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More "Impractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in India who, when they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty, if it be ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... "you are, as usual, brilliant. Your imagination vaults—your daring is splendid. But as usual you are visionary and impractical. Buy them? To do this would require the credit of a nation! It would be subversive of all peace and all industry. You do not realize the sums required. You do not realize how ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... the first to introduce rifles into Ceylon, which were then regarded by the highest authorities in the island as impractical innovations, too difficult to sight, whereas an ordinary gun could be used with ball more quickly in ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Waring, marks only more clearly our temperamental difference; but it does not mark that one or the other of us is less a dedicated spirit. If I have wandered away from the warmth of poesy and become practical, have you not remained and become confirmed in all that is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day, have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... He lead Israel back to the Promised Land, Palestine, and not before," wrote another. While the Jews of America, in their pride as American citizens, were as swift as their brethren abroad to ridicule Noah's plans for Ararat, denouncing them as impious or impractical. ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... side. Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... to see this idea abandoned at the very moment of its birth. It's a good idea, and in no way impractical, in my opinion. So permit me to make another proposition. I will build the twenty theatres myself, and furnish the films for them, provided the young ladies will agree to assume the entire management of them ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... of his wild notions adopted, and gasped in profound astonishment at the alacrity of his townsmen. Consetena Tate had unwittingly stumbled upon a solution of that "surplus" difficulty. He wasn't thinking of the surplus. He was too utterly impractical for that. He was a tall, gangling, effeminate, romantic, middle-aged man whom his parents still supported and viewed with deference as a superior personality. He was Smyrna's only ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... through weary years, hoping against reason, the victim of illogical constancy to a mere young man. Sweet and gracious Ellen Berstoun, so slender and pretty and charming, wasting her fragrance in the old garden and the dark pine-woods for the sake of certain passionate memories and the most impractical of day-dreams, was a sight to ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... fails to appreciate the spirit with which a church member works, even if results are not always as anticipated, or even if the project itself is not always practical. He will cheerfully put his hand down into his pocket and pay the bill for some impractical scheme, rather than dampen the ardor of an enthusiastic worker. He knows that experience will come with practice, but that a willing, zealous ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... in the soft accent of Italy, 'as the eminent but slightly impractical Hungarian—I refer to Kossuth—said, Staten Island "is lovely, but exposed." We should not be safe there. Listen; in my house I have prepared a secret chamber, fifty feet square, plentifully supplied with healthful though plain provisions, and furnished with a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... systematically infect other animals with their own rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the trouble to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that unless he would devote himself entirely to ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes—the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. I ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the courses to Mars and Venus thoroughly charted—but considered a trip to Jupiter somewhat impractical. So, what with Dane's presence and the mysterious white streaks that so often shot up into the sky like fuzzy yarn from the AFDC base, it wasn't hard to guess what ...
— This is Klon Calling • Walt Sheldon
... habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. For most of us, the best education is that which makes us the best and most obedient servants. This is the way of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seriously try ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... woman's business," he almost sneered, critically surveying the striped walls of the reception-room; and later, "Impractical and affected, I call it," he said. "If I was building a house I'd steer clear of any ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... that no walnut orchards have been called to my attention that were completely killed. Several badly neglected orchards and two orchards where it is said that the temperature dropped lower than minus 25 degrees F. are so severely damaged that it is impractical to try to save them, but even these ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... first part of the story, and with a harlot in the second, have only occasional and languid interest; it is one of the many books of Dostoevski that one vigorously vows never to read again. The sickly and impractical Ordinov spends most of his time analysing his mental states, and indulging in that ecstasy of thought which is perhaps the most fatal of all Slavonic passions. Soon after appeared a strange and far better novel, called "The Gambler." This ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... couldn't quite grasp it. Now let me ask you something more. Have you had any reason for keeping this a secret, other than your fear of confessing that you violated a few bigoted and idiotic mining rules—which, after all, are binding only upon sentiment—and which your success has proved to be utterly impractical?" ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... didn't know much. After all, he pointed out, it was impossible to check everyone in an office building of that size, or at least impractical. Furthermore, it was a cover operation, and any kind of a careful check on people in the building would warn them that something was going on. Tom agreed, however, that it was better to be safe than sorry. JANIG would run a check on the barber, ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Roeser, who was a mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... did the old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her. Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and achieve a ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... battery itself, but with the circuit. A gravity battery is suitable only for a circuit which is normally closed. It is therefore undesirable for electric bells, induction coils and all other open-circuit apparatus. The circuit should also have a high resistance. This makes it impractical for running fan motors, as the motor would have to be wound with fine wire and it would then require a large number of batteries to give a sufficiently ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not bother any more about what ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... point refers to the omission of any authority after a cultivar-name. Many cultivars are first described in reports of trials, in catalogues, and other anonymous publications; this makes the quoting of an authority impractical, but there is provision in the Code for writing the raiser's or introducer's name in brackets after the cultivar-name if so ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... often be reduced to a small amount by steaming instead of boiling the vegetable, or any drained off can be used in gravy, soup, sauce, or some similar fashion. The strong flavor of some vegetables, however, makes such economy rather impractical. ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... bloodshed; it was guarded by the Royalist Cossack clans, as lawless as they are brave. The Ufa Directorate derived its authority from the moderate Social Revolutionary party composed of the "Intelligenzia"—republican, visionary, and impractical. Kerensky was, from all accounts, a perfect representative of this class, verbose and useless so far as practical reconstructive work was concerned. This class blamed the unswerving loyalty of the Cossacks and the old army officers for all the crimes of which the ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... large or small quantity, all the goods and wares of these magazines which are used for various purposes. Those which are in danger of spoiling shall be distributed by his order; and what shall not be thus disposed of shall not be passed over, at the time, to the royal officials. That ordinance is impractical, for, besides the continual occupations of the governor in affairs of greater importance and his inability to personally supervise things so minute, your Majesty had issued the necessary ordinance before the visit, and I have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... impractical. Parasight was worthless beyond the borders of the null. No surrogate could penetrate it and no weapon would operate within it. It would be most unsafe for any true man to enter. There, one would be subject to gross, physical attack and unable to ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... the Himalayas." My suggestion one day to Dwarka Prasad, the young son of our landlord in Bareilly, fell on unsympathetic ears. He revealed my plan to my elder brother, who had just arrived to see Father. Instead of laughing lightly over this impractical scheme of a small boy, Ananta made it a definite point to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... effective with the "rabbit." He never relied on speed; in fact, Merritt often scornfully accused him of being unable to break a pane of glass; he used principally what we called floaters and a change of pace. Both styles were absolutely impractical with ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... or, for instance, the nun-like expression I had seen on her face the day before—all that was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When in my collisions with her I tried to define what sort of a person she was, my psychology went no farther than deciding that she was giddy, impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine logic; and it seemed to me that that was quite sufficient. But now that she was crying I had a passionate ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... my name in this book I promise to take good care of all the books I read in the Library and of those I take home and to obey the rules of the Library." Such a method of registration is not impractical, even in a large library provided the work is carefully planned to admit ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... my father saw to all that. He seemed not to want me to work: not that I hold that against him; he'd an idea I'd turn out a genius of some sort or other, I believe.... Well, he failed and died all in a week, and I found myself left with an extensive wardrobe, expensive tastes, an impractical education—and not so much of that that you'd notice it—and not a cent.... I was too proud to look to my friends for help in those days—and perhaps that was as well; I sought jobs on my own.... Did you ever ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... fiddle. His eyes were paler than his daughter's, and not nearly so bright, and he had a way of staring at a thing for minutes at a time as if he did not see it—and usually he didn't. Altogether, he was a very impractical person. He must have made a feeble sailor—a regular fool as a look-out—and the wonder is that he lost only one leg during his deep-sea career. He looked at the skipper with that calm, far-away shimmer in his eyes, combing his thin ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... Blake's own admission, that the proposed venture must fail. It has been evident to some of us from the start." It was a fighter of the old school who was speaking; his voice was that of one whose vision has dimmed, who sees but the dreams of impractical visionaries in the newer inventions, and whose reliance for safety is placed only in the weapons ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... promptly sends a vigorous though respectful reply, which is intended to convey that they are to have done with such impractical foolery. It is a world-shaking fight he has on hand. The honour and military glory of France are at stake. It is not for mere theoretic upholders of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity to meddle with such things. He says to them, "Kellerman is an excellent General, and could lead an army ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... blood meal, leather dust, feather meal, or meat meal (tankage). It is a powerful source of nitrogen with significant amounts of phosphorus. Like other slaughterhouse byproducts its high cost may make it impractical to use to adjust the C/N of compost piles. Seed meals or chicken manure (chickens are mainly fed seeds) have somewhat lower nitrogen contents than animal byproducts but their price per pound of actual nutrition is more reasonable. If hoof and horn meal ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... It is impractical for the manufacturers to make complete foundation drawings, as they are not familiar with the lay-out of pipes and the relative position of other apparatus in the station. All that the manufacturers' drawing is intended to do is to show the customer where ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... overestimate human beings like that? Your Miss Cassandra, or whatever her name is, doesn't know her history. Those cities and towers and other human devices you speak of are none of them any good to us. Who would take such an impractical view of the world as you do? If you don't accept the premise that the earth is dominated by the flies, that the flies are the most widespread and most important race on earth, you'll scarcely get a real ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... selfish. They believe that they merit all the blessings of health, distinction and wealth that may come to them, and they condemn their less fortunate brother as one deserving his fate. The poor, the weak and the impractical did not themselves bring about their condition. Who knows how large a part the mystery of birth and heredity play in one's life and what environment and opportunity, or lack of it, means to us? Health, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... Negro's natural tendency his unfortunate heritage from slavery, and we see at once that the race needs especially to be rooted and grounded in the underlying scientific principles of concrete things. The time when the world bowed before merely abstract, impractical knowledge has well-nigh passed; the demand of this age and hour is not so much what a man knows,—though the world respects and reveres knowledge and always will, I hope,—what the world wants to know is what a man can do and how well he ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears—the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites! But still, it's all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls—and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... "Impractical, but sensible," commented the ambassador. He turned a page. "There's Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It's technically backward. There's a landing grid, but space exports are skins and metal ingots and practically nothing else. There is no broadcast power. ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... government may think proper to afford would in all probability be extremely useful and profitable to the country in the future. Provided, always, that such societies are really devoted to the dissemination of information and the careful organization of the industry, and are not merely visionary and impractical cultivators of misapplied enthusiasm. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... is erroneous, much in textbooks that is misleading if not fallacious, and that there are still many designers who are unable to think in terms of the new material apart from the vestures of timber and structural steel, and whose designs, therefore, are cumbersome and impractical. The writer, however, cannot agree with the author that the practice is as radically wrong as he seems to think. Nor is he entirely in accord with Mr. Godfrey in his "constructive criticism" of those practices in which he concurs, ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... to take up the various elements or divisions of psychological study as determined by a consensus of psychologists, and to illustrate each in turn from the three types of management; but the results from any such method would be apt to seem unrelated and impractical, i.e., it would be a lengthy process to get results that would be of immediate, ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... grudge the hardship, for he carried on his back a bulky bundle of clothes for Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned him the title ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Progressive Introduction of Fire-Arms Into the Armament of the Infantryman 4. The Classes of Fire Employed with Each Weapon 5. Methods of Fire Used in the Presence of the Enemy; Methods Recommended or Ordered but Impractical 6. Fire at Will—Its Efficacy 7. Fire by Rank Is a Fire to Occupy the Men in Ranks 8. The Deadly Fire Is the Fire of Skirmishers 9. The Absolute Impossibility ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... the tunnel to the other, and that the traveler should be moved backward or forward, as might be required, and thus deliver the concrete from the end of the belt directly over the place in which it was to be deposited in the bench-walls. As a matter of fact, it was found impractical in operation to move the gantry readily, owing to its great weight, which was supported on only four ordinary car wheels and their bearings, and it was found more convenient to leave the arm in one position ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... a speaker before the Royal Society in London observed that in order to obtain rotary output from a reciprocating steam engine, a crank "naturally occurs in theory," but that in fact the crank is impractical because of the irregular rate of going of the engine and its variable length of stroke. He said that on the first variation of length of stroke the machine would be "either broken to pieces, or turned back."[6] John Smeaton, in the front rank of English steam engineers of his time, was ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... pungent. Presently there came a poignant edge to his trailing tones. After giving the subject new points of view, showing him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely radical, so impractical. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had made for him. Why he should wish for a flint-lock rifle was an unanswerable question, but someone wanted that sort of a gun or it would not have been made, and my father's letters showed him to be a man of sentiment, and impractical, just the sort of fellow to use a flint-lock when he might just as well have had a modern breech-loading ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... into the jungle with me; yet someone must go in search of your father. He is more than apt to wandering off aimlessly, regardless of danger or direction, and Mr. Philander is only a trifle less impractical than he. You will pardon my bluntness, but our lives are all in jeopardy here, and when we get your father back something must be done to impress upon him the dangers to which he exposes you as well as himself ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Eccarius, Liebknecht, and others might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. They seemed to have forgotten, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... shown enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their own real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... she said, "and sounds very poetic, but it would be rather impractical for us all ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... recognizing the symptoms of intoxication, and as no one but a physician can judge the effects of the alkaloid he himself should remain with the patient until the efficient dose has been absorbed. This is manifestly impractical and we therefore maintain that the alkaloid is not suited for the treatment ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... (1795-1854).—Poet, b. at Berlin, Conn., was a precocious child, and a morbid and impractical, though versatile man, with a fatal facility in writing verse on all manner of subjects and in nearly every known metre. His sentimentalism appealed to a wide circle, but his was one of the tapers which were extinguished by Lowell. He had also a reputation as a geologist. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... have passed from the middle ages to modern times."[210] It is a tribute to the excellence of Buddhist discipline that a prince who spent twenty-six years as a monk should have emerged as neither a bigot nor an impractical mystic but as an active, enlightened and progressive monarch. The equality and simplicity of monastic life disposed him to come into direct touch with his subjects and to adopt straightforward measures which might not have occurred ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... time in talking about it," he told the grateful members who sought to press his hands. "Go home and organize. I've got your name. Get your neighbours into line, and keep me informed. I'll pay for the postage-stamps. I'm no impractical reformer, and if we're going to do this thing, we'll ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there on the white plain to serve the present, and temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had collected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical, speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions. Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office and shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... at the far side of the hut awaiting she knew not what impending fate. She could not sleep so filled was her mind with wild schemes of escape though each new one must always be discarded as impractical. Half an hour after the warrior had returned her to her prison he rose and entered the hut, where he tried to engage in conversation with her. Groping across the interior he leaned his short spear against the wall and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for a long time, mechanically drawing little designs upon a blotter. Wild impulses, impractical plans, followed each other in quick succession. They crystallized finally into a definite resolve, and her lips set in a ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... been good—her father good. Every one was good,—even impractical, absurd Mary Lou, and homely Lydia Lord, and little Miss Sherman at the office, with her cold red hands, and her hungry eyes,—every one was ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... I am interested in the saving of human life. That comes first with me. My theories, as you call them, come second. I cannot undertake the promotion of these theories as a salaried advocate. This is the only stupid and impractical thing that my grandfather ever did, I believe. He must have known that the terms of the will could not be carried out. Mr. Dodge is right. It was his way of leaving the property to me after declaring that he would not do so, after adding ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... heartened me for this petty business of living, you have praised my verses, you have even accorded me certain pecuniary assistance as to their publication—though I must admit that to accept it of you was very distasteful to me. Ah!" Felix Kennaston cried, with a quick lift of speech, "impractical child that I am, I had not thought of that! My love had caused me to forget the great barrier ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Impractical men have told me that right will always triumph of itself; it needs no fighters to support it. The man who believes that is ignorant, and such ignorance is dangerous. Right is always trampled down when no fighter upholds it. But men will fight for right who will not fight ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... adapt myself to such a life as people had led eighteen hundred years ago. I thought that if I took the example of the Saviour's life for my guiding star, I would certainly get along very well. Undoubtedly this would have sufficed in a spiritual sense, but I found that it would be impractical as applied to my temporal welfare and the requirements of the present time. For I could not perform miracles nor could I live as the Saviour had done, roaming over the country and teaching the natives. And then, seeing that there were so many Jews in New Mexico, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... like to tell us, also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's Bohemia reveals the fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, the cost per caput will be nil. Not only so, but the poet ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the Wood King. What had I to hope for? What chance, however remote, was there of successfully wresting that blooming prize from the arms of her captor? Force was out of the question; stealth was utterly impractical; as for cajolery, apparently the sole remaining means of winning back the Princess—why, one might as well try the persuasion of a penny flute upon a hungry eagle as seek to rouse Ar-hap's sympathies for bereaved Hath in that way. Surely to go forward would mean ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... his sign on the pass and said heavily, "All right then, Ben. That's it. Maybe if you go back up to that place for a few days and see that psycho who was writing a book again, perhaps you'll realize how impractical it is." ...
— The Real Hard Sell • William W Stuart
... and there, they would do for birthday presents for her aunts. And the stovepipe could be sent out to the farm to be put around the peach trees to keep the cows off. How in thunder she was ever going to get a stovepipe around a peach tree never crossed her mind. She is just as impractical as a baby. ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... brilliant, talented, impulsive seventeen-year-old girl, who is suddenly required to fill her mother's place at the head of a household, with a literary, impractical ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... our Stanwood is so impractical. Probably he would have declined the commission. Atmospheric envelopes slowly en route to the dead letter office of dream pastels demand his whole attention. Painting is crass; he mildly cameos. Tonal nuances—shades of imperceptible difference ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Miss Smith,—just it. Your heart is good, but you need strong practical advice. You know we weak women are so impractical, as my poor Job so often said. Now, I'm going to arrange to endow this school with at least—at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. One condition is that my friend, Mr. Cresswell here, and these other gentlemen, including sound ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... acres of land" from the government; for it stood in the way of real effort in practical directions. So, while a nobler ideal is of incalculable benefit to a people, it is a real evil for them to be indulging in impractical dreams. They waste effort and divert power from practical ends, and result in that kind of disappointment that discourages the heart and unnerves the arm. Those, then, who talk of nationalism as a solution of our troubles, ought to tell us just what they are after, and what methods they propose. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... speaks of a reconnaissance made by Thomas, Smith and Brannan on the north side of the river to a point opposite the mouth of Citico Creek, near the head of Missionary Ridge, which he thought at that time "proved Smith's plan of attack impractical." But further investigation proved that a passage could he made higher up the river, and when Sherman was taken to the place that had been selected, examining both the place for the bridge and its approaches, on both sides of the river, with his usual care, he closed ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... you and the others seem absurd. Grim knew that, of course, but when you're dealing with a woman there's just one chance in a hundred that she may think of something vital that hasn't occurred to anybody else. Most women aren't practical; but it's the impractical ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the Chateau de St. Louis ever heard of ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... such things, or the positive worth of an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily sentimental, naive, or impractical. A bit late, realization is growing that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people interfere massively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest sense—the sense of the integrity of a place to look ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... should have said so flatly. If it meant the Army should try unsegregated and mixed units, it should have said so. Its report, McCloy concluded, should have put these matters beyond doubt. He was equally forthright in his rejection of the quota, which he found impractical because it deprived the Army of many qualified Negroes who would be unable to enlist when the quota was full. Even if the quota was meant as a floor rather than a ceiling, McCloy thought it objectionable. "I do not see any place," he ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... has to send out word that no sums except those already subscribed can be received! The Christian Scientists have a faith of the mustard-seed variety. What a pity some of our practical Christian folk have not a faith approximate to that of these "impractical" ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... All sorts of impractical schemes tormented her feverish brain. She would appeal to the manager of the place. She was a woman. She would understand. She would do any work, anything, for her bare keep. Take care of the rooms, ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... reverential, too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men, measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash, revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could fail to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to break every trammel ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that at least 45 per cent of clay is required to fill the voids and bind the sand grains together, because the clay spreads the sand grains apart during the mixing, thus having the effect of increasing the voids. As a matter of experiment, it is found to be impractical to secure by available construction methods mixtures of sufficient uniformity to render it necessary to exercise great exactness in proportioning the components, but reasonable care in proportioning ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... war of its picturesqueness, were in German prisons or lay in unmarked and forgotten graves before Namur and Antwerp and Termonde. The Belgians that I had left were dirty, dog-tired, and disheartened. They were short of food, short of ammunition, short of everything save valor. The picturesque but impractical uniforms they wore—the green tunics and cherry-colored breeches of the Guides, the towering bearskins of the gendarmes, the shiny leather hats of the Carabinieri—were foul ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... I have heard that it is not quite as large as the old sixteen-inch rifle that they had to throw away because of some trouble, I don't know just what. It was impractical, in spite of its size and great range. But this new gun they are going to test is considerably ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... American life. Both their feet are firmly fixed upon the solid ground. They generally know just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not, for the most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent unusual places. The finespun speculations of the philosophers and the impractical dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the world they live in is a sharply defined and clearly lighted and rather limited place. They like to say to this man come and he cometh, and to that man go and he goeth. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... The house, the surroundings, where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort to shabby makeshifts ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... action. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot, organized everywhere Turnvereine, or gymnastic clubs, as a tangible form of expressing this demand. Among the students of the universities liberal patriotic clubs called Burschenschaften were organized, idealistic in their aims and impractical in their propaganda, where "every man with his bonnet on his head, a pot of beer in his hand, a pipe or seegar in his mouth, and a song upon his lips, never doubting but that he and his companions are training themselves to be ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... am particularly interested in Pete's opinion of your abilities," Addington rejoined coldly. "My dear little girl," he went on, palpably striving for patience and gentleness, "there's nothing you could do to help me. Women are too impractical. This is a man's work, besides. By the way, after we've had our little outing, I'll leave you with Lulu. Honey and Pete and I are going to meet at the Clubhouse to work ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... are, in the first place, the get-rich-quick swindles, the out-and-out impostures, which have deceived the credulous into investments that never could pay. Bonanza mines, impractical inventions, town lots laid out on the prairie, orange groves that existed only on paper-such bogus hopes have enticed many an honest man and woman, who could ill afford to lose, into turning over their small earnings to the brazen exploiters.[Footnote: For cases, see ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Father Waite, "of the mighty fact that there is nothing so practical as real Christianity. I want you to tell Professor Cane that. He calls her 'the girl with the Utopian views,' because of her ingenuous replies in his sociological class. But I want you to show him that she is very far from being impractical." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and you look hopelessly about you at the stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary. Things don't work out as happily as ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... preventive discovery since vaccination, the mosquito dogma, the Crescent City marshaled her defenses. This time there was no panic, no mob-rule of terrified thousands, no mad rushing from stunned inertia to wildly impractical action; but instead the enlistment of the whole city in an army of sanitation. Every citizen became a soldier of the public health. And when, long before the plague-killing frost came, the battle was over, New Orleans had triumphed not only in the most ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... thought, this was impractical. Parasight was worthless beyond the borders of the null. No surrogate could penetrate it and no weapon would operate within it. It would be most unsafe for any true man to enter. There, one would be subject to gross, physical attack and unable ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... look. The Eliot woman, in her speech before the Woman's Forum, had doubtless placed the responsibility for the continuation of those factory conditions upon the district attorney's office, had doubtless repeated those damn fool, impractical questions which the suffragists were displaying in ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... see this idea abandoned at the very moment of its birth. It's a good idea, and in no way impractical, in my opinion. So permit me to make another proposition. I will build the twenty theatres myself, and furnish the films for them, provided the young ladies will agree to assume the entire management of them ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... put in Mr. Heath's heavy voice again, "I tell you, Dave, it can't be done. It's impractical. Why, no car could advance against ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... leave you here alone with these cutthroats, and you certainly can't venture into the jungle with me; yet someone must go in search of your father. He is more than apt to wandering off aimlessly, regardless of danger or direction, and Mr. Philander is only a trifle less impractical than he. You will pardon my bluntness, but our lives are all in jeopardy here, and when we get your father back something must be done to impress upon him the dangers to which he exposes you as well ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... deputy warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W.H. Mackay, wrote a letter to the Attorney-General on the 6th of November, 1913, parts of which were published in newspapers about that time. In this letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, arrogant, negligent, extravagant, visionary and impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners, and was totally unfit for the position he held. He goes on ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... find a working definition; for this political or social movement is based upon a system of a priori reasoning which often is vague and lacking in deductions from practical experience. Socialism also is unreal in its assumptions and impractical in its conclusions, so that a person finds it almost impossible to give a definition that will include within its scope all the Socialistic vagaries and explain all the suppositions based upon nonexistent facts. Bearing ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... after an energetic September, succeeded in putting all the furniture to rights and in evoking curtains and linen. Anybody, even the impractical Father, can fill a house with furniture, but it takes two women and at least four weeks to make the furniture look as though it had grown there. She had roamed the fields, and brought home golden-rod and Michaelmas daisies and maple leaves. She no longer panted ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... compelling men like Carl to give their lives and sacrifice their wives. These men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. They could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece—modest ones—on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. Professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things in their ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... required to fill the voids and bind the sand grains together, because the clay spreads the sand grains apart during the mixing, thus having the effect of increasing the voids. As a matter of experiment, it is found to be impractical to secure by available construction methods mixtures of sufficient uniformity to render it necessary to exercise great exactness in proportioning the components, but reasonable care in proportioning the ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... this level, too, must be at a point where construction work was possible. The river was incredibly rough and treacherous. From the first they packed everything in waterproof bags. The canvas canoes were impractical. The river was full of hidden rock and by the third day the second canoe was torn to pieces and they were depending on rafts made from the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... see him you'll understand. Nice old chap as ever lived. Only impractical, dreamy. Gentle as a sheep—and no more capable of running that big, expensive plant than a motherly old ewe. That's where the trouble is. When father's closed down on him and edged him out—quietly, you understand—it'll be the best thing that ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... however, where only a few, or possibly only one, of the fingers has sufficient ridge detail for identification. In such instances a search through the FBI files would be impractical. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of making a positive identification by the use of the one finger. Though a search through the file is not possible, a comparison can be made with the fingerprints of individuals who it is thought the deceased may be or, in some instances, with ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... Philip replied, "that is ever the cry of the selfish. They believe that they merit all the blessings of health, distinction and wealth that may come to them, and they condemn their less fortunate brother as one deserving his fate. The poor, the weak and the impractical did not themselves bring about their condition. Who knows how large a part the mystery of birth and heredity play in one's life and what environment and opportunity, or lack of it, means to us? Health, ability, energy, favorable environment ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... long life he had known it to be the only reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had never found it a very cheerful atmosphere ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... or two on his fiddle. His eyes were paler than his daughter's, and not nearly so bright, and he had a way of staring at a thing for minutes at a time as if he did not see it—and usually he didn't. Altogether, he was a very impractical person. He must have made a feeble sailor—a regular fool as a look-out—and the wonder is that he lost only one leg during his deep-sea career. He looked at the skipper with that calm, far-away shimmer in his eyes, combing his thin whiskers with ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... errors and crimes. Nor, inflamed with rage and scorn, was he wise in the remedies he proposed. Only God can overrule the wrath of man, and cause melodious birth-songs to succeed the agonies of dissolution. Burke saw the absurdity of sophistical theories and impractical equality,—liberty running into license, and license running into crime; he saw pretensions, quackeries, inexperience, folly, and cruelty, and he prophesied what their legitimate effect would be: but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... you can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... (among them spinach, peas, carrots, and asparagus), can often be reduced to a small amount by steaming instead of boiling the vegetable, or any drained off can be used in gravy, soup, sauce, or some similar fashion. The strong flavor of some vegetables, however, makes such economy rather impractical. ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... to work: not that I hold that against him; he'd an idea I'd turn out a genius of some sort or other, I believe.... Well, he failed and died all in a week, and I found myself left with an extensive wardrobe, expensive tastes, an impractical education—and not so much of that that you'd notice it—and not a cent.... I was too proud to look to my friends for help in those days—and perhaps that was as well; I sought jobs on my own.... Did you ever keep ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the trouble to live ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... that first morning. The half-track was driven to the edge of the Dumps. Within the Dumps one walks—or does not go. Phobos is an airless world, and yet so small that rockets are impractical. The terrain is broken and littered with the refuse of half a dozen worlds, but the ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... amount of material or "critical mass" be brought together in contact for the nuclear explosion to take place. The more efficient fission weapons tend to fall in the yield range of tens of kilotons. Higher explosive yields become increasingly complex and impractical. ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... hour. Reedy watching with a gloating shrewdness the impractical fellow who had tried to farm with money. He knew Benson had lost money on the last crop, and besides had been thoroughly ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... The impractical cooperative which fails is bad enough, for it discourages many people from making a second attempt, but the false cooperative is a greater menace to the cooperative movement. The private promoter with his selfish interests rigs ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... younger than you," she said. "He has no place in the world. He has neither position nor salary. He is impractical. Loving you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing something that would give him the right to marry, instead of paltering around with those stories of his and with childish dreams. Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never grow up. He does not take to responsibility and a man's work ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... government gave him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned for debt, and sank into such abject poverty that he depended on his friends for bread. How much the gloomy Philip II is satirized in Cervantes' masterpiece has ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... those earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It means these changes ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... you," said the plump sister,—her name was Maggie. "Holly's a fool about some things. Holly is trying the Uplift, and he shuts his eyes to things that don't fit in with his theories. If you've copied much of that stuff he's been writing, you ought to know how impractical he is. Holly's got his head in the clouds, and he won't look at what's right under his feet." Again she looked reproof at Holly, and again Holly's lips quirked around the stem ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... and impractical as were many of his ideas, to an age tired of absurdities and pretensions and injustice, and suffering deeply from the abuses of both Church and State, his attractively written book seemed almost inspired. The Social Contract virtually became the Bible of the French Revolutionists. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... companions of his own age. He was peculiarly a mother's boy, content to grow up dreamy and impractical at her quiet hearthstone. Consequently he was awkward and reserved, easily imposed upon, and lacking in self-reliance. These qualities remained with him as long as he lived, and caused him many painful failures. On the other hand, the pious example of his mother and the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... hundred years ago. I thought that if I took the example of the Saviour's life for my guiding star, I would certainly get along very well. Undoubtedly this would have sufficed in a spiritual sense, but I found that it would be impractical as applied to my temporal welfare and the requirements of the present time. For I could not perform miracles nor could I live as the Saviour had done, roaming over the country and teaching the natives. And then, seeing ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... in talking about it," he told the grateful members who sought to press his hands. "Go home and organize. I've got your name. Get your neighbours into line, and keep me informed. I'll pay for the postage-stamps. I'm no impractical reformer, and if we're going to do this thing, we'll have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... disregarded altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the Chateau de St. Louis ever heard of them. In one case a new ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... have been said of Lockwin that he was impractical; that he was a dreamer. He had done singular things. He had not studied ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... keeping this a secret, other than your fear of confessing that you violated a few bigoted and idiotic mining rules—which, after all, are binding only upon sentiment—and which your success has proved to be utterly impractical?" ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the hardship, for he carried on his back a bulky bundle of clothes for Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned him the title of Old Prospector. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... King. What had I to hope for? What chance, however remote, was there of successfully wresting that blooming prize from the arms of her captor? Force was out of the question; stealth was utterly impractical; as for cajolery, apparently the sole remaining means of winning back the Princess—why, one might as well try the persuasion of a penny flute upon a hungry eagle as seek to rouse Ar-hap's sympathies for bereaved ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... dismisses Gandhi's program as one of an impractical dreamer, let it first reflect on a definition of SATYAGRAHA by the Master ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... gutter says, "I'll never reach it." And he is right. He never will—of himself, alone. Yet that's truth, true truth. "A hopeless case" you say; "utter impractical idealizing! Case ruled out of court." Just wait, that's only half the case, and not ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... convince me that you're hopelessly impractical. Give it up, young man! Give it up and get into something that'll pay the bill at the corner grocery. Solar power is about as practical as wave power. Fit merely for the dreams of poets. Sorry not to be able to give you more time. ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... up in the market-place, would have done well enough as the god of the new people. Such a god they had indeed made in their own image, as all peoples make the god they truly serve; though of course certain of the idealists went to church on Sunday, and there knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. But while the Growing went on, this god of their market-place was their true god, their familiar and spirit-control. They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... difference between the mixture of colored light and of colored pigments, not with the idea of explaining it here, but to emphasize their difference; for in the next chapter we shall describe the practical making of a color sphere with pigments, which would be quite impractical, could we have only the colors of the spectrum to work with. See Appendix ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... dealt with somewhat fully, to show that the matters along the lines of man's interior, intuitive, spiritual, thought, soul life, instead of being, as they are so many times regarded, merely indefinite, sentimental, or impractical, are, on the contrary, powerfully, omnipotently real, and are of all practical things in the world the most practical, and, in the truest and deepest sense, the only truly practical things there are. And pre-eminently is this true when we look with a ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... forthcoming, all of them impractical, and the already frayed nerves of the passengers began to show evidence of reaching the snapping point. Bob's employer was among those who had gathered in the corridor, and he decidedly favored the ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... a mayor, not to help the woolen-goods business. There was old Hon. Calvin Dow, a pensioner of David Morrison, now passed on to the considerately befriending Stewart, and Mac Tavish was deeply disgusted with a man who was so impractical in his business affairs that, though he had been financially busted for ten years, he still kept along in the bland belief, based on Stewart's assurances, that money was due him from the Morrisons. Whenever Mac Tavish went to the safe, obeying ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... thought that a schooner rig allowed more adjustment of sail area and thus would give better handling of the boat under all weather conditions. This was important because oyster dredging could be carried on in rough weather when tonging would be impractical. Like the Maryland terrapin smack, the Carolina sharpie schooner adhered closely to New Haven principles of design and construction. However, Carolina sharpie schooners were larger than terrapin smacks, ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... entire village was on the march toward my station. Their intentions were quite easy to determine. They were armed with pitchforks, scythes, axes, and other tools which could be converted to offensive use. I established a protective screen, but realized that to set up a permanent defense would be impractical and even harmful. I therefore called the cruiser, requesting evacuation for myself and for young Forell. Prior to evacuation, I demolished all my fixed equipment, so that the only things left for the villagers to find when they entered the ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... the strange scenes around her with amused interest. There was a faint blush upon her round cheek as she greeted her old admirer. Mr. Hemstetter shook hands with Johnny in a very friendly way. He was an oldish, impractical man—one of that numerous class of erratic business men who are forever ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... URINE.—In diseases of the urinary apparatus, a careful examination of the urine is very necessary in order to be able to form a correct diagnosis. In domestic animals it is impractical to attempt to determine the exact amount of urine passed within a certain time, but we can make a general estimate of the quantity passed by carefully observing the animal and noting the condition of ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... tendency his unfortunate heritage from slavery, and we see at once that the race needs especially to be rooted and grounded in the underlying scientific principles of concrete things. The time when the world bowed before merely abstract, impractical knowledge has well-nigh passed; the demand of this age and hour is not so much what a man knows,—though the world respects and reveres knowledge and always will, I hope,—what the world wants to know is what a man can do and how well ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind. The reverential, too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men, measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash, revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could fail to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... difficulties. Having farmed all their lives and been content with the meager results they had obtained, they shrugged their shoulders at Martin's experiments with irrigation and fertilizer, regarding his attempts as the impractical theories of a fanatic. Of youth, Sefton Falls contained only a scattering, the more enterprising young men having gone either to the city ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... time in his life, Consetena Tate found one of his wild notions adopted, and gasped in profound astonishment at the alacrity of his townsmen. Consetena Tate had unwittingly stumbled upon a solution of that "surplus" difficulty. He wasn't thinking of the surplus. He was too utterly impractical for that. He was a tall, gangling, effeminate, romantic, middle-aged man whom his parents still supported and viewed with deference as a superior personality. He was Smyrna's ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... In his constant efforts to achieve a telephone he had entirely neglected his school of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that unless he would devote ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... them to posterity, it was necessary to write them down; and so there was developed a written language, and by this method civilized men through all the ages have written down the laws under which they are willing to live. It would be impractical for all of us to meet together to pass our laws, and therefore we elect representatives who make our laws for us. These laws are binding upon all of us until they are set aside by still other legislators, still acting for the whole people, ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... always be followed for children, and it is preferable for adults. However, having dinner at noon is often very inconvenient and sometimes impossible, because frequently one or more members of the family are at business some distance from home and their coming home at noon for dinner is impractical. In such an event, the evening meal should be the heavy one, but it should not be made too hearty ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... that JANIG didn't know much. After all, he pointed out, it was impossible to check everyone in an office building of that size, or at least impractical. Furthermore, it was a cover operation, and any kind of a careful check on people in the building would warn them that something was going on. Tom agreed, however, that it was better to be safe than sorry. JANIG would run a check on the barber, even ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... visiting her had always been like taking a trip to fairy land and to live with her—well, it would be just too wonderful, Tony thought. But Doctor Holiday had vetoed decidedly both these pleasant and impractical propositions. Tony was far too young and pretty to live alone. That was out of the question. And he was scarcely more willing that she should go to Mrs. Norman, though he liked the latter very well and was glad that his niece would have her to go to in any emergency. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... can not too much emphasize the fact that the leaders of this period were by no means impractical theorists but men who were scientifically approaching the social problem of their people. They not only anticipated such ideas as those of industrial education and of the National Urban League of ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism[FN248] a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man's hunger for "belief" which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... was moods, and now dreams." He seated himself comfortably at her feet. "You would cause me to believe you a most impractical person, Miss Naida." ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... years went by in the period of Alvin's boyhood when no school was held that he could attend. The school term was only for three months, beginning early in July. It was found impractical to hold sessions in the winter, for many of the children lived long distances away and the branches from the mountain springs that crossed the roadways and fed the River Wolf, would go on rampages that ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... the best that is found in brain, enterprise and ability and should have every possible aid and cooperation. Furthermore it should be protected from impractical promoters, impractical managers ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an insipid and impractical view ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... The meal is similar in nutrient composition to blood meal, leather dust, feather meal, or meat meal (tankage). It is a powerful source of nitrogen with significant amounts of phosphorus. Like other slaughterhouse byproducts its high cost may make it impractical to use to adjust the C/N of compost piles. Seed meals or chicken manure (chickens are mainly fed seeds) have somewhat lower nitrogen contents than animal byproducts but their price per pound of actual nutrition is more ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... The ships in use at this time among the Japanese were far less seaworthy than those of European nations. The accompanying figures given by Charlevoix, although probably somewhat fanciful, show the impractical character of the vessels of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... most practical people the world knows. And, on the other hand, those who take great pride in speaking of their own practicality are many times the least practical. Or again, in some ways they may be practical, but so far as life in its totality is concerned, they are absurdly impractical. ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... described in the foregoing pages, represents the game as it is played with unlimited hands, that is where no limits are set on the number of points permissible in the score of a hand. It is impractical, however, to play with unlimited hands in a game where a stake has been set due to the inconsistencies of the winning hand scores; one may win with a hand of 200,000 points, whereas the ordinary or average winning hand numbers approximately ...
— Pung Chow - The Game of a Hundred Intelligences. Also known as Mah-Diao, Mah-Jong, Mah-Cheuk, Mah-Juck and Pe-Ling • Lew Lysle Harr
... What's needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of business, a London banker, a Radical M. P., whose devotion to ancient history and literature forms the most illustrious confutation of the charges brought against such studies as being useless and impractical." ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... disliked his speech the other night so heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the great man warned them against being led away by the Socialists, those foolish, unreasonable, impractical people who wanted to see an immediate improvement in their condition; and he reminded them that Rome was not ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... peas on the head of the unfortunate clerk. The result was such a strenuous chorus of "Amens," that the laughter of the congregation could not be restrained, and the peas were abolished and consigned to the limbo of impractical inventions. Possibly the story may be ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... race. Why? Let the facts answer. I have already said that the Church strove to continue after the war the same method of dealing with the negroes as before. She tried to keep the races together; but she has found it impractical, that impracticability growing more and more clear as the years have run on. The races have been steadily drifting apart in all social or semi-social life; the better class of each race is coming less and less into ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... favor the cause of colonization received from the press, it was an impractical, impossible, wild, and visionary scheme that could not be carried to the extent its projectors designed. It lost strength yearly, until all were convinced that the Negro would be emancipated here and remain here; that it was as impossible to colonize ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... and my intellect, my education and experience prompt me to reason from the same standpoint," was the grave response. "My professional pride also cries out 'Absurd! Impossible! Impractical!' But I dearly love that little girl in there," and the man's voice grew gentle as a woman's and trembled in spite of his manhood, as he glanced towards the adjoining room. "I love my sister, whose life is ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... gaping and wrangling on the hellward side. Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... other inventors, did not discover the means by which the end was accomplished; he used the discovery of other men, and turned their impractical theories and inventions to practical uses, and, in addition, invented many theories of his own. The man who does old things in a new way, or makes new uses of old inventions, is the one who achieves great things. And so it was the reading ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... but it does not mark that one or the other of us is less a dedicated spirit. If I have wandered away from the warmth of poesy and become practical, have you not remained and become confirmed in all that is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day, have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire of yesterday? Ah, Dane, you cannot rekindle that fire. The whirl ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... transported as tenderly as possible out of the main egress from the bowl, it being impractical to use the other. And it was from this larger entrance, after the fence had been torn away, that the cattle were driven, by a long winding trail amid the mountains back to Happy Valley. Only a few were lost by the raid, which was ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... cherishing, and increasing all the institutions of the government, and of a vigorous and energetic administration of it. From his rapidity of thought, he is often wrong in his conclusions, and his theories are sometimes wild, extravagant, and impractical. He has always claimed to be, and is, of the Democratic party, but of a very different class from that of Crawford; more like Adams, and his schemes are sometimes denounced by his party as ultra-fanatical." [Footnote: Mass. Hist. Soc., ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... these strange, impractical, unnatural beliefs, because of the sincerity of others. It's better to do, and to be the thing we can ourselves measure, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... that Fanny Foster was to have, sometime or other, a silk petticoat, made up to her for this day's work and self-sacrifice. For Grandma was one of those rare practical people who yet believed in respecting the foolish dreams of impractical humans. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... on a purely economic basis leads to conditions more confused than those from which we have emerged. The so-called purely economic basis is the basis where only Mammon's laws are considered, and God's are held to be impractical. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... adjusted jauntily over their poetic locks—their eyes beaming with that exquisite sense of feeling suddenly rich, that those who live for art's sake know! The keenest of pleasures lie in sudden contrasts, and to these six poetic, impractical Bohemians, thus suddenly raised from the slough of despond to a state where they no longer trod with mortals—their cup of happiness was full and spilling over. They must not only have a good time, but so must every one around them. With their great riches, they would ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... eclectic in accumulating stores of Greek erudition, while his mind had a tendency, in the midst of a variety of inconsistent doctrines, to leave the conclusion undetermined. He brought everything to a practical standard; he admired the exalted purity of stoical morality, but he feared that it was impractical. He believed in the existence of one supreme creator, in his spiritual nature, and the immortality of the soul; but his belief was rather the result of instinctive conviction, than ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... speaking specifically of the work in which I have had a part for some years in China. My apology is this: that wherever the returned missionary goes, even among God's people, he finds himself obliged to defend his work to some who regard it as an impractical and self-devised effort at doing good, rather than the simple carrying out of the expressed will of God. We have to go back to first principles and inquire afresh: 'What is the ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... that the long history of mankind's agricultural pursuits ought to have been sufficient to bring together the necessary experience. The analysis of the vocational activities has given every evidence that even the oldest functions are performed in an impractical, inefficient way. The students of scientific management have demonstrated how the work of the mason, as old as civilization itself, is carried on every day in every land with methods which can be improved ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... from that impractical librarian," she declared. "Why did Dorothy marry him? She might have known what the result ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that these rules are all right for college professors, journalists and authors, but impractical for the every-day business correspondent. Some of the most successful companies in the country, however, have recognized the importance of these very points and have adopted strict rules that give strength and character to the letters that are sent out. For example, here is a paragraph taken ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... of Montgomery upon the newly arrived was rather pleasing, with a something rather provincial, quite in keeping with its location inland. Streets, various in length, uncertain in direction and impractical as to pavement, ran into Main street at many points; and most of them were closely built with pretty houses, all of them surrounded by gardens and many by handsome grounds. Equidistant from the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... regulate my own life and my life's work. I need not explain to you just how deeply I am interested in the saving of human life. That comes first with me. My theories, as you call them, come second. I cannot undertake the promotion of these theories as a salaried advocate. This is the only stupid and impractical thing that my grandfather ever did, I believe. He must have known that the terms of the will could not be carried out. Mr. Dodge is right. It was his way of leaving the property to me after declaring that he would not do so, after adding the codicil annulling the bequest intended ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... that idea it was impractical. He was too far ahead of the times. But to-day, lad, it means that every mine dump in the Cripple Creek region will be worked over again and the gold removed at a trifling expense, for in that tube are the blueprints of the greatest electrical ore-roasting ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... late-blooming varieties, the leading ones established in Oregon being the Mayette and the Franquette. Other varieties will undoubtedly be introduced in the next few years that will withstand frost in regions where walnut planting now seems impractical. Mr. Henry Hewitt's one tree that blooms the fourth of July, at an elevation of 1,000 feet, is evidence of the possibilities in this ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... only in prayer or to receive Knighthood, 326-l. Mason should assume the title of a "lover of wisdom", 691-l. Mason should be—, 113-m. Mason should be humble and modest before God, 338-u. Mason should be satisfied there is a real God, infinitely wise, 338-l. Mason should have no alliance with impractical theorists, 338-m. Mason should live while he lives and enjoy life, 345-l. Mason should steer away from vain philosophies, 338-u. Mason should treat his brother who goes astray with charity, 133-m. Mason, sympathy is the great distinguishing characteristic ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears—the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites! But still, it's all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls—and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... for thousands of years, was accomplished in less than a decade from the moment when men first determined that it was possible to split an atom. It is difficult to forget that even after World War II some of our most respected scientists sold short the idea of developing long-range missiles. Impractical, they said; visionary. But 6 years after the United States went to work seriously on missiles, an operational ICBM with a 9,000-mile range was an ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... attitude of a supposedly conservative Englishman of recognised ability, he was tried almost beyond endurance. For the next two or three days the newspapers printed caustic contributions from fellow architects and builders, in each of which the luckless Medcroft was taken to task for advocating an impractical and fatuous New York hobby in the way of construction,—something that staid old London would not even tolerate or discuss. The social chroniclings of the Medcrofts in Vienna, as despatched by the correspondents, offset this unhappy "bull" to some extent, in so far as Medcroft's ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... general method of putting the propeller-shaft in place. The young boat-builder will readily understand that it would be very impractical merely to bore a hole in the hull of the boat to put the propeller-shaft through. In this way water would surely leak into the hull and the boat would sink in a short time. Some method must be evolved to keep ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... very impractical to business men. When you have to build up a factory system from the machinery itself, you have something gigantic on your hands. And that is the task on which Mr. Dennison and Mr. Howard embarked. I suppose ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... necessity of resorting to it, for through the fog of his misapprehensions, beneath the obscurity of his ignorance, he began to discover the true outline of things and to understand that his ideas were impractical. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... freebooters listened sedately to his protests and redoubled their offending, well aware that in their candidate's chamber politics could have yet no place. Far from the turmoil, the celebrity ate the jellies of his idolaters, and spent his waking hours in the impractical companionship of a certain ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage engine, ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... village viewed the vanguard of the ex-soldiers with sullen indifference. Silvanus Rock had told them not to worry their heads over the "efforts of an impractical dreamer to turn the town upside down." And who knew, if Rock didn't? As the days went by, however, and the invasion became more noticeable, the alien element of the fishing colony began to experience a feeling of sharp resentment against the new owner of the Legonia cannery ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... breathing, which became a part of the muffled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow. Of something which had never been, but still might be! Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again! Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and make everything different! ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... follow Cecil Rhodes, a chief propagandist of their main design. It is true that the idea of getting Americans to participate in any formal union with all the rest of their brethren by race and tongue seems now impractical. But time works wonders. Mr. Gladstone foresaw the United States a people of six hundred comfortable millions, living in union before the end of the next century. The hegemony of the English-speaking nations seems likely ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to change in the racial composition of the Navy. Less than two weeks after Knox's appointment, it prepared for his signature a letter to Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti of New York defending the Navy's policy. The bureau reasoned that since segregation was impractical, exclusion was necessary. Experience had proved, the bureau claimed, that when given supervisory responsibility the Negro was unable to maintain discipline among white subordinates with the result that teamwork, harmony, and ship's efficiency suffered. The Negro, therefore, had to be segregated ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... position slowly and with extreme difficulty. The possibility of the vehicle itself moving occurred to us; but, as I pointed out, the task of replacing their heavy apparatus in it, and then reassembling the apparatus in a new position, made such a step impractical. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... brought to understand that successful politics demands a "machine." Each of its individual members is a boss. They have been derisively termed "goo-goos," which is a contraction of "goody-goods." They are youthful, sanguine, patriotic, impertinent, impractical and self-sufficient. Their idea of conducting a campaign is nebulous. They believe that a number of voluble young men, clad irreproachably in evening dress and touring the city in carts after nightfall, stopping on corners and haranguing the multitude, cannot fail to ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... like to resettle the country with colonies of town unemployed, but these proposals are opposed by some as impractical. "To imagine that any such colony could be self-supporting, that the land which no capitalist will now till with expert farm labourers at ten shillings a week would yield trade-union rates of wages to a mixed crowd of unemployed townsmen, that such a heterogeneous collection of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... And so "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... met one whom he could not drive. So he did not break with the new Governor. Roosevelt was wise, too, although he was honest. So he did not break with the "easy boss." His failure to do so was a disappointment to his impractical friends and supporters, who were more concerned with theoretical ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... such a drug to any one incapable of recognizing the symptoms of intoxication, and as no one but a physician can judge the effects of the alkaloid he himself should remain with the patient until the efficient dose has been absorbed. This is manifestly impractical and we therefore maintain that the alkaloid is not suited ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... sat down, Phineas made one allusion to that former scuttling of the ship,—an accusation as to which had been made against him so injuriously by Mr. Bonteen. He himself, he said, had been called impractical, and perhaps he might allude to a vote which he had given in that House when last he had the honour of sitting there, and on giving which he resigned the office which he had then held. He had the gratification of knowing that he had been ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... me for this petty business of living, you have praised my verses, you have even accorded me certain pecuniary assistance as to their publication—though I must admit that to accept it of you was very distasteful to me. Ah!" Felix Kennaston cried, with a quick lift of speech, "impractical child that I am, I had not thought of that! My love had caused me to forget the great barrier that ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... objectors preferred to be treated as criminals rather than contribute in any way to the shedding of blood even in the defence of their country and themselves; and only the baser among their fellow-men attributed to them any worse motive than impractical idealism. The example of the mother-country was subsequently followed, with more liberal exemptions, by New Zealand and the Dominion of Canada; but Australia, which had long enjoyed compulsory military service for home defence, and was the only country in which the issue ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... commission, and the steps which he has taken to secure the organization of a national chamber of commerce. I heartily commend his view that the plan of a trade commission which looks to the fixing of prices is altogether impractical and ought not for a moment to be considered as a possible solution of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the larger vision that underlay The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is now merely a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated, as seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved to be of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave them their point in Dury's own day, his ideas have become the accepted standards of modern ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... former policies! Surely practical demonstration of these experiments in other parts of the country will have a tendency to reduce criminality. If not, pray tell me what will? Time and again have I heard prisoners and others comment upon the impractical Christianity portrayed, with seldom any exception. They weary of being only preached to. The actions of such men as Warden Hoyle and of such women as Matron Smith will probably have more to do with helping these convicted ones to lead upright ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... the teaching of the Old Philosopher was its extremely impractical character, its unsuitability to the needs of men and women engaged in the ordinary avocations of life. In one sense he was an Anarchist, for he held that the empire would fare better if there were no government at all, the fact being that violence ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... "Oh, impractical! impractical! Wholly a back-eddy in the forward-moving current. You can't go back of a world-wide movement. Things are too complicated now for everybody to do his share of anything. It's as reasonable, as to suggest ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the omission of any authority after a cultivar-name. Many cultivars are first described in reports of trials, in catalogues, and other anonymous publications; this makes the quoting of an authority impractical, but there is provision in the Code for writing the raiser's or introducer's name in brackets after the cultivar-name if so desired, thus: ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... they had finished here they might want to look over the country around what is now Bagdad, but then only near the capital city of Nebuchadnezzar's empire. This is about eight hundred miles away, an impractical trip by helicopter, so they would return to the platform, climb to a few hundred thousand feet, and scoot over in a few minutes. Here they would land again in some uninhabited spot and repeat the maneuver. This country was probably sprinkled with more people than they expected. ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton
... courses to Mars and Venus thoroughly charted—but considered a trip to Jupiter somewhat impractical. So, what with Dane's presence and the mysterious white streaks that so often shot up into the sky like fuzzy yarn from the AFDC base, it wasn't hard to guess what was ...
— This is Klon Calling • Walt Sheldon
... the close of the war, it was a real evil for them to be expecting "a mule and forty acres of land" from the government; for it stood in the way of real effort in practical directions. So, while a nobler ideal is of incalculable benefit to a people, it is a real evil for them to be indulging in impractical dreams. They waste effort and divert power from practical ends, and result in that kind of disappointment that discourages the heart and unnerves the arm. Those, then, who talk of nationalism as a solution of our troubles, ought to tell us just ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... group are those defenders of property who look upon the Church as impractical; who consider the Golden Rule as something all right for the minister to talk about on Sundays, but something useless to try to follow during the week. Those men criticize the Church for preaching love, for talking the Sermon on the Mount, and for being ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... must be done. Unfortunately, there is no way of legally doing anything at present, and we must be patient until a way is discovered." Way after way is suggested, only to be dismissed as "dangerous" or "impractical" or "unconstitutional." The years pass; the clamor persists, becomes imperious. The politicians pass a law that has been carefully made unconstitutional. This gives the exploiters several years more ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... purpose tonight to outline a scheme of self-education, which if consistently followed out I am sure will help you, though I am aware that to a certain order of mind it will seem highly mystical and impractical. If it commends itself to your favor ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes—the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double cylinder I had made a great many experimental ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... yellow and lavender, romping upon our lawn of a sunny day, I feel that we should have a supply of smoked eye glasses to offer visitors. Of course you know that some of those brilliant fabrics are going to be very fadeable and impractical. But Mrs. Livermore is as bad as you—she doesn't give a hang. She'll make a second and a third set if necessary. DOWN WITH ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... son—heavily enough punished—did not prevent her from loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
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