"Inefficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and fully aware of the danger and of the smallness of their forces, were debating whether they should yield to the demand of the Russian troops, and give up the town without any defence, or, with twelve hundred garrison troops, two rusty cannon, a few thousand wounded soldiers, and an inefficient body of citizens, give battle to the twelve thousand irregular troops of General Tottleben, who would soon he reenforced by the army of General Tschernitscheff, twenty thousand strong, and fourteen thousand Austrians under Count Lacy, who, as they well ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... principle; he would compromise cheerfully on a method which did not mean surrender of the principle. He perceived that there were in political life many bad men who were thoroughly efficient and many good men who would have liked to accomplish high results but who were thoroughly inefficient. He realized that if he wished to accomplish anything for the country his business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was the choice that he made in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous, awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful. Even before they set foot on these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was born in that day. It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and that which nourishes the leaders into ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said, simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all. He had been dependent at one time on his partner's capital. It was a moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with men not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
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