"Do-nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 decided; and leads him to speak as though the elasticity of population were not ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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 |
