Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Wasteful   /wˈeɪstfəl/   Listen
Wasteful

adjective
1.
Inefficient in use of time and effort and materials.  Synonym: uneconomical.  "Wasteful duplication of effort" , "Uneconomical ebb and flow of power"
2.
Tending to squander and waste.
3.
Laying waste.



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Wasteful" Quotes from Famous Books



... store, Sergeant Fones urged his stout broncho to a quicker pace than usual. The broncho was, like himself, wasteful of neither action nor affection. The Sergeant had caught him wild and independent, had brought him in, broken him, and taught him obedience. They understood each other; perhaps they loved each other. But about that even Private ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... That seems wasteful and not very hopeful. But, to be honest—and if this final piece of pen-work be not honest to its core, it certainly will prove the very acme of futility—I must add the expression of opinion that most of the important actions ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... shame, which they endeavored to disguise by the use of their tongues. The Chinese came really to afford assistance, but too late. We remained until the stockade of Sekundis was finished, while the enemy kept up a wasteful fire from the opposite side of the river, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel

... bore it like a warrior and a man; there was a reason that I should bear it: but when that reason was ended, I bethought me to get beyond the accursed sounds. It was trying to the courage and to the habits, but I had heard of these vast and naked fields, and I came hither to escape the wasteful temper of my people. Tell me, Dahcotah, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... as the plantation shows signs of deterioration it is abandoned, and a fresh one planted out in new land, the land previously under crop with bananas being either planted in sugar-cane or allowed to run to grass. This is certainly a very wasteful method of utilising our land, and the time will come, sooner or later, when greater care will have to be given to it, and that once land has become impoverished by banana culture, it will have to be put under ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson

... Negroes would have among themselves men of careful training and broad culture, as teachers and teachers of teachers. There are always periods of educational evolution when it is deemed quite proper for pupils in the fourth reader to teach those in the third. But such a method, wasteful and ineffective at all times, is peculiarly dangerous when ignorance is widespread and when there are few homes and public institutions to supplement the work of the school. It is, therefore, of crying necessity among ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... himself until late in the summer probably, and there was a great deal that ought to be done in the early spring. He would have to be contented to go slow of course, and must remember that unskilled labor is always expensive and wasteful; still it would likely be all he could get. Just how he would feed and house even unskilled labor was a problem yet ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... 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 Nature by first earning ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... have 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

... and undermining to his health; while his constant recourse to medicine—daily, as it appears, and in large quantities—both evinced, and, no doubt, increased the derangement of his digestion. When to all this we add the wasteful wear of spirits and strength from the slow corrosion of sensibility, the warfare of the passions, and the workings of a mind that allowed itself no sabbath, it is not to be wondered at that the vital principle in him should so soon have burnt out, or that, at the age of thirty-three, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various

... is amusing to notice the various, and oftentimes contradictory, notions of economy, among judicious and experienced housekeepers; for there is probably no economist, who would not be deemed lavish or wasteful, in some respects, by another and equally experienced and judicious person, who, in some different points, would herself be as much condemned by the other. These diversities are occasioned by dissimilar early habits, and by the different ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... practice in this country favored having several judges hold all trial courts, whether a jury was or was not to be called in. It was a method wasteful of time and money. In Massachusetts it survived for their highest nisi prius court until 1804. In many States it endured much longer ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD

... different from the rest of the house. He felt a little awkward for he knew he had no business there, and when he got to the big, vaulted kitchen, he stopped and looked round him dubiously. The fire in the old-fashioned, wasteful range had been allowed to die down, and on the round wooden table in the middle of the room were heaped up the dinner ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

... situation, and determined to remedy it 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 Corps had been, virtually, but ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan

... he ventured to strike a match, mentally belaboring himself at the wasteful way in which he had always used his flash light which was now so much needed and out of commission. The cellar was large, running under the whole house, with heavy rafters and looming coal pits. A scurrying rat started a few lumps of coal in the slide, and a cobwebby rope hung ominously ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... of my God, How do thy towers in ruin lie, How art thou riven and strewn abroad, Under the rude and wasteful sky!" 'Twas thus upon his fasting-day The "Man of Loves" was fain to pray, His lattice open toward his darling west, Mourning the ruined home he still ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... on the part of both workers and the management as to the quickest time in which a piece of work can be done constitutes what has been the most formidable obstacle in the path of all progress toward improved industrial conditions.... Every wasteful operation, every mistake, every useless move has to be paid for by somebody, and in the long run both the employer and the employee have to bear a proportionate share.... For each job there is the quickest time in which it can be done by a ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt

... Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn, Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; Shall not carved tables serve my turn, But all must be of buhl? Give grasping pomp its double share— I ask ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... sighed, for when I looked again the sky was overcast, The summer insect's winged dance was o'er, yet on I past, The gaudy butterfly was gone, the bee away had fled, While on each fairest, brightest flower the wasteful locust fed. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... the garrison had to fear for hunger, in case blockade should be resorted to as the means of reducing them. The Major's directions had been imperfectly obeyed in regard to laying in provisions; and the dragoons, in spite of all warning and authority, were likely to be wasteful in using them. It was, therefore, with a heavy heart, that Major Bellenden gave directions for guarding the window through which the Castle had so nearly been surprised, as well as all others which offered the most remote facility for ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... and so the Court of Philip the Third, with its fools, dwarfs, idiots and all of its dancing, jiggling, juggling, wasteful folly, did not succeed in wrecking the land. When Philip the Third traveled, he sent hundreds of men ahead to beat the swamps, day and night, in the vicinity of his royal presence, so as to silence the frogs. He thought their croaking was a personal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... pace, its dried mud flying off like missiles, through those French villages, which are so tidy because there is nothing to waste; where there is just enough and no more—no extra paper, no extra string, or food, or tin cans, or any of the litter that goes to make the disorder of a wasteful American town; where paper and string and tin cans and old boots serve their original purpose and then, in the course of time, become flower-pots or rag carpets or soup meat, or heaven knows what; and where, having fulfilled this second destiny, they go on being useful in feeding ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... 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 enemies ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... were the causes which predisposed her to what was, after all, anything but an act of self-renunciation. First of all she could not fail to remark the increasing discontent with her arbitrary and wasteful ways. Within ten years she had created 17 counts, 46 barons and 428 lesser nobles; and, to provide these new peers with adequate appanages, she had sold or mortgaged crown property representing an annual income ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... it became necessary to fire off and clean the entire battery every evening, lest a miss-fire should be the consequence upon the following morning from the condensation of moisture in the nipple during night. This was not only great trouble and a wasteful expenditure of ammunition, but the noise of so many loud reports just at the hour when wild animals were on the move, alarmed the country. Trustworthy gun-carriers are always difficult to procure, and it was by no means uncommon that in moments of danger, when the spare rifles were ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... people he did bless, In the wasteful wilderness; He hath, with a piteous eye, Viewed ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams

... road, he slants off to the right or 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 ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... meanwhile, sat by the fire, now musing in drunken revery,—"in cogibundity of cogitation,"—now grumbling a lament for his perished son, which, by a natural licence of affliction, he managed to intermingle with regrets for his lost liquor, and occasionally heaping maledictions upon the heads of his wasteful companions, or soliciting the prisoner's attention to an account, that he gave him at least six times over, of the peculiar ceremonies which would be observed in burning him, when once safely bestowed in the Piankeshaw nation. In this manner, the old savage, often nodding, but always ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... the parish priests as seculars, and gradually drew away again the devotion and the means of the faithful from the parishes where they were needed, and to which they properly belonged. It drew them away, in Scotland, not only to rich centres like cathedrals, with their too wasteful retinue, but far more to the great monasteries scattered over the land. Kings and barons, who proposed to spend life so as to need after its close a good deal of intercession, naturally turned their eyes, even before death-bed, to these wealthy strongholds of poverty ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes

... some snappish, 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 of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... betokening the maturity of the season and the near approach of autumn's latest splendor. Big boulders of granite, overlaid with lichens, were profusely ornamented with crimson creepers. Everything appeared in splendid and wasteful confusion. There were huge trees with branches partially torn away; others, with split trunks leaning in slow death against their fellows; others, prostrate on the ground; and around and among all, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... midway his neck; then he frothed the soap-suds into his red rectangular ears, which stood out like speaking trumpets; there he let it remain. Soap is for putting on the face, grease on the hair. It is folly then to wash either off. Besides being wasteful. His flaxen hair stood out in wet strands and clammy tags and tails. All the while Saunders kept ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... were certainly not moderated 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 ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... Basso, in brief, shalt have no tribute here, Nor shall the heathens live upon our spoil: First will we raze the city-walls ourselves, Lay waste the island, hew the temples down, And, shipping off our goods to Sicily, Open an entrance for the wasteful sea, Whose billows, beating the resistless banks, [118] Shall overflow ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe

... my friends object not, come again." Hence, our grave Lover, though he liked the face, Praised not a feature—dwelt not on a grace; But in the simplest terms declared his state: "A widow'd man, who wish'd a virtuous mate; Who fear'd neglect, and was compell'd to trust Dependants wasteful, idle, or unjust; Or should they not the trusted stores destroy, At best, they could not help him to enjoy; But with her person and her prudence bless'd, His acts would prosper, and his soul have rest: Would she be his?"—"Why, that was much to say; She ...
— Tales • George Crabbe

... 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 sun sets ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... wars which were destined to last 116 years, and to exhaust the strength of two strong nations, were now about to begin. They brought brilliant and barren triumphs to England, and, like most wars, were a wasteful and terrible mistake, which, if crowned with ultimate success, might, by removing the centre of the kingdom into France, have marred the future welfare of England, for the happy constitutional development of the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... the time, Leaving mine isled self behind it far Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas, (As down the years the splendour voyages From some long ruined and night-submerged star), And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore; Adding its wasteful more To his own overflowing treasury. So through his river mine shall reach thy sea, Bearing its confluent part; In his pulse mine shall thrill; And the quick heart shall quicken from the ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... gloom and woe: Telling how the guests 10 Crowd into the yard, Run to see the bride Whom the husband brings Homeward at his side. How his parents both Fling themselves on her; How his brothers soon Call her "wasteful one"; How his sisters next Call her "giddy one"; 20 How his father growls, "Greedy little bear!" How his mother snarls, "Cannibal!" at her. She is "slovenly" And "disorderly," She's ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... for the time being apparently of the more noble and aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil really is, but due to our wasteful way of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... 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

... "very dear." Try now, "Migh verrie deare Wyfe." Is it not immediately infinitely more soft and tender? Is there not something exquisitely pleasant in lingering over those redundant letters, leaving each word, as it were, with a reluctant caress? Such spelling is a soft, domestic, lovingly wasteful use of material. Or, again, if you have no wife, or object to an old-fashioned conjugal tenderness, try "Mye owne sweete dearrest Marrie." There is the tremble of a tenderness no mere arrangement of trim everyday letters can express in those double ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... must be absolutely wasted—like water poured into the sea. This was accomplished by the use of the surplus products in the support of bodies of workers employed in unproductive kinds of labor. This waste labor was of two sorts—the first was that employed in wasteful industrial and commercial competition; the second was that employed in the means and ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... the sovereignty of the United States in those distant islands as in all other places where our flag rightfully floats. I shall put at the disposal of the Army and Navy all the means which the liberality of Congress and the people have provided to cause this unprovoked and wasteful insurrection to cease. ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... 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 ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... desired, the ripening tops must be cut frequently, because the plants mature very unevenly. But this method is often more wasteful than spreading cloths or sheets of paper beneath the plants and allowing the seed to drop in them as it ripens. Twice a day, preferably about noon, and in the late afternoon the plants should be gently jarred to ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... the former, as Heyward joined them, "you are wasteful of your powder, and the kick of the rifle disconcerts your aim! Little powder, light lead, and a long arm, seldom fail of bringing the death screech from a Mingo! At least, such has been my experience with the creatur's. Come, friends: let us to ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... that purpose, renders their continued enforcement possible. The experience of other nations teaches us that a country can not be stripped of its forests with impunity, and we shall expose ourselves to the gravest consequences unless the wasteful and improvident manner in which the forests in the United States are destroyed be effectually checked. I earnestly recommend that the measures suggested by the Secretary of the Interior for the suppression of ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson

... dog-rose gemmed with dew; no lustrous meadow crossed by shadows thrown by ancient dreaming elms; no flash from the briskly-flowing brook: no, nothing of this, but in its place a parched and rugged land of hills or knolls, stony, wasteful, where for countless ages the juniper, the broom, the gorse, and the heather have disputed the sovereignty, the intervening valleys, timidly cultivated, producing little else but rye and buckwheat, and the deep gorges sombre ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... 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 ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... been very wasteful as regards space; for only a few volumes, say a couple of dozen, could be accommodated on a single desk. As books accumulated therefore some other form of case had to be devised, which would accommodate more volumes than could be consulted at once. The desk could ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark

... actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store, instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in the fire faster than it can be ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... useful to play at shop with, until you are ready. Not at dinner-parties, for they will not grow unless uncooked. Potatoes are not grown with seed, but with chopped-up potatoes. Apple trees are grown from twigs, which is less wasteful. ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit

... Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... and flashed in the precious ruby of the ring he wore on his white hand. He seemed a true incarnation of his magnificent city, a century before the rest of all Italy in luxury, in extravagance, in the art of wasteful trifling with great things which is a rich man's way of loving art itself; and there were many others of the company who were of the same stamp as he, but whose faces had no interest for Zorzi compared with Contarini's. Beside him they were but ordinary ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... is not development but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side and sufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible to restore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate into a wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility is the worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much more acceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjust itself to the new outlook and temper and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... cool side, since there is not the vestige of a breeze; but faint odors arrive, become stronger, and die away, or are wholly dissipated by an onrush of others, so musky or so sweet that one can almost taste them. These have their secret purposes, since Nature is not wasteful. If she creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her whim to walk in obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable. However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... like me. Well, I said I'd take it out of this noble country of mine, and I am doing; and I shall keep on doing until I'm tired. These thirty men or so here might be at some useful productive work, fishing or merchant-marining. They're otherwise engaged. They're spending a pleasant wasteful month over our lunch and tea. That's what I enjoy. It makes me smile to myself when I wake up in the middle of the night.... I'm showing my beloved country who's ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... as he asked the question, the answer to it, which he had once known so well and forgotten, looked at him in the boy's pale face and glowing eyes, the great answer not to be silenced, youth, and the wonderful, wasteful urge of youth. "Don't you know this town's sick?" he demanded abruptly. "It's dirty. You can't clean it up. Don't you ever try. Don't you stir things up. Don't you dig in too deep. I suppose you know the town's ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... 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 ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... "water-jacket," forming part of the boiler. A water-jacket signifies a double coating of metal plates with a space between, which is filled with water (see Fig. 6). The fire is now enclosed much as it is in a kitchen range. But our boiler must not be so wasteful of the heat as is that useful household fixture. On their way to the funnel the flames and hot gases should act on a very large metal or other surface in contact with the water of the boiler, in order to give up a due ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... a wide difference of opinion the country over as to whether colonization should be a public affair or be left to private initiative and effort. Those who favor private colonization claim that public colonization is wasteful, uneconomical, that it puts a new burden on the taxpayers, and savors of Socialism. Those who favor public colonization maintain that private colonization companies in the very nature of their endeavors work ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek

... twenty miles over the roadless camp, would be prohibitive, and there was no wood to be had. For this reason, on every estancia there were some ten acres planted with peach trees. It seems horribly wasteful to cut down peach trees for fuel, but they grow very rapidly, burn admirably, and whilst they are standing the owner gets an unlimited supply of peaches for pickling and preserving. The soil of the Argentine suits peaches, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... resulting from the change has been rendered the more striking. Under the benign influence of our republican institutions, and the maintenance of peace with all nations whilst so many of them were engaged in bloody and wasteful wars, the fruits of a just policy were enjoyed in an unrivaled growth of our faculties and resources. Proofs of this were seen in the improvements of agriculture, in the successful enterprises of commerce, in ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... and spent his money as if there were plenty more where it came from; but he was never dissipated nor wasteful. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... belligerent countries toward the development of other sources of nitrogen. The United States, under governmental appropriation, began the building of extensive plants for the fixation of nitrogen from the air, and the building of by-product coke ovens in the place of the old wasteful beehive ovens was accelerated. Germany before the war had already gone far in both of these directions, not only within her own boundaries, but in the building of fixation plants in Scandinavia and Switzerland. War conditions required further development of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... you the cause of this difference of opinion between the two countries was the careless and wasteful way in which the hunters have ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 49, October 14, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... her to be remedied, or, at least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their patriotism consist ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... job is to crash your ship," he said. "It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris

... exempt from the law against combinations in restraint of trade, combinations to increase the cost of living by increasing the prices of agricultural products and the prices to be paid for labor. The effort seems to be to compel men to compete in the use of their savings no matter how wasteful the competition, and to forbid men competing in the use of their labor, no matter what the idleness thereby caused. I think it a truism that whoever seeks to be exempted from the restrictions or liabilities he would impose on others, seeks not ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery

... lady Chia with a smile, "only the first fall of snow in the tenth moon. We'll have, after this, plenty of snowy days so there will be ample time to put your ladyship to wasteful expense." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... with him the particulars of departure. The duke was lodged magnificently in Paris. He had one of those superb establishments pertaining to great fortunes, the like of which certain old men remembered to have seen in all their glory in the times of wasteful liberality of Henry III.'s reign. Then, really, several great nobles were richer than the king. They knew it, used it, and never deprived themselves of the pleasure of humiliating his royal majesty when they had an opportunity. It was this egotistical aristocracy ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... of expenditure and a living wage to meet legitimate needs, are both demanded by students of economic reform. It is not according to the principles of social righteousness that any family should suffer from cold or hunger, nor is it right that any social group should be wasteful of the portion of economic goods that has come to it. There is great need, also, that the expense of living should be reduced while the standards of living shall not be lowered. The business world has been trying to secure economies in production; there is even greater need of economies ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... 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 am not very confident, that more ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... be true, a society to circulate Bibles is a most irrational and wasteful expenditure of energy and money. We cannot ignore the extent and severity of the opposition to the very idea of revelation, even if we would; we should not if we could. We are told with some exaggeration—the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Verinder. On this occasion, however, she not only disappointed—she really shocked me. There was an absence of all lady-like restraint in her language and manner most painful to see. She was possessed by some feverish excitement which made her distressingly loud when she laughed, and sinfully wasteful and capricious in what she ate and drank at lunch. I felt deeply for her poor mother, even before the true state of the case had been confidentially made ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... used it all up in giving yourself a holiday in Europe?" Lucy exclaimed, half reproachfully. To her economic British mind such an expenditure of capital seemed horribly wasteful. ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... that, under the antient Government of Ireland, the Education of the landed Gentry, when Luxury, with its wasteful Catalogue of Vices, had not rendered Property so mutable and wavering as in modern Ages, was provided for; whether by the immediate Care of Parents, or essential Attention of Guardians, by the Laws of the Land; in order that Gentlemen ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke

... moving, to let forth The King of Glory, in his powerful Word And Spirit, coming to create new worlds. On Heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, Up from the bottom turned by furious winds And surging waves, as mountains to assault Heaven's highth, and with the centre mix the pole. 'Silence, ye troubled Waves, and thou Deep, peace!' Said then the omnific Word: 'your discord end!' Nor stayed; but on ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... goldfields, where water is very scarce, white explorers have sometimes adopted a way to get help which is far more objectionable. The natives in those regions are very reluctant to show the locality of the waterholes. The supply is scanty, and they have learned to regard the white man as wasteful and inconsiderate in regard to water. But a white explorer or traveller has been known to catch a native, and, filling his mouth with salt, to expose him to the heat of the sun until the tortures of ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox

... Christ defends the side of Mary's deed which the critics fastened on. They posed as being more practical and benevolent than she was. They were utilitarians, she was wasteful. Their objection sounds sensible, but it belongs to the low levels of life. One flash of lofty love would have killed it. Christ's reply to it draws a contrast between constant duties and special, transient moments. It is coloured, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... been nothing further to consider, the invasion of the Senate by Big Business in the 'fifties might not have taken place. But there was something else. Slavery's system of agriculture was excessively wasteful. To be highly profitable it required virgin soil, and the financial alliance demanded high profits. Early in the 'fifties, the problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery. The ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... intellect with which woman as well as man is endowed, has been given for use and exercise, and not "to fust in her unused." Such endowments are never conferred without a purpose. The Creator may be lavish in His gifts, but he is never wasteful. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... burden not only of the South, but of the American people at large. Ignorant labor is shiftless and wasteful labor. The growth of varied and inter-related manufactures cannot rest upon a labor element of clumsiness and stupidity. Civil duties demand intelligence and morals. The best patriotism of the South joins ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various

... question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience—incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... though they were only half an ell. Madam ventured to speak a word to encourage me, for she saw I was much abashed and flustered, yet he did not heed her, but went on talking very loud against the folly and the wasteful wantonness of the times. Poor Madam is a quiet, sickly-looking woman, and seems not a little in awe of her husband, at the which I do not marvel, for he hath a very impatient, forbidding way with him, and, I ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... most wasteful of property, and which embarrass, and may cause harm in, a country so new, because of the animosity and quarrels resulting therefrom, are the suits and controversies engendered among the citizens, and among the Indians themselves. Although it is my will that complete ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair

... a brilliant figure, 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 springs of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... ten years. I cut off, almost at a stroke, a horde of lobbyists, lawyers, threateners without influence, and hangers-on of various kinds. I reduced the payments for legislation to a system, instead of the shameless, scandal-creating and wasteful auctioneering that had been going on ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... is absolutely opposed 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 ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... away through a colander; return them into a pot or saucepan without water; cover them up, and set them before the fire for a quarter of an hour longer. Do not pare the potatoes before they are boiled, which is a very unwholesome and wasteful practice. ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury

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

... munitions is to be forbidden, then every state must accumulate its own supply or greatly enlarge its arms manufacturing capacity, both wasteful processes. To say that a moderate trade is lawful which a big trade is not is like the excuse of the lady who thought her baby born out of wedlock did not matter because it was such ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... have ventured to call the African system. I am quite reassured. My friend, who is an accomplished and experienced Irishman, tainted only by a very few years' residence in England, assures me that I have considerably understated the wild, wasteful profusion, slothfulness, and dirt of the old-fashioned chieftain's kitchen. He assures me that families are now abroad in the world without an acre of land or a halfpenny beyond their earnings, who, within his recollection, have been "ruined ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... at home be extended abroad? Practicable and beneficent here, it must be the same there. Then would nations exist without perpetual and reciprocal watchfulness. But the first step is to discard the wasteful, oppressive, and pernicious provocative to war, which is yet maintained at such terrible cost. To-day this glorious advance is presented ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner

... who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; tens of thousands of wealthy people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying trivialities, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich or poor, in the wasteful byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to develop understanding... All these people reflect ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... at the same time have an opportunity of studying what to her twentieth-century mind would seem even more astonishing types of humanity than she would seem to them—namely, people who, surrounded by a needy and anguished world, could get their own consent to be happy in a frivolous and wasteful idleness. Afterward we would go to Europe and inspect such things there as might naturally be curiosities to a girl out of the year 2000, such as a Rothschild, an emperor, and a few specimens of human beings, some of which were at that ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... implications of evolution, calls attention to the following: "Take the evolution of living forms. The more we learn about biological history the clearer it becomes that the process has been, from the human point of view, incredibly bungling and wasteful. There have been futile experiments without number; highly successful achievements have been thrown aside; one type of life after another has arisen and has pushed up a blind alley to extinction. If there is a God whose method has been Evolution, then seemingly ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... trained in the world in which we used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destruction of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive machine. And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also—or peace under the old conditions of industry—is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten—so at least it might with confidence be estimated—is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering superfluities ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... 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. —SHAKESPEARE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... were brought up to be economical; to waste is a sin; we live simply; and each has enough, all that he can eat and wear, and no man can use more than that." This was the simple explanation I received from a Harmonist, when I wondered whether some family or person would not be wasteful or greedy. ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical beyond the garden walls, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the t's and dot all the i's of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of life are not grown in the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 'from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Steele has done this for us himself, though he has not furnished us with the items on either side.—He says that "from the year 1773 to 1779 (he arrived in Barbadoes in 1780), his stock had been so much reduced by ill management and wasteful economy, that the annual average neat clearance was little more than one and a quarter per cent. on the purchase. In a second period of four years, in consequence of the exertion of an honest and able manager, (though with a further reduction of the stock, and including ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson

... unless by some miraculous chance he obtained both place and power, and a share in the ruling of things, there was every possibility of a split in the Revolutionary Committee,—one half being inclined to indulge in the criminal and wholly wasteful spirit of Anarchy,—the other disposed to throw in its lot with the Liberal or Radical side of politics. And she began to regard Pasquin Leroy, with his even temperament, cool imperturbability, intellectual daring, and literary ability, as the link which kept them all together, and gave ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... is!' urged Sugarman. 'A maiden who sticks to a ring like that is not likely to be wasteful of ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... she never attempts any thing with either, except the excitement of alarm. But it is in the direction of Turkey that all the solid advances are made. There she always finishes her hostility by making some solid acquisition. She is now carrying on a wasteful war in the Caucasus; its difficulty has probably surprised herself, but she still carries it on; and let the loss of life and the expenditure of money be what they will, she will think them well encountered if they end in giving her the full possession ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... rates of interest for the money which the poor were obliged to borrow. All over the land the mass of the people were living in hovels and selling their sons and their daughters into slavery to keep from starving, while the rich men and their families lived in luxury and in wasteful, extravagant display. ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... after sheet explanatory of her relations with Charlotte Bronte. 'Two separate householders in London each declares that the first interview between Miss Bronte and Miss Martineau took place at her house.' In one passage Mrs. Gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon Mr. Bronte ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and King lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he heaped great fagots on the fire—wasteful fagots, each of which had cost some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap. Finally, with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... really shot away one of your ear-rings? Careless, cruel, wasteful men! What could ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... fortune was a little nook of land; And there the Scythian found him, hook in hand, His fruit-trees pruning. Here he cropp'd A barren branch, there slash'd and lopp'd, Correcting Nature everywhere, Who paid with usury his care. 'Pray, why this wasteful havoc, sir?'— So spoke the wondering traveller; 'Can it, I ask, in reason's name, Be wise these harmless trees to maim? Fling down that instrument of crime, And leave them to the scythe of Time. Full soon, unhasten'd, they will go To deck ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... grinding at this very lens, and fitting the thing 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

... what there is water enough at times; only, those rivers of the great plains, like the Platte and the Kansas and the Arkansas, are so wasteful of their supply in the spring that by July they are gasping for a shower. So, part of the year they revel in luxury, and during the rest they go ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... shot, break a butterfly on a wheel; labor in vain &c (useless) 645; cut blocks with a razor, pour water into a sieve. leak &c (run out) 295; run to waste; ebb; melt away, run dry, dry up. Adj. wasted &c v.; at a low ebb. wasteful &c (prodigal) 818; penny wise and pound foolish. Phr. magno conatu magnas nugas [Lat.]; le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle [Fr.]; idly busy rolls their world ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... countrymen are nothing near so silly as they are supposed to be. There was a time when I used to sit with my legs stretched out before the English coal fire and listen with respectful attention while people who I thought knew all about it explained to me how wicked and how wasteful were our methods. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome



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



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com