"Unworkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... extracting gold, and that, owing to the small value of human labour, they could get out as much of the metal as could now be done. They knew perfectly what was worth working and what was not; and I think it likely that what you have brought home, had been rejected by the ancients as unworkable[EN12]. Further search may lead to the discovery of workable stuff; but would doubtless require a good deal of time, unless lucky ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... have stated it," Lord Chelsford said slowly. "My information is positive. When you came to me and suggested that you should make two copies of everything, one correct, one a mass of incorrectness, I must admit that I thought the idea farfetched and unworkable. Events, however, have proved otherwise. I have safely received everything which you sent me, and up to the present, with the exception of that first plan of the Winchester forts, our secrets are unknown. But now we ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued that the problem of the press is confused because the critics and the apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make up for all that was not foreseen in ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... meetings on the Continent. Such an arrangement would greatly add to the comfort and enjoyment of competitors, and would, I imagine, be a great boon to the referee. Spectators, I know, would welcome it. I think a time-table might prove unworkable where handicap events are concerned, but in the case of open events I feel sure it could be introduced with great advantage to all concerned. I have so often sat hour after hour at a London tournament (having only entered for the open events), ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... as we shall presently see, when they involved imprisonment for debt. But the tentative efforts to introduce English civil law side by side with the old French code resulted in great confusion and much discontent. The land laws had become so unworkable under this dual system that they had to be left as they were. A Court of Common Pleas was set up specially for the benefit of the French Canadians. If either party demanded a jury one had to be sworn in; and French ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... shall conquer the world," boasts Lenine. If he needs a few more he can get them at the Patent Office in Washington, which is packed with plans and specifications of perpetual motion machines and other contraptions as unworkable ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... especially effective. Thus the polar reservoirs are despoiled in the act of being opened. Further objections might be taken to Mr. Lowell's irrigation scheme, but enough has been said to show that it is hopelessly unworkable." ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... into the only thing open to them—the trial of offenders. In short, they were employing energy in destruction when they ought to have been employing it in construction. Mac seems indifferent now. "The thing is unworkable," ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... ships, however, came up, and the disparity in numbers turned the other way. The Ardent attacked her on the other side, and the Triumph and Director poured a raking fire along her decks. One after another her masts fell, and the wreck rendered half her guns unworkable. Her crew were swept away, until De Winter was left alone on her quarter-deck, while below there were hardly enough men left to man the pumps. Then the gallant admiral with his own hand hauled down his colours, having fought to the admiration ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... nation has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid and unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write a pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstock himself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is a sufficient statement of the Puritan position: "MORALS, Not Art or ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... taking slaps at yourself. With the exception of a few empathic cripples, who can't use the mentacom properly anyway, everyone, inside the administrative offices, as well as out, recognized that the bureaucracy was simply unworkable as it stood. So, ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... persuaded to go the whole road, made a speech in favour of a central parliament. The proposal met with still less favour than before. British, Australian, South African, Newfoundland, and Canadian prime ministers joined in pronouncing it unworkable and undesirable. 'The proposal seems to me to be absolutely impracticable,' declared Sir Wilfrid Laurier. 'It is not a practical scheme; our present system of responsible government has not broken down,' agreed Premier Fisher of Australia. 'The creation of some body with centralized ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... remain a debatable point with his friends—quietly quitted the stage, resigning his seat in Parliament, withdrawing from the Directory of the United Irish League, and ceasing publication of his weekly newspaper on the ground, as he says himself, that "the authorised national policy having been made unworkable, nothing remained, in order to save the country from dissension, except to leave its wreckers an absolutely free field for any alternative policy ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... humans do fail, and the conclusion to which it brings me is, why hold principles that you find unworkable? I prefer a standard to which I can at least be true, in the main, and avoid self-condemnation, pricks of conscience, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... report the news. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best fountains for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each man's hope and each man's whim, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... may look with reverence, as well as pity, on many figures in history, such as Sir Thomas More's; on persons who, placed by no fault of their own in some unnatural and unrighteous position; involved in some decaying and unworkable system; conscious more or less of their false position; conscious, too, of coming danger, have done their best, according to their light, to work like men, before the night came in which no man ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... evidently contemplated by the Constitution in the choice of a President with a new House of Representatives and a new one-third of the Senate. Yet this inadequate enactment remained on the statute book for nearly one hundred years, becoming all the time more and more unworkable from obsolescence. One provision of it, moreover, still survives, that which ordains that the only evidence of refusal to accept, or of resignation from the office of President or Vice President, shall be an ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Constitution for Japan in February, 1889, was an event of great interest to the civilised world. There were, of course, at the time a large number of persons who prophesied that this Constitution would go the way of many others that had preceded it—that it would, in fact, be found unworkable and, being so found, Constitutional Government in Japan would eventuate, as it had elsewhere, in the resumption of autocratic rule as the only alternative to anarchy. It is pleasing to be able to record that these prophecies have, after nearly eighteen years' experience, not ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... thought it my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you might act on it in any way you think right. In any case, if the delay thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, I need not say that I shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and I shall be quite content to remember the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... it seemed that further multiplying lever might be added to the previous system. But this failed on account of added mass and friction; and some altogether new solution had therefore to be sought. Material contact having proved unworkable the ideal weightless and frictionless linking was obtained by introducing a new magnetic contrivance, and this with the surprising potency of magnification from 5 to 100 million times. The mind cannot grasp the meaning of this stupendous magnification; how then ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... by Watt had an extraordinary effect upon the production of iron. It created a largely increased demand for the article for the purposes of the shafting and machinery which it was employed to drive; while at the same time it cleared pits of water which before were unworkable, and by being extensively applied to the blowing of iron-furnaces and the working of the rolling-mills, it thus gave a still further impetus to the manufacture of the metal. It would be beside our purpose to enter into any statistical detail on the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... that freedom was necessary to frontier communities in meeting their peculiar problems—a freedom which the doctrine of State Rights promised them—and so he had roused Kentucky's wrath by the pedantic and, as the Court itself was presently forced to admit, unworkable decision in Green vs. Biddle. Then on the other hand, the nationalism of this period was of that negative kind which was better content to worship the Constitution than to make a really serviceable application of the national powers. After the War of ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... elected President he had reached the conclusion which most unprejudiced students of American government eventually arrive at—that the system of checks and balances is unworkable in practice and that the legislative and executive branches cannot be in fact coordinate, independent departments. Other Presidents have acted on that hypothesis without daring to admit it, and endeavored to control Congress by patronage and by threats. Mr. Wilson ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... of a prison on shore is difficult enough, but with an underwater prison, it strikes me as completely unworkable." ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... radical notions throughout The History of the Pyrates, he had little faith in their practicality. Libertalia must be understood as Defoe's best expression of political and social ideals which he admired but considered unworkable. The continuation of Misson's career in the section "Of Captain Tew" depicts the decline and fall of the utopia and the hero's tragic death as a disillusioned idealist. This, however, is another story, a story which suggested that private property ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... the water retained with a certain degree of rapidity. Soils which do not admit of this taking place are the cause of much inconvenience and injury in practice. By becoming thoroughly saturated with moisture during winter, they remain for a long time in a wet and unworkable condition, in consequence of which they cannot be prepared and sown until late in the season, and though chemically unexceptionable, they are always disadvantageous, and in some seasons greatly disappoint the ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... not attended one of the lectures required for the degree, and they presented the unanswerable excuse that the teacher in question had not lectured, having himself been excused by the University from the duty of giving the lecture. In fact the whole system would have been unworkable but for the power of granting 'graces' or dispensations, which has already been referred to: how necessary and almost universal these were, may be seen from the fact that even so conscientious a disciplinarian as Archbishop Laud, ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... letter I pointed out how cleverly the Nationalists dissect the bill, how they point out that its proposals are insulting to Ireland, how they prove that its provisions are inconsistent and unworkable, how they propose to discount the trumpery restrictions and the gimcrack "safeguards" of the proposed measure, how in short, they tear the bill to rags, laugh its powers to scorn, and hold its authors in high derision. The Belfast ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... W. M. Geldart, Elements of English Law (London and New York, 1912), 9. As this author further remarks, "if all the statutes of the realm were repealed, we should have a system of law, though, it may be, an unworkable one; if we could imagine the Common Law swept away and the Statute Law preserved, we should have only disjointed rules torn from their context, and no provision at all for many of the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the most effective of the Senators in drafting and pushing the bill, which became known by his name, was Newlands. The draft of the bill was worked over by me and others at several conferences and revised in important particulars; my active interference was necessary to prevent it from being made unworkable by an undue insistence upon States Rights, in accordance with the efforts of Mr. Mondell and other Congressmen, who consistently fought for local and private interests as against the interests of the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... that reasoning was an unworkable technique with this compound. Henry, a past master at it, had already tried threats and abuse. That hadn't worked. I next tried one of the oldest forms in the teaching ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... ostensible objectors to Mr. Hare's scheme, some profess to think the plan unworkable; but these, it will be found, are generally people who have barely heard of it, or have given it a very slight and cursory examination. Others are unable to reconcile themselves to the loss of what they term the local character of the ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... followed similar lines of federation. During the early years of capitalism there was a strong tendency to concentrate all of the power of a given business at one point, and in the hands of one man. With the growth of large enterprises, however, such centralization became unworkable. Instead of a single generalissimo, business organized the general staff. The corporation with its board of directors (executive committee) helped to make the transition, and when the United States Steel Corporation was formed, at the peak of the period of American ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing |
