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Wasteful   Listen
adjective
Wasteful  adj.  
1.
Full of waste; destructive to property; ruinous; as, wasteful practices or negligence; wasteful expenses.
2.
Expending, or tending to expend, property, or that which is valuable, in a needless or useless manner; lavish; prodigal; as, a wasteful person; a wasteful disposition.
3.
Waste; desolate; unoccupied; untilled. (Obs.) "In wilderness and wasteful desert strayed."
Synonyms: Lavish; profuse; prodigal; extravagant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wasteful" Quotes from Famous Books



... geologic development of our earth and its companion planets, and in the development of life wherever life may exist in our system, has been the product of this retained heat. At the present day the same wasteful process is going on. Each moment the sun's particles are losing energy of position as they draw closer and closer together, and the heat into which this lost energy is metamorphosed is poured out most prodigally in every direction. Let us consider for a moment how little of it gets used in ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... look at, I notice, now I've begun to live again and don't need to worry over Jack every instant. I had feared it might be necessary to own up to twenty-nine, only two years short of my real age, which would be so wasteful. But thank goodness, I see now I can safely retreat in good order back to twenty-five, and stay there for some time to come. I always did feel that if girl or woman found a nice, suitable age, she ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... studies of the mountaineers. My pity was less challenged in their case. Lonely as their lives were, it was not a sordid loneliness. The cattle rancher was at least not a drudge. Careless, slovenly and wasteful as I knew him to be, he was not mean. He had something of the Centaur in his bearing. Marvelous horsemanship dignified his lean figure and lent a notable grace to his gestures. His speech was picturesque and his observations covered a wide area. Self-reliant, fearless, instant of action in ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... just now a very popular word for a nouveau-riche, it is a schieber, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... their motive-power from underneath, whereas in Philadelphia the overhead wires are, I regret to say, killing the trees which lend the streets their greatest charm. Altogether, Tammany or no Tammany, New York cannot possibly be described as an ill-governed city. Its government may be wasteful and worse; inefficient it is not. Even the policemen seem to be maligned. I never found ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... everywhere he flung the pearls of his wit broadcast. He gave his opinion on men, affairs, and events in profound sayings; he would have put you in mind of a fruit-tree putting forth all its strength in blossom. He was leading an enervating life wasteful of money, and even yet more wasteful, it may be of a man's soul; in that life the fairest talents are buried out of sight, the most incorruptible honesty perishes, the best-tempered ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... to an accurate fraction of a millimetre, as we always fit these things—we who are careful and honest workmen—to show an idle man's friends the hairs on a flea's fore-leg. If that isn't enough to make a man ashamed of our present wasteful and chaotic organisation, I should think he must be a survival from the preglacial epoch—as, indeed, most of us ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... who could scold those two bright, hard-working little men? I think their papa had to console himself with thinking if only they would work as well at something useful when they were grown up, he could forgive their rather wasteful ...
— The Nursery, September 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... lumber for many purposes; but a careful treatment of the forests with an eye to their continuance, the plan of cutting large trees, and preserving the small ones, is a very different thing from our present wasteful methods. ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... know that we weigh every pound of coal we burn? Thus, we learn the value of the coal we buy; we know to a tee the last penny of cost of every item of production, and we learn which firemen are the most wasteful, which firemen, out of stupidity or carelessness, get the least out of the coal they fire." The superintendent beamed again. "You see how very important the little matter of coal is, and by as much as you learn of this little matter you will become that much better a workman—more valuable to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... I met her she was carrying on two interviews and trying to arrange to have me shown some of the social work she is directing. There seemed to be little system about her efforts. Her office was rather disorderly, and her method of work seemed very wasteful of time and effort, and very much like the usual Russian way of doing things. Bill Shatov, formerly organizer of the I.W.W., who is commissar of police for Petrograd and also commissar for one of the northern armies, introduced me to Madame ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt

... a thousand of her pranks, Her pride, her wasteful spending, her unkindness, Her scolding, pouting, . . . Were to reap ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... mouth did water at thought of tasting! But that was not to be till grandpa came. She hoped that would be at once, before they cooled; for the burning of gas, their only fuel, was managed with strictest economy. It would seem a wasteful sin to light the stove again to reheat the chops, as she would have to do if the captain was not on ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond

... permitted to the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive method of elimination, through death. In the future it will be carried out far more effectively by conscious and deliberate selection, exercised not merely before birth, but before conception and ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... to raise more cotton to buy more negroes," and for every negro he buys he gets trusted for another. Both himself and his hands are of the least possible value to the community. By maintaining his system he excludes cheap labor from the cultivation of cotton,—slave-labor being the most wasteful and the most expensive of any. He purchases for his laborers the least possible amount of manufactured articles, and he wastes his own expenditure in the purchase ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... respect to grandeur, or even beauty, the scenery through which we now travelled was not to be compared with the sublime passes of the Pyrenees, or with many spots which we had beheld; but in truth, a hamlet uninjured and tenanted by its own rude peasantry, a field of Indian corn exhibiting no wasteful track of foragers, nay, a single cottage with its flowers and evergreens budding around it, was at this a more welcome object to our eyes than the wildest mountains or most romantic valleys displaying no habitations ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... had given to his predecessors; his chief revenue was drawn from the customs; yet his debts, of which I find an account in the Parliamentary History, after a reign of twenty-one years, did not amount to 200,000l.[A] This monarch could not have been so wasteful of his revenues as it is presumed. James I. was always generous, and left scarcely any debts. He must have lived amidst many self-deprivations; nor was this difficult to practise for this king, for he was ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... two were sleeping, a full tide Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke, And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell In vast sea-cataracts—ever and anon Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs Heard thro' the living roar. At this the babe, Their Margaret cradled near them, wail'd and woke The mother, and the father suddenly ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... of this wood, Sally, an' it ought to last twel summer," he observed, as he glanced to where his wife stood wringing out the clothes. "If you warn't so wasteful that last pile would ha' held ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... cocking the other, in the most indescribably comical manner, and the whole four stood gazing and laughing at it. There was a certain threatening attitude about its hand, which, Jock said, looked as if the ghost of old Barnes had come to threaten them for the wasteful expenditure of his hoards. Or, as Babie said, it was more like the ghastly notion of Bertram Risingham in Rokeby, of some phantom of a murdered ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... were the Duke of Jauer and the Duke of Schweidnitz,—lofty-minded gentlemen, perhaps a thought too lofty. But these also Johann's son, little Kaiser Karl IV., "marrying their heiress," contrived to bring in;—one fruitful adventure of little Karl's, among the many wasteful he made, in the German Reich. Schlesien is henceforth a bit of the Kingdom of Bohemia; indissolubly hooked to Germany; and its progress in the arts and composures, under wise Piasts with immigrating Germans, we guess to have become doubly rapid. [Busching, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... efficiency, for example, as found from the test mentioned. Its value was 54 per cent. This is altogether too low and indicates wasteful operation. The efficiency of a hand-fired boiler ought not to be less than 65 per cent, and it can be increased to 70 per cent by careful management under ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm

... door, and as the glide of his sandals died away in the echoing cloisters, I leaned forth to spread my expanding heart in the upward and boundless light of the moon—for I seemed to wish never again to lose in the wasteful forgetfulness of sleep, the consciousness that I was loved ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... tells us, may minister not merely to the physical necessities, but to the beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, when Matthew the publican made for Him a feast in His own house, He did not churlishly refuse, saying that such expenditure was wasteful and wicked excess. When in the house of Simon the leper Mary "took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus," and they that sat by murmured, saying, "To what purpose ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson

... all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls the "hinterland," in a quickening ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... WHITE FISHERMEN civilized 'em," was the emphatic reply; "and not a bit too soon either, for the wasteful cusses got so bad they wasn't satisfied with chucking dead fish overboard, but would go on to the prairies, and after using the grass cabins we WHITE fishermen had built to go into in bad weather, the bloody furiners would burn them up to bother us. They thort they'd drive us teetotally out of ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... Virginia, there was a gradual decline in the Tidewater area. The increase in population naturally caused a continual expansion of the tobacco industry from its meager beginnings at Jamestown, but this was not the major cause. The primary cause was the wasteful cultivation methods practiced by the planters. To obtain the greatest yield from his land the planter raised three or four consecutive crops of tobacco in one field, then moved on to virgin fields. This practice was begun on a relatively large scale as early as 1632 when a planting restriction of ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon

... and the sea and from Land's End to John O' Groat was combed and scraped for every eligible casualty, every overconfident office holder of a "cushy" job, and in short, for all those who could by hook or crook hold a rifle to help stem this threatening tide. And in our own lot, even those wasteful luxuries, the petted officers' servants were amongst us, doing fighting duty for the first time, so that we almost welcomed the desperate occasion which furnished so rare and ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson

... clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely—more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... citizen of New Orleans, and possessed a domestic establishment of great extent and elegance, with a body of servants in the condition of slaves, to whom he was an indulgent master. The description of this splendid mansion, with its lounging and wasteful attendants, its indolent, pretty, and capricious lady-mistress, and the account of Ophelia, a shrewd New-England cousin, who managed the household affairs, must be considered the best, or at least the most amusing portion of the work. The authoress also dwells with fondness on the character of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various

... these days the daily round of his life, after the fight with Bill, as Jean's lead dog. The swift, positive, and ordered evolutions of those smoothly running days seemed merely miraculous in retrospect as Jan compared his memory of them with the wretched muddle of Beeching's wasteful scramble across the country: They carried no trade goods, nothing save the necessary dog-food and creature-comforts for the two men; yet their sled—an extra-large one—was half as heavy again to pull as Jean's had been, despite the ten primely conditioned dogs ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... fact gathered from railway experience is, that there is an expenditure which pays, and an expenditure that is totally wasteful. Directors have made the discovery, that costly litigation, costly and fine stations, fine porticos and pillars, fine bridges, and finery in various other things, contribute really nothing to returns, but, on the contrary, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various

... that of infinite wisdom we expect infinitely more than of a human ruler. Once unintelligent nature had a crude, wasteful, hard method of producing new and higher types of life. Man, having intelligence, produces the same result without waste or suffering. We expect immeasurably higher procedure of such an intelligence as Christians ascribe to God. One can understand ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... live the noble Caesar!"—his slaves scattered gold profusely among the multitude, who fought and scrambled for the glittering coin, still keeping up their clamorous greeting; while the dispenser of the wasteful largesse appearing to know every one, and to forget no face or name, even of the humblest, had a familiar smile and a cheery ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... you all in bounty and honor. Thus, my sons, have I parted in your portions the substance of my wealth, wherein if you be as prodigal to spend as I have been careful to get, your friends will grieve to see you more wasteful than I was bountiful, and your foes smile that my fall did begin in your excess. Let mine honor be the glass of your actions, and the fame of my virtues the lodestar to direct the course of your pilgrimage. ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... optimistic thoughts. It is a strongly pro-German piece of road. It supports allegations against Great Britain, as, for instance, that the British are quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone those of an empire; that they are an incompetent people, a pig-headedly stupid people, a wasteful people, a people incapable of realising that a man who tills his field badly is a traitor and a ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... accord with the calm of nature. But very different was the harsh note of the new calamity, which had struck not the house in which the tragedy was being enacted, but this one, which lay bare and naked in the last light of the sinking sun. So young and so careless! So young, so wasteful of life and all that life had to give, and now parted from it, taken from it ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... which come at first, when turning away from an unnatural and wasteful life of contractions, for the effects of relaxing. Such disorders are no more caused by relaxing than are the disorders which beset a drunkard or an opium-eater, upon refusing to continue in the way of his error, primarily caused by the abandonment of his evil habit, even ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... as he looked at the sapphire sparkling in his broad, brown palm; "I never saw such a with-lavishness-wasteful-and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gentleman! I wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take his own life, belikes; ach, Gott! He will take ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... Lantier was not wasteful in certain ways, for he never gave a garcon more than two sous after he had served a meal that cost some seven or ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... half-grown young, to take their place, so the place will not be left desolate a day. If man would only take this hint in his own treatment of trees, leave the young ones to take the place of those he removes, we should not have to dread the wasteful destruction ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... him to be away at such a time," said Katy, imposingly. "Suppose now his father wanted to make his last will in the testament, who is there to do so solemn and awful an act for him? Harvey is a very wasteful and very disregardful man!" ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... season with Penn, and left no address behind. He had a dread that these millionary people, with wasteful private cars, might take undue interest in his companion. It was better to visit inland relatives till the coast was clear. "Never you be adopted by rich folk, Penn," he said in the cars, "or I'll take 'n' break this checker-board over your head. Ef you forgit ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... an industrious population; banishes the yeomanry of the country; deprives the spinner, the weaver, the smith, the shoemaker, the carpenter, of employment and support. Labor of every species is disreputable, because performed mostly by slaves; the general aspect of the country marks the curse of a wasteful, idle, reckless population, who have no interest in the soil, and care not how much ...
— Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do - Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio • Cydnor Bailey Tompkins

... necessary, the men confining themselves to ploughing and wood-cutting. At the latter employment they are most expert; they use the axe in the most masterly manner, but their mode of cutting is fearfully wasteful; they always leave some three feet of the best part of the wood in the ground, very rarely cutting a tree close down to the root. Many of them are good charcoal-burners, and indeed their principal occupation is supplying the adjacent villages with charcoal and firewood. They use ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... Stamnum, first censor, that such women as, living in gallantry and view about the town, were of evil fame, and could not show that they were maintained by their own estates or industry, or such as, having estates of their own, were yet wasteful in 'their way of life, and of ill-example to others, should be obnoxious to the animadversion of the Council of Religion, or of the censors: in which the proceeding should be after this manner. Notice should be first given of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... Directory, which he accused of weakness, indecision, pusillanimity, wasteful expenditure, of many errors, and perseverance in a system ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... water. Savory smells began to be wafted out. Evidently old Marda meant to atone for the shortcoming of the noon. Juan Can, in his bed, also heard and smelled what was going on. "May the fiends get me," he growled, "if that wasteful old hussy isn't getting up a feast for those beasts of Indians! There's mutton and onions, and peppers stewing, and potatoes, I'll be bound, and God knows what else, for beggars that are only too thankful to get a handful of roasted wheat or a bowl ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... more landlords at all, at all. But isn't that nonsense, says I? If ye split up the land into patches as big as yer hand and give every man a patch, wouldn't some men have twenty or a hundred, or maybe a thousand patches in five years? An' thin, thim that was lazy an' wasteful an' got out o' their land would be for shootin' the savin', sthrivin' man that worked his way up by buying out the drones. For wouldn't he be a landlord the moment he stopped workin' all the land himself. An' that would ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian resistance in the Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... woman this sum before evening comes and she leaves me. Now, father, do see to it that I don't forswear myself, and do rescue me just as soon as you can from this creature on account of whom I have been so wasteful and wicked. See you don't let a matter of two hundred pounds vex you; I will pay it back to you a thousand times over, if I live. Good-bye and do look out for this." What do you ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... meal, Vexatious carnal appetites above, Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced, And rose but at command from under heel. The love devolvent, the ascension love, Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked, Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks; Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste, Took up but solids for its glowing seal. The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel, Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks, His night's first quarter sicklied ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... scarce, the methods of washing the gravel were both crude and wasteful. And it is interesting to note that the first gold "pans" were bateas, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... guide the trade in the fundamental food commodities as to eliminate vicious speculation, extortion, and wasteful practices, and to stabilize prices in the essential staples. Second, to guard our exports so that against the world's shortage we retain sufficient supplies for our own people, and to cooeperate with the Allies to prevent inflation of prices; and, third, ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... the family was the uncle of Charles, Lucien Buonaparte, archdeacon of the cathedral. It was he who had supported and guided his nephew, and had sent him to the college founded by Paoli at Corte. In his youth Charles was wasteful and extravagant, but his wife was thrifty to meanness. With the restraint of her economy and the stimulus of his uncle, respected as head of the family, the father of Napoleon arrived at a position of some importance. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... appliances, or tools; that under our present system the loss falls immediately upon the employee, who is almost invariably unable to bear it, and ultimately upon the community, which is taxed for the support of the indigent; and that our present system is uncertain, unscientific, and wasteful, and fosters a spirit of antagonism between employer and employee which it is for the interest of ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... a poor cook. You are wasteful, dirty, ill-tempered and impertinent. You have been a grievous trial and a money loss to me. I am willing to write this down, together with the statement that you are sober, strong and quick to learn, and that you would probably work well under a stricter mistress than ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... corn and water of Rome, for public buildings, for the great military roads, and for the imperial post. Nevertheless the emperor could handle all this latter money exactly as he chose, and it is upon this chest that Nero was drawing for all his lavish prodigalities and his undeserved and wasteful bounties. Yet even Nero was scarcely so bad as Caligula, who managed to spend L22,000,000 in less than ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... retorted. "The Timminses are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful." ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... here is the nation to be entrusted with the great work. But, after all, it is a nation of money-grubbers, ruled by a money-trust, where wealth is worshipped as no other nation worships rank; a nation without culture, without experience in world-politics, without self-control, loudly vain, inept, wasteful, childish—a nation, in other words, at the awkward age between youth ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... This shows wasteful practice. This small mill in southern Illinois was buying these short bolts cut from small trees. Be careful that you don't sell trees that are too small and too young. It is like, I suppose, harvesting your walnuts before the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... on his order, made demand for a share of his wife's estate. And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness. He was making money, and had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a conservative and written a book on "Getting on in the World, or Success ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... charity has either allowed her family to depend upon insufficient doles and so drift into beggary, or else has put all the children in orphanages. If the mother is a good mother, capable with help of rearing her children to independence and {74} self-support, this latter is not only a cruel but a wasteful method. As charity becomes more discriminating and resourceful, it will be possible to organize pensions for widows of this class, though these pensions will need the careful oversight of a visitor, who should see that the children are taught to bear the ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond

... although no one would decide to grow weeds rather than flowers because weeds are more efficient. In the case of what are called natural monopolies, there is duplication of effort instead of cooperation. Competition is here wasteful. But when we have to do, not with a specific product, or with a fixed field such as that of street railways or city lighting, but with the open field of invention and service, we need to provide for continuous cooperation, and competition seems at least ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts

... This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it. Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen, these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly shacks by the force of landlordism behind. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... hat with the greatest respect, and walked forward to communicate this good news. The crew of the Yungfrau and the conspirators or smugglers were soon on the best of terms, and as there was no one, to check the wasteful expenditure of stores and no one accountable, the liquor was hoisted up on the forecastle, and ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... shall have enough to lead a comfortable life. I do not suppose, however, that any rational Socialist would accept that programme of isolation. He would hold that, in his Utopia, we can do more efficiently all that is done under a system which he regards as wasteful and unjust. The existing machinery, whatever else may be said of it, does, in fact, tend to weld the whole world more and more into a single industrial organism. English workmen are labouring to satisfy the wants of other human beings in every quarter of the world; while ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... of food, when better days came, they thought only of enjoying the present, and took no heed of the future. After harvest, with its high wages and cheapness of provision, the laborer frequently became wasteful and improvident. Instead of the stinted allowance of salted meat or fish, with the pinched loaf of bean-flour, and an occasional draught of weak beer, his fastidious appetite demanded fresh meat or fish, white bread, vegetables freshly gathered, and ale of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... the Arab title to the far more appropriate heading, "Story of the Rich Man and his Wasteful Son." The tale begins with AEsop's fable of the faggot; and concludes with the "Heir of Linne," in the famous Scotch ballad. Mr. Clouston refers also to the Persian Tale of Murchlis (The Sorrowful Wazir); ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... rates of interest, many millions of dollars. It is believed that into these banks the Ring have taken the city's obligations and converted them into money, which has been sent flowing into the various channels of wasteful administration, out of which they have drawn into their pockets millions on millions. The craft of this contrivance was profound. It wholly avoided the difficulty of raising money on the unlawful and excessive issues of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... truth, under the law that every thing produces after its kind, that children become what their parents are. A simple people, virtuous and healthy, will produce virtuous, healthy, and true-hearted children, A luxurious people—lazy, sensual, wasteful—will produce children like themselves. If we go through the vicious quarters of a great city, where licentiousness and drunkenness and beastly vices prevail, we shall find that though all die before old age, the communities are abundantly recruited by the children which ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... that from 5,500 to 7,000 feet (or even more, if the director is inclined to be wasteful) of negative film is exposed, or used up, in taking the scenes intended for a five-part (5,000-foot) "feature." In every case, a certain amount of film in excess of what is actually needed is inevitably exposed ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... appreciated or respected by the white man. In peace he has too often been the dupe of artful traffic; in war he has been regarded as a ferocious animal whose life or death was a question of mere precaution and convenience. Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... heaven, all that earth has to keep of John Clare, one of the sweetest singers of nature ever born within the fair realm of dear old England—of dear old England, so proud of its galaxy of noble poets, and so wasteful ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... the piston, and moving steam tight through the cylinder cover, enables the connecting rod which is fixed to the piston to vibrate within it to the requisite extent. But the vice of all trunk engines is that they are necessarily more wasteful of steam, as the large mass of metal entering into the composition of the trunk, moving as it does alternately into the atmosphere and the steam, must cool and condense a part of the steam. The radiation of heat from ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... chance might bring them, in the shape of bullocks, sheep, or pigs, which they would knock down, without a "By your leave" to the owner, and, after eating as much as satisfied their present hunger, would throw the rest away. Thus, between their wasteful defenders and their wasting invaders, the poor distressed inhabitants were brought to the ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady

... advantages of printing, at this time of day, would be "wasteful and ridiculous excess." We content ourselves with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various

... They had not fed, and could find nothing to feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares; but they drank, and cleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that caution one only learns in a world full of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... is no complaint more just than what we find in almost every family, of the folly and ignorance, the fraud and knavery, the idleness and viciousness, the wasteful squandering temper of servants, who are, indeed, become one of the many public grievances of the kingdom; whereof, I believe, there are few masters that now hear me who are not convinced by their own experience. And I ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... and intermixed in a fine grove of large trees, are the various fragments of the ruins already noticed. Some of these are interesting relics of architectural antiquity; and though several detached parts remain, yet we cannot (says Britton) but regret the wasteful destruction that has taken place at this once celebrated place of monastic splendour and human superstition."—Beauties of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various

... Asia's coast, Which lately bless'd my gentle government, Soon as the sultan's unexpected fate Fills all th' astonish'd empire with confusion, My policy shall raise an easy throne; The Turkish pow'rs from Europe shall retreat, And harass Greece no more with wasteful war. A galley mann'd with Greeks, thy charge, Leontius, Attends to waft ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... any of the well-known Southwestern Languages of Europe, namely, Creo, I CREATE, of the Latin, Italian, etc., and Crio, I REAR, of the Spanish. The other forms are entirely unused. Of any other simple series of Euphonic combinations, such as Phonetic art can readily construct, there is the same wasteful neglect, and, in consequence of this total failure of the scientific world to extract these treasures of Phonic wealth lying directly beneath their feet, they are driven to such desperate devices as that of naming ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... if possible; so in due time I sought an interview with General Meade and informed him that, as the effectiveness of my command rested mainly on the strength of its horses, I thought the duty it was then performing was both burdensome and wasteful. I also gave him my idea as to what the cavalry should do, the main purport of which was that it ought to be kept concentrated to fight the enemy's cavalry. Heretofore, the commander of the Cavalry ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... babe into her arms with a languid long-drawn sigh, as of one wearied out with happiness. 'That he should have heard my confession, and only pet me the more! Foolish, wasteful thing that I am. Oh, babe! if I could only make you grow and thrive, no one would ever be so happy ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hang. Ladysmock: the cardamine pratensis. Pink: the chaffinch. Pooty: the girdled snail shell. Ramping: coarse and large. Rawky: misty, foggy. Rig: the ridge of a roof. Sueing: a murmuring, melancholy sound. Swaly: wasteful. Sweltered: over-heated by the sun. Twitchy: made of twitch grass. Water-Hob: ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... of biscuits and slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm going to use the biggest platter, and I've got two extra boards in the table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big somehow. I've cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... with the black steamers snorting in their sleep; the wrecks and condemned hulks, in process of breaking up, strewing the shores with their timbers; the boatfuls of Negroes gliding to and fro; and all the signs of our hasty, irreverent, wasteful, semi- barbarous mercantile system, which we call (for the time being only, it is to be hoped) civilisation. The engine had hardly stopped, when we were boarded from a fleet of negro boats, and huge bunches of plantains, yams, green oranges, junks of sugar-cane, were displayed ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... fellow of the self-same flight The self-same way, with more advised watch To find the other forth; and by adventuring both I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof, Because what follows is pure innocence. I owe you much; and, like a wasteful youth, That which I owe is lost: but if you please To shoot another arrow that self way Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, As I will watch the aim, or to find both, Or bring your latter hazard back again, And thankfully rest debtor ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare

... correct the wasteful and demoralizing spoils system, in vogue ever since the first administration of Jackson, Congress passed, January 16, 1883, "an act to regulate and improve the Civil Service of the United States." Under the provisions of this ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby

... West. Any permanent improvement must therefore be based upon the strengthening of the South's economic position. Essentially the task was to build up Southern agriculture, which for generations had been wasteful, unintelligent and consequently unproductive. Such a far-reaching programme might well appall the most energetic reformer, but Dr. Buttrick set to work. He saw little light until his attention was drawn to a quaint and philosophic gentleman—a kind ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... Register down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as much as he spent; and in spite of considerable assistance from Lord Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as L30,000, Burke, like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into debt. Pitt's debts were the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs. Burke, on the contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues—the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... HERCULES with firm disdain Braved the soft smiles of Pleasure's harlot train; To valiant toils his forceful limbs assign'd, And gave to Virtue all his mighty mind, 495 Fierce ACHELOUS rush'd from mountain-caves, O'er sad Etolia pour'd his wasteful waves, O'er lowing vales and bleating pastures roll'd, Swept her red vineyards, and her glebes of gold, Mined all her towns, uptore her rooted woods, 500 And Famine danced upon the shining floods. The youthful Hero seized his curled crest, And dash'd with lifted club the watery Pest; With ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... great improvements have been made mentally, morally and materially. We believe that man fashioned in God's image and endowed with mental faculties which are capable of development was not sent into the world to serve, in order that other men may revel in luxuries and wasteful living. ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various

... should stand in the sun, and be stirred every day. If it does not begin to look like soap in the course of five or six days, add a little hot lye to it; if this does not help it, try whether it be grease that it wants. Perhaps you will think cold soap wasteful, because the grease must be strained; but if the scraps are boiled thoroughly in strong lye, the grease will all float upon the surface, ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child

... the interest of German tranquillity. Such expenditures are economic precautions against expensive wars. Thereby the solvency of the German exchequer would be moderately insured. So far from unduly fostering a bellicose spirit tending to war, these would be tactful preventives of wasteful foreign and civil broils. Fifty years' current expense to insure the empire's peace would not equal waste of one such serious conflict. There is no doubt that this sturdy sovereign possesses much military spirit. This is natural heritage, coming down in ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... bisons—roamed over the North American prairies at the time we write of in countless thousands; for the Indians, although extremely wasteful of animal life, could not keep their numbers down, and the aggressive white-man, with his deadly gun and rifle, had only just begun to depopulate the plains. Therefore the hunters had not to travel far before coming up ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... left, he escapes at a tangent. If I try to interfere and to bring him back to the path of my choosing, he persists in his refusal, shrivels up, does not budge, and soon the whole procession is in confusion. We will not insist: the method is a poor one, very wasteful of effort for at best a ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... as the result of this war. The intelligent farmer in the ranks, who has learned his superiority to 'Secesh,' as a soldier, and who knows himself to be superior to any Southern in all matters of information and practical creative power, looks with scorn at the worn-out fields, wasteful agriculture, and general shiftlessness of the natives, and says, with a contemptuous laugh: 'We will get better crops out of the land, and manage it in another fashion, when we settle down here.' Not less scornfully does the mechanic look down on the clumsy, labor-wasting contrivances ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... strowed wasteful fire, Envenoming the hearts of most and least, Folly, disdain, madness, strife, rancor, ire, Thirst to shed blood, in every breast increased, This ill spread far, and till it set on fire With rage the Italian lodgings, never ceased, From ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... made, and leave two or three hundred less behind me when I die,—me as have allays done right and been careful, and the eldest o' the family; and my money's to go and be squandered on them as have had the same chance as me, only they've been wicked and wasteful. Sister Pullet, you may do as you like, and you may let your husband rob you back again o' the money he's given you, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... earth. If hens and ducks were to lay their eggs in high trees, and among rocks, as many birds do, we should get very few of them; and as they lay many more than they can hatch, it would be a great and wasteful loss. By this we are sure that poultry was intended for our use; and if you take care not to frighten or tease them, you may bring up chickens to be as tame and familiar as dogs or cats. I remember a droll proof of this. Once, out of a great many fowls, belonging ...
— Kindness to Animals - Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked • Charlotte Elizabeth

... related progression between science and practice in this matter: "The natural sciences developed first, because man was first interested in the conquest of nature, and the simpler physical laws could be grasped at an early period. This period brought an increase of wealth, but it was wasteful of human life. The desire to save life led the way to the study of biology. Knowledge of the physical environment and of life, however, did not prevent social disease from flourishing, and did not greatly improve the social condition ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares against wasteful and careless farming in a way that reminds us of our good friend Judge ——, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... lodging; who, grown old, Walks with his staff on the same soil and mould Where he did creep an infant, and can tell Many fair years spent in one quiet cell! No toils of fate made him from home far known, Nor foreign waters drank, driv'n from his own. No loss by sea, no wild land's wasteful war Vex'd him, not the brib'd coil of gowns at bar. Exempt from cares, in cities never seen, The fresh field-air he loves, and rural green. The year's set turns by fruits, not consuls, knows; Autumn by apples, May by blossom'd ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... I never was wasteful in postage stamps. But as I was in London, to see the doctor, for the Edinburgh ones can make nothing of the case—a kind of dwawming—I looked in at auld Nicky Maxwell's. She gave me a good character of you, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... you found your life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... teeth brushed: many, indeed, will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren

... Public Instruction in New York State, writes,—[14] "We cannot exculpate the schools. They are as wasteful of child life as are the homes. From the bottom to the top of the American educational system we take little account of the time of the child.... We have eight or nine elementary grades for work which would be done in six if we were working mainly for productivity and power. We have shaped ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... day of the New Year, she was at her post as usual, and Joseph stood convicted of being wasteful in ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... contemporary criticism of Antony's habits: "And on the other side, the noblemen (as Cicero saith), did not only mislike him, but also hate him for his naughty life: for they did abhor his banquets and drunken feasts he made at unseasonable times, and his extreme wasteful expenses upon vain light huswives; and then in the daytime he would sleep or walk out his drunkenness, thinking to wear away the fume of the abundance of wine which ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare

... supplied by market growers is needlessly long in the stem. The bundles have an imposing appearance, no doubt, but the useless length adds nothing to the comfort of those at table, and is a wasteful tax on the energy of the plant. For home consumption it will generally suffice if the white portion is about four inches long, and this determines the depth at which the sticks should be cut. Here it may be useful to remark that deeply buried roots do not thrive ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... the nerves,' which I know to be true, having knitted many a worry into the heel of a sock. I learned at an early age the value of money, and once having acquired the saving habit, it is not possible to be wasteful in ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... Legislature of Iowa, as a police regulation, should put the power in some hands, carefully and wisely guarded from abuse and wasteful extravagance, to arrest by isolation and destruction, if necessary, any contagious disease which may suddenly be developed in any neighborhood. This, however, not to include any of doubtful contagious ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... large as the earth. If it has indeed been the scheme of nature to call into existence the solar arrangements on their present scale for the solitary purpose of cherishing this immediate world of ours, then all we can say is that nature carries on its business in the most outrageously wasteful manner. ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... price under 4s. 6d. to 5s. per lb. The estate alluded to above yields from 30,000 to 40,000 lb. per annum; a uniform rate of 41/2 d. per lb. of finished bark is paid for the labor. Cinnamon oil is produced from this bark by distillation; the mode is very primitive and wasteful. About 40 lb. of bark, previously macerated in water, form one charge for the still, which is heated over a fire made of the spent bark of a previous distillation. Each charge of bark yields about three ounces of oil, and two charges are ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou! Sunset faints after sunset into the night, Splendorously dying from thy window-sill— For ever. Sad our poverty doth bow Before the riches of thy making might: Sweep from thy space thy systems at thy will— In thee the sun sets ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... the capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... water. Many drift with other groups of human wastage to the unemployed, thence to the unemployable, and so to the gutter and the grave. The poor we have always with us; but the wastrel—like the pauper—"is a work of art, the creation of wasteful sympathy and legislative inefficiency." ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... thousand for six weeks' cruising, the staunchest freighter afloat, And Mac he'll give you your bonus the minute I'm out o' the boat! He'll take you round to Macassar, and you'll come back alone; He knows what I want o' the Mary. . . . I'll do what I please with my own. Your mother 'ud call it wasteful, but I've seven-and-thirty more; I'll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door. . . . For my son 'e was never a credit: 'e muddled with books and art, And 'e lived on Sir Anthony's money and 'e broke Sir Anthony's heart. There isn't even a grandchild, and the Gloster ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... of metaphysics, and floundered a while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through galleries—the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure, and we ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... Wastefulness.—The wasteful man buys things he does not need; spends his money as fast as he can get it; lives beyond his means; throws things away which are capable of further service; runs in debt; and is forever behindhand. He lives from hand to mouth; is dependent upon his neighbors for things ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn, Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;— Shall not carv'd tables serve my turn, But all must be of buhl? Give grasping pomp its double share,— I ask but one ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... His Vizier Er Rehwan a. Story of the Man of Khorassan, His Son and His Governor b. Story of the Singer and the Druggist c. Story of the King Who Knew the Quintessence of Things d. Story of the Rich Man Who Gave His Fair Daughter in Marriage to the Poor Old Man e. Story of the Rich Man and His Wasteful Son f. The King's Son Who Fell in Love with the Picture g. Story of the Fuller and His Wife h. Story of the Old Woman, the Merchant and the King i. Story of the Credulous Husband j. Story of the Unjust King and the Tither i. Story of David and Solomon k. Story of the Thief and ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... are, is not communicated; but we can justly fear they were far too frugal,—and excused the underhand borrowing, which is evident enough as a painful shadow in the Prince's life henceforth. He does not seem to have been wasteful; but he borrows all round, under sevenfold secrecy, from benevolent Courts, from Austria, Russia, England: and the only pleasant certainty we notice in such painful business is, that, on his Accession, he pays with exactitude,—sends ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... production of its food, clothes and housing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any anarchic plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to a much higher degree than we do at present we can never get rid of the wasteful and iniquitous welter of a little riches and a deal of poverty which current political humbug calls our prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an excellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has paid its daily debt to ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... to our present system, but our present system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of industries, is equally objectionable. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... dollars wasted—just thrown away—in this country every year furnishing nutriment to tails that are of no earthly use to the horses after they're nourished. You can depend on that. I've examined the government statistics, and they're enough to make a man cry to see how wasteful the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... around display How impetuous ocean's sway Once with wasteful fury spread The wild ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... of the fences is a laborious task, yet after one or two years they require extensive repairs, and when the repairs are such as to amount to a practical rebuilding, the "conuco" is commonly abandoned, and a new one located elsewhere. This method is wasteful of fence-material and land. The planting is done in the most primitive way, commonly by making a hole in the ground with a machete or by using a forked stick as a plow. There are few hoes, and among the natives no modern ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... in various countries must surely have arrived at the conclusion that the Englishman is the most wasteful being on the face of the globe! He only thinks of getting through the work, or whatever it may be, that he has purposed to himself, attaining the end immediately in view in the speediest manner possible without regard to anything else, lavish of himself and of the stuff ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall

... fourth and tenth Nymphals are also touched with the sadder, almost satiric vein; the former inveighing against the English imitation of foreigners and love of extravagance in dress; while the tenth complains of the improvident and wasteful felling of trees in the English forests. This last Nymphal, though designedly an epilogue, is probably rather a warning than a despairing lament, even though we conceive the old satyr to be Drayton ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... Georgino, and you know how I hate display," she said. "Shakespeare was content with the most modest scenery for his masterpieces, and it would be a great mistake if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by mere wasteful opulence. In all the years I have lived here, and contributed in my humble way to the life of the place, I have heard no complaints about my suppers or teas, nor about the quality of entertainment which I offer my guests when they are so good as to say 'Si,' to le ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... rings and dangles, of which each seemed to possess an inexhaustible variety. Ferdinand's dressing-case and its contents were exquisite in their way, and were something between an amusement and a horror to Wilmet, who could not understand Felix's regard for so extravagant and wasteful a person, who gave away sovereigns where half-crowns would have been more wholesome, half-crowns instead of shillings, shillings instead of pence, and who moreover was devoted to horse- flesh. His own favourite steed, Brown Murad, had been secured at a fabulous price; and the possession of ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... will not utilize more than from 5 to 10 per cent. of the energy contained in the fuel used. It will thus be seen that the process of converting static to dynamic caloric by luminous combustion, by means of the steam engine, is an exceedingly wasteful and costly method, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... know," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder—"don't you know that you're a most foolish and wasteful person? We get along capitally, you and I—we've had a rattling time all this week—and then you will go and make uncivil remarks about my friends—in public, too! You actually think I'm going to let you tell Aunt Watton how to manage me! You get me into no ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a right, either moral or legal, to destroy or squander an inheritance of his children that he holds for them in trust. And man, the wasteful and greedy spendthrift that he is, has not created even the humblest of the species of birds, mammals and fishes that adorn and enrich this earth. "The earth is THE LORD'S, and the fulness thereof!" With all his wisdom, man ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... substances are then picked up by the wind and blown into noxious dust storms; pollution in the Caspian Sea; soil pollution from overuse of agricultural chemicals and salination from poor infrastructure and wasteful irrigation practices ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... the artificial rocks that spread in fine disorder about the feet of its sea-gods and sea-horses; but they who mourn the old papal rule accuse the present Italian government of stinting the supply of water. To me there seemed no stint of water in any of the fountains of Rome. In some a mere wasteful spilth seems the sole design of the artist, as in the Fontana Paolina on the Janiculum, where the cold wash of its deluge seemed to add a piercing chill to our windy afternoon. The other fountains have each a quaint grace or absolute charm or pleasing absurdity, whether the waters shower ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... that trembled in her voice. "How one can be mistaken in souls under gay garbs. Indeed it is as the child used to say, 'God made all beautiful things, and nothing is to be called common or unclean, or high and lofty and wasteful.' I am more glad than I can say that thou hast returned to the fashion of the Friends again, but thou art a man to look well in nice attire, and truly one serveth God with the heart and not with the clothes, except that neatness ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... building up a core of suitable size by laying together thin sheets of soft iron, or by forming a bundle of soft iron wires. The use of laminated cores is for the purpose of preventing eddy currents, which, if allowed to flow, would not only be wasteful of energy but would also tend to defeat the desired high impedance. Sometimes in iron-clad impedance coils, the iron shell is slotted longitudinally to break up the flow of eddy currents ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... for the Sea-Service, and submitted to the East India Company many notable plans for injuring the Commerce of the Hollanders. I have likewise reason to think that he did me a great deal of harm amongst my late Owners at Bristol and elsewhere, saying that I had been the Ruin of him with Wasteful Extravagance and Deboshed Ways, and that but for his Intercession I should have been Broken on the Wheel for unhandsome Behaviour to the Fair Beguine. Ere he flitted, he left me a Letter, in which he had the Impudence to tell me that he had long since drawn ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... panther, but hard on the deer; for the killer is wasteful and will often kill for ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... are impoverished. I have just been in the country. Is it proper that peasants should overwork themselves without getting enough to eat, while we are living in such wasteful luxury?" ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... earth with a prolificness which seems inexhaustible. And when plant life is abundant, animal and insect life is abundant also. So profuse, indeed, is the output of living things that it seems simply wasteful. A single tree may produce thousands of flowers. Each flower may have dozens of seeds. The tree may go on flowering for a hundred or two hundred years. So a single tree may produce millions of seeds, each capable of growing into a forest ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... ruinous in thousands of cases, is extravagance. Wastefulness is almost become a trait of our society. American women, especially, are profuse and lavish of money in dress, in equipage, in furniture, in houses, in entertainments, in every particular of life. Everywhere this foolish and wasteful use of money challenges the surprise and sarcasm of the observant foreign tourist through our country. Perhaps the largeness and immensity of our land, its resources and material, as well as the wonderful national advance we have already made, tends to cultivate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... energy, skill, and willingness of the American laborer. The English laborer is faithful to the policy of "ca' canny." He refuses point-blank to get the work out of a machine that the New World scab gets out of a machine. Mr. Maxim, observing a wasteful hand-labor process in his English factory, invented a machine which he proved capable of displacing several men. But workman after workman was put at the machine, and without exception they turned out neither more nor less than a workman turned out by hand. They obeyed the mandate ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... by his associations—enormously rich people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish whims—for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and coarsened and vulgarized their pretty women—or perhaps for a night's gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous caresses of some belle of the other world. Norman fortunately ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... any children were no marvels. At two o'clock her grate was screwed up to the narrowest possible dimensions, and the ashes, potato peelings, tea leaves and cabbage stalks were thrown on the poor, struggling coals. No meat, by the way, was ever roasted—it was considered wasteful—everything was baked or boiled. After half-past four not a bit of anything that was not cold was allowed till the next morning, and, indeed, from the first of April to the thirty-first of October the fire was raked ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... woman had expended ten dollars on foolish and rapid living where she gave one in charity; it was her wasteful extravagance, not her open heart of sympathy, which made her ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... deliberately chose the dearest market for their purchases. In the same spirit, the price of freights was wilfully heightened by the Navigation-laws. Important branches of home industry were crippled by prying, vexatious, and wasteful excises. And this system was conceived to be the highest wisdom; or at any rate, to be so invincible a necessity that it could not be avoided or altered without danger. The country, if it were to make its way, could make it only because other ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... abounding in faith and mystery and hope, why do your myriad virgins consent to a task that no human slave has ever accepted? Another spring might be theirs, another summer, were they only a little less wasteful of strength, a little less self-forgetful in their ardour for toil; but at the magnificent moment when the flowers all cry to them, they seem to be stricken with the fatal ecstasy of work; and in less than five weeks they ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... would have his boy "look into all sorts of knowledge," and train his understanding with a wide variety of exercises. In the education given in the grammar schools of his time he found much that seemed to him wasteful of time and thoroughly bad in principle, and he used much space to point out defects and describe better methods of teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons therefor. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... an ostentatious exhibition of their contempt for the world. St. John, happening to be passing through the Forum, witnessed this display, and, pitying the folly of these misguided men, kindly gave them sounder advice. Sending for Crato their master, who had led them into error, he blamed the wasteful destruction of valuable property, and instructed him in the true meaning of contempt for the world according to Christ's doctrine, quoting the precept of that teacher, his own Master, when, in reply to the young man who inquired of Him how he might obtain eternal life, He said, 'If thou wilt be perfect, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various

... have painted themselves all over, as the Picts of this island; that the Hottentots smear themselves all over with grease. And lastly, that many of our own heads at this day are covered with the flour of wheat and the fat of hogs, according to the tyranny of a filthy and wasteful fashion, and all this without inconvenience. To this must be added the strict analogy between the use of the perspirable matter and the mucous fluids, which are poured for similar purposes upon all the internal membranes ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... added anxiety about the other babies, to whom we feared the poisoned milk might have been given, and we dreaded what the next post might bring. Just at that moment it was suggested, with kindest intentions, that perhaps we were on the wrong track, the work seemed so difficult and wasteful. ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... being threatened by a preponderance of the feeble-minded and degenerate. Perhaps if things went otherwise, man would now be an extinct animal. The elevation of type is dangerous for the preservation of the species. Why? Strong races are wasteful, we find ourselves here confronted with ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... some without authority. The housekeeper, who should have been chosen with the greatest care, since in her hands lay the whole management and preparation of the food of these growing children, was a slovenly, wasteful woman, taken from Mr. Wilson's kitchen, and much believed in by himself. Nevertheless to her door must we lay much ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... perfect morning,—a cobalt sky, an ultramarine sea, a golden sun, an almost wasteful extravagance of crimson over hills of purest snow, which caught a reflected glow from rock and crag. Between me and the hills lay miles of rough ice and long veins of thin black slob that had formed during the night. For the foreground there was my poor, gruesome pan, bobbing ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell

... to ease a world-old human curse by imitating the occupations, points of views, and methods of a radically different being. Can she realize her quest in this way? Generally speaking, nothing is more wasteful in human operations than following a course which is not native and spontaneous, not according to the law of ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell



Words linked to "Wasteful" :   improvident, pound-foolish, spendthrift, inefficient, destructive, thrifty, prodigal, profligate, wastefulness, uneconomic, extravagant, uneconomical



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