Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




More "Selective" Quotes from Famous Books



... of this term 'natural selection' is overlooked when people talk glibly about 'natural selection' of ideas. Darwin used the term 'natural selection' because he thought he saw an analogy between the tendency of nature and the selective purposes of intelligent beings. It was because nature, working without intelligence, produced the same kind of result as man does by intelligent selection, that he ventured to use this term 'selection' of the process of nature. Perhaps he was hardly justified in adopting the term, as nature ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... breeder; she is a reckless coupler and—she slays. It was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest, a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as most people who share his mistake have been misled, by the grammatical error of employing the Survival of the Fittest for the Survival of the Fitter, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... Jimmy became more selective. He saw no point in reporting a car that wasn't going to be used. An easy mark wedged between two other cars couldn't be removed with ease. A car parked in front of a parking meter with a red flag ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... service for which by nature he is best suited. It must see, further, that any obstacles which prevent the full use of these means by particular individuals are, as far as may be possible, removed. A national system of education, on the other hand, must be aristocratic in the sense that it is selective of the best ability. Lastly, it must be restrictive, in order that the means of higher education may be utilised to the best advantage, and not misused on those who ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... Gerald continued, as they bent over to look under the car, "you see the gear is of the selective sliding type, which has been adopted by all the high grade cars. And back here is what they term a floating axle. The wheels and tires are both extra large—in fact, there is nothing about the car, that I've been able to discover, that is not the ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond

... becomes still more civilized. The obvious remedy is to begin conservation at an earlier stage, when it is easier and better in every way, by enforcing laws for close seasons, game preserves, the selective protection of certain species, and sanctuaries. I have just defined a sanctuary as a place where man is passive and the rest of Nature active. But this general definition is too absolute for any special case. The mere fact that man has to protect a sanctuary ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... must not overlook the delicacy of many of their descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... commissioned for Siena there would have been less braggadocio. Leonardo never recovered his Tuscan frame of mind after his sojourn in Milan. Donatello himself realised these novelties to the full, and their results upon his art. While he was making the intricate bas-reliefs, the selective genius of Luca della Robbia was composing the Florence Lunettes,[193] monumental in their simplicity. And though Vasari records the enthusiasm with which Donatello's productions were greeted in the North, the sculptor recognised the dangers of unqualified ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... Bulldog, and the Terrier, differ very greatly, and yet there is every reason to believe that every one of these races has arisen from the same source,—that all the most important races have arisen by this selective breeding from accidental variation. ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley

... essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man has originated the races of domestic animals—the struggle for existence taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of natural selection, that selective action which he performs ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... unflagging zeal the Liberty Girls were annoyed to discover that another traitorous circular had been issued. A large contingent of the selective draft boys had just been ordered away to the cantonment and the day before they left all their parents received a circular saying that the draft was unconstitutional and that their sons were being sacrificed by autocratic methods to further the political schemes of ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... existed in his handwriting. The reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... present time, with the exception of the Oriental races, there has been no real restriction to immigration. Our policy has been selective rather than restrictive. Of those arriving certain individuals are rejected by the immigration authorities because of some defect of mind, of body, or of morals, or because of age infirmity, or some other cause by reason of which ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... accept the volitional hypothesis (of Lamarck) or the selective force exerted by outward circumstances (Darwin), I deem an innate tendency to deviate from parental type, operating through periods of adequate duration, to be the most probable way of operation of the secondary law whereby species have been derived ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all—from those windows—a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective," than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the dazzling ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... a particular appeal to our attention and contribution to our delight, will count for more in the ideal type than its frequency would warrant. The generic image has been constructed under the influence of a selective ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... Service points out that listeners have a wide choice of broadcast programmes, advertised well in advance, and it assumes that listeners will be selective in tuning in their sets, and restrictive in not allowing their children to listen after 7 p.m. when programmes specially suited for them cease. This assumption, however, is not well founded. Once switched on, ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.

... ably managed, will not make serious and perhaps enduring mistakes; but he can answer that inaction and irresponsibility are more costly and dangerous than intelligent and responsible interference. The practice of non-interference is just as selective in its effects as the practice of state interference. It means merely that the nation is willing to accept the results of natural selection instead of preferring to substitute the results of artificial selection. In one way or another a nation is bound to recognize the results of ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women, but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink puppy ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... have said in the seventh essay, the fact of evolution is to my mind sufficiently evidenced by palaeontology; and I remain of the opinion expressed in the second, that until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation; the apparent inheritance of acquired characters in some cases; and the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... fingers through her own bronze-flecked ringlets. Selective breeding this, with a vengeance, I thought; an ancient experiment in heredity which of course would in time result in the stamping out of the tendency to depart from type that lies in all organisms; resulting, obviously, at last, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... tablet, shard and papyrus have told their story, and the vista stretches back to the dawn of human history in that inexhaustible valley watered by the perennial overflow of the grandest river in the world. But there is much still to be accomplished by the enthusiastic spirit, the keen and selective mind, in the study of this ancient land, the cradle and the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... for the early classes in the high school does the situation demand a relatively flexible curriculum, else the only choice will be to drop out to escape drudgery or failure. Inglis maintains that the selective function of the high school may operate by a process of differentiation rather than by a wholesale elimination.[59] The pupil surely cannot know in advance what he is best fitted for, but the school must help him find that out, if it is to render a very valuable ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien

... Levinson and McCarty made the breakthrough that revolutionized the whole concept. In very simplified language they unlocked the key to producing specialized living tissue through a bombardment of an extremely complex carbon compound with amino acids and electricity, then making it selective in function by a fantastically intricate application ...
— Am I Still There? • James R. Hall

... no more wars. It must be acknowledged that the elimination of war was the direct result of non-violence practiced on a general scale. But we can take a more objective view of war today. What was so terrible about it? War had a profound selective value, perfectly in accord with the teachings of Darwin and Mendel and others. Without war the mass of useless, incompetent mankind, without training or intelligence, is permitted to grow and expand unchecked. War acted ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick

... or dray horses as the case may be, and the system works with almost mechanical certainty. He gets what he wants and would never think of raising scrubs and taking a chance on results. The effect of selective breeding and culture is beyond dispute, and to many it seems obvious that all that is needed to perfect the human race and wipe out misery and crime is to supervise human breeding in the same way, so that the species may ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... sorts still exist that a selective and varietally aware home gardener can make do. Since I've become water-wiser, I'm interested in finding and conserving heirlooms that once supported large numbers of healthy Americans in relative self-sufficiency. My earlier book, being a guide ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon

... perspectives of young men in new countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne meant to be a good lawyer, squarely proposed to himself that the country should hold no better; and as to more selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little stumping for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario House in the fall. It wouldn't be his first electioneering: from the day he became chairman of the Young Liberals the party had an eye on him, and when occasion arose, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... service. "Men in every department of practical life," says President Hadley of Yale, "men in commerce, in transportation, or in manufactures—have told me that what they really wanted from our colleges was men who have this selective power of using books efficiently. The beginnings of this kind of knowledge are best learned in any home ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... McCarty made the breakthrough that revolutionized the whole concept. In very simplified language they unlocked the key to producing specialized living tissue through a bombardment of an extremely complex carbon compound with amino acids and electricity, then making it selective in function by a fantastically intricate ...
— Am I Still There? • James R. Hall

... student's attention was withdrawn from his specimens by a peculiar smell, which, being followed up by a system of selective sniffing, proved to be an emanation leaking into the stable from the alley. He opened ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... of the imagination we may hope to penetrate this mystery. The cloud takes no note of size on the part of the waves of aether, but reflects them all alike. It exercises no selective action. Now the cause of this may be that the cloud particles are so large, in comparison with the waves of aether, as to reflect them all indifferently. A broad cliff reflects an Atlantic roller as easily as a ripple produced by a seabird's wing; ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... education, her selective abilities had been indeed good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich to have ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... camp over the age of thirteen was obliged to have an occupation. To a certain extent, this occupation was selective, but in the main it was to be determined by a board whose business it was to see that the man-power was directed to the best advantage for all concerned. A camp tax was ordered. At the end of the week, every citizen was required to pay into the common treasury two "hours." He could ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... place, he thought that genuine realism forbade his being selective and commanded him to put everything in his verse. He accordingly included some offensive material which was outside the pale of poetic treatment. Had he followed the same rule with his cooking, his chickens would have been served to him without removing the feathers. His refusal ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... begins at the point where it began in his parents, not at the point where it ended in them. Biological improvement of the race (and such improvement greatly fosters all other kinds) must be made through a selective birth-rate. There is no short-cut by way of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... industrial army. Neither would injustice be done to the immigrant himself. On the contrary, he would be assured of a job and respectful consideration when he arrived. The "dago" or the "bohunk" would acquire a new dignity and a more enviable status than he now occupies. The selective process thus involved would much improve the quality of the immigrant admitted, and would incidentally render assimilation of the foreigner ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... all that the United States has done to assist in bringing the war to its successful close, from the adoption of the selective draft down thru the management of the training camps, the operation of the railroads, conservation of food and fuel, to the knitting of a pair of socks and the sale of a thrift stamp, what shall be said ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... gives an idea of the selective method that has been followed. There has been no slavish or unconscious imitation. On the contrary, there has been a constant conscious effort to follow the best model that the civilized world afforded. Of course, it may be doubted whether in fact they have always chosen the best; but ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... horror at the sight of a snake, and a repugnance to its ways, but a snake is just as perfect an animal as a monkey. The living world does not consist of a repetition of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them, that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical circumstances of the localities they inhabit. The moral and intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... that new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present,—and which we call 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation,—is as wholly unknown to the historian ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... metals ... the ability, at will, to endow the higher, more selective metals with intelligence ... and the ability to retain command of the intelligences thus endowed. This explained the power of Luar over the Gnomes, and the power of the Gnomes over the cubes—if they possessed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... readers already exists, and may some day come to the support of original literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided. That majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... grass out of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped between the barbs of the fine ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... enough confined hellfire in its missile warheads to destroy an area hundreds of miles across, the occupation troops of Mekin could not use such weapons. They needed blast-rifles for minor threats and artillery for selective destruction. In any case no sane man would try to destroy the Isis aground after an announcement that its bombs were armed, and that they were fused ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... The Drama, says: "It is in finding the mean between personal narrowness which is too selective, and photographic impersonality that is not selective at all, that the individuality of the artist, his training, and his ideals, are tested. It is this that determines how much his work shall possess of what we may call poetic, ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... visible and invisible, is powerfully affected by the selective absorption of our atmosphere and that of the sun; and we must first observe that could we get outside our earth's atmospheric shell, we should see a second and very different spectrum, and could we afterward remove the solar atmosphere also, we should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... selective mental process is helped by the score described in the last chapter; and the quantity of each color chosen for the group is easily indicated by a variable circle, drawn round the various points on the diagram. Thus, in the case of the child's clothes, a large circle ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... decorations, and rewards for acts, it stimulates what it rewards and causes new cases of it. The operation of selection is direct and rational. The cases in which the application of distinction is irrational show most clearly its selective effect. School-teachers are familiar with the fact that children will imitate a peculiarity of one which marks him out from all the rest, even if it is a deformity or defect. Why then wonder that barbarian mothers try to deform their babies towards an adopted type of bodily ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... to preferment and others to ignominy in order that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles, some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process—as heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding this process. That it is incapable of doing this is not to be hazarded. ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... delicacy of many of their descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... incongruous in a drama approaching more closely to the evolutions of ordinary experience, become, in the ideal drama, artistic modes of expression; and it is in these that Ristori displays a fine selective instinct, and a ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... mind at this point. Arthur T. Hadley, recently President of Yale University, has said, "Men in every department of practical life, men in commerce, in transportation or in manufactures, have told me that what they really wanted from our college was men who have this selective power of using books efficiently. The beginnings of knowledge are best learned in any home fairly well furnished with books." Professor William Mathews has added, "It is not the number of books which a young man reads that makes him intelligent and well-informed, but the number ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for facts, relations, values - material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and EX FACTO art. He learns it in the crystallisation of day-dreams; in changing, not in ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... receive their original traits from their ancestors, probably as parts or units. Mendelism is the doctrine of the pure transmission of unit characters. Eugenics is the science of improving the human race by selective breeding. An individual's life is the result of the interaction of his hereditary characteristics ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... delayed a little before beginning his repast, and it happened that when Miss Harden appeared again she found him holding a tea-cup to his lips with one hand, while the other groped in a dish of cream cakes, abstractedly, and without the guidance of a selective eye. Both eyes indeed were gazing dreamily over the rim of the tea-cup at her empty chair. He was all right; so why, oh why did he turn brick-red and dash his cup down and draw back his innocent hand? That was what he ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... unusual brilliance when heated in a flame—it is easy to understand the reason for this. For example, when a number of substances are heated to the same temperature they may radiate the same amount of energy and still differ considerably in brightness. Many substances are "selective" in their absorbing and radiating properties. One may radiate more luminous energy and less infra-red energy, and for another the reverse may be true. The former would appear brighter than the latter. The scientific worker in light-production has been searching for such "selective" radiators whose ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... story, and the vista stretches back to the dawn of human history in that inexhaustible valley watered by the perennial overflow of the grandest river in the world. But there is much still to be accomplished by the enthusiastic spirit, the keen and selective mind, in the study of this ancient land, the cradle and the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... William Russell. These atrocities and the trials at Old Bailey, no doubt, gave my mind the bent for the criminal law, not that I was in any sense conscious of the possession of superior powers. It was merely the selective tendency of a fresh and buoyant mind, rather vigorous than contemplative, and in which the desire for a special field of action is but the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... the uniformitarian geology of Lyell with its graded advance of existences from age to age seemed absolutely to demand some evolutionary explanation; partly because artificial selection was a familiar idea of proved value in selective breeding, and "natural selection" seemed an exact parallel carried on by nature in the direction of continual improvement; but perhaps more largely because the abstract idea of "natural selection" involved so many intricate separate ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... will cry "peccavi" when I hear of the Duke or you attacking breeders for saying that man has made his improved shorthorns, or pouter pigeons, or bantams. And I could quote still stronger expressions used by agriculturists. Man does make his artificial breeds, for his selective power is of such importance relatively to that of the slight spontaneous variations. But no one will attack breeders for using such expressions, and the rising ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... other at the most effective moment. The choice of the incidents is determined invariably by one consideration—the light which they throw upon the characters; and the characters themselves appear to us from only a very few carefully chosen points of view. The narrowed and selective nature of Moliere's treatment of character presents an illuminating contrast when compared with the elaborately detailed method of such a master of the romantic style as Shakespeare. The English dramatist shows ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... of unflagging zeal the Liberty Girls were annoyed to discover that another traitorous circular had been issued. A large contingent of the selective draft boys had just been ordered away to the cantonment and the day before they left all their parents received a circular saying that the draft was unconstitutional and that their sons were being sacrificed ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... an historian so diffuse, and so little selective, it would obviously be difficult to give any suitably brief specimen that should seem to present a considerable historic action in full. We go to Froissart's account of the celebrated battle of Poitiers (France). ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... necessary to reexamine it in order to know how it treats some particular topic! The former reading was too defective to meet a special need, because the very general aim caused the attitude to be general or non-selective. How often do young people who have been taught to have no particular aim in their reading, have no aim at all, beyond intellectual dissipation, the momentary tickle of the thought. Thus all particular needs are in danger of being left unsatisfied when no particular need is fixed upon as the object. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... horse-raiser will breed for race horses or dray horses as the case may be, and the system works with almost mechanical certainty. He gets what he wants and would never think of raising scrubs and taking a chance on results. The effect of selective breeding and culture is beyond dispute, and to many it seems obvious that all that is needed to perfect the human race and wipe out misery and crime is to supervise human breeding in the same way, so that the species ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... our atmosphere, together with selective absorption, also by our atmosphere and its vapors, have been suggested as causes in this curious ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... seem strange that Sally Patterson, who, according to her own self-estimation, was the least adapted of any woman in the village, should have been the one chosen by a theoretically selective providence to deal with a ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the Vote, soon to be theirs, and how it should be exercised. From that—by some instinct—Honoria passed on to a talk about Vivien Warren ... a selective talk. She said nothing about David Williams, but enlarged on Vivie's absolute "straightness," especially towards other women; her business capacities, her restoration of her mother to the ranks of the respectable; till at last ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... and development in this selective tendency of Love—and yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application of this egoistic ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... Andamans. But so soon as a differentiation of function has well begun on the lines marked out by this difference in physique and animus, the original difference between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of selective adaptation to the new distribution of employments will set in, especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the group is in contact is such as to call for a considerable exercise of the sturdier ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... sense, every American, because of the privilege of his citizenship, is a part of the Selective Service. ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... the Atlantic from five days to one, or even less; but in that direction, too, there is a limit to progress; no invention will enable us to arrive before we start. The conquest of physical disease seems to be well within view; the possibilities of intensive cultivation and selective breeding in plants and animals are likely to be rapidly developed. When such material problems cease to exercise the first fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental sciences, psychology and sociology, with the great neglected ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... him, but which kept recurring again and again, and which ended by cheating him out of his night's sleep. Why should Roscoe Bent be leaving home with two suitcases at twelve o'clock at night when he would have to register for the selective draft the next day? ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... great question we faced was that of universal service for the war—or the selective draft—again how farsighted our President then proved himself. What would be our situation now if we had tried to go to war under the volunteer system? This question once solved, our President led us with a breadth of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... Bodies. He remained on his Deputation from the 22nd July 1896 to the 19th April 1897. He read a paper 'On a complete Apparatus for studying the Properties of Electric Waves' at the meeting of British Association, held at Liverpool, in 1896. He then communicated a paper 'On the Selective Conductivity exhibited by Polarising Substances,' which was published by the Royal Society, in January 1897. He next delivered his 'Friday Evening Discourse,' at the Royal Institution, 'On Electric Waves,' on the 29th January 1897. "There is, however, to our thinking" wrote the Spectator ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... the finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women, but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... he was. Ambition, definitely shining goals, adorn the perspectives of young men in new countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne meant to be a good lawyer, squarely proposed to himself that the country should hold no better; and as to more selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little stumping for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario House in the fall. It wouldn't be his first electioneering: from the day he became chairman of the Young Liberals the party ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator his due of credit through the artistic charm of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... of musical execution is already on the way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... and this atomic attraction is known as affinity. There is not the least possible doubt that affinity is a form of universal attraction, except that the affinity of atoms is selective. This affinity of atoms for each other gives rise to the combination of atoms known as molecules ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... discovered for this often pestiferous weed with which nature carpets moist soil the world around is to feed caged song-birds. What is the secret of the insignificant little plant's triumphal progress? Like most immigrants that have undergone ages of selective struggle in the Old World, it successfully competes with our native blossoms by readily adjusting itself to new conditions filling places unoccupied, and chiefly by prolonging its season of bloom beyond theirs, to get relief from the pressure ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... nearly always coincide; only the other man always seems to coincide first. And, as he takes his hundred and fifty on a selective principle, I am beginning to know from bitter experience what he will ask for and how long he will take to get served. He begins with a note for fifty and goes on with fifty in fivers. Then he has twenty sovereigns, and so on, down to the pound in copper. He and the cashier chat airily the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various

... this term 'natural selection' is overlooked when people talk glibly about 'natural selection' of ideas. Darwin used the term 'natural selection' because he thought he saw an analogy between the tendency of nature and the selective purposes of intelligent beings. It was because nature, working without intelligence, produced the same kind of result as man does by intelligent selection, that he ventured to use this term 'selection' ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... the department of biology, he yet ventures to continue his doubt regarding the evidence of their peculiar doctrines. He first cites Darwin's admissions that it would be fatal to his theory if any organs existed which could not have been evolved by minute selective modifications, and his further concession that "man, as well as every other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various

... Access in Public Libraries A. Overview of Public Forum Doctrine B. Contours of the Relevant Forum: the Library's Collection as a Whole or the Provision of Internet Access? C. Content-based Restrictions in Designated Public Fora D. Reasons for Applying Strict Scrutiny 1. Selective Exclusion From a "Vast Democratic Forum" 2. Analogy to Traditional Public Fora V. Application of Strict Scrutiny A. State Interests 1. Preventing the Dissemination of Obscenity, Child Pornography, and Material Harmful to Minors ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... shot with cream in which there was a suggestion of a picture. Suppose one didn't put the switch all the way up? Ross examined the slot in which the bar moved and now noted a series of tiny point marks along it. Selective? It would not do any harm to see. First he hurried back to the cork of chairs he had jammed into the stairwell. The squawks were now coming only at intervals, and Ross could hear nothing to suggest that his ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... It must see, further, that any obstacles which prevent the full use of these means by particular individuals are, as far as may be possible, removed. A national system of education, on the other hand, must be aristocratic in the sense that it is selective of the best ability. Lastly, it must be restrictive, in order that the means of higher education may be utilised to the best advantage, and not misused on those who are unfitted ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... exceptionally favored by the occurrence of large areas of seedling trees. According to the 1910 census there were in the neighborhood of one and a quarter million seedling trees growing in California. With this almost unlimited material for selective use, it seems indeed reasonable that many varieties will be selected in the future which are better adapted to the demands of the industry than some of those now being propagated. By means of hybridizing methods it is also hoped that some of the desirable unit characters of the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... old sorts still exist that a selective and varietally aware home gardener can make do. Since I've become water-wiser, I'm interested in finding and conserving heirlooms that once supported large numbers of healthy Americans in relative self-sufficiency. My earlier book, being a guide to what passes for ordinary vegetable ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon

... is a highly selective creature, and the normally healthy woman still more fastidiously selective in romantic relationship. Neither man nor woman is naturally in the least attracted by promiscuous intercourse. On the contrary, it is repugnant to both. Both regard the elements of romance, reciprocity and ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout

... development means this,—that in unavoidable changes men like the new doctrine which is most of a 'preservative addition' to their old doctrines. The imitative and the persecuting tendencies make all change in early nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part keeping what is old, but annexing some new but like practice—an additional turret ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously sought these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to introduce an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical allusion. But what the poet's brain does not do consciously it does unconsciously; a selective action is going on in its recesses simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... encouraged to dwell upon central principles, to become familiar with the structure of the various subjects which are put before him, to travel easily over the steps of the more important deductions. In this way a good tone of mind is cultivated, and selective attention is taught to dwell by preference upon what is ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... the most delightful epistolary contributions to modern literature, the more so perhaps as they were written without a thought of future publication. But being a born woman of letters, every line she writes has the elusive qualities of style and charm; and she has besides the selective gift of putting down on paper even to her own family only what ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... ratio at birth has recently emerged as an indicator of certain kinds of sex discrimination in some countries. For instance, high sex ratios at birth in some Asian countries are now attributed to sex-selective abortion and infanticide due to a strong preference for sons. This will affect future marriage patterns and fertility patterns. Eventually it could cause unrest among young adult males who are ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... this struggle for survival must now and again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder, and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that absolute hostility is a law of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge









Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com




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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar