"Indefensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... even resort to blandishments of costume to give their parts a special emphasis. Our leading ladies are more richly clad than the minor members of their companies. Even the great Mansfield resorted in his performance of Brutus to the indefensible expedient of changing his costume act by act and dressing always in exquisite and subtle colors, while the other Romans, Cassius included, wore the same togas of unaffected white throughout the play. This ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... and if Christianity says "There is a higher way to which God calls you," I do not think there is here an indefensible contradiction. It is a case of a higher and ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... time was very singular. He was acting as substitute for Sir Robert Chambers, the principal of New Inn Hall and Vinerian Professor of Law, who contrived to hold his university preferments, whilst he discharged the duties of a judge in India. To give an honest color to this indefensible arrangement, it was provided that the lectures read from the Vinerian Chair should actually be written by the Professor, although they were delivered by deputy. Scott, therefore, as the Professor's mouth-piece, on a salary of L60 a year, with free quarters in the Principal's house, was ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... includes a considerable number of individuals who are attracted by a suggestive treatment of morbid phases of life. To cater to the low desires of some readers, on the ground of "giving the public what it wants," will always be regarded by self-respecting editors and authors as indefensible. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of art that was not illicit must have been eminently welcome. But The Task has merits of a more universal and enduring kind. Its author himself says of it:—"If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect, however, I do not think it altogether indefensible), it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the preceding passage, and that, except the fifth book, which is rather of a political aspect, the whole has one tendency, to discountenance the modern enthusiasm ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... of his Puzzlehead boyhood. "I'm not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I said was that, things being as they are, you can't help seeing that their horrible ways are bringing the vote a jolly sight nearer than it's ever been before. Millions of people who never would have thought about ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Monarchy from Democracy, for he is expected to make 70,000 changes in the public service; fifty years ago John Quincy Adams dismissed only two men. The purchase of judicial appointments is manifestly indefensible; yet in the old French monarchy that monstrous practice created the only corporation able to resist the king. Official corruption, which would ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary relief from the pressure of absolutism. There are conditions in which it is scarcely a ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... practically a condition of almost constant war between the wealthy mine-owners and the Western Federation of Miners, at whose head stood Messrs. Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer, who were about that time indicted for the murder of the Governor of Idaho. Much that was lawless, much that was indefensible, had been done by both sides. The Legislature of Nevada was in sympathy with, or at least was afraid of not expressing sympathy for, Messrs. Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, and their associates. The State was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... embody a fairly complete representation of the Conservative party; and as a party does not need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired whenever the Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed its proper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its most indefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongest practical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had no particular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenly interested in ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... which must be satisfied. The individuals, companies, and governments which use force to exploit resources in weaker countries are merely the agents in supplying the demand created by all of us. While their methods are often indefensible, the exploiters cannot be regarded merely as irresponsible buccaneers who are projecting themselves unnecessarily into somebody else's business. Whatever the sentimental and ethical aspects of the question, it seems almost inevitable that the demands of civilization will ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... may tend to justify, however slightly, is eagerly seized upon and proclaimed. There is scarcely an evil practice for which the doer may not raise up or create reasons in justification, and plausible arguments may be made to gloss over the most detestable and indefensible crimes. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... ethics—my own, for that matter—what followed was entirely indefensible. The grab for the treasure, its swift hiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest cross street; all these named me for what I was at the moment—a half-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief. When I had made ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... included several potential prime ministers Macdonald had advanced to the first place by reason of gifts precisely suited to the demands of the hour. Lord Monck's choice was therefore justified. Nor was the resolve to abolish the awkward and indefensible system of a dual premiership less open to question. It may have given pain to Cartier, but it was ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... some person the right of drawing the revenues of a vacant benefice for a certain specified time, was highly prejudicial to the best interests of religion. Such a practice, however justifiable in case of benefices to which the care of souls was not attached, was entirely indefensible when adopted in regard to bishopric, abbacies, and minor benefices, where so much depended upon personal activity and example. The person who held the benefice /in commendam/ did nothing except to draw the revenue ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... palpitating interest of a novel of adventure. Commiseration had finally developed the vehemence of a love affair. Besides, the knowledge that the exploiters of this woman were the ones that had denounced her, had aroused his knightly enthusiasm in the defense of her indefensible cause. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... any solution at all possible you have assumed cosine squared theta negligible. Mathematically, it is of course vanishingly small compared to the first power of the cosine, but fields of that type must be exact, and your neglect of the square is indefensible. Since you cannot integrate with the squared term in ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... will be allowed, more indefensible than a cold-blooded attempt to corrupt the purity of an innocent heart; and we can scarcely conceive any being more truly despicable, than he who, without the apology of unruly passion or tumultuous desires, sits down to ransack the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... forces that destroyed them, and not see that the judgment on things is always on character, and that the last testing principle is, "See—not what manner of stones, but what manner of men." While we deplore the forces that destroyed, we have also to deplore the indefensible lives of the monks which at their last stage stirred such ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... balance of judgement, and practical sagacity. The sole important issue was the encouraging of the peace party at Paris, with a view to the revocation of the aggressive decrees of the Convention. In private, Fox had admitted that they were wholly indefensible; and yet, in order to snatch an oratorical triumph, he fired off a diatribe which could not but stiffen the necks of the French Jacobins. At such a crisis the true statesman merges the partisan in the patriot ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... It is indefensible that in the face of incidents of our history such as these Californians should be ignorant of the lives and experiences of those who preceded them on this coast. The history of their experiences is a part of the history of the ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... small share to the support of your Majesty's Government, abandoned in a situation, from various reasons the most critical, upon grounds which appeared to me upon every principle, public and private, wholly indefensible. To the natural difficulties of my undertaking, I had the additional misfortune of not finding myself peculiarly in those confidential habits with your Majesty's servants, to which, in such a situation, I should naturally look for support. My trust, under God, was in your Majesty's goodness ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... strike a blow that would intimidate the Mexicans from making any insurrectionary movement. Alvarado himself declared that he had information that the Mexicans intended to rise, but he gave no proofs, whatever, to justify his suspicions. The affair, indeed, seems to have been utterly indefensible, and must ever remain a foul blot ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... he dealt with the potato blight, and consequent Irish Famine, is indefensible. His policy from first to last was a policy of delay—delay in a case in which delay was ruin. He went on by slow and almost imperceptible degrees preparing his colleagues for his altered views on the Corn duties; talking and writing ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... growing and ripening or ripened harvest—whereas it is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is not obscurity—or indistinctness—which, as we have said before, is often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a contradiction—and therefore indefensible on any ground either of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... noted its present form, let us go on to observe the way in which it is still swayed by the crude hypotheses it set out with; so that even now, doctrines long since abandoned as untenable in theory, continue in practice to mould the ideas of geologists, and to foster sundry beliefs that are logically indefensible. We shall see, both how those simple sweeping conceptions with which the science commenced, are those which every student is apt at first to seize hold of, and how several influences conspire to maintain the twist thus resulting—how ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... more Dal considered his position, the more indefensible it appeared. Time after time he had thought of Dr. Arnquist's words about judgment and skill. Without one the other was of little value to a doctor, and whatever his skill as a surgeon might have been in the Moruan operating room, he now realized that his ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... loved their laws and took pride in obeying and enforcing them. The different attitude of the modern Irish towards foreign laws and administration is amply explained by the morally indefensible character of those laws and that administration, to be read in English statutes and ordinances and in the history of English rule in Ireland—a subject too vast and harrowing, and in every sense foreign to what has gone before, to be entered upon here. Though ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... amount of decision and of moderation that is remarkable in so young a non-commissioned officer. Sergeant Overton thereby demonstrated his fitness to command men. Private Hinkey's conduct, from start to finish, as testified to by the witnesses, was gross and indefensible. Such conduct in a soldier of the regular Army ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... affected by their relations to other individuals who are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory. What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... it, my Hippolito, that the same man shall be alternately governed by the meanest and most exalted motives: that he shall now appear an essence celestial and divine, and now debase himself by a conduct the most indefensible and unworthy? But such I am afraid is man. Mixed in all his qualities, and inconsistent in all his purposes. The most virtuous and most venerable of us all are too often guilty of things weak, sordid, and disgraceful. And it is to be hoped on the other hand, that ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... eye and ear were such as, for accuracy of observation, few have ever witnessed. It is true he could subsist a long time without food, but, like the renowned Captain Dalgetty, when an abundance of it happened to be placed before him, he displayed the most indefensible ignorance as to all knowledge of the period when he ought to stop, considering it his bounden duty on all occasions to clear off whatever was set before him—a feat which he always accomplished with the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... law, logic or demand of justice could change Judge Hunt's will. We were convicted before we had a hearing and the trial was a mere farce." Some time afterwards Judge Selden wrote her: "I regard the ruling of the judge, and also his refusal to submit the case to the jury, as utterly indefensible." Scarcely a newspaper in the country sustained Judge Hunt's action. The Canandaigua Times thus expressed the general sentiment in an editorial, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... addressed the eighty-seven bishops assembled in the Council of Carthage, and told them that they were all on an equality, he might have felt that the doctrine of episcopal parity, as then understood, must be given up as indefensible if assailed by the skill of a vigorous logician. Who could believe that the bishop of Carthage held exactly the same official rank as every one of his episcopal auditors? He was the chief pastor of a flourishing metropolis; he had several congregations under his ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the other element. Yet it has been suggested, though unsuccessfully, that honesty is not a necessary ingredient in the defence of "fair comment." It was argued that a criticism, defensible if written by an honest critic, could not be indefensible because written by one whose motive was malicious—in other words, that the matter was objective, not subjective. Certainly, at first sight, it seems strange that A can say with impunity that Smith's book is dull and B may ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... slave-holders. The Compromise Acts of 1850 had not abrogated that line, and related only to our Mexican acquisitions; but they had affirmed a principle, and if that principle was sound, the Missouri restriction was indefensible. The whole question of slavery was thus reopened, for the sacredness of the compact of 1820 and the wickedness of its violation depended largely upon the character of slavery itself, and our constitutional relations ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... precariously enjoyed, men should so set their hearts on building a permanence in words: something to stand, in the lovely stability of ink and leaden types, as our speech out of silence to those who follow on. Indefensible absurdity, and yet the secret and impassioned dream of those ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Act and the Seditious Meetings Act, went beyond the necessity of the case; that they were not only violations of the constitution—which, when the measures are temporary, as these were, are not always indefensible—but that they were superfluous, unjust, and impolitic; superfluous, when they proposed to deal with acts already visitable with punishment by the ancient laws of the kingdom; unjust, when they created new classes of offences; and impolitic, as exciting ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... the only thoroughly logical people in the world, and their excessive development of the logical faculty leads them at times into pitfalls. "Ils ont lesdefauts de leurs qualites." In this country we have found out that systems, absolutely indefensible in theory, at times work admirably well in practice, and give excellent results. No Frenchman would ever admit that anything unjustifiable in theory could possibly succeed in practice—"Ce n'est pas logique," he would object, and there would be ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... not defend our own Indian policy.... Wounded and disabled in our Indian wars... I know all about them and how indefensible they are..... ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... may be said to choose imperfect rimes deliberately, both as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: blossom. Keats and Rossetti ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... pondering ruefully on the condition of affairs at the south. He saw that the only hope of saving Charleston was in the defense of the bar; and when that became indefensible, he saw that the town ought to be abandoned to the enemy, and the army withdrawn to the country. His military genius showed itself again and again in his perfectly accurate judgment on distant campaigns. He ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Parliament was fixed and irreversible; that there was only resistance to the execution of this policy on the one hand, and submission, which must end in abject slavery, on the other. If the American Revolution be morally indefensible, then not only are all wars indefensible, but all human governments, the wisest ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... of Masquerade" I am guilty of quite arbitrarily discovering a reason to explain the mystery of Baron Bjelke's sudden change from the devoted friend and servant of Gustavus III of Sweden into his most bitter enemy. That speculation is quite indefensible, although affording a possible explanation of that mystery. In the case of "The Night of Kirk o' Field," on the other hand, I do not think any apology is necessary for my reconstruction of the precise manner in which Darnley met his death. The event has long ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... scrupulously conscientious. We begin to have our suspicions of his uprightness when we find him in his Subjection of Women laying it down as a fundamental postulate that the subjection of woman to man is always morally indefensible. For no upright mind can fail to see that the woman who lives in a condition of financial dependence upon man has no moral claim to unrestricted liberty. The suspicion of Mill's honesty which is thus awakened ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... far outstripped our sources of revenue that we have come to look on an annual deficit as a normal and defensible thing. I think it is indefensible. I think it is going to have a bad effect on our attendance and our morals if the members have to look forward to what amounts to a good big assessment at every convention. A deficit is not inevitable. The secretary-treasurer was ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... and they permitted the last opportunity for annihilating the invaders to escape. As to Kutusoff, who was fully informed concerning the utter disintegration of the "grand army," his conduct in holding back the main Russian force at the crucial moment is utterly indefensible; he saved thousands of his troops, perhaps, but he has passed into history as the man who is indirectly responsible for the rivers of blood which were still to drench the continent of Europe. Both he and Wittgenstein unloaded all the blame on Admiral Tchitchagoff, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... leave my readers to form their own conclusions. That it has occasionally been beneficial, in the peculiar state of the communities in which it has been practised, must be admitted; but it is equally certain that it is in itself indefensible, and that but too often, not only the punishment is much too severe for the offence, but what is still more to be deprecated, the innocent do occasionally ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... particularly because the clergy generally were ready to be released from the financial exactions of the Holy See, as well as from its practical exercise of patronage. Parliament opened an anti-clerical campaign, but its measures at first were confined to dealing with almost indefensible and obvious abuses. Bishop Fisher recognised the familiar thin end of the wedge, and charged the Commons with desiring "the goods, not the good" of the Church; but the opposition was slender. In the six weeks of the first session, there were passed, the Probate and Mortuaries Acts, abolishing, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan Coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... she caught at the name; it was the property in which Severance had lost his money; and she recalled ugly rumors that, before, had not affected her. Now that his money was gone, they attached to themselves a newer significance, accusing and indefensible. "The Teton Sisters! What do you mean?" For was the shame of losing his wealth to be coupled with the shameful admission that he had taken a hand in gouging her former suitor? It was singular she hadn't thought of it before; now it struck ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... was the hardest task of all. Of you, Jacob, I have to ask forgiveness for depriving you of your early and truest friend—yes, and for much more. Of you, sir," addressing the Dominie, "for my conduct towards you, which was cruel and indefensible—will you ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... glass of ale after dinner, which was quite indefensible, for they had had a sufficiency at that bounteous repast. Evidently, the dominie was in for a good time. A wizened old fellow, named Batiste, with a permanent crick in his back, dug the worms, and presented them to the lawyer in an empty lobster tin, the outside of ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our dreams!" ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... seen; or that—being ignorant of Gaelic—it would have helped them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, e.g., Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... place, the levying of the POOR'S RATE as a burden exclusively laid on real property in England, that is, lands and houses, to the entire liberation of personal property or professional incomes, is a most monstrous inequality—indefensible on every principle of justice or expedience, and the long continuance of which can only be explained by the well known and proverbial supineness of that class of men, and their inability to rouse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... position to offer any effectual resistance. The fort was weak and indefensible. The English inhabitants consisted only of a hundred civilians, and two hundred soldiers. Governor Morse endeavoured to obtain, from the nawab, the protection which he had before granted to Dupleix, a demand which the nawab at ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... fleet, when drawn up in line of battle, but lay stupidly upon your back, gazing at the sky; nor did you get up and let your men see you, until Marcus Agrippa had forced the enemies' ships to sheer off." Others imputed to him both a saying and an action which were indefensible; for, upon the loss of his fleets by storm, he is reported to have said: "I will conquer in spite of Neptune;" and at the next Circensian games, he would not suffer the statue of that God to be carried in procession as usual. Indeed he scarcely ever ran more ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... malignant rebel," cried Oliver. "Art thou not ashamed, sir, to detain me before the door of a house which you had no force to defend? Wearest thou so white a beard, and knowest thou not, that to refuse surrendering an indefensible post, by the martial law, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... use another name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left England practically penniless to earn an honest living—no one had shown it was not—was the last resort of legal desperation. It was an indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man because of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single word of evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by Crozier's own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by schedule, we find it indefensible. In Schedule A alone the list of necessities on which the tax is to be raised includes Persian berries, extract of nutgalls and isinglass. Take isinglass alone. With prices shooting up in this market, what is to become of our picture post-cards? Where once for a nickel you ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... the American Union in 1861 would have been wholly justifiable; and, conversely, the Northern States, in forcibly preventing secession and compelling the inhabitants of the States composing the Confederacy to remain under the authority of the Federal Government, would have perpetrated a great and indefensible wrong against the people of the South by depriving them of a right to which they were by nature entitled. This is the logic of the application of the principle of "self-determination" to the political rights at issue in ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... afraid," he said quickly. "There is no immediate danger. I have only been sent to warn you to be ready to leave the bungalow. The front wall is shot-riddled, and the place may become indefensible at any moment. When that time comes, you must slip out to the old bungalow. Nicholson believes he can ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... as a secret placed in my keeping: I claimed perfect freedom to use my own discretion. Worse even than that, I took an unwarrantable advantage of my position. "Choose, sir," I said to Mr. Smalley, "between the risk of losing your client's business and the risk of losing Mine." Quite indefensible, I admit—an act of tyranny, and nothing less. Like other tyrants, I carried my point. Mr. Smalley chose his alternative, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... had more ammunition; a few wadded bullets, caps, and powder-charges, loose in a jacket pocket; and I thrust them into one of his, upon a sudden impulse, not (as I think) altogether unaccountable, albeit (as I have said) so indefensible. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... inspired? On the contrary, have not these salutary schemes been often treated with neglect and contempt? And have not some, who have been entrusted with experimenting their effects, been guilty of the most indefensible partiality in the accounts they have given of these trials? It must, however, be confessed, that many distinguished persons, both in the direction and command of our fleets, have exerted themselves on these occasions with a judicious and dispassionate examination, becoming ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... stating her demands, and on the following day informed all the European powers of her attitude. The neutral Press of the world and an unusually large section of the German Press, immediately pronounced Austria's position to be indefensible and untenable. The German Government, in spite of these facts, gave its official and unreserved support to Austria's attitude on July 26th. After eight weeks of war (on September 25th), Austria officially declared that she had never swerved from ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the tone of one resuming an argument] There can't be two opinions about it, Ronny. Young Dunning's refusal is simply indefensible. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with those honest men who will not go the whole way. That independent co-operation can serve the full purpose of the binding alliance that has proved fatal. Above all, let there be no charge of bad faith against the earnest man who chooses other ways than ours; it is altogether indefensible because we disagree with him to call his motives in question. Often he is as earnest as we are; often has given longer and greater service, and only qualifies his own attitude in anxiety to meet others. To this we cannot assent, but to charge him with ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... provided Belgium with the strongest and most unequivocal guarantees respecting her territorial integrity. Provided these guarantees were observed faithfully, the closing of the Scheldt by Holland in time of war, the critical situation on the Eastern frontier created by the indefensible cul-de-sac of Dutch Limburg, and the supremacy in Luxemburg of a foreign Power, did not seriously jeopardize the country's security. The treaties of 1839 were considered as forming a whole, the moral safeguard of guaranteed neutrality counterbalancing, to a certain extent, the new territorial ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... Nice is altogether indefensible, and therefore without fortifications. There are only two iron guns upon a bastion that fronts the beach; and here the French had formed a considerable battery against the English cruisers, in the war of 1744, when the Mareschal Duke de Belleisle had his headquarters at Nice. This little ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Empire. A French aviator had dropped bombs on Neuremburg, one of the artistic treasures of Europe, although, mercifully, his bombs had inadvertently been filled with air. Then followed the even more indefensible act of Great Britain, whose only motive in joining forces with paper allies was to aim a blow at the glorious commercial prestige of Germany, the object of her fear and hate ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... national achievements which men justify to themselves as a patriotic feat, or, it may be, a necessity of empire, and it is not classified among punishable offences at all. And then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... take place with respect to other secret societies in the army." In the debate which followed, it was generally admitted that the establishment of lodges in the army was pregnant with mischief and indefensible; but it was maintained, that any use which had been made in this way of warrants for creating lodges had taken place without the knowledge and authority of the grand-master, or the other superior officers of the association. From statements made by the members for Sligo and Cavan, it appeared ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... decision of a disputed case but the legislation necessary to regulate an international property was in itself a great step in the development of world polity. The charlatan who almost brought on war by maintaining an indefensible case was also the statesman who made perhaps the greatest single advance in the conservation of the ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... was not an unmixed calamity, and was a righteous judgment on the Greeks. Nothing could be more unscrupulous than the career of Alexander and his generals. Again, the principle which had animated the Oriental kings before him was indefensible. We could go back still further, and show from the whole history of Asiatic conquests that their object was to aggrandize ambitious conquerors. The Persians, at first, were a brave and religious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... ecclesiastical statesmanship which dominates the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The programme of the great Popes, from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, must appear a tissue of absurdities, of preposterous ambitions and indefensible actions, unless it is studied in relation to a theology as far remote from primitive Christianity as from the cults and ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... number of private companies, whose duty it was to regard the dividends of the shareholders rather than the interests of the public. The existence of a monopoly of this kind in private hands seemed to him indefensible. His attention was especially directed to the injury done to trade by the differential rate imposed on goods traffic; on many lines it was the custom to charge lower rates on imported than on exported goods, and this naturally had a very bad effect on German manufactures. He would ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... Newcome; and he spoke of his nephew's conduct with much indignation. In vain I urged that her ladyship desiring to be considered absent from London, her grandson was bound to keep her secret. "Keep her secret, yes! Tell me lies, no!" cries out the Colonel. Sir Barnes's conduct was in fact indefensible, though not altogether unusual—the worst deduction to be drawn from it, in my opinion, was, that Clive's chance with the young lady was but a poor one, and that Sir Barnes Newcome, inclined to keep his uncle in good-humour, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours—the defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... one modern method which has always seemed to me much to be condemned, and that is the habit of changing the end of a story, for fear of alarming the child. This is quite indefensible. In doing this we are tampering with folklore ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... individuals, he sees humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law." The principle on which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers. Were his socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very generality, would break up ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... this, it must be confessed that occasionally he indulged in paradoxes which cannot be defended. I will not conceal the fact that these occasional kickings over the traces personally delighted me as a young man, and still delight me, but, all the same, they are indefensible from the point of view of the serious man—that dreadful person, the vir pietate gravis. For instance, it was always said by some of his friends, and I think with truth, for I have not dared to verify the point, that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... jurisdictional strikes. In such strikes the public and the employer are innocent bystanders who are injured by a collision between rival unions. This type of dispute hurts production, industry, and the public—and labor itself. I consider jurisdictional strikes indefensible. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Unless, indeed, it be true, as I have heard it main- tained, that in the Middle Ages every one did go mad, - every one was mad. The theory that this was a period of general insanity is not altogether indefensible. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the eve of a great political crisis, it may be of national disaster, a distinguished Liberal statesman makes public confession of his belief that, as a permanent solution, the Irish policy of the Government is indefensible." ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... took this bill under consideration.[40] Prolonged debate ensued. Brown of Rhode Island again made a most elaborate plea for throwing open the foreign slave-trade. Negroes, he said, bettered their condition by being enslaved, and thus it was morally wrong and commercially indefensible to impose "a heavy fine and imprisonment ... for carrying on a trade so advantageous;" or, if the trade must be stopped, then equalize the matter and abolish slavery too. Nichols of Virginia thought that surely the gentlemen would not advise the importation of more Negroes; for while ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... aunt, I did not defend his conduct, supposing him guilty," said Juliet, with quiet dignity; "for if that be really the case such conduct is indefensible. I only hoped that ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... a criminal mistake to underestimate either the magnitude, the fighting quality, or the staying power of the forces which are arrayed against us. But it would be equally foolish and equally indefensible to belittle our own resources, whether for resistance or attack. [Cheers.] Belgium has shown us by a memorable and a glorious example what can be done by a relatively small State when its citizens are animated and fired by the spirit of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... those of Fairyland.' The tremendously suggestive thing of the whole story of Becket is that Henry II submitted to being thrashed at Becket's tomb. It was like 'Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer as an apology for some indefensible death incidental to the Jameson Raid.' Undoubtedly Chesterton has got at the kernel of the story that made an Archbishop a saint (a rare occurrence) and an English king a sportsman (a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... no doubt childish for these two simple-minded colored men to take this gloomy view of their surroundings and their future. They should have realized that the fact that their privileges were insecure and their rights indefensible was their own misfortune, perhaps even their fault. They should have remembered that the susceptibilities of that race among whom their lot had been cast by the compulsion of a strange providence, were ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a policeman, and demanded our papers. Luckily they were not at the very bottom of the baggage, but in Yejiro's bosom; for otherwise our effects would have become a public show, and collected an even greater crowd than actually gathered. The arm of the law took the passport, fell at once on the indefensible date, and pointed it out to us. There we were, caught in the act. We sank several degrees instantly in everybody's ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... composition. But during the past generation these attempts, never very hopeful, have become much less so. It is only too easy to play scientific havoc with the foundations of modern music: but, arbitrary and scientifically indefensible though they may be, they are our inheritance. Music has come to be what it is by methods that will not bear accurate investigation: our tonal systems are mere makeshifts, and no composer can completely express his thoughts in our clumsy notation. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... twelve miles east of Strasburg, was committed to the charge of Colonel Kenly, of the 1st Maryland Regiment in the Federal service, and 1000 rifles and 2 guns were placed at his disposal. The post itself was indefensible. To the west and south-west, about three miles distant, stand the green peaks of the Massanuttons, while to the east the lofty spurs of the Blue Ridge look down into the village streets. A mile and a half north the forks of the Shenandoah unite in the broad ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... pleased to see the force of what I urged. As far as I had inclinations in the case, they were towards the cause, not of Burgundy himself, whose murder of Orleans was alike treacherous and indefensible, but of his cause, seeing that Flanders is wholly under his authority, and that in Artois he is well-nigh paramount at present. On the other hand, Amiens and Ponthieu, which lie but a short distance to the south of me, are strongly Orleanist, and I have therefore ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... he had been genuinely disgusted, not as a matter of duty, but unaffectedly, as a matter of simple nature. What interested him in her was her novel and bold moral attitude, her self-respect in the midst of her sin, her striking arguments in favor of an apparently indefensible course of life. Hers was no common case of loose living, he felt: there was a soul to be saved there, if only Heaven would raise her up a friend in some man absolutely proof against the vulgar fascination of her prettiness. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Government have displayed in dealing with the ugly phenomenon of War Profits. We know, of course, what happens to those profits at present. Half is taken by the State: half passes to the firms who are getting "rich quick" out of its necessities. In theory, it is an anomalous arrangement, indefensible in logic, and opposed to every canon alike of justice and of taxation. In practice it works out in the way we have indicated: that certain privileged firms and individuals are amassing huge fortunes out of the gravest crisis through which the nation has passed, and which will pinch us all ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... of interpretations of the common reading are from their uniform absurdity sufficient to show that it is corrupt. I have chosen the least offensive, but am still certain that [Greek: apartizei] is indefensible. Hermann (who, strange to say, is followed by Wellauer) reads [Greek: katargizei], Blomfield ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... ancestors and our minds filled with a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended, present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... possible. At present the majority of Parliament obey certain leaders; what those leaders propose they support, what those leaders reject they reject. An old Secretary of the Treasury used to say, "This is a bad case, an indefensible case. We must apply our majority to this question." That secretary lived fifty years ago, before the Reform Bill, when majorities were very blind, and very "applicable". Nowadays, the power of leaders ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... mistake, Wolff," Seaman declared angrily. "I am your superior in the Service, and your attitude towards me is indefensible." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... certain of the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... or some one else. The conduct of your parents in regard to medical assistance, the obstinate refusal of your father, and, allied to that, your mother's arbitrary changing and fixed prejudices, in matters which neither of them understand, seem to me, between ourselves, indefensible. He to whom God has intrusted a child, and an only child at that, must employ for her preservation all the means that God has made available, and not become careless of them through fatalism or self-sufficiency. If writing tires you, ask your mother ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in his eight books of Clitophon and Leucippe, the very diction of which is soft and effeminate, as if intended to relax the vigour of the reader's mind." This last denunciation of the patriarch, however, is somewhat too sweeping and indiscriminate, since, though some passages are certainly indefensible, they appear rather as interpolations, and are in no manner connected with the main thread of the story, the general tendency of which is throughout innocent and moral; and whatever may be said of these blemishes, it must be allowed that the pages of Achilles Tatius are purity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... in such a man is an element;—first, as a survival of true moral standards; second, because to punish what would not be blameworthy in an average member of the community would be to enforce a standard which was indefensible theoretically, and which practically was too high ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... my character—aye, sir, and I HAVE a character which is very dear to me, and will be the best inheritance of my two daughters—to tell you, on behalf of another, that your conduct is wrong, unnatural, indefensible, monstrous. And I tell you, sir,' said Mr Pecksniff, towering on tiptoe among the curtains, as if he were literally rising above all worldly considerations, and were fain to hold on tight, to keep himself from darting skyward like a rocket, 'I tell ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... she had walked blindly into the clutches of cocaine and veronal, her subsequent experiments with chandu were prompted by indefensible curiosity, and a false vanity which urged her to do everything that was "done" by the ultra-smart and vicious set of which she ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... since corresponded with the Duke of Sutherland upon the whole case—viz. upon the petition for land, as affected by the shocking menaces of the Seceders—has, in no other way, been able to evade the double mischief of undertaking a defence for the indefensible, and at the same time of losing the land irretrievably, than by affecting an unconsciousness of language used by his party little suited to his own sacred calling, or to the noble simplicities of Christianity. Certainly it is unhappy for the Seceders, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... almost always, to be, not average, well-disposed citizens, but a more or less incendiary minority who want to change things—and to change them a lot and very quickly. That aspiration is not wholly indefensible, for a good many things would be the better for changing, but real light and leading have not often been found on top at meetings in schoolhouses, and experience has proved that the Teachers' Union has ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... true history; and even our learned and judicious Dr. Wall, in his late posthumous Critical Notes upon all the other Hebrew books of the Old Testament, gives none upon the Canticles, or upon Esther, and seems thereby to give up this book, as well as he gives up the Canticles, as indefensible; I shall venture to say, that almost all the objections against this Book of Esther are gone at once, if, as we certainly ought to do, and as Dean Prideaux has justly done, we place this history under Artsxerxes Longimanus, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... baseless and indefensible critical assertion. It is evidently to be ascribed to the fact that the metre of the ancient ballads is employed in both plays. But my tone is quite different from Hertz's; the language of my play has a different ring; a light summer breeze plays over the ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... flippant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it." It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it." I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land, (in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... All this was less indefensible under the judicial practice of a century ago than it would be now, and there were not enough votes of Guilty on the article of impeachment founded upon ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... schooner was taken, but the "Prince Regent" had gone to Kingston three days before; the weather which drove Chauncey back had enabled her to join her fleet as soon as released by the ice. By her escape the blow lost most of its effect; for York itself was indefensible, and was taken again without difficulty in the following July. A 30-gun vessel approaching completion was found on the stocks and burned, and a large quantity of military and naval stores were either destroyed or brought away by the victorious squadron. ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... moment. Transpositions of that kind, to speak plainly, are important only as affording conclusive proof that such copies as B[Symbol: Aleph]D preserve a text which has undergone a sort of critical treatment which is so obviously indefensible that the Codexes themselves, however interesting as monuments of a primitive age,—however valuable commercially and to be prized by learned and unlearned alike for their unique importance,—are yet to be prized chiefly as beacon-lights preserved by a watchful ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon |
