"Unreliable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over-burdened pocketbook gives entree, and the rules of conventionality have never even been whispered. His love affairs, confined to this class of women, have seldom lasted more than a week or ten days. His editors know him as a brilliant genius, irresponsible, unreliable, but at times inestimably valuable. He cares little for personal appearance beyond a certain degree of neatness. He is quick on the trigger, and in a time of over-heated argument can go some distance with his fists; in fact, his whole career is best ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... learnt something of the management of the estate, but gross material preoccupations—the prospect of a passable luncheon at San Giovanni after the "Hotel Vittoria" fare—tempted me to press forwards. A boorish and unreliable-looking individual volunteered three pieces of information—that the house was built thirty years ago, that a large nursery for plants lies about ten kilometres distant, and that this particular domain covers "two or four thousand ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... is to feel safe. And we see to it that they do not. Death waits for them at the street corner, on their travels, at their own doorsteps. They never know at what moment the bomb may not be thrown, or the pistol fired. It is sad that explosives are so unreliable. There are many difficulties. You would not believe the obstacles that we find placed in our path at every turning. And for those who are suspected there is Siberia, and the mines. But it is worth it. It is worth anything to feel that one is working and risking all for one's ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... finished the Arabic, i.e. somewhere about 1724 or 1725, he cut his own name in Roman type and placed it at the foot of the specimen. This attracted the notice of Samuel Palmer, the author of a very unreliable History of Printing, and with Palmer, Caslon worked for some time, but at length transferred his services to William Bowyer, for whom he cut ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... Savoys neither head as readily (the "Improved American Savoy" being an exception) nor do the heads grow as large as the Drumhead varieties; indeed, most of the kinds in cultivation are so unreliable in these respects as to be utterly worthless for market purposes, and nearly so ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... ever had a chief by this name. The fact is, that Governments of to-day frequently publish unreliable native records, for they are mainly based on information obtained from self-styled experts, who, in South Africa, should always ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... and the baleen whales with curiosity, I tried to get as much information about them as I could, from the whalers, but, with the exception of the officers of whaling ships, there was much that was unreliable in Jack's notions about the sperm. On one occasion I was just too late to see one killed. The boats, under full sail, were towing the carcase towards the ship. I would have given a good deal to have seen the encounter. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... when the national life is threatened. I am not a party man. In my day, I have voted about evenly on both sides, for when I do vote, it is after consideration of the actual issues involved at the time. Both sides therefore rightly consider me unreliable, but, perhaps, both will listen when I point out that the independent vote is increasing, and that it is the only vote worth cultivating. The true Grit or Tory will vote with his party, right or wrong. No time, therefore, need be given to ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Cardinal Wolsey set out for Paris as the representative of England. While Wolsey was absent in France arranging the terms of the alliance, Anne Boleyn took occasion to warn Henry that his great minister was unreliable, that in his heart he was opposed to the separation, and that without his knowledge or consent negotiations should be opened directly with the Roman court. An agent was dispatched to Rome and succeeded in securing an interview with Clement ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... not only sensitive, but it's unreliable. You might actually drop a jar of the stuff and do nothing but shatter the jar. Another jar, apparently exactly similar, might go off because it got jiggled by a seismic wave from a passing truck half a mile away. But the latter was a great deal ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... force of Cossacks proved unreliable and officer's patrols of Americans served better but owing to lack of maps or guides were able to gain but little information of the forest trails of the area. British intelligence officers depending ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... olvidaba de declarar." Antonio de Espejo, El Viaje que hizo ... in Hackluyt's Voyages, Navigations, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1600 A.D., pp. 457-464. A somewhat abbreviated and frequently unreliable copy of Espejo's letter, dated "Sant Salvador de la Nueva-Espana, 23 April, 1584," mentions a district two days east from Bernalillo, inhabited by pueblo Indians: "Los quales tienen ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... the Indians, and entertained them at public feasts. He knew well that their fur trade was of great importance, and, moreover, he wanted them as allies in the event of an attack by the Iroquois, which might be expected at any time, as they were unreliable and always anxious for war. A league with the Hurons, Algonquins and Montagnais, with one hundred French, would, in the opinion of Champlain, be sufficient to protect the colony, and he wrote to that effect to the cardinal. This was probably ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... occasion no surprise to learn that several of the discoveries of former years, relied on in this connection, have since been shown to be unreliable. They have not been able to stand a careful examination at the hands of later scholars. They were made when European savants were first communicating to the world the results of the explorations of the river gravels ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... mission house is sacked, the husband escapes by a miracle and the poor young lady is torn away to be the prey of a vile slave-trader. Lastly, according to the quite unreliable evidence of some savage already in the shadow of death, she is seen in the charge of other unknown savages. On the strength of this the husband, playing the part of a mad botanist, hunts for her for a score of years, enduring incredible ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... nearly everyone said there was probably something in it, and Didlum could think of no reply. Mr Bosher upon being appealed to for his opinion, explained that science was alright in its way, but unreliable: the things scientists said yesterday they contradicted today, and what they said today they would probably repudiate tomorrow. It was necessary to be very cautious before accepting any ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... by. My memory has become vague and unreliable. Sometimes I think of the colonel, but without feeling again the terrors of those early days. All the doctors to whom I have described his afflictions have been unanimous as regards the inevitable end in store for the invalid, and ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... outrage was longer continued. Could such a public fraud be carried on under any other than a Spanish government? It is not pleasant to record the fact, but it is nevertheless true that the Spaniards in Cuba are artful, untruthful, unreliable even in small things, with no apparent sense of honor, and seeking just now mainly how they can best avoid their honest obligations. As evil communications are contagious, the Cubans have become more or less impregnated with this spirit of commercial dishonesty. It must be admitted that of true, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... her head she carried a bundle tied up in a sheet. She had, of course, come out of Virgin alley, where many laundresses lived, and had just passed out of the shadow when I saw her. We exchanged salutations, and I went home to lie and brood over the unreliable ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... the 4th of December the matter came before the Cabinet. No formal resolution was adopted, but regret was expressed at Palmerston's want of caution in not ascertaining in advance the tenor of the addresses, and in admitting unreliable reporters.] ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... for the present subject is the development of psychological studies of testimony or report. Because of the natural expectation that the pathological liar might prove to be an unreliable witness our studies on this point will be offered in detail. For years we have been giving a picture memory test on the order of one used extensively abroad. This "Aussage'' Test is the one described as Test VI in our monograph on Practical Mental ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... he said. "The wood is unreliable. It might break. I will cut you a better one," and he swung the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the menagerie, and he spoke of them affectionately. "They bring to my mind the power and beauty of God," he said. He came to meals with the community, at least to dinner, until five or six years before his death, when his appetite became so unreliable that he took what food he could, and when he could, in his room. He also attended the community recreations after meals until a few years before the end; but it was often noticed that the process of humiliation he was undergoing caused him ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... matter from the ten floors beneath it; but the situation might well stand a little lubrication if good feeling were to endure. Therefore Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. had the satisfaction of reading that William S. Gowdy was altogether too impulsive, erratic and unreliable—happily Hill did not employ the word "untrustworthy"—for holding a quasi-public position of some importance. Age was impairing his judgment and setting a ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... which, when they are submerged, is their sole weapon of attack, they have an uncertain means of striking their armed enemy. The eccentricities of the automobile torpedo are well known; but, even eliminating the fact that this missile is unreliable, the important question of accuracy in the estimate of range and speed which the submersible commander has to make before firing the torpedo must be considered. There is usually a large percentage of error in ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... compelled, then, to fall back upon those same unreliable, irresponsible rhymesters, and to insist with them that a maid waiting in the springtide for the man she loves is necessarily happy and very rarely puzzles her head over the scientific ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... is employed with a very important and illuminating addition, in which we read, 'His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.' That is the secret of a fixed heart—continuous faith rooted and grounded in Him. This fluttering, changeful, unreliable, emotional nature of mine will be made calm and steadfast by faith, and duties done in the faith of God will bind me to Him; and sorrows borne and joys accepted in the faith of God will be links in the chain ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... completely relieve the dyspnea. By its therapeutic effect of rest, it favors the rapid subsidence of the inflammation in the larynx and is the treatment to be preferred. Intubation is treacherous and unreliable except in diphtheritic cases; but in the diphtheritic cases it is ideal, if constant skilled ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... unconsciously into an apologetic tone when they attempt to justify the use of newspapers as historical sources? I suppose it is because of the attitude of cultivated society to the newspaper of to-day. Society calls the ordinary newspaper sensational and unreliable; and, if neither, its accounts are so diffuse and badly proportioned as to weary the seeker after the facts of any given transaction. Despite the disfavor into which the American newspaper has fallen in certain circles, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... to secure white labor, unable to trust Japanese labor, unable to endure Japanese neighbors or to enter into Japanese social life weary of paying taxes to support schools for the education of Japanese children, weary of daily contact with irritable, unreliable and unassimilable aliens, sold or leased their farms in order to escape into a white neighborhood. I presume, Mr. Parker, that nobody can realize the impossibility of withstanding this yellow flood except those ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... of investigation. The whole situation is unfavourable; low lights and high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts a desired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinations and forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliable and introduce errors of observation. Nowhere can we be less sure of our facts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of them still remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. At best we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... shop and goes home to bed at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of hours longer. But the lights were gone for good that night. Liddy had gone to sleep, as I knew she would. She was a very unreliable person: always awake and ready to talk when she wasn't wanted and dozing off to sleep when she was. I called her once or twice, the only result being an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe—then I got up and lighted ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... returned the Owl. 'But the sun is rather unreliable, after all. He has the Ecliptic to go round, and the whole of the Solar System to attend to, and one must make allowances for him. But, for purposes of strict chronology, watches are better, especially these watches! They wind themselves up punctually ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... this—that prayers are answered—and these millions have prayed to different gods. Were they all wrong or all right? Would a tentative prayer be listened to? Admitting that the Bibles, and Korans, and Vedas, are misleading and unreliable, may there not be an unseen, unknown Being, who knows my heart—who is watching me now? If so, this Being gave me my reason, which doubts Him, and on Him is the responsibility. And would this being, if he exists, overlook a defect for which I am not to blame, and ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... him? What did she think of him? Nothing perhaps. She had belonged to the "old guard." Many men had passed through her hands. He felt at that moment acute hostility to women. They were treacherous, unreliable, even the best of them. They had not the continuity which belonged to men. Even elderly women—he was thinking of women of the world—even they were not to be trusted. Life was warfare even when war was over. One had to fight always against the instability ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Jersey. Mr. Colt then endeavored to induce the Government of the United States to adopt the arm in the military and naval service. Strange as it now seems, however, the officers of the army and navy were not disposed to regard the revolver with favor. They declared that the percussion cap was entirely unreliable, and that no weapon requiring it could be depended on with certainty; that there was great danger that two or more of the charges would explode at the same time; and that the arm was liable to get out of order ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... he said. "This is the second time in succession that Dalla and I have had to bolt away from here, but policemen are like doctors—always on call, and consequently unreliable guests. While you're feasting, think commiseratingly of Dalla and me; we'll probably be having a sandwich and a ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... phenomena, such as, for example, the explanation that "hearing is produced by the hollow bone behind the ear; for all hollow things are sonorous." He was a rationalist, and he taught that the brain is the organ of mind. The sources of our information about his work, however, are unreliable. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... haste, had in his seventeenth year eloped with Martha, daughter of Major-General Richard Holmes, and married her in the Fleet on March 2, 1715. As was only to be expected from a person so volatile he from the beginning neglected his wife; but, as is put quaintly in that unreliable work, Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, which was concocted by Mrs. Eliza Haywood, "after some years of continu'd extravagance, the Duke, either through the natural Inconsistency of his Temper, or the Reflection how much he had been drawn in by his unworthy Companions ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... presidio at Paynaven which has been increased, is injudiciously allowed to make raids among the natives upon any occasion. The trouble comes to a head with the murder of the nephew of one of the chiefs, Dalinen, by another chief Calignao, the latter of whom appears to have been a thoroughly unreliable and malicious man. Dalinen, in order to avenge the murder in accordance with Zambal traditions, takes to the wilds, but with his followers, is pursued by the soldiers of the garrison. As Calignao has not fled, the missionary Domingo Perez, O.P., in order to win him over, indiscreetly ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... and creeds within her shores will bring their tribute, great or small, to the great total of national enterprise, national statesmanship, and national happiness. Men may deride that ideal; they may say that it is a futile and unreliable ideal, but they cannot call it an ignoble one. It is an ideal that we, at any rate, will cling to, and because we cling to it, and because it is there, embedded in our hearts and natures, it is an absolute bar to such a proposal as this ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... 'phoned about getting a costume for you and it's alright. It will suit you beautifully, and I've got my harlequin dress with me. Madame Kelnicort, excellent soul, is going to chaperone you, and she'll take you back any time you like; I'm quite unreliable when I get into fancy dress. I shall probably keep going till some unearthly hour of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... various peace proposals of the Winter of 1916-1917. The negotiations which followed during December and January were obscure at the time and are by no means clear even yet. The fullest account of them is that of Bernstorff, whose personal interest in vindicating himself would make him a somewhat unreliable witness even if there were nothing else against him. And at the time, when the President's motives were unknown to a public which had not his advantage of information as to what was going to happen in Europe, almost every step which he took was misconstrued, and his occasional infelicities ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... "vacation" of Banneker's at the State Capitol. He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties. Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they overlap, took thoughtful heed of him. How could they make ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... emphatically pronounce conscientious, and accurate in the highest degree in their respective days; but these days were long ago, and the present state of knowledge has rendered a considerable proportion of their texts obsolete and unreliable. Dibdin has certainly added to Herbert, but he has not, on the contrary, in all cases faithfully reprinted him; if his book had been as great an advance on his predecessor as Herbert's was on Ames, it would have been a treasure ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... verging on childishness. Pluto was convinced that despite the old man's wonderful memory of details in the past, he was entirely irresponsible as to his accounts of the present, and he did not intend that the McVeigh family or any of their visitors should be the subject of his unreliable gossip. Pride of family was by no means restricted to the whites. Revolutionary as Pluto's sentiments were regarding slavery, his self esteem was enhanced by the fact that since he was a bondman it was, at any rate, to a first-class family—regular quality folks, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... stay here: patrol around, and use your paralyzers on anybody who even twitches a muscle." Ultrasonics were nice, effective, humane police weapons, but they were unreliable. The same dose that would keep one man out for an hour would paralyze another for no more than ten or fifteen minutes. "And be sure none of them ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... so, but one man has turned out unreliable and must be got rid of. Besides that, there are other things. They want you ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... my company, Maurice. Not but what I am sure Louise will come. But you see from this what she is—the most unreliable creature ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... her knee with a fan. "Be thankful you haven't got him on your conscience," she rejoined. "I call Eglington unscrupulous and unreliable. He has but one god—getting on; and he has got on, with a vengeance. Whenever I look at that dear thing he's married, I feel there's no trusting Providence, who seems to make the deserving a footstool for the undeserving. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... member." He has been reading Michelet's "History of France" which "gives him the essence of an old book which he had despaired of ever seeing, but which is the only authority extant, — save Froissart and a few others equally unreliable; it is the chronicle of the 'Continuator of Guillaume de Nangis'." With Olmsted's book of travels as a model, he planned a series of articles for ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... consider that a peaceable time would require it should be dismantled. There is danger never to be able to regain it, and it would be very hard to keep; for in intestine dissensions, your man may be of the party you fear; and where religion is the pretext, even a man's nearest relations become unreliable, with some colour of justice. The public exchequer will not maintain our domestic garrisons; they would exhaust it: we ourselves have not the means to do it without ruin, or, which is more inconvenient and injurious, without ruining the people. The condition of my loss would be scarcely ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the fear that death brings to most people. They arrive in the astral world with the feeling that everything is unknown and uncertain. All preconceived ideas about the life after death have suddenly been found unreliable and they are afraid of, they know not what. They want to cling to anybody who knows something of the new world. When we remember that people are arriving in the astral world by the tens of thousands daily, even under normal conditions, it is evident ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... parallel texts of the Book of Lecan, and Egerton, 1782, have been used where the Leinster text is deficient or doubtful, but the older MS. has in the main been followed, the chief alterations being indicated in the notes. The only English translation hitherto given of this version is the unreliable one in Atlantis, vol. iii. There is a German translation in Thurneysen's Sagen aus dem alten Irland which may be consulted for literal renderings of most of the verse portions, which, however, are sometimes nearer ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... father, Wieland, for having provided him with such an unreliable weapon, Wittich was about to announce himself conquered, when Hildebrand, realizing that he had not acted honorably, gave him back his own blade. Dietrich, to his surprise and dismay, found himself conquered in this second encounter, and was forced to ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure—thinks I, 'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'—or fifty, or whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... latter when automatism is desired. In the early days of the industry it would have been impossible to speak so favourably of automatic carbide-to-water generators, for they were at first constructed with absurdly complicated and unreliable mechanism; but now various carbide-feed gears have been devised which seem to be trustworthy even when carbide not in ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... in those old days; and thus it is to-day. Cyril's guests ranged in years from four to six; they were chiefly older than their host; this was a pity, it impaired his importance; but up to four years a child's sense of propriety, even of common decency, is altogether too unreliable for a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in such dire need of another pair of hands than her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... to me was, 'Now, Gleason, I want you to be kind to my old sergeant; he served all through the war, and I've never forgiven them in the First for going back on him and refusing to re-enlist him; but the captains, one and all, said it was no use; he had sunk lower and lower; was perfectly unreliable; spent nine-tenths of his time in the guard-house and all his money in whiskey; and one after another they ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... "the Press nowadays becomes more unreliable every day. It is apparent, my dear Von Hern, that this account of your death was, to say ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... their inventive faculties, and next morning published three theories, side by side, concerning the murder, so that the Beorminster Chronicle containing these suppositions proved to be as interesting as a police novel, and quite as unreliable. But it amused its readers and sold largely, therefore proprietor and editor were quite satisfied that fiction was as good as fact to tickle the long ears of a ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... somber with misgiving, and love swelled into longing that made him feel sure that Claire was necessary to his life. Without her there could be no living for him. He wondered if she and Lawrence had found love. "If they have," he argued, "there can be but one explanation. Claire is unreliable, vicious, and dangerous." His aching desire to possess her did not lessen, however. It became deeper, in fact, with each succeeding thought of her as a wanton at heart, and he set his teeth over his will, assuring himself that all would ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... is confined almost entirely to events that have occured[sic] within one's lifetime. There are few traditions that have any historical value, and even in these there is an element of the wonderful that makes them unreliable as guides. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... ideas, this is the result of the purely agricultural occupation of the people. Commerce was in the hands of the Jews, and these could not teach us accuracy; the cultivator of the soil is unreliable because the soil is unreliable, he is unpunctual because nature has no punctuality. Working in the soil, they gradually take some of its characteristics, which enters into their moral being, and in the course of time becomes an ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and sober belief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and on arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of reveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliable inferences, destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to face the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... where he spent three years. Returning to Palestine at the beginning of the great rebellion against Rome, he was appointed revolutionary governor of the important province of Galilee. The appointment was unfortunate, for he proved both incompetent and unreliable. In 67 A.D. he and his followers were shut up by Vespasian in the Galilean city, Jotapata. During the siege he vainly tried to desert to the enemy. At the fall of the city he was captured, but his life was spared by ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... there was need of their labor; and during the minutes that elapsed Cuthbert managed to ask numerous questions about Stackpole, for when he learned from Owen that in times past this fellow and the halfbreed Dubois, from whom he had secured the unreliable chart, had been boon companions, a disturbing thought was born in his mind that possibly there might have been more of design than accident in the coming of the timber-cruiser ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... among the vicious and the unreliable. Other evils may flourish among the idle, the indolent, the treacherous, the deceitful and the dishonest, but industry and economy and integrity and faithfulness and honor and even God-fearing ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... Strength and Elasticity of a Fabric. The old-fashioned plan of testing cloth by tearing it by the hand is unreliable, because tearing frequently requires only a certain skilled knack whereby the best material can be pulled in two. In this way an experienced man may tell good from bad cloth, but he cannot determine slight differences in quality, because he has ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... Errors—The Fact that Modern Buddhism, like many other False Systems, Claims Christ as a Believer in its Principles—The Theory that the Life of Christ is Modelled after that of the Buddha—The Superior Authenticity of the Life of Christ—The Unreliable Character of Buddhist Legends—The Intrinsic Improbability that a Religion claiming a Distinct Derivation from Jewish Sources would Borrow from a far-off Heathen System—The Contrast of Christ's Loving Recognition of the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... felt a more troubled heart beat between these cold walls, than my own wretched heart! Ah! I will not curse our poor human reason, our philosophy; are they not, after all, the noblest and best conquests of our nature? But, great Heaven! how little they amount to! What unreliable guides, and what feeble supports! Listen to a sad story: Yesterday, thanks to Madame de Malouet, I remained alone at the chateau the whole day and the whole evening. I was therefore as much at peace as it was possible for me to be. Toward midnight I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... compete with professionals. Then down she dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang—the long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at times. Again—most of the time—it was unreliable. No, she could not hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... can co-operate together and act harmoniously, the supposition that if there were many Gods they would have fallen out, would indicate that in spite of all the virtues that you ascribe to God you think his nature to be quite unreliable, if not vicious. Thus in whichever way one tries to justify the existence of God he finds that it is absolutely a hopeless task. The best way then is to dispense with the supposition ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... treatment, and yet they often become the opprobrium of the practioner by remaining, as they frequently do, an eyesore on the top of the hock; they do not interfere, it is true, with the work of the horse, but fixing upon him the stigma of what, in human estimation, is a most unreliable and objectionable reputation, to wit, that of being an habitual "kicker," and, worse than all, one that kicks ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... played in the upbuilding of the South—left prostrate by the Civil War. One could see their eager, upturned faces glow with pride and self-satisfaction. But suddenly he would shift the tone of his comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent and shiftless and unreliable and vicious were retarding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority and how they were perpetuating the prejudice against the whole race. And as he pictured this seamy side of the situation one could see the glow of pride gradually wilt from ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... of all things. With the habit of questioning ultimate convictions Mr. Chesterton has little patience. Modesty, he tells us, has settled in the wrong place. We believe in ourselves and we doubt the truth that is in us. But we ourselves, the crude reality which we actually are, are altogether unreliable; while the vision is always trustworthy. We are for ever changing the vision to suit the world as we find it, whereas we ought to be changing the world to bring it into conformity with the unchanging vision. The very essence of orthodoxy is a profound and reverent conviction of ideals ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... led the allies to ask themselves whether it was worth while to destroy a country in order to change its rulers. Five years before Lopez came into power the population of Paraguay had been reckoned at something between 800,000 and 1,400,000—so unreliable were census returns in those days. In 1878 it was estimated at about 230,000, of whom women over fifteen years of age outnumbered the men nearly four to one. Loose polygamy was the inevitable consequence, and women became the breadwinners. ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... luxury. There was also a possibility of arranging a drawing-room in our house, and though I had not intended to be extravagant, I finally discovered that, in addition to the trouble of negotiations with unreliable Parisian workmen, I was drawn into expenses I had not counted upon. But I comforted myself with the reflection that, as it could not be helped now, Minna would at least be pleased when she entered the house she was henceforth to manage. I also thought it necessary to get a maid for ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... sing; so is Mr. Lauder. Mr. Lauder is ready to fulfill his engagement—if you are not I don't see how I can force you to do so. But you will do yourself no good if you leave us in the lurch—I'm afraid people who are arranging concerts will feel that you are a little unreliable." ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... and there we went. Most of the day, however, we mixed with the mob which crowded round, while the voters—you may be sure, not all of them sober—were brought up to vote. The excitement was immense; there was the hourly publication of the state of the poll—more or less unreliable, but, nevertheless, exciting; and what a tumult there was as one or other of the rival candidates drove up to his temporary quarters in a carriage and pair, or carriage and four, made a short speech, which was cheered by his friends and howled at derisively by his foes, while the horses ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... friends were continually suggesting suitable matches for me and painting the marriage relation in the most dazzling colors, now that state was represented as beset with dangers and disappointments, and men, of all God's creatures as the most depraved and unreliable. Hard pressed, I broke my engagement, after months of anxiety and bewilderment; suddenly I decided to renew it, as Mr. Stanton was going to Europe as a delegate to the World's Anti-slavery Convention, and we did not wish the ocean to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... had nothing to lose, who had but little to gain. They were turbulent and rebellious. Revolts among the soldiers were common. They brought new vices to the camps, and learned in addition all the vices of the Romans. They were greedy, unreliable, and cherished concealed enmities. They had no common interest or bond of union. They were always ready for revolt, and gave away the highest prizes to fortunate generals. They sold the imperial dignity, and became the masters rather than the servants of the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... suspicion attach to whatever else he put forward? Who could tell that, on any other subject, the plainest and most direct statement of fact was not equally a fancy, only embodying or enshrining (under the guise of its errors) some real Divine facts? If Genesis i. is unreliable, we have a case of a writer going out of his way to add to certain truths, which might easily have been stated by themselves, a number of positive declarations, as of Divine authority, regarding facts, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... I share Your desire for the conservation of peace. However I cannot—as I told You in my first telegram—consider the action of Austria-Hungary as an "ignominious war." Austria-Hungary knows from experience that the promises of Servia as long as they are merely on paper are entirely unreliable. ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage. They are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... the reports of the government commissions for enforcing the husbandry statutes before 1600,[9] and Miss Leonard has made the returns of the commission of 1630 for Leicestershire available.[10] The conditions under which these commissions worked make the returns somewhat unreliable even for the years covered by their reports, and much interpolation is necessary, as there are serious gaps in the series of years for which returns are made. For dates outside of the period 1485-1630 we must rely entirely on literary ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... well the presence of men, the vibration from the present body of the man. There may not be any actual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center in the man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening dark rays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in the father to the corresponding ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... lobsters in Maine previous to 1880. It is therefore difficult to make comparisons, and one is compelled to depend largely upon the memory of the fishermen and the statements of the canners and dealers, which the lapse of time, etc., makes rather unreliable. The numerous petitions sent to the legislature asking for restrictive laws, while possibly exaggerated at times, indicate that there were fears of the exhaustion of the fishery for some years back. It ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... do. "There were, of course, some battles fought during his reign," said Harvey, "but I fancy the accounts of them were much exaggerated; news was very unreliable in those days, and there were practically no war correspondents, so generals and commanders could magnify every little skirmish they engaged in till they reached the proportions of decisive battles. Louis was really famous, now, as a landscape ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... certain of a couple of unreliable members of the choir, Honor cycled last of all to a picturesque little bungalow near the Police Court, and dismounted at its tumble-down gate. From frequent removals for jumping competitions for raw ponies, it was considerably damaged and ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... 62] divided into 60", and these must not only be noted, but even tenths and hundredths of seconds must be discerned. Of course they are not seen by the naked eye; some mechanical contrivance must be called in to assist. A watch loses two minutes a week, and hence is unreliable. It is taken to a watch-maker that every single second may be quickened 1/20160 part of itself. Now 1/20000 part of a second would be a small interval of time to measure, but it must be under control. If the temperature of a summer morning rises ten or twenty degrees we scarcely notice ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... we believe, the only city in England which has retained the entire circuit of its walls complete. According to old unreliable legends, Marius, or Marcius, King of the British, grandson of Cymbeline, who began his reign A.D. 73, first surrounded Chester with a wall, a mysterious person who must be classed with Leon Gawr, or Vawr, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the route on which they had come; another pass much lower leads out from the other or northern end of Hope Valley, but was not visible from their trail. The summit of Carson Pass is approximately latitude 38 deg. 41' 50"; longitude 119 deg. 59'. Fremont's longitude readings are unreliable, owing to error in ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable—but teach him, inoculate him with chess! It is well, perhaps, that the right way of teaching chess is so little known, that consequently in most cases the plot fails in the performance, the dagger turns aside. Else we should all be chess-players—there would be none left ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... to," she said. "I think it was the best thing to do. Perhaps you think it's a bit unreliable of me or rash ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... it resolved to this: that he dared not stand before her with his heart beating as if he had run for miles and his chest suffocating with emotions—the very features of his face uncertain, his voice unreliable. . . . If a man entered the cage of a strange tiger, as little master of himself as this—it would be taking his life in his own silly hands. Skag couldn't get past this point, and he had a romantic adjustment in his mind about ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... it covers. He felt that eight dollars a week were all that he could ever get where he was. Upon his arrival in the City of Chicago he was put at work for seven dollars, the representations made to him having proven unreliable. There were about fifty young men and women in the same room. Seated at his desk when eight o'clock came, he found that his chances to rise were seemingly restricted to the hours of noon and six o'clock. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... of a dying man, as well as of those preceding the first faint cry of a new-born child. Sceptics, however, might have shown a little more indulgence, for, as they are well aware, ordinary memory is even now so unreliable that a man has great difficulty in recalling the whole of the thoughts that have entered his brain during the last few minutes; he has forgotten the details of the various events of the week; the facts of the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... However unreliable Liszt's facts may be, the PHILOSOPHY of his account shows real insight. Karasowski, on the other hand, has neither facts nor insight. He speaks with a novelist's confidence and freedom of characters whom he in no way knows, and about whom he has nothing to tell ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... too unreliable," I cried. "She'd get bay rum, or something equally futile. It must ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... were very weak and sprung leaks frequently. Moisture, formed by condensation, made them practically useless. In certain positions the image of the object picked up by the periscope became inverted. Their radius of vision was limited, and in every way they proved unreliable and unsatisfactory. But, just as almost every feature of submarine construction was gradually developed and most every technical obstacle overcome, experts gradually concentrated their efforts on the improvement of periscopes. Modern periscopes are complicated optical ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... says, is absurd. Therefore we shall have to take the arrival for granted. The only light which she herself ever shed upon the matter was a statement that she "had a feeling." And feelings, to Aunt Caroline, were the only reliable things in a strictly unreliable world. To follow a feeling across a continent was a trifle to a determined character such as hers. To insist upon Dr. Rogers following it, too, ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the wind began steadily from the north. I was nearly ready. Every vessel had been thoroughly repaired, but many were so rotten that the caulking was considered by the English shipwrights as quite unreliable for a long voyage. I had dragged the iron diahbeeah out of the water, and had substituted new plates in many places where the metal was honeycombed with rust. The plate that had been pierced by the tusks of the hippopotamus was removed, as it proved to be very ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... mother as frankly as to his own heart, with the certainty of finding sympathy and aid. And she should not let him forget that he is not to seek information from outside sources, such information being unreliable. ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... she is receiving. No school ever wishes to have its ideals confused by a vulgar display of wealth or by loud or conspicuous behaviour. Yet many a school, with ideals all that they should be, is misjudged in public places because of some thoughtless or unreliable girls. This doesn't seem like fair-play or team-play, does it? The fineness of life ought to be felt and expressed in student behaviour. Yet how often ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... or invention. He will then show how his class begins to deal with it, with what I might call a suspicious warmth. By that token you know the class. They belong to that large group of people who, without being abnormal, still have passed the line which divides the perfectly trustworthy from those unreliable persons who, with the best inclination to tell the truth, can render it only as it is distorted ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... had been a geyser of considerable power. Wetherill told a story of an old Navajo who had lived there. For a long time, according to the Indian tale, the old chief resided there without complaining of this geyser that was wont to inundate his fields. But one season the unreliable waterspout made great and persistent endeavor to drown him and his people and horses. Whereupon the old Navajo took his gun and shot repeatedly at the geyser, and thundered aloud his anger to the Great Spirit. The geyser ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... at the suggestion of Henry H. Sibley, who furnished the stone. It will be remembered that I have referred to the visit of George Catlin, the artist, to Minnesota, in 1835, and that his report was unreliable. Among other things, he said that he was the first white man who had visited this quarry, and induced geologists to name the pipestone "Catlinite." Mr. Sibley, in his communication to the legislature presenting this slab, in answer to ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... carefully composed body of troops proved, however, to be entirely unreliable. Agnew and Anderson were, within a few hours of their arrival at Mooltan, attacked and severely wounded by fanatics, and no one raised a hand to help them. Lying helpless and sorely wounded in the temporary asylum which their quarters ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... drank when he got the chance. Now worked around the Army Hotel and received in return his bed and one meal ticket a day. Expected to leave the city as soon as the weather got warmer. Evidently a kind of tramp with a tendency to become worse. Looked wild and unreliable. ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... the great cataract or its surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... declared, through my teachers, that all the supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible. Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy, Milton ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... is said to have written to Stella or to Swift—there are discrepancies in the versions given by Sheridan and Lord Orrery, both of whom are unreliable—asking whether the report that they were married was true. Swift, we are told, rode to Celbridge, threw down Vanessa's letter in a great rage, and left without speaking a word.(9) Vanessa, whose health had been failing for some time, died shortly afterwards, having ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... constantly resorted to in protection of individual and public interests. . . . If they are relied upon as agencies for accurate mathematical results in mensuration and astronomy, there is no reason why they should be deemed unreliable in matters of evidence. Wherever what they disclose can aid or elucidate the just determination of legal controversies there can be no well- founded objection to resorting to them." Frank v. Chemical Nat. Bank, ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... of his heart, the weight of her influence and feeling would be against him. And he did not underestimate the compelling power of a nature like Polly's. She was wayward, high tempered, sometimes appearing unreliable and almost unloving. Yet this last fact was never true of her. It was only that her personality was of the kind that can want but one thing at a time with all the passion and force of which it ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... boy and girl has seen the chalet-like "weather-house," where one might suppose the clerk of the unreliable elements to reside, and which is certainly tenanted by a gay old lady, who comes out when the sun shines, and a military gentleman, who, disregarding catarrh, parades in front of the cottage whenever there is a rain-cloud in the ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... interferes to prevent the circulation of spurious coin.' Counterfeit coin is more readily detected than a fictitious paper currency, yet no sane man would advocate the repeal of the laws which prohibit it. Why, then, permit the unlimited manufacture of paper money of an unreliable character? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... found to be unreliable as a contraceptive. We know this upon good authority. It should not be depended upon ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... said—had made rulers and unmade them, had helped to alter the map of more than one continent. Green investigated personally. The tale turned out to be nine-tenths reporter's imagination, and one-tenth, a garrulous, unreliable old man. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... most of the middle and northern counties are insurrectionary,—burning bridges, destroying telegraph lines, etc.,—and can be kept down only by the presence of troops. A large portion of the foreign troops organized by General Fremont are unreliable; indeed, many of them are already mutinous. They have been tampered with by politicians, and made to believe that if they get up a mutiny and demand Fremont's return the government will be forced to restore him to duty here. It is believed that some high officers are in the plot I have already been ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... population continues to suffer from insufficient food, clothing, housing, and medical care. Inflation remains a serious problem throughout the country, with one estimate putting the rate at 240% in Kabul in 1996. Numerical data are likely to be either unavailable or unreliable. ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... repeated sternly, "but I cannot fight women. You cannot tell what they will do; they are absolutely unreliable; they are ungrateful, too. Many of these women who form the cursed Women's Club, are women I have been on friendly terms with; so has the Chief. We have granted them interviews; we have listened ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... death; what really did so was bad management. The money this expedition cost, variously estimated at from 40,000 to 60,000 pounds, was almost thrown away, for the map of the route of the expedition was incorrect and unreliable, and Wills's journal of no geographical value, except that it showed they had no difficulty with regard to water. The expedition was, however, successful in so far that Burke crossed Australia from south to north before Stuart, and was the first traveller who had ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and a Jew at the same time (see my Texte u. Unters. I. 3, p. 68; the antitheses of Marcion became very important for the heathen and Manichaean assaults on Christianity). Because he represented the twelve Apostles as unreliable witnesses, he appeared to be the most wicked and shameless of all heretics. Finally, because he gained so many adherents, and actually founded a church, he appeared to be the ravening wolf (Justin, Rhodon), and his church as the spurious church. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... to the launch in silence. Patsy was quite disappointed in Maurie. He had so many admirable qualities that it was a shame he could be so untruthful and unreliable. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole,—two unpardonable ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... very odd, unreliable, and irregular in their actions and reactions. You can't count on them as you can on chemicals. I suppose that merely means that one doesn't know them so well. They are far harder to know; there is a ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... course, with a large portion of the Secret Service fund at my disposal, I was able to buy expert assistance, and even to get information from anarchists themselves. This latter device, however, was always more or less unreliable. I have never yet met an anarchist I could believe on oath, and when one of them offered to sell exclusive information to the police, we rarely knew whether he was merely trying to get a few francs to keep himself from starving, or whether he ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... think our friends will admit that we have been successful. But first we want to learn all we can about this wonderful world. How long has your race existed? Our astronomers tell us Mars is too old to be inhabited, and, considering some of my own recent experiences in finding my science unreliable, it rather consoles me to discover that they ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... Geoffrey was surprised to see windmills, and wire fencing for the cattle pastures that adjoined their homes. He was even more interested in their rifles, which, the tribesmen told him, were repeaters. He was puzzled by the absence of a cylinder, such as could be found on the generally unreliable revolvers ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... acts was to get rid of the unreliable element which Anson had brought away from Umballa. The Infantry he sent to Rohtuk, where it shortly afterwards mutinied, and the Cavalry to Meerut. That these troops should have been allowed to retain ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Oh! Gambling is an unreliable resource excepting for certain crooks, and I am not such a fool as to run the risk of disgrace for the sake of winnings which always have their limit. Publicity, my dear friend, has been the abolition of all those shady careers in which fortune ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and her heart entirely unreliable. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wisdom,' and 'the bitter fruit of earthly experience,' and 'sharpness,' and 'shrewdness,' and so forth. Jesus Christ, even whilst reminding Peter, by that 'more than these,' of his utterly hollow and unreliable boasting, shows Himself ready to accept once again the words of one whose unveracity He had proved. 'Charity hopeth all things, believeth all things,' and Jesus Christ is ready to trust us when we say, 'I love Thee,' even though often in the past ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... to them of Michael. Freddy had heard many accounts and varying reports from unreliable sources of his travels in the eastern desert. He was almost convinced that Michael's silence was due to the fact that there was some foundation for the scandal, which was persistent, that Millicent was one of his party. The report had drifted to him from so many sources that he could scarcely doubt ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... that I always trouble you with all sorts of commissions—but my Vienna acquaintances are so lazy and unreliable that I have no other alternative but ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... "is uncertain; perhaps tonight I shall find it absolutely unreliable. What I am getting at is this: if anything happens to me—death, to be accurate—the Gar is yours, the ketch and a sum of money. It is secured to you in this box, which you will deliver to my address in Boston. There is another provision that I'll mention merely to give you the opportunity to repeat ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... most concrete and easily ascertainable fact in public health statistics, the total of deaths, is often qualified or perverted, it follows that dependent data, such as the assigned causes of death, as required by law, are still more unreliable; so I shall keep as far away from statistics as possible except where some specific condition can be shown by approved figures or by figures so inherently self-disproved that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... he could dictate similar facts for a week without stopping to search his memory. Mr. Gladstone proposes to place the poor people of Ireland under a Government utterly inexperienced in the administration of great matters, utterly unreliable where the handling of money is concerned, utterly ignorant of business methods and business routine. The fate of the destitute poor and the fortunes of the well-to-do classes are to be at the mercy of men whose business ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... has been embodied in almost every American school history. Mr. Charles Dean, in 1860, was the first to question Smith's veracity, and since that date many historians have taken the ground that his works are quite unreliable. Alexander Brown has contended that his account of Virginia was purposely falsified to further the designs of the Court Party during the reign of James I. The discovery of numerous documents relating to the years covered by Smith's histories, ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... those among the few claiming to have any insight into the real Hawk Carse who declared that a month went out of his life for every minute he spent in the cell then. The story, of course, came trickling out through various unreliable sources; we who delve in the lore of the great adventurer have to thank for our authorities Sewell, the great historian of that generation—who personally traveled several million miles to get what meager facts the Hawk would ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... in danger of losing the support of the nation. In order to hoodwink the people the Emperor constituted himself a seer, and announced with great pomp that he was in direct communication with the gods of Heaven. In doing this he was following the advice of his crafty and unreliable minister Wang Ch'in-jo, who had often tried to persuade him that the pretended revelations attributed to Fu Hsi, Yue Wang, and others were only pure inventions to induce obedience. The Emperor, having studied his part well, assembled his ministers in the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Captain enjoys a good rollicking song, preferably of a patriotic turn, but is very unreliable as to the sources ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... experience the slightest inconvenience in distinguishing switch-lights and signals when you are in good health and sober, but a slight indigestion, or a glass of liquor, decreasing the power of your brain, would render your vision of colors unreliable and might cause a wreck, hence I advise you to keep out of the business." The man was a railroad engineer, and admitted that he could generally distinguish colors without difficulty, but that his color sense was lost, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... musician. He has not yet succeeded in eliciting more than two notes and a half out of his instrument, and these he lets off in spasmodic puffs, governed by a curious notion of the proper places for them to fit into the general performance. The flutes are a little unsteady and unreliable; the clarionet always squeaks in pathetic parts; and the cornet imagines that loudness is the chief thing ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... excellent, fast, deep, and well placed, yet in making this he steps away from the ball, again wasting energy. His backhand is a poke and very unreliable. To save it he runs around everything possible, again causing unnecessary exertion. His volleying is brilliant while ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... "Sam's a unsteady, unreliable, tricky old man," exclaimed the skipper, hotly; "the idea of going and leaving a boy on our hands like that. I'm surprised at him. I'm ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... community when they are inspired by a high sense of duty, and guided by principles of truth and integrity. The other class of detectives who enact the role of Paul Pry on breaches of the moral law, as, for example, the working up of testimony in divorce cases, is mostly a despicable, unreliable, corrupt being, whose methods are villainous, and whose ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... her duty to secure for the child its rightful heritage. Then Jim, too, appeared in a new light, as one who could never fulfil himself unless working through the natural channels of his birth, inheritance, and upbringing. Jim, drunken and unreliable, with broken will and fighting to find himself—the waste places were for him, until he was the master of his will and emotions. Once, however, secure in ability to control himself, with cleansed brain and purpose defined, the widest field would be still be too narrow for his talents—and ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... sorely disappointed when he refused to become a candidate. On the whole, he had deserved well of the country and the people recognized that he had done much to uphold their honor and dignity, even though he had been too often imposed upon by unreliable ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... of that alley threw Stott back for two years. When he first emerged to try conclusions on the field, he found his length on the longer pitch utterly unreliable, and the effort necessary to throw the ball another six yards, at first upset ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... Alwyn, eagerly bending over the sacred book; then drawing back with a gesture of disappointment he added, "But you are reading from Esdras, the Apocrypha! an utterly unreliable ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the real expert often rests on his ability to influence the local physician.[14] At the late Wharton-Van Ness trial the defence desired to show that the work of the chemist employed by the prosecution was unreliable, because the analyses made by him in a previous case had "been condemned by the united voice of the whole scientific world." The court was not able to see the relevancy of this, and refused to allow the professional ability or standing of an expert to be called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... error. The first, by a single false assumption, may lose its way; the second, by making too free use of the imagination, can easily forget when it is dealing with faith and facts; and the third, by one act of over-reaching, is liable to become puerile, fanciful, and unreliable. The philosopher, the litterateur, and the exegete need to be less observant of the surrounding world than of the purity of their own inner life and the teachings of the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... was quite unreliable, but following our outward tracks (for it became thick and overcast), and judging by our old camping sites, we reckoned that we had done an excellent run of 23 to 24 miles (statute) for the day. The temperature when we camped ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... of the Marquess, Celia regretted keenly the advent of Lord and Lady Heyton at the Hall. Of the man, Celia had formed a most unfavourable opinion, and she could not but see that his wife, beautiful as she was, was shallow, vain, and unreliable, the kind of woman who would always act on impulse, whether it were a good or evil one. Such a woman is more dangerous than a deliberately wicked and ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... Professor contemptuously, "a most unreliable authority. However, I'll promise you one thing, Hope, that if there are any jewels, or jewelry, you ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... sneered at most bitterly whenever I remembered it; that was the fact that Lal had prophesied that I should become great, and also that I should meet Dick Whittington. Both these imaginary things I regarded now as being utterly unreliable, and looked upon as two ghostly myths of the past. I might have known better. The nervousness from which I suffered, and which I have already alluded to, was becoming so marked that it greatly stood in my way, particularly whenever I had any writing to do. I would fidget, bite my fingers, nibble ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... material for a biography bears some resemblance to interrogating witnesses in a Court of Law. There are good witnesses and bad: reliable and unreliable memories. I remember an old lady, a friend of my mother's, who remarked with candour after my mother had confided to her something of importance: "My dear, I must go and write that down immediately before my imagination gets ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... by Diodorus does not mention; but above all, Manetho gives us a list of Egyptian rulers arranged according to a regular system. But however important in this respect Manetho's work may be, it must not be forgotten what difficulties he had to contend with in the writing of it, and what unreliable sources lay in these difficulties. He could not use the sources in the form in which he found them. He was obliged to re-write them, and he added to them synchronisms and relations to other peoples which necessarily exposed him to the dangers ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... me twice, comin' after you, ma'am," he lied. "I plowed up the ground considerable. I've never knowed Patches to be so unreliable." ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... untrained hands, the newspaper recipe has become a synonym for something utterly unreliable, and, therefore, a byword among those so old-fashioned as to believe that a woman who holds a pen is, of ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... required standard of utility, and are characterized by defects which are at once forced upon us by a little close examination. Felt is an admirable non-conductor of heat, but owing to its combustible nature it is quite unreliable when subject to the heat of a high pressure of steam. A large fragment of this material which had been taken off the boiler of a North River steamboat was exhibited at the meeting, scorched and charred as ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... a bluff that stood where the Toledo Railroad Machine Shops have since been built, about seventy-five rods west of the present entrance to the harbor. In those days the river entrance was of a very unreliable character, being sometimes entirely blocked up with sand, so that people walked across. It was no uncommon thing for people to ride over, or jump the outlet with the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... reader, he need not support his truth by an accumulation of evidence imitated from the actual life he has observed. But on the other hand, there is nothing to prevent his doing so; and unless he be very headstrong—so headstrong as to be almost unreliable—he will be extremely chary of his freedom. He will not subvert the actual unless there is no other equally effective means of conveying the truth he has to tell. Many times a close adherence to actuality is as advisable for the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton |
