DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • More 'Asinine' Quotes from Famous Books

... contained the sound proposition that the president's services should be limited to one term, thereby endorsing a material part of Governor Hayes' letter of acceptance in advance. It also contained what some have called the rascally, others the asinine propositions that the volume of currency should be made and kept equal to the wants of trade; that all National Bank circulation should be promptly and permanently retired, and legal tenders be issued in their stead, and that the payment of at least one-half of the customs ...

— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... the moose is certainly the most ungraceful of the deer family. His head is long, out of all proportion; so, too, are his legs; while his neck is short in an inverse ratio. His ears are nearly a foot in length, asinine, broad, and slouching; his eyes are small; and his muzzle square, with a deep sulcus in the middle, which gives it the appearance of being bifid. The upper lip overhangs the under by several inches, and is highly prehensile. A long tuft of coarse hair ...

— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... an anecdote as an illustration—an interpretive picture—will help to hold us to its true purpose, for a purposeless story is of all offenses on the platform the most asinine. A perfectly capital joke will fall flat when it is dragged in by the nape without evident bearing on the subject under discussion. On the other hand, an apposite anecdote has saved many a speech ...

— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... old chap, no offence, I assure you," said Cleek, more asinine than ever, as Zuilika, having picked up the piece and looked at it, disclaimed all knowledge of it, and laid it on the edge of the table without any further interest in it or him. "Just to show, you know, that I—er—couldn't have meant anything disrespectful, ...

— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... to be shod, geared, kept roadworthy and regular; say six thousand country wagoners, thick-soled peasants: then, hanging to the skirts of these, in miscellaneous crazy vehicles and weak teams, equine and asinine, are one or two thousand sutler people, male and female, not of select quality, though on them, too, we keep a sharp eye. The series covers many miles, as many as twenty English miles (says Tempelhof), unless in favorable points you compress them into five, going ...

— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... Italians and French, and theatrical Americans, and English swells, could not endeavour to make the apology which I have just made for the Irish Brigade generally. She knew that her father had made an ass of himself. All the asinine proportions of the affair had been so explained to her as to leave no doubt on her mind as to the matter. But the more she was sure of it, the more resolved she became that Lord Castlewell should not call her father an ass. She might do so,—and undoubtedly would after her own fashion,—but ...

— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... with ingenious coquetry so as to make around the legs patterns which make them look as if they were wearing open-worked stockings. When they are white, the end of the tail and the mane are dyed with henna. Of course this is only in the case of thorough-bred animals, of the aristocracy of the asinine race, and is not indulged ...

— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... pronounced ass. Trefusis, on the contrary, was the last man of her acquaintance whom she would have thought of as a very nice fellow or a virtuous gentleman; but he was not an ass, although he was obstinate in his Socialistic fads. She had indeed suspected him of weakness almost asinine with respect to Gertrude, but then all men were asses in their dealings with women, and since he had transferred his weakness to her own account it no longer seemed to need justification. And now, ...

— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement—or one will have to pay dearly for it!—"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me to be right"—this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into ...

— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... original owners of the soil; with far greater reason we in the far East might shout, "China for the Chinese", "Japan for the Japanese". I will quote Mr. T. S. Sutton, English Secretary of the Chinese-American League of Justice, on this point. "The most asinine whine in the world," he says, "is that of 'America for the Americans' or 'China for the Chinese', etc. It is the hissing slogan of greed, fear, envy, selfishness, ignorance and prejudice. No man, no human being ...

— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang

... constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of it," he says, "the French entered into my empty brain"; but he is careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, ...

— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... is surely a disastrous spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No better;—if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their neck!—My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which ...

— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think about, in the dark, and when he is alone, ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... glasses, and sneezed. Then he smoothed out the already remarkably smooth hairs he had left on his head, rubbed his hands as if he were beginning to feel quite at home, and tittered when there was any sign of a stoppage in his asinine eloquence. ...

— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... must rewrite it! It's impossible to leave it, for it is in a devil of a mess. My God! if the public likes my works as little as I do those of other people which I am reading, what an ass I am! There is something asinine about our writing.... ...

— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... nowhere such a problem. There are twelve thousand horses, for one thing, to be shod, geared, kept roadworthy and regular; say six thousand country wagoners, thick-soled peasants: then, hanging to the skirts of these, in miscellaneous crazy vehicles and weak teams, equine and asinine, are one or two thousand sutler people, male and female, not of select quality, though on them, too, we keep a sharp eye. The series covers many miles, as many as twenty English miles (says Tempelhof), unless in favorable ...

— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle