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More "Do-nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after all a negative programme. Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic arsenal? This was a do-nothing policy, difficult to reconcile with the enthusiastic liberalism which Young America was supposed to cherish. Yet Douglas gauged the situation accurately. The bulk of the party wished a return to power more than anything else. To this end, they ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Florida two years before, and, charmed with the climate, the river, the oaks, the flowers, the sweet do-nothing life, we had followed the example of so many worthy Northerners and had bought an old plantation, intending to start an orange-grove. We had gone over all the calculations which are so freely circulated in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... on the next day (5.30 a.m., March 30th) in disorderly style. The night had been cool and comfortable, dry and dewless; but the Shaykhs were torpid after the feast, and the escort and quarrymen had been demoralized by a week of sweet "do-nothing." Striking up the Wady el-Wijh, which now becomes narrow and gorge-like, with old and new wells and water-pits dotting the sole, we were stopped, after half an hour's walk, by a "written rock" on the right side of the bed. None of the guides ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... mild dignity which effectively closed the discussion and left Mr. Colt raging. In and about St. Hospital nine observers out of ten would have told you that the Chaplain held this dear, do-nothing old Master in the hollow of his hand, and on nine occasions out of ten the Chaplain felt sure of it. On the tenth he found himself mocked, as a schoolboy believes he has grasped a butterfly and opens his fingers cautiously, to find no prisoner within them. He could never precisely understand ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... an extraordinary fact, illustrative how far the ignorance of a discerning public will carry those who make a living by practising upon their credulity, that notwithstanding there is an immense number of books annually presented to the do-nothing world, under the curiosity-provoking title of fashionable novels, we have hardly more than one or two generally recognised true and faithful pictures of really fashionable life. The caricatures of caricatures of this Elysian state are numberless—imagination ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... passes a soldier's guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets! That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them; this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look—behold it; in the stolidest of do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... iron. For the most part it swayed lightly, with a certain moral effect only over the head of the rank and file, but it grew to a crushing beam for the officer who did not with alacrity habitually attend to his every duty, great or small. The do-nothing, the popinjay, the intractable, the self-important, the remonstrant, the I thought, sir—the It is due to my dignity, sir—none of these flourished in the Army of the Valley. The tendencies had been there, of course; ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... The fairy Do-nothing was gorgeously dressed with a wreath of flaming gas round her head, a robe of gold tissue, a necklace of rubies, and a bouquet in her hand of glittering diamonds. Her cheeks were rouged to the very ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... a thoroughgoing supporter of the 'do-nothing' doctrine. He approved of a national system of education, and of the early factory acts, though only as applied to infant labour. So, as we shall see, did all the Utilitarians. The 'individualism,' however, is not less ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... sung paeans to his "Popular Sovereignty" doctrine until his Supreme Court, co-operating with him, has squatted his Squatter Sovereignty out. But he will keep up this species of humbuggery about Squatter Sovereignty. He has at last invented this sort of do-nothing sovereignty,—that the people may exclude slavery by a sort of "sovereignty" that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is not that running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... was not already demonstrated—as if history was not already a picture of what the result will be. Will you be good enough to tell me which woman you think to-day is the superior? There is the problem: the Asiatic woman is the woman we hear tell about; just look at her—a do-nothing, a know-nothing woman! The European woman is the woman that has been cultured. Which is the superior to-day? which commands ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... influence on life and conduct, for which all is done that they can demand when they are accepted. But the truth is no inert substance like the element which recent chemical discoveries have found, which is named 'argon,' the do-nothing: the truth is, as physiologists say, a ferment. It is intended to come into life, and into character, and into the inmost spirit of a man, and grip them, and mould them, and transform them, and animate them, and impel them. The truth is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... was after all a negative programme. Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic arsenal? This was a do-nothing policy, difficult to reconcile with the enthusiastic liberalism which Young America was supposed to cherish. Yet Douglas gauged the situation accurately. The bulk of the party wished a return to power more than anything else. To this end, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... one advantage, though some policemen call it by quite the opposite name, in being stationed at Ancon. When crime takes a holiday and do-nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires of his native land and people a short stroll down the asphalt takes him into the city of Panama. Barely across the street where his badge becomes mere metal, and he ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. "He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors said when others pitied ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... the following afternoon, entering the kitchen and putting his arm about his wife, as she stood at the table busy with her baking. "Fanny, what can we do for the young people of Boyd City? Amy is only one of many. It is all the result of the do-nothing policy of the church, and of the Goodrich type of Christians, who think more of their social position than they do of the souls of their children, or ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
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