conquerors found themselves ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... in response, "I thing you is juz right. I believe, me, strong-strong in the improvidence, yes. You know my papa he hown a sugah-plantation, you know. 'Jules, me son,' he say one time to me, 'I goin' to make one baril sugah to fedge the moze high price in New Orleans.' Well, he take his bez baril sugah—I nevah see a so careful man like me papa always to make a so beautiful sugah ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in a perfect phrensy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the shocking and uncoloured violence and injustice of that partition, but at the debility, improvidence, and want of activity, in their government, in not preventing it as a means of aggrandisement to their rivals, or in not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their share of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... present to expect, it would by no means follow that the mere removal of that great obstacle to regular industry and commerce, would in any very short space of time produce considerable or extensive improvements. The ignorance, the profligacy, the improvidence and the various other moral evils, which necessarily accompany the slave trade, will, it is to be feared, long survive the extinction of that traffic which produced and fostered them. The whole history ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... that, as a result of these virtues, they were also fairly well-to-do! The Right Honorable Joseph Chamberlain, another enemy of Socialism, signed with several others a Minority Report, but they agreed "that the imputation that old age pauperism is mainly due to drink, idleness, improvidence, and the like abuses applies to but a very small proportion ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... September, Wassili returned from the woods. Daria had a prospect of several months before her before the return of Aphanassi, if ever he should return at all; and she gave herself up to her love with pleasing improvidence. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... man who should openly have avowed a doctrine that glory was a bubble, besides that, instead of being prompted to this on a principle which so far raised him above other men, must have been prompted by a principle that sank him to the level of the brutes, viz., acquiescing in total ventrine improvidence, imprescience, and selfish ease (if ease, a Pagan must have it cum dignitate), but above all he must have made proclamation that in his opinion all disinterested virtue was a chimera, since all the quadrifarious virtue of the scholastic ethics was founded either on personal self-sufficiency, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... heart still ached with the memory of her name) Sam's business had prospered. She had been one of those woman who can rise to any emergency in the interest of her loved ones; the first to realise Sam's improvidence and lack of executive ability, she had taken hold of the business with a firm hand and made it pay—while she lived. It has never ceased to be a source of wondering speculation to me, that she, with her gentle training, so wholly aloof from every thought of commerce or economy, should have ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... not the term I intended to imply," he condescended to explain. "I meant to say that improvidence is the prevailing fault of those whose ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... as the practical virtues of economy and providence. On the other hand, there are their counterparts of avarice, fraud, injustice, and selfishness, as displayed by the inordinate lovers of gain; and the vices of thoughtlessness, extravagance, and improvidence, on the part of those who misuse and abuse ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... before pointed out that the remedy for these disorders must be a radical one. Improvidence among the poorer classes is familiar to economists in more experienced societies than that of Newfoundland, and may be accepted as a permanent element in the difficulty. The real hope lay in opening up, on remunerative lines, industries which would occupy the poor ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... The improvidence of the poor is a most distressing spectacle to all right-minded students of sociology. But please spare me your homily this time. It does not apply. The poor are the poor in spirit. Those who are rich in spiritual endowment will never be ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... thrifty farmer, whose wife, having no children of her own, doted upon the painter's boy, and grieved at the mention of their departure. I doubt if my new friend would have had the enterprise to migrate at all, but for my urgency; but I soon discovered, that, with the improvidence of his tribe, he had laid nothing by, and that he stood in need of medical advice, and, after a long conversation, upon my engaging to secure him an economical home and plenty of work in Utica, he promised to remove thither in a month; and then becoming more cheerful, he exhibited, one by one, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Indians were suffering from the famine that their waste and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have said something on the white man's side. But he had nothing to say when rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego's sacrifice of the last leaf of his tobacco to the Great Spirit "Brother, I have something to say to you, and I hope you will not be ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Socialist regime the earth would, as by a magician's wand, be transformed into a paradise. Over-population, bad harvests, the maladjustment of international demand and supply, and individual folly, laziness, wastefulness, improvidence, and passion would apparently no longer have the same unfortunate consequences which they have now. "The struggle for individual existence disappears...."[60] "The words 'poor' and 'charity' will be expunged from the dictionary ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... wirra!' or, 'Och hone, mavrone!' betokened the smouldering remains of emotion in the frieze coats and gaudy shawls assembled for'ard: the wisest of the party were arranging their goods and chattels 'tween-decks, where they must encamp for a month or more; but the majority, with truly Celtic improvidence, will wait till they are turned down at nightfall, and have a ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... insistence; hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain, and he could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder what underlying impulse was driving him onward. Stoner was one of those unfortunate individuals who seem to have tried everything; a natural slothfulness and improvidence had always intervened to blight any chance of even moderate success, and now he was at the end of his tether, and there was nothing more to try. Desperation had not awakened in him any dormant reserve of energy; on the contrary, a mental torpor grew up round the crisis of his fortunes. With ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... to that," he replied, "our people are prosperous and happy. There is very little poverty and what there is is obviously the result of vice or improvidence. Our labor is light and all the necessaries of life, many of the comforts and some of the luxuries are abundant and cheap. I hardly know what you mean by the tyranny of the trusts; they do not seem to care to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... cut only—for the arm holes; but be careful that the quantity of material be very ample—say four times as much as is positively necessary, for nothing is so characteristic of a perfect gentleman as his improvidence. This garment must be constructed without buttons or button-holes, and confined at the waist with cable-like bell-ropes and tassels. This elegant deshabille had its origin (like the Corinthian capital from the Acanthus) in accident. A set of massive window-curtains having been carelessly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hear at this moment the cry of suffering. We are told of grass-grown streets, of crumbling mansions, of beggared planters and barren plantations, of fear from without, of terror within. The once fertile fields are wasted and tenantless, for the curse of slavery, the improvidence of that labor whose hire has been kept back by fraud, has been there, poisoning the very earth beyond the reviving influence of the early and the latter rain. A moral mildew mingles with and blasts the economy of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... except what is purely accidental, or brought on by the improvidence of individuals. In the very best regulated society there must, of necessity, be poverty less or more," said the ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet, especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead, tinder-like remains. How far human improvidence and recklessness—especially that of our own destructive Caucasian race—has contributed to denude the Plains of the little wood that thinly dotted their surface at a period not very remote, I can not pretend to decide; but it is very evident that there are far fewer ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... companions rode together and pooled their gains. Then the thrift of some and the improvidence of others set in motion the immutable laws of distribution. Soon a class of rich and powerful individual owners was created, who employed great outfits of ten to fifty men each, splendidly mounted and armed. These outfits were in continually moving camps, and travelled ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... workshops a standard of opinion of their own, and found only too effectual means of compelling their weaker comrades to conform to it. And hence a great deal of wild dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... There was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and sneers about the misapplication of bounty. Her taste did not lie in the "Charity Ball" direction; her funds were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she heard ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... frequently worn in winter. There is another circumstance, which no doubt has an unfavorable influence on health, especially among the poorer class: it is the want, during the summer season particularly, of substantial food. This is sometimes owing to indolence or improvidence; but perhaps oftener, to the circumstances in which a few families are placed, at a distance from ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... bad effects from the segregation and the privacy of the home, even of the good kind. For there are very many bad homes; those in which drunkenness, immorality, quarreling, selfishness, improvidence, brutality, and crime are taught by example. After all, we like to speak too much in generalities—the Home, Woman, Man, Labor, Capital, Mankind—forgetting there is no such thing as "the Home." There are homes of all kinds with every conceivable ideal of life and training ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... woodcut last named was in several respects a curious test of modern feeling. For the sake of the general reader, it may be well to state the occasion and character of it. It will be remembered by all that early in the winter of 1854-5, so fatal by its inclemency, and by our own improvidence, to our army in the Crimea, the late Emperor of Russia said, or was reported to have said, that "his best commanders, General January and General February, were not yet come." The word, if ever spoken, was at once base, cruel, and blasphemous; base, in precisely reversing the temper of all ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of the Mississippi bubble did not change the principles of administration in Louisiana. The settlers, always looking to France to supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were in the habit of butchering for food the livestock sent them for propagation. The remedy came in the shape of a royal edict forbidding any colonist to kill, without permission of the authorities, any cow, sheep, or lamb belonging to himself, on pain of a fine of three hundred ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... "Teter," an odd nickname, the reason of which he did not seem to understand himself. This Teter was one of those good-natured, obliging, reckless, happy-go-lucky individuals who never fail to win the love of boys. His generosity was equalled only by his improvidence, and both were surpassed by ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... from sentimentality to reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated, civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness, improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm. Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... deceitful and extravagant modesty. The business of history is to tell the truth; the truth is that we muddle through with amazing success. This success we affect to regard as an undeserved reward bestowed by Providence on improvidence. But is the law of cause and effect really made void on our behalf? The people of the island, it is true, are slow to make up their minds; their respect for experience and their care for justice make them distrust quick action if it is not instinctive action. They are unimaginative in this ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... Flemish Brussels. Even in the Flemish part, the city has none of that winsome sympathetic air which usually surrounds a quaint mediaeval bourg. Rather it gives one the impression that old traditions are all but dead and that it is mere improvidence and laisser-aller that allows them ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the Revolution and the Union. Meantime slavery was dying out; its abolition was desired; and had free labor then and there superseded it, far different would have been the destiny of the fair State; whose western portion affords such a contrast to that wherein this blight induced improvidence and deterioration, the tokens whereof were noted by every visitor in the spare and desultory culture of the soil, the neglected resources, the dilapidated fences and dwellings, and the absence of that order and comfort which inevitably attaches to legitimate industry and self-reliance. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... special admiration and affection. He not merely supplied all their wants, but he endeavoured to make them self-reliant, and to raise them above the sordid and narrow conditions of the life to which they were either born or reduced by the improvidence or misfortune of their parents. Of course Gordon was often deceived, and his confidence and charity abused; but these cases were, after all, the smaller proportion of the great number that passed through ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... times during that period, he had been the subject of conversation between parties, one or both of which were looking out for a man, of thorough business qualifications, against which capital would be placed; nor the fact, that either his first failure, his improvidence, or something else personal to himself, had caused him to be set aside for some other one not ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... organized charities, for women inspectors, and the gradual growth of popular interest, are bringing about a few improvements, but the mass at all points are as stated. Ignorance and the vices that go with ignorance, want of thoroughness, unpunctuality, thriftlessness, and improvidence, are all in the count against the poorer order of worker, but for the most part they are living honest, self-respecting, infinitely dreary lives. This fact is emphasized in every Labor Report in which the subject of women wage-workers is treated, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... before, But never in his arms. Then pity comes, Knocks at his breast, it may be, and comes in, Makes a wide wound that haply will not heal, But bleeds for poverty, and crime, and pain, Till for the dear kin's sake he grandly dares Or wastes him, with a wise improvidence; But who can stir the weighty world; or who Can drink a sea ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... Wilbur acquiesced readily. "It is a mighty fine morning, and you need to get out," he said. Poor Wilbur at this time felt guiltily culpable that he did not own a motor car in which his Margaret might take the air. He had tried to see his way clear toward buying one, but in spite of a certain improvidence, the whole nature of the man was intrinsically honest. He always ended his conference with himself concerning the motor by saying that he could not possibly keep it running, even if he were to manage the first cost, and pay regularly his other bills. He, however, ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... afraid that wouldn't do," objected Anne, whose practical experience with poverty had made her wise. "I imagine with her it is a question of being economical. It wouldn't be fair to tempt her to extravagance, for a single would be the height of improvidence, particularly if she had to go ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... But by those same laws of Nature and Providence, if the labour of the nation or of the individual be misapplied, and much more if it be insufficient,—if the nation or man be indolent and unwise,—suffering and want result, exactly in proportion to the indolence and improvidence—to the refusal of labour, or to the misapplication of it. Wherever you see want, or misery, or degradation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error. It is not accident, it is not Heaven-commanded ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... as the most atrocious crimes are to any of your lordships. Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding truth, of carefully respecting the property of others, of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as little think of lying or cheating or stealing, or running in debt, as of rushing into an element in which ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... existence whose infancy had lasted six thousand years? And, indeed, I think this the truest, as well as the most cheering, view that we can take of the world's history. Little progress has been made as yet. Base war, lying policy, thoughtless cruelty, senseless improvidence,—all things which, in nations, are analogous to the petulance, cunning, impatience, and carelessness of infancy,—have been, up to this hour, as characteristic of mankind as they were in the earliest periods; so that we must either ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... indolence; but after he is once in the net, the oppression of him, and making the most of his distress, are ours. The nets which we use against the poor are just those worldly embarrassments which either their ignorance or their improvidence are almost certain at some time or other to bring them into: then, just at the time when we ought to hasten to help them, and disentangle them, and teach them how to manage better in future, we ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... in extent to form a good-sized independent State in Western Europe. The very rich families, however, are not numerous. The lavish expenditure in which Russian nobles often indulge indicates too frequently not large fortune, but simply foolish ostentation and reckless improvidence. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... It was my fortune to be the referee on all disputes on the accounts of the first year of such contracts, and I solemnly declare the liberality and consideration of the planters would astonish the hard-fisted business-men of some of our factories. They knew the improvidence of the race, and out of regard for them, instead of paying them in money, they allowed them to obtain goods in their names at the leading stores. Almost invariably these bills exceeded the amount ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... income, but according to the assets of which he is possessed. The effect of such a tax would be that he who has spent everything that he has earned on his own enjoyment would go scot free in the matter of the capital tax, and would be rewarded for his improvidence by being asked to make no sacrifice; while his thrifty brother who, out of a smaller income, has set aside a certain proportion during the last twenty or thirty years, would have to hand over a portion of his current income assessed ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... encourage this taste, we lent pantaloons to the chiefs who visited us, when they wished to enter our houses, never allowing them to do it in a state of nudity. They possess, in an eminent degree, the qualities opposed to indolence, improvidence, and stupidity: the chiefs, above all, are distinguished for their good sense and intelligence. Generally speaking, they have a ready intellect and a tenacious memory. Thus old Comcomly recognised the mate of the Albatross ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... imprudence, rashness, thoughtlessness, heedlessness, indiscretion, recklessness, wastefulness. improvidence, prodigality, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... length and breadth of our great country who make a fair living by traducing better men than themselves; by continually crying out that the black man is incapable of being civilized; that he is born with the elements of barbarity, improvidence and untruthfulness so woven into his very nature that no amount of opportunity, labor, love, or sacrifice can ever lift him out of the condition, the "sphere God designed him to occupy"—as if the great Common Parent ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... freedom and labor on their own account, the great mass of the negroes depend for their living on an advance of supplies (as they need food, clothing, or tools during the year) upon the pledge of their growing crop. This is a generic imitation of the white man's improvidence during the slavery times; then the planters mortgaged their crops and negroes, and where one used the advances to extend his plantation, ten squandered the money. The negro's necessities have developed an offensive race, called merchants by courtesy, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Indian of this country, and he might be rendered highly serviceable in our attempts to civilize the nation. He mentioned that the Mandans are very much in want of meat, and that he himself had not tasted any for several days. To this distress they are often reduced by their own improvidence, or by their unhappy situation. Their principal article of food is buffaloe-meat, their corn, beans, and other grain being reserved for summer, or as a last resource against what they constantly dread, an attack from the Sioux, who drive off the game and confine them to their ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... road from the hollows and ruts that horses and narrow-tired wagons invariably make, and in which the water stands, ultimately wearing the macadam through. We could not see that the slightest attention was paid to the notices. Everybody kept the middle of the road, such is the improvidence of men; the country people grumble at the great expense of good roads, and then take the surest way to ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... those Indians having the status of wards. Recognizing only equitable rights of ownership in the Indians, the commonwealth kept their property under public guardianship to protect them from the consequences of their own improvidence. Indians had the right immediately to have their share of the common lands of the tribe transferred to them or sold for their special benefit. They were granted also the right to have their share in any funds or other property held in trust for the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... indiscriminately to all, without respect of person. There is a common, but erroneous, idea in the world, that simply to give is charity. To live what many esteem a life of charity, that is a life of indiscriminate giving, is often to pay a bounty upon idleness and improvidence, and to furnish the means of vicious indulgence. While remembering the command to give to those who ask, we must not forget the prohibition against casting pearls before swine. To give good things to those we have ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... consideration, he resolved to add secretly to the remains of Evelyn's fortune such a sum as might, being properly secured to herself and children, lessen whatever danger could arise from the possible improvidence of her husband, and guard against the chance of those embarrassments which are among the worst disturbers of domestic peace. He was enabled to effect this generosity unknown to both of them, as if ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... With their usual improvidence, the Australians, when they take a turtle, feast upon it until all has been consumed and the cravings of hunger induce them to look out for another; but the Torres Strait Islanders are accustomed to dry the ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... poverty or negligence of execution. In short, the whole place was the true emblem of an understanding and talents run to waste, and become more dangerous than advantageous to society, by the want of steady principle, and the improvidence ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... also, and benefits no one, cannot be otherwise than wrong; that purely objectless asceticism which has not even self-discipline in view, is not virtue, but folly; that misdirected charity which, engendering improvidence, creates more distress than it relieves, is not virtue, but criminal weakness. But though admitting that there can be no virtue without utility, I do not admit either that virtue must be absent unless utility ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... his return to England, his father died, somewhat impoverished by improvidence. Gray, thinking himself too poor to study the law, sent his mother and a maiden sister to reside at Stoke, near Windsor, and retired to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he resumed his classical and poetical pursuits. To West, who by this time was declining in health, he sent part of "Agrippina," ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... to procure food, by seizing whatsoever might issue from the flames, as snakes, birds, or other animals; for they had taken every fish in the river, and the low state of its waters had enabled them to procure an abundance of muscles from its bed, which they had consumed with their characteristic improvidence. They were, consequently, in a starving condition, and so pitiable were their indications of it, that I was induced to feed such of them as visited the camp, notwithstanding their late misconduct; being likewise anxious to bring about a good understanding, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... even your wine-cellar,—because they eat nothing. But your horses soon eat their heads off their own shoulders if you pass weeks without getting on their backs. Hampstead had endeavoured to mitigate for himself this feeling of improvidence by running up and down to Aylesbury; but the saving in this respect was not sufficient for his conscience, and he was therefore determined to balance the expenditure of the year by a regular performance of his duties at Gorse Hall. But the other matter was still more important to him. He must ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... large numbers of turtledoves feasted undisturbed on the tall stalked mapira ears, and we easily secured plenty of fine fat guinea-fowls—now allowed to feed leisurely in the deserted gardens. The reason assigned for all this listless improvidence was "There are no women to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... consumunt, liguriunt; casualties, taxes, mulcts, chargeable offices, vain expenses, entertainments, loss of stock, enmities, emulations, frequent invitations, losses, suretyship, sickness, death of friends, and that which is the gulf of all, improvidence, ill husbandry, disorder and confusion, by which means they are drenched on a sudden in their estates, and at unawares precipitated insensibly into an inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... bribes to public favour with which Cimon and others had sought to corrupt the populace. Nor was Pericles without the means or the spirit to devote his private fortune to proper objects of generosity. "It was his wealth and his prudence," says Plutarch, when, blaming the improvidence of Anaxagoras, "that enabled him to relieve the distressed." What he spent in charity he might perhaps have spent more profitably in display, had he not conceived that charity was the province of the citizen, magnificence ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... asked to convict. These unfortunate wives and children were an important scenic feature in our defence, and if the prisoner was unmarried Gottlieb had little difficulty in supplying the omission due to such improvidence. Some buxom young woman with a child at the breast and another toddling by her side could generally be induced to come to court for a few hours for as many dollars. They were always seated beside the prisoner, ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... contrary, gratitude and gratulation. For were our best wishes not, nor ever, hindered, sure it is that the still better wishes of destiny in our behalf would be hindered yet worse. Sure it is, I say, that Hindrance, both outward and inward, comes to us not through any improvidence or defect of benignity in Nature, but in answer to our need, and as part of the best bounty which enriches our days. And to make this indubitably clear, let us hasten to meditate that simple and central law which governs this matter and at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... progress, the want of discipline, forts, ships, munitions of war, credit abroad, and frugality at home, was most severely felt; and the principal honor derived from it arose from the exploits of the few frigates left to us by improvidence and parsimony, from the achievements of the Northern troops of Scott, Brown, and Miller, disciplined during the war, and the courage and sagacity of the veteran Jackson and his Western volunteers behind their cotton ramparts at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... would attend such a system. The States, to whose lot it might fall to support the necessary establishments, would be as little able as willing, for a considerable time to come, to bear the burden of competent provisions. The security of all would thus be subjected to the parsimony, improvidence, or inability of a part. If the resources of such part becoming more abundant and extensive, its provisions should be proportionally enlarged, the other States would quickly take the alarm at seeing the whole military force of the Union in the hands of ...
— The Federalist Papers
... buy more land; they are temperate, because intemperance is incompatible with industry and prudence; they are independent, because secure of the necessaries of life, and from having property to fall back upon; and they avoid improvidence in marriage, because the extent and fertility of their fields is always plainly before them, and therefore how many children they can maintain is easily calculated. The worst of them is that they work too hard and deny themselves too much: but, over the greater part of the world, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... fortune seemed to us so enormous that it never could be spent. Like a young rake coming into a very large inheritance, we attacked this noble fauna with characteristic American improvidence, and with a rapidity compared with which the Glacial advance was eternally slow; the East went first, and in fifty years we have brought about an elimination in the West which promises to be even more radical than that effected by the ice. We ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and punishments were attached to human ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the Transvaal to the adjoining British territories would be so close that a certain measure of British control over its internal administration might come to be needful. This control, which was indeed but slight, he surrendered in 1884. But the improvidence of the act does not in the least diminish the duty of the country which made the Convention to abide by its terms, or relieve it from the obligation of making out for any subsequent interference a basis of law and fact which the opinion of the world ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... than to lay it upon the oppressed; and yet, as a rule, the cowardice or folly of the oppressed has generally been one cause of their misfortunes, and cannot be overlooked in a true estimate of the case. That drunkenness, improvidence, love of gambling, and so forth, do in fact lead to pauperism is undeniable; and that they are bad, and so far disgraceful, is a necessary consequence. In such cases, then, pauperism is a proof of bad qualities; and the fact, like all other facts, must be recognised. The stress ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... they forgot that the unproductive employment of large numbers created the demand for their crops, without which no dollar had been theirs to spend. Their outcries rung in the ears of the Commissioner: he blamed the improvidence of the Governor, who had rejected their applications, and threw some ridicule on his architectural ambition. The Commissioner only saw a gaol, but Macquarie believed, that when he erected an edifice he was forming a model; and that in aiming ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... we would speak with diffidence on a point on which it would be rash to pronounce a positive judgment without a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed upon it, that the labouring classes of this island, though they have their grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence, some by the errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of an equally extensive district of the old world. For this very reason, suffering is more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere. We must take into the account ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for a time, and drained the streets of the large towns of Canada of the miserable objects; but, such was the improvidence of most of these settlers and such their broken constitutions, that, on my present visit, I found but one old serjeant left, and he was on the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... women free as men to seek and choose, Banish the senseless inequality, And you make marriage less a vulgar game In which one tries to circumvent the other. Oh! all this morbid ribaldry of men, And all this passive imbecility, And superstitious inactivity, Dissimulation and improvidence, False shame and lazy prejudice of women, Where the great miracle of sex concerns us, And Candor should be innocently wise, And Knowledge should be reverently free,— Is against nature,[9]—helps to hide the way Out of the social horrors ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... under the present system. It is always this minority that is pointed out to us with pride. But even this well-being, which is the exclusive right of a few, is it secure? To-morrow, maybe, negligence, improvidence, or the greed of their employers, will deprive these privileged men of their work, and they will pay for the period of comfort they have enjoyed with months and years of poverty or destitution. How many important industries—the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... saved! Encampment does not in any way distress this migratory tribe. Through the half-opened doors, their poverty is betrayed by the four bare walls of an unfurnished chamber, or the litter of an overcrowded room. It is bohemianism in the domestic circle, a life full of improvidence and surprises. ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... to himself it is not easy to see). As for the action and interaction that goes on in the non-ego, he refers it to fate, fortune, chance, luck, necessity, immutable law, providence (meaning generally improvidence) or to whatever kindred term he has most fancy for. In other words, he is so much impressed with the connection between luck and cunning, and so anxious to avoid contradiction in terms, that he tries to abolish cunning, and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... products to ripen early, and go out of season last. Such conditions, of course, would furnish motives for skill and industry, and demand of the people frugal and temperate habits. The luxuriance of a tropical climate tends to improvidence and indolence. Where nature pours her fullness into the lap of ease, forethought and providence are little needed. There is none of that struggle for existence which awakens sagacity, and calls into exercise ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence to a degree that left ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... not disappointed: conviction, interest, or fear, prevailed on many to take the oath; while doubt, worldly improvidence, or a scrupulous piety, deterred others. A schism took place between the jurors and nonjurors—the people became equally divided, and adhered either to the one or the other, as their habits or prepossessions directed them. Neither party, as it may be imagined, could ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Winning enough when he wants to get round you and wheedle cash out of you. I tell you what, partner: Jack's got all his father's aristocratic notions, all his father's pride and improvidence. Ay, and he'd ruin his dad ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... beggar who contrives to cross our path and present an appearance of distress. There are men, women, and children in our day, who trade upon their sores, and even make sores to trade upon. To give alms indiscriminately, in these circumstances, is both to waste means and propagate improvidence. But (2.) it is not enough to resist importunities which may proceed from feigned distress. Shut your hand resolutely against the whine of trained, unreal pauperism; but, at the same time, diligently ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Pentuer," continued the minister, "and inquire: whence will the heir get his twenty talents to keep the promise which he made this day to the army with such improvidence? Besides, it seems to me, and certainly to thee, a dangerous step for an heir to make presents to the army, especially now, when his holiness has nothing with which to pay Nitager's regiments returning from the Orient. I do not ask what thy opinions are, for I know them, as Thou knowest ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in June. The ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the same age as Goualeuse, her former prison-friend. There was between these girls the same difference that exists between laughter and tears; between joyful carelessness and melancholy reverie; between daring improvidence and serious, incessant anticipation of the future: between a nature exquisitely delicate, elevated, poetic, morbidly sensitive, incurably wounded by remorse, and a disposition gay, lively, happy, unreflective, although good and compassionate; for, far from being selfish, Miss ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... and of some who ought to have known better the effect of taking off from men the responsibility of labor, in both ways, its fruition and its penalty. Once declare in New York that Government would take care of poverty and old age, so as to make it honorable, and it would be a premium upon improvidence. With us, it is expected that every man will work, will earn, will lay up, will deliver his family from public charity. There is, to be sure, an Alms House to catch all who, by misfortune or improvidence, fall through. But such is the public opinion in ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... accident, and luck seem to be the only sense there is in primitive life. Knowledge alone limits their sway, and at least changes the range and form of their dominion. Primitive folkways are marked by improvidence, waste, and carelessness, out of which prudence, foresight, patience, and perseverance are developed slowly, by pain and loss, as experience is accumulated, and knowledge increases also, as better methods seem worth while. The consequences of error and the effects ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner |
