"Inferiority" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... check by Gilbert, and by a wholesome dread of Hereward's strong arm; until, in Gilbert's absence, an incident occurred which placed the young exile on a pinnacle so far above them that only by his death could they hope to rid themselves of their feeling of inferiority. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... changed while she was speaking, perhaps by the enumeration of her points of inferiority. She turned her bright eyes towards Greif with a look of curiosity, as though wondering whether she had hit the mark, as indeed she had, by ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... relation of one man to another is not determined by physical superiority and inferiority, if the relations of classes within a society are not determined in this manner, why should it be assumed that as a sex woman's position is fixed by this means? It seems more reasonable to assume that some other principle than that of club law, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... laborious thought, but sweet in the mildness of humanity, and serene in the peace of conscience! I could not be mistaken. Julius Faber was before me,—the profound pathologist, to whom my own proud self-esteem acknowledged inferiority, without humiliation; the generous benefactor to whom I owed my own smooth entrance into the arduous road of fame and fortune. I had longed for a friend, a guide; what I sought stood suddenly ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unswerving graciousness of these people, and all that it implied, but her sharp mind had long since warned her that as she had neither the position nor the training to emulate it, at least she must not betray a sense of social inferiority by open resentment. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... years past, by an unremitting series of vexatious, oppressive and unconstitutional acts, to retard our growth and prosperity, and if possible, to get rid altogether of a people whose presence so hourly reminds them of their own ignorance and inferiority. Some of these acts I now ...
— Texas • William H. Wharton
... been blamed for not taking advantage of his victory and falling upon the Federals on the morning after the battle; but although such an assault might possibly have been successful he was conscious of his immense inferiority in force, and his troops would have been compelled to have advanced to the attack across ground completely swept by the fire of the magnificently served Northern artillery posted upon their commanding ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... his feeling of respect, and even of reverence, for those who, without ability, were distinguished for high principle and industry. "If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers where they have been honestly, truly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Bradshaw, and to give one more of his various reasons for wishing to take Mr Donne to Abermouth. The wealthy Eccleston manufacturer was uncomfortably impressed with an indefinable sense of inferiority to his visitor. It was not in education, for Mr Bradshaw was a well-educated man; it was not in power, for, if he chose, the present object of Mr Donne's life might be utterly defeated; it did not arise from anything overbearing in manner, for Mr ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... supports of which the principal parts, base, shaft, and capital, have certain constant and closely defined mutual relations. Like a zoological species, each order has a distinctive character and personal physiognomy of its own. An art that is deprived of such a resource is condemned to a real inferiority. It may cover every surface with the luxury of a sumptuous decoration, but, in spite of all its efforts, a secret poverty, a want of genius and invention, will be ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... freedom in a family or a school? We should say that he was applying a good, general principle to a case in which the conditions rendered it inapplicable—the case in which the governed are in an admitted state of mental inferiority to those who govern them, and are unable to decide what is best for their permanent welfare. Children must be subjected to some degree of authority, and guidance; and if properly managed they will cheerfully submit to it, because they know their own inferiority, and believe their elders are ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... naturally, it is rather expected of them that they will attend more church services than the busy people of "the world." The sight of these little houses always oppressed me with a sense of my inferiority in the matter of devoutness. I could not imagine myself living in one of them, until I came across a group of their occupants engaged in discussing some racy gossip with the nuns on one of the doorsteps. Gossip is not my besetting weakness, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage" is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means inclined to admit the general inferiority of contemporary conversation to that of the last generation, I am disposed to think that in the art of repartee our ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... of an ordinary man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest excellence—Saint-Simon was one of them—the value of whose productions have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were. But unfortunately this is not so with Victor Hugo. His faults—his intellectual ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... that element of physical compulsion which would make the Negro work." The Negro wished to be free to leave his job when he pleased, but, as Benjamin C. Truman stated in his report to President Johnson, a "result of the settled belief in the Negro's inferiority, and in the necessity that he should not be left to himself without a guardian, is that in some sections he is discouraged from leaving his old master. I have known of planters who considered it an offence against neighborhood courtesy for another to hire their old hands, and in ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority—when those in all parts of these states who could easier realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... over a bridge, which they did in perfectly good order. Our loss was between sixty and seventy, killed, wounded, and taken. The enemy's is unknown, but it must be equal to ours; for their own honor they must confess this, as they broke twice and run like sheep, till supported by fresh troops. An inferiority in number obliged our force to withdraw about twelve miles upwards, till more militia should be assembled. The enemy burned all the tobacco in the warehouses at Petersburg, and its, neighborhood. They afterwards proceeded to Osborne's, where they did the same, and also ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... much toleration for anything like impertinence, vulgarity, inferiority of parts, or even difference of taste from herself, soon checked every endeavour at intimacy on their side by the coldness of her behaviour towards them; but Elinor, from politeness, submitted to the attentions of both, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... arguing in favour of natural genius, and saying that I thought no cultivation could make the abilities of one man equal to those of another, he, without seeming to perceive that I was apologizing at once for my own indolence and my intellectual inferiority, answered in general terms, "It is difficult to judge what are the natural powers of the mind, they appear so different in different circumstances. You can no more judge of a mind in ignorance than of a plant in darkness. A philosophical ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... extraordinary disregard to grammar and spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint her family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was a martyr, but took care to let everybody know that she was so. If she suffered, as she said and thought she did, severely, are we to wonder that a young creature of such delicate sensibilities should shriek and cry ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of books in their midst attracting little or no attention, their own limited to a Bible or prayer book,—many not these. With their minds in this normal healthy state, unharassed by the sordid assail of care, undepressed by any sense whatever of inferiority, unfrayed by the trituration of the average book, their powers of apprehension—singularly clear—had full scope to appropriate and resolve the world about them, which they did to such purpose as to master every exigence of their lives. Seizing upon the minutest ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... attention, though his black, weazened face worked and his lips trembled. It was the first time since he was a buck private that he had been spoken to in such a manner. For the first time, the yoke of discipline galled him. The bitterness of his inferiority and servitude was as wormwood within him. The harsh injustice of such treatment in this, his black hour, after years of faithful work, aroused in him a demon of resentment that made him long to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... were scarce; many teachers hardly had as much book-learning as lads of thirteen years now have among ourselves. Men who could neither read nor write abounded, and a deficiency so common could hardly imply much disgrace or a marked inferiority; many learned these difficult arts only in mature years. Fighting was a common pastime, and when these rough fellows fought, they fought like savages; Lincoln's father bit off his adversary's nose in a fight, and a cousin lost the same feature in the same way; ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... it. Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a signpost, nor Homer hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub Street bard. Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting up lofty ideals, enriching ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... dollars, and declaring all such marriages absolutely null and void; and the same law was again re-enacted in its revised code of 1844. So that, down to the last-mentioned period, the strongest mark of inferiority and degradation was fastened upon the ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... of love multiplied by the majesty and might of royalty itself, seemed like a death-blow to Raoul. If there be anything which can in any way assuage or mitigate the tortures of jealousy, it is the inferiority of the man who is preferred to yourself; whilst, on the very contrary, if there be one anguish more bitter than another, a misery for which language lacks a word, it is the superiority of the man ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... needed not. Talk for you is good discipline. You converse imperfectly. While you speak, there can be no oblivion of inferiority—no encouragement to delusion: pain, privation, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... community. Indeed, the effect of women's emancipation might well prove to be the opposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition between men and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority that, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should find themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have to begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the point of inferiority, however, the position had its charm. From the eerie of the top landing window one could get a bird's- eye view of the Napier Terrace gardens with their miniature grass plots, their smutty flower-beds, and the dividing walls with their clothing of blackened ivy. ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to Headquarters, Evans pushes forward and gaining Buck Ridge, to the North of the Northern loop of Young's Branch, forms his line-of-battle upon that elevation—which somewhat compensates him for the inferiority of his numbers—nearly at right angles to the Bull Run line; rapidly puts his Artillery in position; the Rebel guns open on Burnside's advance—their hoarse roar soon supplemented by the rattle of Rebel musketry, and the answering roar and rattle of the Union onset; ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... making his brother and his son, not Caesar, but emperors; acting indeed in this respect with great kindness. Nor had any one yet ever created a colleague with powers equal to his own, except the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who made his adopted brother Verus his colleague in the empire without any inferiority of power. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... warships and three fireships under his command. Ayscue had previously sailed up Channel with forty men-of-war and five fireships for a similar purpose. The two fleets met on August 16, and despite his inferiority of force De Ruyter forced Ayscue to withdraw into Plymouth, and was able to bring his convoy ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... be overthrown at once or leaped down from the cars, so that these being no longer under control injured the Persians more than the enemy. For the rest, the Persians do not disguise their military weakness, they concede their inferiority and do not dare to take the field except there are Greeks in their army. They have for their maxim 'never to fight Greeks without Greek auxiliaries ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her, and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not with ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the company of an inferior never let him feel his inferiority. If you invite an inferior as your guest, treat him with all the politeness and consideration you ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... and sister were children, they were constantly at the vicarage with their uncle and aunt, and Miss Gwynne was their playmate there, and had not known their inferiority. Now that he really was a man of education and a gentleman, in spite of all her kindness to his mother, she knew it full well. Why did he never consider what any one else in his own neighbourhood thought of him or his family? It was ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... with my infirmity, as she lifted me coarsely and carelessly over the flinty steps, which my brothers traversed with shout and bound. I remember the suppressed bitterness of the mo-ment, and, conscious of my own inferiority, the feeling of envy with which I regarded the easy movements and elastic steps of my more happily formed brethren. Alas! these goodly barks have all perished on life's wide ocean, and only that which seemed so little seaworthy, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... feel, and least of any a Frenchman, who possesses an equal degree of national predilection as the Englishman, and the moment that sentiment is attacked, or that our Gallic neighbours conceive that an attempt is made to insinuate that they are regarded in the light of inferiority, as compared with any other nation, hatred to the individual who seeks to humiliate them or their country is instantly engendered, and in all their transactions and communications with their soi-disant superior, they will either take ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... body and this constitution rivalling that body and that constitution, I am doomed to an inferiority more slavish and scarcely less painful than that I have left behind. For identity of career, identity of powers. Nature does nothing inductively; does not fit the parts of her scheme to each other experimentally; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lyrics in the world; but our dramas, with the exception of Shakespeare's, are not remarkable. And in that modern extension of the drama, the novel, we are distinctly inferior to the French and Russians. This inferiority must be ascribed to the new-fangled prudery of language and thought which emasculates all our later fiction; but as that prudery is not found in our lyric verse it is evident that here alone the inspiration is full and rich enough to overflow the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the tribunes of the people, instead of being chosen by the comitia of the centuries, in which, as we have seen, the aristocrats had the advantage, should be chosen by the comitia of the tribes, in which there was no such inferiority of the commons. Though violently opposed by the patricians, this law was passed, in the year 471 B.C. Other measures were, however, still necessary to give the plebeians a ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... such efforts to encourage industrial education would pay our Government is best seen in the example of England. The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its complete inferiority to several continental countries in art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to study the problem, and out of this study arose the Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar institutions throughout the country, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... troubled him a little because it gave him a sense of inferiority to a rival. He believed, against his will, that Maurice Levy could have successfully eaten chocolate-creams, licorice sticks, lemon-drops, jaw-breakers, peanuts, waffles, lobster croquettes, sardines, cinnamon-drops, watermelon, pickles, popcorn, ice-cream and sausage with raspberry lemonade ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... these reasons? To us it does not seem easy to exhibit them. It is easy to declaim about the inferiority of the race, the impossibility of their ever living on an equality with the white race, their lack of ability to support themselves, and the like, but in the end it is very difficult to perceive the ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... which it stands. Nedd or Neth is the same word as Nith, the name of a river in Scotland, and is in some degree connected with Nidda, the name of one in Germany. Nedd in Welsh signifies a dingle, and the word in its various forms has always something to do with lowness or inferiority of position. Amongst its forms are Nether and Nieder. The term is well applied to the Glamorganshire river, which runs ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... siege of Paris, and a million other things; the whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or with Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a little forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... confine his threatenings to the grazing-periods. He became aggressive on the march. Though less free to give battle here, which was possibly his reason, he would frequently jockey close, and either flash his head around with teeth snapping, or else, as if to make Pat feel inferiority, would plunge forward to a point immediately in front, and in this position fling back choking dust or gravel. At such times the round-faced man, the white's master, would drag him away mightily, or, if he was not quick ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... the mind behind that frown, and could sense a feeling of fear, suspicion and unrest. He caught a fragment of thought—"another one after my job?"—and in a flash of inspiration guessed what was wrong. This superintendent must have a terrible inferiority complex, which that disfiguring scar certainly didn't help. He was undoubtedly competent, or he would not be here, but felt every new man was ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... own inferiority in the qualities by which he acquired his personal ascendancy, I had now to try what it might be possible for me to accomplish without him: and the Review was the instrument on which I built my chief hopes of establishing a useful influence over the liberal and democratic section of the ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... the white man did. The hurtful influences of the institution were not by any means confined to the Negro. This was fully illustrated by the life upon our own plantation. The whole machinery of slavery was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority. Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape. The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self-help out of the white people. My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... that could the poet but have drank one bottle at Samaden—where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it—he would have been less chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Such meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth, then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and manly tone of the story of Copperfield that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of Micawber over Skimpole is one of many indications of the inferiority of Bleak House to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... difficulties I have to overcome in making a few tolerable verses. A happy combination by nature, an irrepressible and fruitful intellect, made you a great poet without any effort of your own. I feel and acknowledge the inferiority of my talent. I swim about in the ocean of poetry with my life-preserver under my arm. I do not write as well as I think. My ideas are stronger than my expressions; and in this embarrassment, I am often content if my verses are as little indifferent as ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... enthusiastic fervor and prophetic instincts of George Mason. They reasoned, that slavery was inconsistent with Christianity, was in conflict with the rights of man; that it was a slow poison, daily contaminating the minds and morals of their people; that, by reducing a part of their own species to abject inferiority, they lost the idea of the dignity of man, which the hand of Nature had implanted within them for great and useful purposes; that, by the habit from infancy of trampling on the rights of human nature, every liberal sentiment was extinguished or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the inferiority of women in human beauty is shown by those composite statues prepared by Mr. Sargent for the World's Fair of '93. These were made from gymnasium measurements of thousands of young collegians of both sexes all over America. The statue of the girl has a pretty face, small ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... she was not a common woman, then all this is easily understood. She was abominable but she was not common. She had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from constant self-repression. A common woman finding herself placed in a commanding position might have formed the design to become the second Mrs. de Barral. Which would have been impracticable. De Barral would ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... of both the Houses have been very prolific and scientific about the inferiority of race. Pretty specimens of superiority are they, with their sham, superficial, at hap-hazard gathered, unvaluable small information, with their inveterate prejudices, with their opaque, heavy, unlofty minds! Give to any Africo-American equal chances ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Chinese waters—a prince who in addition to being the kaiser's only brother, is brother-in-law to the Russian czar, and a grandson of the Queen of England,—would have the effect of giving to the cause of Germany in the Orient an importance and a prestige which would atone for the inferiority of its naval strength in that part of the globe. Then, too, the emperor is generally believed to have foreseen the conflict between Spain and the United States, and to have known beforehand of the intention of the latter to make a dash upon ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... said, recognising even in his plight the man's inferiority, "is there anything about this hotel that ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... on shore; whilst at sea, with the exception of the capture of the Chesapeake and one or two other affairs towards its conclusion, we have been equally unsuccessful. From what cause does this proceed? Not from any inferiority in courage or discipline, because in these particulars British soldiers and sailors will yield to none in the world. There must, then, be some other cause for these misfortunes, and the cause is surely one which has continually baffled all ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... too high a value upon it. He could bear no restraint. If Lawrence had attempted to impart instruction to him, he would probably have resisted it with all his might; he was ill at ease under even the semblance of pupilage; he declined to recognise his own inferiority; he was angry with the position he occupied in the studio of Sir Thomas. It would seem to have been difficult to quarrel with one who was always so courtier-like in manner, so gentle and suave and forbearing as was Lawrence. But it is possible these ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... seem to be asking anything new or troublesome, I beg you to remember, that it is the primary idea of this College to vindicate women's right to an education in all points equal to that of men; the difference between them being determined not by any fancied inferiority of mind, but simply by the distinct offices and character of the sexes. And surely when you recollect the long drudgery at Greek and Latin verses which is required of every highly-educated man, and the high importance which has attached to them for centuries in the opinion of Englishmen, you cannot ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... decidedly bore sway than in a period of greater cultivation; and the strong and weak in reference to intellect; those who were bold, audacious and enterprising in acquiring an ascendancy over their fellow-men, and those who truckled, submitted, and were acted upon, from an innate consciousness of inferiority, and a superstitious looking up to such as were of greater natural or acquired endowments than themselves. The strong in intellect were eager to avail themselves of their superiority, by means that escaped the penetration of the multitude, and had recourse to ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... horizon of persons on different cultural levels varies, but no one, for that reason (because of intellectual inferiority), loses the right to recognition as a person, provided that he maintains, over against his environment, his integrity as an individual and remains a self-determining person. It is the loss of this self-determined individuality alone that renders man completely ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... light-complexioned men; the effect is a tendency toward lighter complexions, especially among the more active elements in the race. Some might claim that this is a tacit admission of colored people among themselves of their own inferiority judged by the color line. I do not think so. What I have termed an inconsistency is, after all, most natural; it is, in fact, a tendency in accordance with what might be called an economic necessity. So far as racial differences go, the United States puts a greater premium on color, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... his treatise on engraving, makes the perfection of the art consist in the close similitude of the graver's work. It was this which at first cramped the artist, and delayed the progress of etching, and gave it not only the appearance, but the reality of inferiority—and often times the name and reputation of inferiority is as prejudicial as the thing itself, and we verily believe that it still has its effect upon the public taste. Artists have not sufficiently taken to etching. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose, that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority of the sex; but as the subject lies in my way, and I cannot pass it over without subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction, I shall stop a moment to deliver, in a few words, my opinion. In the government of the physical world, it is observable ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... for conferring benefits by inflicting indignities. He was obliged to sweep part of the courts in the morning, to carry up the dishes from the kitchen to the fellows' table, and to wait in the hall until that body had dined. His very dress marked the inferiority of the "poor student" to his happier classmates. It was a black gown of coarse stuff without sleeves, and a plain black cloth cap without a tassel. We can conceive nothing more odious and ill-judged than these distinctions, which attached the idea ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... them and to medical science. Much; perhaps too much. If this woman's work had been imagined and created by a man, no doubt he would have been accused of having lost sight of women's repugnance to speak or write of their physical inferiority, or even to dwell upon it in thought. Yet the name Karin Michaelis is no pseudonym; the writer really is of the same sex as her heroine ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... tenderness, and care, are to be the same in both; but it does not follow that the Presbyter has the same sole power and exclusive right of guidance; and for this reason,—that his flock are not sheep, but men; not of a natural, generic, or even constant inferiority of judgment; but Christians, co-heirs of the promises, and therein of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and of the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. How then can they be excluded from a share in Church ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... him, and too much to care whether he was Saxon or Jew or rich or poor, but he must—he must be what in her child's vocabulary she called "good," or if not that he must at least see good and bad with clear eyes: sins one can pardon, but the idea of any essential inferiority of taste was torture to her. And meanwhile Lawrence wide of the mark began to coax her. . "My own," his arm stole inside her coat again, "there's nothing to get so red about! Come, you do like me—confess now—you like me ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... animals,—nothing of the general mode of execution,—nothing of the plan expressed in that mode of execution. Yet, with the exception of the ordinal characters, which, since they imply relative superiority and inferiority, require, of course, a number of specimens for comparison, his one animal would tell him all this as well ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... had of L3000 prize-money from the proceeds, among other booty, of those two well-furnished Apostles aforesaid, as he familiarly terms the St. Matthew and St. Andrew. Another and more generous grievance was the inferiority of the gains of his seamen to those of the soldiers. With other principal officers of the fleet he offended Vere by backing the sailors in their demand for a search of the soldiers' chests. Throughout there had been ill-will between Vere and him. Before they set out ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... of the low view of woman entertained in India, and of the humiliating customs to which she is subjected; but nature asserts itself there as elsewhere, and notwithstanding all the inferiority with which she is charged, she exercises a profound influence on the male portion of the community. This is recognized by the people always saying, Ma, Bap—Mother, Father—not Father and Mother, as we say. It is well known that in the large households of which I ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... adhered to the established church, yet the dissenters formed a numerous body, possessing in many instances great respectability, wealth, and influence. As a body they were impressed with the idea that, by the church being supported as a national institution, they were stamped with a mark of inferiority. Acting upon this impression, they very naturally employed the power with which they were now invested to bring down the established church to the same level on which they themselves stood; to annihilate all the rights, powers, and privileges ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... case will be still stronger when we come to inquire, as we must before we close, into the causes of the facts which have just been presented. There is no reason to believe that the slower increase of the colored race is at all due to any original inferiority in the powers of reproduction, or that any such inferiority exists. Its causes are to be found wholly in the different circumstances, characters, and habits of the two peoples. The negro is, to a great extent, a barbarian in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... school—taught for nothing—teaching others what she learnt, for nothing—boarded for nothing—lodged for nothing—and set down and rated as something immeasurably less than nothing, by all the dwellers in the house. The servant-maids felt her inferiority, for they were better treated; free to come and go, and regarded in their stations with much more respect. The teachers were infinitely superior, for they had paid to go to school in their time, and were paid now. The pupils cared little for ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Paradise as a fable; entering upon both the probability of the story (Id. b. iii.) and the moral features of the Deity brought out in the narrative. He seems also to have passed from the idea of creation to that of providence, and to have dwelt on the inferiority of the Hebrew scheme as a theory of providence, in having an absence of inferior deities beneath the supreme one; and resists the idea of the obligation of all men to embrace one creed, inasmuch as they do not ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... which she could not break down or pass. She was the daughter of the richest man in Rexton and inclined to give herself airs on that account, but Alan's gentle indifference always brought home to her an unwelcome feeling of inferiority. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... she exclaimed, "your public school and University education! They make us feel our inferiority, and it isn't fair." ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... fifty per cent. less valuable. Hence the Cape de Verd salt is constantly imported, and is mixed with that from these salinas. The purity of the Patagonian salt, or absence from it of those other saline bodies found in all sea-water, is the only assignable cause for this inferiority: a conclusion which no one, I think, would have suspected, but which is supported by the fact lately ascertained, [3] that those salts answer best for preserving cheese which contain most ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and which a casual observer would unhesitatingly pronounce a short skirt, the material being so ample. Hungary is still practically a land of serfs and nobles, and nearly every peasant encountered along the road touches his cap respectfully, in instinctive acknowledgment, as it were, of his inferiority. Long rows of women are seen hoeing in the fields with watchful overseers standing over them - a scene not unsuggestive of plantation life in the Southern States in the days of slavery. If these gangs ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... understood the workings of its springs they seemed to me so miserably regulated by a feeble generation that the hopes of my mentors, unknown to themselves, were doomed to disappointment. Instead of realizing my own inferiority and endeavouring to efface myself in the crowd, I imagined that I could give proof of my superiority whenever I wished; and I fed on fancies which I blush to recall. If I did not show myself egregiously ridiculous, it was thanks to the very excess of this vanity which feared ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... is often so much better than learning,—by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the arts or sciences,—his company is pleasing to all who know him. I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the wit to find ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he who governs not by a written and a public law, must either administer that government in person, or by others: if in person, he will sink under a labour which no man is able to sustain; and if by others, the inferiority of their rank must subject them to temptations which it cannot be hoped they will always resist, and to prejudices which it will perhaps be impossible for them to surmount. But to administer government by a law which ascertains the offence, and directs ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... abject misery of their lives to take the least chance of adding myself to their sorrowful number. If I were married to you I could endure to be beaten by you and perhaps love you still, but the moment I was compelled to confess your inferiority to some other woman's husband I should hate you, and in the end drag both of us ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... thoroughly aware. People went to fill his world, but only as they affected him. Archelaus was a terrific being whom he held in awe for his feats of strength, but about whom he was beginning to be conscious of a certain inferiority. Tom he dreaded for his powers of sarcasm, and here he felt no sense of superiority as he did over Archelaus; Tom could make him feel even smaller than the Parson could, and with no kindly intention ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which I am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt." The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense of largeness and dreariness ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... thousands—and even millions—of women are taught music, and not one has been anything but a fourth-rate composer, it shows a natural incapacity for the highest branch of the art. In poetry and painting, where the cultivation is far rarer, greater excellence has been attained by many women. Their inferiority is certainly not so marked ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... completed it, the wall was not the work of his reign alone. Similarly the triumphs of his arms and arts were due in large measure to his predecessors, who for centuries had aspired to universal sway. Conscious of inferiority in culture, they welcomed the aid and rewarded the services of men of talent from every quarter. Some came as penniless adventurers from rival or hostile states and were ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... read me one or two letters of Moore to him, in which Moore speaks with great kindness of me; and of course I cannot but feel flattered by the approbation of a man, my inferiority to whom I am proud to acknowledge. Amongst other things, however, Moore, after giving Lord B, much good advice about public opinion, &c. seems to deprecate my influence on his mind on the subject of religion, and to attribute ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... selfish nature was, indeed, hardly capable of such a sentiment; especially toward one so refined, so guileless in her childlike innocence and purity that to be with her gave him an uncomfortable sense of his own moral inferiority. ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... the unity of the authorship of the Homeric poems. The grave and cautious Thucydides quoted without hesitation the Hymn to Apollo,(20) the authenticity of which has been already disclaimed by modern critics. Longinus, in an oft quoted passage, merely expressed an opinion touching the comparative inferiority of the Odyssey to the Iliad,(21) and, among a mass of ancient authors, whose very names(22) it would be tedious to detail, no suspicion of the personal non-existence of Homer ever arose. So far, the voice of antiquity seems to be in ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... formal equality, he has no real opportunity to grow and develop in the true characteristics of manhood; when we put him off in an inferior diocesan Convocation, he feels that he is not treated as a man; he is forced steadily to realize his inferiority to the white man, that inferiority declared and impressed upon him by the Church of God. This, it seems to me, is the chief reason why we are not now growing as we ought to among the leading influential negroes ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... The pyramids of this period were of moderate size, and those princes who abandoned the custom of building them were content like Autuabri I. Horu with a modest tomb, close to the gigantic pyramids of their ancestors. In style the statues of this epoch show a certain inferiority when compared with the beautiful work of the XIIth dynasty: the proportions of the human figure are not so good, the modelling of the limbs is not so vigorous, the rendering of the features lacks individuality; the sculptors exhibit ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and the loftiest truths of less importance than the price of stocks or cotton, or the elevation of baseness to office, merely lives on the level of commonplace, and fitly prides himself upon that inferiority of the soul's senses, which is the inferiority and imperfect ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... mutiny, knowing our inferiority of numbers, and not knowing whether he might count on all the old crew, Captain Len Guy re-entered the cavern with West in order to procure arms. Hearne and his ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... one of the chief causes of the inferiority and defects of Modern Architecture is, that our designers are so anxious to display their taste in ornamentation. They first design the exterior, and then fit into it the interior of their building. The purpose ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... pounds, while Cuvier's brain weighed over four pounds, giving him the advantage of more than eight ounces over our household oracle! Accidental difference in brain weight proves nothing; for you will not admit your mental inferiority to any man, simply because his head requires a larger hat ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... what they were. For anything that, as yet, appears to the contrary, the earliest known Marsupials may have been as highly organised as their living congeners; the Permian lizards show no signs of inferiority to those of the present day; the Labyrinthodonts cannot be placed below the living Salamander and Triton; the Devonian Ganoids are closely related to ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... my mother. When the day of interment arrived, four of my gentlemen were appointed bearers, one of whom was named La Boessiere. This man had entertained a secret passion for her, which he never durst declare on account of the inferiority of his family and station. He was now destined to bear the remains of her, dead, for whom he had long been dying, and was now as near dying for her loss as he had before been for her love. The melancholy procession was marching slowly, along, when it was met by the Marquis de Varenbon, who had ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... glance about and exclaim before he took the easiest chair by the hearth and accepted pipe and tobacco. Martin was ill at ease and looked helplessly now and again to his son for leadings with this stranger who laughed so constantly and regarded him as if he were a person of inferiority and lack of intelligence who must, nevertheless, be ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... of Independence, the most learned man in his profession, and one of the best men of any profession. Who could have foreseen that this friendless orphan, a Baptist preacher's son, in a State where to be a "dissenter" was social inferiority, should have found in this eminent judge a friend, a mentor, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... still further onward (we use not the word advanced, because it may be misunderstood) state, in the state of more convention, of manners, and of luxury. Hence even most refined subjects of the Venetian are, with regard to purity, and moral and intellectual beauty, in a grade of inferiority to the Roman and Florentine. They are of the age of a civil government rather than of a religious influence. The countenances indicate the business of the world; the more varied costume, the more rich covering of the figures, with less of the nude, are marks of merchandise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Pentarchy which had not been humiliated by his blows, or yet more by his assistance. England has suffered from her connection with him,—a connection difficult on many occasions to distinguish from inferiority and subserviency; and in war the old superiority of the French armies to those of Russia and Austria has been asserted in the Crimea and in Italy. Prussia alone has not stooped before the avenger of the man whom she had so vindictive a part in overthrowing, and whom her military chief purposed having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... because of the communion of speech and thought and reminiscences between them; she suffered because of the conversations in which she could take no part, because of what she heard in their voices, but could not understand. The consciousness of her inferiority kindled in her heart the fires of wrath and hatred that burn fiercely in the tropics. She had recourse to her children for her revenge; she urged them on, excited them, aroused their evil passions against her sister-in-law. She ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... in some astonishment, and dropped the subject. The elder woman, conscious of plainness and inferiority, was humbly anxious to please her new cousin. The girl's delicate and characteristic physique, her clear eyes and decided ways, and a certain look she had in conversation—half absent, half critical—which was inherited from her father,—all of them combined to intimidate ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and left her with a sense of inferiority, which would have been pleasing to her woman's nature if Leonard himself had appeared less conscious of it, and had shown ever so little approval of herself; but, impressed upon her too sharply, it piqued and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... but hiring superseded open buying and selling of men. (The African slave trade was the work of the Elizabethan seamen, and was excused, as slavery in the United States was excused, by the Protestant Churches on the ground of the racial inferiority ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... having any relation to the Esquimaux in other parts, and derived great entertainment from a description of any difference in their clothes, utensils, or weapons. Of these the sail in an Esquimaux boat seemed particularly to attract her notice; but, in general, she had no inclination to admit the inferiority of her, own tribe to any other. She was always extremely inquisitive about her own sex, whether Innuees[*] or Kabloonas, listening with eager attention to any account of their dress or occupations, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... authority. It seeks to rise, by hook or crook, for the sole reason of showing off and displaying self. Still growing apace, pride becomes indignant, irritated, angry if this due appreciation is not shown to its excellence; it despises others either for antipathy or inferiority. It believes its own judgment infallible and, if in the wrong, will never acknowledge a mistake or yield. Finally the proud man becomes so full of self that obedience is beneath him, and he no longer respects authority of man or of God. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... in the Scottish Language" (Inverness, 1804), 2 vols. 12mo. Among some rubbish, and much tawdry versification, there is occasional power, which, however, is insufficient to compensate for the general inferiority. There are only a few songs, but these are superior to the poems; and those following are not unworthy of a place among the modern ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... itself should occupy. You cannot derogate from the value of reason without using reason. You cannot put reason into an inferior category, when compared with will or instinct or emotion, without using reason itself to prove such an inferiority. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... fellows were seen clinging to the keel for twenty minutes, but no assistance could be rendered. Now, both of these were considered good lifeboats, but they were not self-righting. Numerous cases might be cited to prove the inferiority of the non-self-righting boats, but one more will suffice. In February 1858 the Southwold boat—a large sailing boat, esteemed one of the finest in the kingdom, but not self-righting—went out for exercise, and was running before a heavy surf with all sail ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... level of character and of capacity must be most marked among the professional politicians of the Republican party. This is a matter of scientific necessity, and not at all of sentiment; and it suffices to account for the unquestionable average inferiority of the Government members of the Senate and the Chamber to the Opposition members in point both of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... work of the road, took the common conveyance by railroad to Liege. It has been a good deal the custom of our late tourists to applaud the superior excellence of the continental railroads. Our noble traveller gives all this praise the strongest contradiction. He found their inferiority quite remarkable. The materials, all of an inadequate nature, commencing with their uncouth engine, and ending with their ill-contrived double seats and carriages for passengers. The attempts made at order and regularity in the arrangements altogether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... outre in the saddle, especially upon a prancing Californian steed. Does it make the young Welshman feel ashamed of himself? Not a bit. He is not the stuff to be humiliated on the score of an inappropriate costume. Nor yet by his inferiority in horsemanship, of which he is himself well aware. He but laughs as his steed prances about—the louder when it ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid |
