"Imbecile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a new kind of underwear, and had endeavoured to make it a gift to humanity; and here was a man who had seized upon it and made millions out of it! Here was a "trance medium," who had got a fortune out of an imbecile old manufacturer; here was a great newspaper proprietor, who published advertisements of assignations at a dollar a line; here was a cigar manufacturer, whose smug face was upon every billboard—he had begun as a tin manufacturer, and to avoid the duty, he had had ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the shame of mankind, when I have wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft, persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... idiotic. I should think you'd be contented with what you've got; but no, you must take your aeroplane right straight over to Europe and let the Germans smash it all to pieces and kill you and everything. Why, I never heard of anything so absolutely imbecile as that!" ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... he enlightened Temple alone, who nevertheless appears to have treated him as though he were what the world took him for; and that Francis, who saw these underlined manuscripts, and yet persisted in the conventional view of Boswell, was not a Mid-Victorian prig but a common imbecile. It is true that he has been stupid enough to mangle and emasculate the letters that he was employed to publish; an officious prude unquestionably he was, but no fool, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... if any one ought to go to a lunatic asylum it might as well be you! You sit there like an imbecile saying, oh, Patty! ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... sermon to the beautiful Stella Monck on the same text? Ralph Dacre's death was quite as much of a mystery. And the kindly gossips are every bit as busy with Captain Monck's reputation as with His Excellency's. But I suppose her devotion to that wretched little imbecile baby of ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... such as to convince her she was a beauty; and we suppose she wasn't, critically speaking. But youth and health, and an arrow-straight bearing, and a flawless complexion, in a flood of evening light, make a bold bid for beauty even in the eyes of others than young men already half-imbecile with love. Sally's was, at any rate, enough to dumbfounder the little janitress with the key, who stood at gaze with violet eyes in her sunbrowned face in the shadow, looking as though for certain they would never close again; ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... factious imputed military delay to mismanagement and want of energy in the Administration. Indeed, but for some redeeming naval successes at Hatteras and Port Royal preceding the meeting of Congress in December, the whole belligerent operations would have been pronounced weak and imbecile failures. Conflicting views in regard to the slavery question in all its aspects prevailed; the Democrats insisting that fugitives should be returned to their masters under the provisions of law, as in ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about? "Not assuredly," Valeria remarked with sudden malice, "by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... you should do so suddenly or clumsily. But you must insinuate the idea very slowly and subtlely. Clarence is not for the works; Clarence is too good for this world—at least for the business of this world. I think him half an imbecile! My father does not hesitate to call him a perfect idiot. Do you begin to see your way now? Clarence can be moderately provided for, but should have no share in the North ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... "watch closely around this palace: the inviolable asylum of all plots against the nation, there a perverse queen lords it over an imbecile king and rears the cubs of tyranny. Lawless priests there consecrate the arms of insurrection against the people. They prepare the Saint Bartholomew of patriots. The genius of Austria is there, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... desiring to work only for the good of their country, they have disdained too much the advice of wise counsillors. With eyes fixed upon their established purpose, they trample under foot every obstacle; and every man who differs from their opinion is but a traitor or an imbecile: hence their lack of moderation, tact and prudence, and their excess of obstinacy and violence. To select one example among a thousand, what marvellous results would have been attained by an entente cordiale between two men like Dupleix and ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... she fed the little, fat scamps to repletion, and the green lawn was dotted with squirrels all busily burying peanuts for future consumption. A brilliant peacock appeared, picking his way towards them, followed by a covey of imbecile peafowl. She fed them until ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... us be merry! The sundown is near— And Error is shivering And shrinking with fear. Power unmolested For centuries, vested In impotent sinew and imbecile brain, Altars that rested On mummeries ilested, Tatters to ruin ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... not regard him! He is a man of the other world—an angel—a mere imbecile—about business!" The priest threw himself back in his chair and laughed tolerantly, showing his beautiful teeth. "All those rich men they give work to the poor. If I had a few thousand dollars to ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... brain. He conquered himself at last; but I fear that his health was impaired by his few mad outbursts. Charles Lamb, who is dear to us all, reduced himself to a pitiable state by giving way to outbreaks of alcoholic craving. When Carlyle saw him, the unhappy essayist was semi-imbecile from the effects of drink; and the savage Scotsman wrote some cruel words which will unfortunately cleave to Lamb's cherished memory for long. Lamb fought against his failing; he suffered agonies of remorse; he bitterly blamed himself for "buying ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... have much fun, anyway, except sitting with him in the office such times as he was lookin' over his accounts and reckonin' his money. She liked that. She always liked to handle money. That proved her a Sands, even if she was imbecile! ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... of the thing that he had supposed to be his imbecile victim into a determined man, with a settled resolution to hunt him down and be the death of him, mercilessly expressed from head to foot, was, in the first shock, too much for him. Without any figure of speech, he staggered under it. But there is no greater ...
— Hunted Down • Charles Dickens
... in the disastrous Turk Countries; but, though willing enough, was never much of a soldier: as to Neipperg, among his own men especially, the one cry is, He ought to go about his business out of Austrian Armies, as an imbecile and even a traitor. "Is it conceivable that Friedrich could have beaten us, in that manner, except by buying Neipperg in the first place? Neipperg and the generality of them, in that luckless Silesian Business? Glogau scaladed with the loss of half a dozen men; Brieg ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and ludicrous, sounded silly enough to provoke a shrug of the shoulders, sounded like one of those sentences which only an imbecile or a lunatic could utter. And yet Valenglay remained impassive. He knew that, in such circumstances as the present, the man before him was not the man ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... fiendish and his eyes shone like beads beneath his shaggy brows. He had a tail 18 inches long, horns from the skull, a full set of teeth, and claw-like hands; he snapped like a dog and crawled on all fours, and refused the natural sustenance of a normal child. The mother almost became an imbecile after the birth of the monster. The country people about Bomballa considered this devil-child a punishment for a rebuff that the mother gave to a Jewish peddler selling Crucifixion-pictures. Vexed by his persistence, she said she would sooner have a devil in her house ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his Latinized abstractions to good concrete English; but that is only when he becomes excited. His face when in repose, we are told, appeared to be almost imbecile; he was constantly sunk in reveries, from which he was only roused by a challenge to conversation. In his writings, for the most part, we seem to be listening to the reverie rather than the talk; we are overhearing a soliloquy ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... no question of encouraging careless, godless men with the hope of a new probation. Here is no question of men wilfully rejecting Christ. The merry, thoughtless child—the imbecile—the heathen—had no thought of rejecting Christ. The poor struggler in Christian lands, brought up in evil surroundings, who though he had heard of Christ yet saw no trace of Christ's love in his dreary life—he cannot be said to have rejected ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... kind of imbecile, you are the finest specimen! I told you truly how it would be. Ha, ha! you were bound to go to Africa, of course! Well, old merriman, now you are going to Africa, how do ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... of writing history may be softened a little. It is not necessary for the actor to present Seckendorf as an imbecile. Actors have the unfortunate habit of taking the whole hand when a finger is offered. In truth I have seen but a very few performances of my play in which Frederick William I. still retained, beneath his attitude ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Salvationism excels all previous revivals. It is unparalleled in its vulgarity. The imbecile coarseness of its language makes one ashamed of human nature. Had it existed in Swift's time, he might have added a fresh clause to his terrible indictment of mankind. Its metaphors are borrowed from the slaughter-house, its songs are frequently coarser than those ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... canvas has been ripped-up in print. If the offender happens to be a man who doesn't paint, then he is called an ignoramus; if he paints or etches, or even sketches in crayon, he is well within the Balzac definition—poor, miserable imbecile, he is only jealous of work that he could never have achieved. As for literary critics, it may be set down once and for all that they are "suspect." They write; ergo, they must be unjust. The dilemma has branching horns. Is there no midway spot, no safety ground for that weary Ishmael the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... "Who is this imbecile?" cried some, "stop him at once." "Kill him," shrieked others, "Help! robbers! murderers! help! help!" "Oh, let him alone," sneered another, and this was the most trying of all, "he is such a beautiful young man; I am sure ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... not matter whether it is a man or a woman. We must do something with our hands. We have got to. Papa told the Signora he should strike her at once unless she put down the red parasol and was silent. What did she do, the imbecile? She stuck out her face like this,"—he thrust his face forward with the right cheek turned towards Artois—"and said, 'Strike me! strike me!' Papa obeyed her. Poom! Poom! He gave her a smack on each cheek before every one. 'You want education!' ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... broke in upon her was that animated piece of ragged door-mat, Toozle. This imbecile little dog was not possessed of much delicacy of feeling, having been absent on a private excursion of his own into the mountain when the schooner arrived, he only became aware of the return of his lost, loved, and deeply-regretted mistress, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... sorrows. Her mother had died in 1496; the next year her only son and heir to the crown had followed; and within yet another year had died her favourite daughter, the Queen of Portugal. Her other children were all scattered with the exception of Juana, whose semi-imbecile condition caused her parents an anxiety greater even than that caused by death. As Isabella's life thus closed sombrely in, she applied herself more closely and more narrowly to such pious consolations as were available. News from Flanders of the scandalous ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... hands. Dan is in hard luck; Cherokee on his part gets driven out each hand; an' Ellis an' the avaricious gent is doin' what little winnin's bein' done, between 'em. It's evident by this time, too, the avaricious gent's layin' for Cherokee. This oninstructed person looks on Cherokee as both imbecile ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness, I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter. I say thus much to you, knowing that you will not make a bad use of it. But it is a fact too true that, if I had only depended on mortal things, both myself and my wife must have been lost. I shall leave every one in this country astonished ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... ape, there, they seem on very good terms. I wonder if they go to the room of Monsieur Kater! I think so; for one—the ghost in white, he is a little lame like the Englishman who goes always to the room of Monsieur.—Ah, bah! Imbecile! ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... hairs. A man laughed at my father for his scrupulous temperance principles, and said: "I am more liberal than you. I always give my children the sugar in the glass after we have been taking a drink." Three of his sons have died drunkards, and the fourth is imbecile through ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... theatre; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and as common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... quartermasters, captains of tops, &c., look forward to the cookdom, as the cardinals look to the popedom; and really there is some analogy between them, for neither is preferred from any especial fitness for the office. A cardinal is made pope because he is old, infirm, and imbecile—our friend Caboose was made cook because he had been Lord Nelson's coxswain, was a drunken rascal, and had a wooden leg; for, as to his gastronomical qualifications, he knew no more of the science than just sufficient to watch the copper where the salt junk and potatoes were boiling. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... captains of tops, etc. look forward to the cookdom, as the cardinals look to the popedom; and really there is some analogy between them, for neither are preferred from any especial fitness for the office. A cardinal is made pope because he is old, infirm, and imbecile,—our friend Caboose was made cook because he had been Lord Nelson's coxswain, was a drunken rascal, and had a wooden leg; for, as to his gastronomical qualifications, he knew no more of the science than just sufficient to watch the copper where the salt junk and potatoes were boiling. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... resentments and self-justifications, he was pouring a flood of broken phrases at her. She caught unintelligible references to narrow laws and the imbecile English, to impositions binding only upon the fools.... ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... his wife should be a nonentity, as was shown in his subsequent choice of Charlotte of Savoy. Now Jean was in feature very like her sister Isabel, Duchess of Brittany, who was a very beautiful woman, but not far from being imbecile, and Louis had never seen Jean display any superiority of intellect or taste like Margaret or Eleanor, but rather impatience of their pursuits, and he therefore might expect her to be equally simple with ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Regarding the imbecile face before her, Amy's sentence ended in confusion. Nor did it add to her comfort that the unhappy fellow now began to weep in a whimpering sort of way, that might have suited a spoiled child of a ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... alternately insufficient and pedantic; the forms of Donatello's David and of Benedetto's St. John are clumsy, stunted, and inharmonious; even Michelangelo's Bacchus is but a comely lout. This sculpture has, moreover, a marvellous preference for ugly old men—gross, or ascetically imbecile; and for ill-grown striplings: except the St. George of Donatello, whose body, however, is entirely encased in inflexible leather and steel, it never gives us the perfection and pride of youth. These things are obvious, and set us against the art as a whole. But see it when it does what ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the imbecile young man who, by the absurd law of hereditary descent, was the destined heir to the throne of more than twenty millions of people. The king was anxious to obtain for his son a bride whose alliance would strengthen ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... spent the years of my life! like an imbecile! But you—if you take me, I shall go mad—I shall love you like a tigress! I shall implore you to invent any way that will enable me to realize life! Oh, if you take me, how madly I shall love you! I fancy myself seeing you now, and I don't know what I should do—I love you so dreadfully! ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... attention to the improvement of the human animal which we do to that of the equine or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... him before the Government in London could seriously believe that a Stuart in arms was in the island. There were other and minor elements of success, too, to be noted in the great game that the Stuart prince {210} was playing. The Ministry was unpopular: the head of that Ministry was the imbecile Duke of Newcastle, perhaps the most contemptible statesman who has ever made high office ridiculous. The King was away in Hanover. England was in the toils of a foreign war, and her prestige had lately suffered heavily from the sudden defeat at Fontenoy. There were ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... had inherited was unfortunately too vast and too well-invested by his overfond and madly foolish father for the son to run through it entirely. A very few years left him an imbecile in body and mind, to become the prey of a parcel of sharks who, dressing in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, held him in a state of abject slavery and fear. One day, aboard his own yacht, off Naples, they married him to a notorious woman. Under the guardianship ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... pig-headed! You are talking like an imbecile. Your secretary, Miss Dore, is a nice girl. But how would you feel if Percy were to come to you and say that he was engaged ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... reeling by the roadside, was sometimes startled to hear the fragments of classical lore, or wild bursts of half-remembered poetry, mixing strangely with the imbecile merriment of intoxication. But when he stopped to gaze, there was no further mark on his face or in his eye by which he could be distinguished from the loathsome and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that I shall be imbecile enough to expose myself in so reckless a fashion as to render that probable?" he returned. "No! If I fight, it will be for life, not for glory, therefore I shall take every reasonable precaution to protect ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... specialization, our superior body of knowledge, and our superior technique for its transmission. At the same time, the individual brain is unstable, fluctuating in normal persons between 1,100 and 1,500 grams in weight, while the extremes of variation are represented, on the one side, by the imbecile with 300 grams, and the man of genius with 2,000 on the other. It is therefore perfectly true that by artificial selection—Mr. Galton's "eugenism"—a larger average brain could be created, and also a higher average of natural intelligence, whether this be absolutely dependent on ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... decency; and several cases have been published of their bodies being remarkably hairy. (37. Prof. Laycock sums up the character of brute-like idiots by calling them "theroid;" 'Journal of Mental Science,' July 1863. Dr. Scott ('The Deaf and Dumb,' 2nd ed. 1870, p. 10) has often observed the imbecile smelling their food. See, on this same subject, and on the hairiness of idiots, Dr. Maudsley, 'Body and Mind,' 1870, pp. 46-51. Pinel has also given a striking case of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... of the imbecile, uncalled-for murder, Maurice, who had until then been a silent spectator of the scene, appeared as if stricken by a sudden fit of madness. He raved and gesticulated, shaking his fist in the face ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... unendurable at all. He was savage when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if Mary had ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... inquiring for Kabba Rega, whom I insisted upon seeing. After a short delay he appeared, in company of some of his bonosoora. He was in a beastly state of intoxication, and, after reeling about with a spear in his hand, he commenced a most imbecile ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... astonishment the wonderful change for the better that had taken place in the man. For with the restoration of his mind all the evil lines of his face had been obliterated, as it were, and in the place of the doddering half-imbecile they found a genial, kindly, and distinguished gentleman who, with the utmost hospitality, brought chairs and begged them to ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders at the thought of Charles X, the priests and nobles and other attendant rabble, whom he had helped to sweep away. Louis Philippe, with his bourgeois following, had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking. As for the Republic of '48, that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him; however, he no longer ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... be an imbecile," he said, rejoining the group on the crossing. "He's given me back a dollar and twenty cents, and I handed him ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... relief. But he disappointed her. That was one of the situations in which one appeals in vain to the resources of language. He shrank and sank back in his chair, his jaw dropped, and he vented a strange, imbecile cackling laugh. It was not an expression of philosophic mirth, of sense of the grotesqueness of an anti-climax. It was not an expression of any emotion whatever. It was simply a signal from a ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... were real, as stated above in the First Part (Q. 84, A. 8, ad 2). Wherefore what a man does while he sleeps and is deprived of reason's judgment, is not imputed to him as a sin, as neither are the actions of a maniac or an imbecile. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... letter-writer, and this correspondence had to be collected and tabulated. For months, and even years, young Markovitch laboriously endeavoured to arrange these old yellow letters, dull, pathetic, incoherent. His patron grew slowly imbecile, but through the fogs that increasingly besieged him saw only this one thing clearly, that the letters must be arranged. He kept Markovitch relentlessly at his table, allowing him no pleasures, feeding him miserably and watching him personally undress every evening ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... "What an imbecile you are!" sighed Tchelkache, and he again turned his back on his interlocutor, thinking this time that he would not vouchsafe him another word. This robust peasant awakened something ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... the Kallikak family, which has been made the subject of investigation, is a still better example of heredity. The family was descended from a Revolutionary soldier, who had an illegitimate feeble-minded son by an imbecile young woman. The line continued by feeble-minded descent and marriage until four hundred and eighty descendants have been traced. Of these one hundred and forty-three were positively defective, thirty-six were ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... of the Nazareth nuns, so that the numbers continually vary, many passing through for their noviciate. The nuns collect alms for the aged poor and children, and many of the poor are thus sustained. Besides this, there are a number of imbecile or paralytic children who live permanently in the convent. The charity is not confined to ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... brother, who became silly and enfeebled in intellect by the loss of his child, was prevailed on by Miss Goodwin and her family to adopt her as his daughter, and by a series of the most artful and selfish manoeuvres they succeeded in getting the poor imbecile and besotted old man to make a will in her favor; and the consequence was that he left her twelve hundred a year, both to her and her issue, should she marry and have any; but in case she should have no issue, then, after her death, it was to revert to my son Woodward ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... gone off your head entirely. You seem to want to make me look utterly foolish! I sigh! Am I such an imbecile? I'm ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... citizens; of the violation of treaty stipulations, and the murder, robbery, and imprisonment of our countrymen." These were all anterior to the annexation of Texas, and perhaps alone would have justified a declaration of war; but "magnanimity and forbearance toward a weak and imbecile neighbor" prevented hostilities. The recent outrages left the country no choice but war. The invasion of the country was the last of the cumulative ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... his head sadly. "I'm afraid I should have said, Mr. Burris, that we did once have one," he admitted. "He was, unfortunately, an imbecile, with a mental age between five and six, as nearly as we were ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... probably would have been quite neglected during the gale, and determined to take her something, and get Mr. Dutton to carry it and steady her own footsteps. Nothing could exceed the discomfort in which they found them. The nursery-maid was imbecile from terror and prostrate with sickness, and the harassed mother doing the ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the imbecile that Your Highness will not see him," responded Glueck, impassively, his hand ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... MSS., including that of "Eugenie Grandet," which had been given to Madame Hanska on December 24th, 1833. During the shameless pillage of the house, the vultures who ransacked it found evidence of the most reckless, the most imbecile extravagance, proof positive that the wisdom, prudence, even the principles of poor Balzac's paragon the Countess Anna, had been routed by the glitter and glamour of the holiday city. One room was filled with boxes containing hats, and in another, piles of costly silks were heaped, untouched since ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... myself, whenever I desired to please anyone else, a performing monkey. My pleasures were stolen or I was snubbed for taking them. I was not taught and was called a fool. My hand was against everybody's. How it was that with my high spirits and vivid imagination I did not grow up a moral imbecile full of perverted instincts I do not know. I describe myself as a docile child, but I was full of temptations to be otherwise. There were times when I was silent before people, but if I had had a knife in my hand I could have stuck it into them. If ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... one has ever been sufficiently visionary to hold that all persons of every age, degree, and character, should be entitled to vote in all elections of all public officers. Idiots, infants, minors, and persons insane or utterly imbecile, have been, without scruple, denied the right as not having the sound judgment and discretion fit for its exercise. In many countries, persons guilty of crimes have also been denied the right as a personal punishment, or as a security to society. In most countries, females, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... pure innocent of the type which never fails to evoke good-natured smiles and kindly emotions. Indeed, as he roamed the streets, the suburb seemed to live its life with less clamour, to appear more decent of outward guise, since the local folk looked upon the imbecile with far more indulgence than they did upon their own children; and he was intimate with, and beloved by, even the worst. Probably the reason for this was that the semblance of flight amid an atmosphere ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Protestantism by any "Romish priest," how good so ever he might chance to be. Against her own inclination, but from the advice of her new friend, she occasionally received her sisters and a few former acquaintances. They went away commiserating her condition, as being semi-imbecile, semi-lunatic. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... strange for you to hear of me again, after the conclusion of the last chapter of my blunders. But it was not I who made the last blunder—it was the druggist. Quite by mistake the imbecile who waited upon me put up four ounces of the aromatic syrup of rhubarb. I felt myself gradually sinking into the death-sleep after I had taken it; with the thought of Belle uppermost in my mind, I allowed myself to sink—"no more catastrophes ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... deserting his peasant wife—enslaved by Emma Hamilton through many a passionate year—and coming back at last that the drudge of his youth might nurse him through his decrepit old age. She remembered going with John in their sweetheart days to see the house where Romney died, imbecile and paralysed, with Mary Romney ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when attacked; but the strange thing is that where the people are held heroic in their victory over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel with the people. If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is then called imbecile. The present government is attempting to save itself by two laws from the same evil Charles X. tried to escape by two ordinances; is it not a bitter derision? Is craft permissible in the hands of power against craft? may it kill those who seek to kill it? The massacres ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... that he could not hide it. He had expected to see a miserable-looking invalid, with imbecile writ large all over him; instead of whom he was confronted by a dignified, courteous gentleman, whose infirmity was only hinted at by a certain languor of movement and wistfulness ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... abundance. In the time of our Founders the signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation were plentiful. Both sexes drifted towards sexual excesses, the men towards sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the complication and refinement of physical indulgences; the women towards those expansions and differentiations of feeling that find expression in music and costly and distinguished dress. Both sexes became unstable and promiscuous. The whole ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... country, and not of grave political importance. For the details of both these events, the reader is referred to "A Korean Coup D' Etat," an entertaining article by Perceval Lowell, Atlantic Monthly, November, 1886. This poverty-stricken country, with an imbecile sovereign at the helm of state, and with no organized array, is practically under the control of the Chinese government, though nominally she is independent. Some European powers, who seem to consider that the greatness of a nation is commensurate with ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... for a very good reason and you know what it is and you could tell it if you wished, you imbecile, you incorrigible, you criminal," Apollyon shouted; then, turning to the avocat and the red-headed little gentleman, "He is a dangerous alien, he admits it, he has admitted it—DON'T YOU ADMIT IT, EH? EH?" he roared at The Silent Man, who fingered his black cap without raising his eyes ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... deal of shouting and shaking, he succeeded in rousing his drunken companion, who staggered up and stared at me in an imbecile manner. ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... family yielded only lunatics? Was it kind—was it courteous to his parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave—to assume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And at forty-eight—or a trifle ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... and gave the example, too, by going himself to the handles, but it seems that these men did actually hang back for a moment, looking at each other dubiously before they followed him. "He! he! he!" He broke out into a most unexpected, imbecile, pathetic, nervous little giggle. "Their hearts were broken so! They had been played with too long," he explained apologetically, lowering his eyes, and ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... know! A document of some kind, without doubt, possibly the scrap of paper Dorcas saw in her hand yesterday afternoon. And I—" his anger burst forth freely—"miserable animal that I am! I guessed nothing! I have behaved like an imbecile! I should never have left that case here. I should have carried it away with me. Ah, triple pig! And now it is gone. It is destroyed—but is it destroyed? Is there not yet a chance—we must ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... of Meer Jaffier was, of course, displeasing to the imbecile Emperor of India, and a large army was sent to dethrone him. The nabob appealed, in his necessity, to his allies, the English, and, with the powerful assistance of the Europeans, the forces of the successor of the great Aurungzebe were signally routed. But the great sums ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of it, there was no fear in my soul—nothing but an apathetic, but indescribably sweet feeling of rest, and a complete inactivity of all the senses except hearing. A moment came when even this sense forsook me, because I remember that I listened with imbecile intentness to the dead silence around me. Is this death? was my indistinct wondering thought. Then I felt as if mighty wings were fanning me. "Kind wings, caressing, kind wings!" were the recurring words in ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... most in vogue, an exposure of their fallacies may perhaps deter our popular apologists of the future from drawing upon themselves the silent contempt of every reader whose intellect is not either prejudiced or imbecile. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... say, a half formed thought—man has many such which are never completed. I felt that it was of joy—of hope; but felt also that it had perished in its formation. In vain I struggled to perfect—to regain it. Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile—an idiot. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... been profusely decorated with flags, flowers and bunting, and mottoes were festooned along the walls, one of which was "God Bless Our Homes," and another, "Imbecile Children Will Be the Product of Imbecile ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... withered breasts of an old African, you wear heavy bracelets and anklets, around your lean flanks is a little, thin striped apron, and you hold in your hand the great fan of peacock feathers! Magnificent! You are the queen's old slave, imbecile!" ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the Grand Council. He had Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... him. He'd swear to that. He had swayed her, overpowered her; he had lacked only the courage to trust his instinct. Coward's luck! It served him right. He had held her in his arms and had let her slip through; her lips had been raised to his, and he had refused to press them. Imbecile! ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... who sustained them in their career, and exercised a fortifying influence on their views of public duty; whilst, on the contrary, he had still oftener seen men of great and generous instincts transformed into vulgar self-seekers, by contact with women of narrow natures, devoted to an imbecile love of pleasure, and from whose minds the grand motive of Duty ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... actually said lacked the precision and the form of these phrases, but he was eloquent, and his father, who had no reason to suppose that he had an imbecile for a son, was the first to yield, in a measure, to his arguments. His mother still resisted, frightened at the risks he must run, far from convinced by his words, and without confidence in the future. Nevertheless, she was forced to yield. It ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... see, imbecile, that it's on my head," and he drew the cap from his pocket and proudly put it on his head, while he ran to ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... it came from his horrid father. But Graydon is a good boy. He couldn't long follow the impulses of his father. I dare say he could be a sinner if he tried, too. I' hate an imbecile. An imbecile to my mind is the fellow without the capacity to err intentionally. God takes care of the fellow who errs ignorantly. Give me the fellow who is bright enough to do the bad things which might admit him to purgatory in good standing, and I'll trust him to do the good ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... a woman of education! What on earth is a person like that doing in this galere?' Vida asked, as if Mrs. Fox-Moore might be able to enlighten her. 'Can't she see—even if there were anything in the "Cause," as she calls it—what an imbecile waste of time it is talking to ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... me in exchange the petty religion of rich women; they will wish to mix themselves up with my life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own tastes; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of pious ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... schools which confer academical "honors"), in a free college, of which the professors are responsible only to a judicious board of directors, examinations for admissions and for advancements will be rigid and impartial, the administration will be vigilant and firm, the reckless who will not and the imbecile who cannot acquire a good education, will be dismissed for more congenial pursuits, the rich and the poor will be upon an equality, and only desert will be ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... his confinement. Had his own wife seen him at that moment it is doubtful whether she would have recognized her lord. Could it be possible that that frail, tottering, wasted form, and that blanched, sunken-eyed, imbecile-looking countenance were all that were left of the once formidable Robert Gourlay? The sight was one which might have moved his bitterest enemy to tears. His clothing, a world too wide for so shrunken a tenant, hung sloppy and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... books. You have not written my plays. Any statement to the contrary is an infamous falsehood. No one else, dead or alive, could ever have written anything which I have written. When I have become an imbecile, which is not likely to happen yet, as I am a vegetarian and do not read your rag, it will be time enough for other people to lay claim to my work. Nor have I ever assisted you in conducting that which you call a paper, nor have I ever written an editorial for its columns. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... exchanged since my escape mentions that in one case an imbecile Belgian was daily led out to the fields, wrapped up in several layers of clothes and then set upon by the dogs under the guidance of their guards; this was for the ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... of those truly unfortunate cases which, so far as present knowledge goes, cannot be guarded against. Eunice, age 31, mentally 2, is a low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... of his conduct one can arrive at is, to believe that his weak mind was fast confined by the trammels of that absurd, but often too convenient, theory of international non-interference,—the most dangerous kind of red-tape that ever tethered the squeamish conscience of an official imbecile. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... milk?" I said, soberly, for the rest were screaming at the imbecile expression of the Guernsey while Amos ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... to Lady Barton's motives, I feel it my duty to explain the exact truth to Luttrell. When last, my dear Tedcastle, Molly was invited to meet the Rossmeres, she behaved so badly and flirted so outrageously with his withered lordship, that he became perfectly imbecile toward the close of the entertainment, and his poor old wife was reduced almost to the verge of tears. I blushed for her; ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... territory with a population that hardly amounted to four millions of subjects. The partition excited great indignation all over Europe, but in 1772 England was sufficiently occupied with the troubles beginning to arise in America, and France was still too completely under the profligate and imbecile rule of Louis XV. and Mme. du Barri, and too much weakened by her disasters in the Seven Years' War, for any manly counsels or indication of justice and humanity to be expected from ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... myself a good man, I am not always an agreeable gentleman, witness what happened to me Thursday last. After having lunched with a lady whom I had called "imbecile," I went to call on another whom I had said was "ninny"; such is my ancient French gallantry. The first one had bored me to death with her spiritualistic discourses and her pretensions to ideality; the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... and his brother of Paris, if there be enough affinity between them to justify this term of relationship. The one drives his horse, the other seems to be driven by his. In London the driver of an omnibus has the air of a gentleman managing a four-in-hand: in Paris the imbecile who holds the reins looks like a workman who has been hired by the day to do a job that he doesn't understand. So pronounced is this antipathy—for it is more than indifference—of the genuine man of the people toward all things pertaining to the horse that, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... on, "I've a heap of critics and a lot of enemies. Some good men say I've no experience in Government, and that's about true. Up in New England the papers are asking who is this political huckster, this county court advocate? Mr. Stanton says I'm an imbecile, and when he's cross calls me the original gorilla, and wonders why fools wander about in Africa when they could find the beast they are looking for in Washington. The pious everywhere don't like me, because I don't hold that national policy can be run on the lines of a church meeting. And ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... steadily carrying with outstretched arms two of the squatter party, his hands tightly grasping their collars. Yet I believe his touch was as gentle as with the violets. His face was preternaturally grave; theirs, to my intense astonishment, while they hung passive from his arms, wore that fatuous, imbecile smile seen on the faces of those who lend themselves to tricks of acrobats and strong men in the arena. He slowly traversed the whole length of one side of the house, walked down the steps to the gate, and then gravely ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... a faint "Ah! Mr. Fyne!" I could read in her eyes that she had recognized me now. Her serious expression extinguished the imbecile grin of which I was conscious. I raised my hat. She responded with a slow inclination of the head while her luminous, mistrustful, maiden's glance seemed to whisper, "What is ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... heroic I am trying of two evils to choose the least. I should like to have my uncle—and Helen here immensely. But if the visit wasn't a success I should be proportionately disappointed and vexed. So is it worth the risk? Disappointments are sufficiently abundant anyhow. Isn't it slightly imbecile to run a wholly gratuitous risk of adding to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... closed the door, but retreated in haste, for she was already crying on the bed. Whereupon, I gave up the puzzle of love, once and for all; and, as I sought the windy day, I was established in the determination by a glimpse of the doctor, sitting vacant as an imbecile in the room where my sister and I had been: whom I left to his own tragedy, myself being wearied out ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... and character of Fanny made him, however, yet more anxious than otherwise he might have been. She certainly deserved not the harsh name of imbecile or idiot, but she was different from all other children; she felt more acutely than most of her age, but she could not be taught to reason. There was something either oblique or deficient in her intellect, which justified the most melancholy apprehensions; yet often, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... silence and overshadowing of that night whose fitful meteoric fires only herald the descent of a superficial fame into lasting oblivion, the imbecile and unavailing resistance which is made against the doom must often excite our pity for the pampered child of market-gilded popularity;" and as "it is not with such feelings that we behold the dark thraldom and long-suffering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... visions. He, too, dreamed of quintessentials, of the sheer power of golden vocables and the secret alchemy of art. He, too, promenaded his incertitudes, to use a self-revealing phrase of Chopin's. An aristocrat, he knew that in the country of the idiot the imbecile always will be king, and, "like many a one who turned away from life, he only turned away from the rabble, and cared not to share with them well and fire and fruit." His Kingdom of Green was consumed ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... to die alone amid the rigors of the polar regions, went down to talk to him. At first Rovinski refused to make any answers to the questions put to him, but at last, apparently enraged by the imputation that he must be a weak-minded, almost idiotic, man to behave himself in such an imbecile fashion, he suddenly ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... Bakkus, "love to realize myself for what I really am, an imbecile, a knave, and a useless craver of money for which I've not had the indignity of working. It soothes me to feel that for all my heritage of culture I am nothing more or less than one of the rabble-rout. I've backed horses ever since I was a boy and in my time I've had a pure ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... gout, etc., is merely affected to prevent his being sent. In short, that he has changed all his plans and did not venture to stir one step. On the other hand, it is said, that he is become nearly quite imbecile." Meanwhile, although Sir Arthur Wellesley had obtained victories at Oporto and at Talavera, having been unsupported by the Spaniards he was obliged to retreat; and following on this, an expedition sent out by the British ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... The old imbecile put his damp finger upon this, and asked me what I thought of it. I said it was very simple but touching, and then, being anxious to get rid of him, ordered two dozen of Kate's fancy. He thanked me most fervently, and said he would bring them to me in a few days. I hurriedly remarked he could post ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the statues of CHARLES VI, and of JANE of Burgundy. The former being struck by a coup de soleil, became deranged in his intellects and imbecile, after having displayed great genius; he is represented with a pack of cards in his hand to denote that they were first invented for that prince's diversion. The latter was Dutchess of BEAUFORT, wife to the Duke, who commanded the English army against Charles VII, and as ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Matron into the courtyard. Several men in bottle-green corduroys loitered there, and a tiny old woman shrivelled and imbecile, who ran to Anne the moment she appeared, holding her skirts high to her knees, skipping on one foot and ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... not perfectly imbecile and void of understanding, is an epicure in his own way. The epicures in boiling of potatoes are innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyment depends on the perfection of the faculties of the mind and body; therefore, the temperate man is the ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... grass bordering the road a face glided past the carriage at the level of the wheels as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face was red, and the bullet head with close-cropped hair seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust. The body was lost in the bushes growing thick along the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad |
