"Inferiority" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The great inferiority of the African to the European lies in the matter of mechanical idea. I own I regard not only the African, but all coloured races, as inferior—inferior in kind not in degree—to the white races, although I know it is unscientific to lump all Africans together and then generalise ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in the August sun; the orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the awning aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight scramble, over damp meat and littered packing-cases! The bitterest touch of all was a growing sense of inferiority and ignorance which I had never before been allowed to feel in my ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... nonplussed for the moment by such a vigorous and unexpected attack on his flank. Resourceful as he was, even his cunning mind came wholly unprepared to this sudden cross-questioning. He felt his own physical inferiority to the big Q.C. more keenly just then than he could ever have conceived it possible for a man of his type to feel it. After all, mind doesn't always triumph over matter. Montague Nevitt was aware that that mountain ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... and English grammar are important to the young printer for several reasons. In the first place, disregard of the correct use and combination of words is a distinct mark of inferiority and a serious bar to business and social advancement. A man's use of words is commonly taken as a measure of his knowledge and even of his intelligence. Carelessness in this regard often causes a man to be held in much less esteem than ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... itself, and never wore away. My chance of security lay, not so much in my own caution, and my perfect command of look and action under all emergencies, as in the self-distrust and timidity of her nature; in the helpless inferiority of position to which her husband's want of affection, and her daughter's want of respect, condemned her in her own house; and in the influence of repulsion—at times, even of absolute terror—which my presence had the power of ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... elegant writers to exist in a degenerate age. So far is this from being the case, that though the style of Plotinus[19] and Jamblichus[20] is by no means to be compared with that of Plato, yet this inferiority is lost in the depth and sublimity of their conceptions, and is as little regarded by the intelligent reader, as motes in a sunbeam by the eye that gladly turns itself to the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... before me I sent for Aristides Papazaphiropoulos, our interpreter, and in the meantime delivered a short lecture to the Sergeant-Major, Quartermaster-Sergeant and Storeman on the inferiority of the Balkan peoples, with particular reference to the specimen before us, to whom, in view of the fact that he seemed a little below himself, I gave a tot of rum. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... had other engagements, or they might have felt their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees, and not being replaced by other company, left their new patron in possession of the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in his kitchen; the landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed traveller sat smoking ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of the sex the three women, while chatting affably, learned all that there was to be learned from the outward appearance of each other in three minutes. Miss Kendal could not deny but what Donna Inez was very beautiful, and frankly admitted—inwardly, of course—her own inferiority. She was merely pretty, whereas the Peruvian lady was truly handsome and ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... will, and bereft of every motive for self-improvement as well as every opportunity to rise. The effect of this upon the dominant race was to fix in their minds, with the strength of an absorbing passion, the idea of their own innate and unimpeachable superiority, of the unalterable inferiority of the slave-race, of the infinite distance between the two, and of the depth of debasement implied by placing the two races, in any respect, on the same level. The Southern mind had no antipathy to the negro in a menial or servile relation. On the contrary, it was generally ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Assyria does not improve as time goes on. Nothing can well be more dry and commonplace than the historical literature of this period, which recalls the early efforts of the Greeks in this department, and exhibits a decided inferiority to the compositions of Stowe and Holinshed. The historiographer of Tiglath-Pileser I., between two and three centuries earlier, is much superior, as a writer, to those of the period to which we are come, who eschew all graces of style, contenting themselves with the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... neglected gunnery and defective shipbuilding. The Admiralty had cut down the supply of practice ammunition and had allowed British ships to lag far behind those of other nations in material and design. The general inferiority of British shipbuilding was such an unwelcome truth to the British people that they would not believe it till the American frigates drove it home with shattering broadsides. But it was a very old truth, for all that. Nelson's captains, and those of still ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... prepared by a board of French generals on "army administration," which is full of information, and is as applicable to us as to the French. I quote from its very beginning: "The misfortunes of the campaign of 1870 have demonstrated the inferiority of our system.... Two separate organizations existed with parallel functions—the 'general' more occupied in giving direction to his troops than in providing for their material wants, which he regarded as the special province of the staff, and the 'intendant' (staff) often working at random, taking ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of the Negro, and break down that unnatural bar of separation now existing. If a Negro is a lieutenant, he will command his company in the absence of the captain. He can wear epaulets, and be entitled to all the rights and privileges 'of an officer and a gentleman;' he is no longer doomed to inferiority. In case of battle, where bullets have no respect of persons, and do not draw the line at color, it may easily happen that a regiment or battalion will do its best work in the face of the enemy under the command of a Negro chief. Thus far the Government ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... certain constant and closely defined mutual relations. Like a zoological species, each order has a distinctive character and personal physiognomy of its own. An art that is deprived of such a resource is condemned to a real inferiority. It may cover every surface with the luxury of a sumptuous decoration, but, in spite of all its efforts, a secret poverty, a want of genius and invention, will be visible in ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... duty, and to attain the respectable success which circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he could hope. This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions. The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties, and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in consequence a nobler man. But all this, which was so much to him for a year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... this trust, I will only say, that I have with good intentions contributed toward the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious in the outset of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience, in my own eyes—perhaps still more in the eyes of others—has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me, ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... not Caesar, but emperors; acting indeed in this respect with great kindness. Nor had any one yet ever created a colleague with powers equal to his own, except the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who made his adopted brother Verus his colleague in the empire without any inferiority ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... African blood. The word "colored," in the States, seems to apply to the whole negro race, whether full-blooded or half-blooded. I allude to this now because I wish to explain that, in speaking of what I conceive to be the intellectual inferiority of the negro race, I allude to those of pure negro descent—or of descent so nearly pure as to make the negro element manifestly predominant. In the West Indies, where I had more opportunity of studying the subject, I always ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... The inferiority of Burmah in respect of population, notwithstanding the superior fertility of the soil, is to be traced to the physical geography of the country. The great rivers of India flow east or west. The great rivers of the Burmese peninsula flow from north to south. The population of India ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... wrote they had that time; and therefore his readers pronounced him a man of genius: but when he talked he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing-stock of his hearers. He was painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation; he felt every failure keenly; yet he had not sufficient judgment and self-command to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one thing which he could not ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that his turn was to come; that he must mount the stump and address the listening throng. He perceived that he could not speak as these men were speaking; and perhaps for the first time in his life began to experience some sense of inferiority. ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... to imagine a more unhappy condition than that of dependance on a peevish man. In every other state of inferiority the certainty of pleasing is perpetually increased by a fuller knowledge of our duty; and kindness and confidence are strengthened by every new act of trust, and proof of fidelity. But peevishness sacrifices to a momentory offence the obsequiousness or usefulness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... meaner then to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... been constantly baffled or repulsed on shore; whilst at sea, with the exception of the capture of the Chesapeake and one or two other affairs towards its conclusion, we have been equally unsuccessful. From what cause does this proceed? Not from any inferiority in courage or discipline, because in these particulars British soldiers and sailors will yield to none in the world. There must, then, be some other cause for these misfortunes, and the cause is surely one ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... which Rosecrans opposed to a forward movement was his inferiority in cavalry. This was removed in July, when General John H. Morgan, with about four thousand Confederate cavalry, crossed the Ohio at Brandenburg, swept around Cincinnati, and struck the river again near Parkersburg. During ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... say, that I have with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government, the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and, every day, the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... moreover, in believing that the negroes were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of the white men; and, however much they overworked their conviction of negro inferiority, they could clearly see that the Abolitionists were applying a narrow and perverted political theory to a complicated and delicate set of economic and social conditions. It is no wonder, consequently, that they did not submit tamely to the abuse of the Abolitionists; ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... in the Desert," and his "Judith Setting out for Holofernes's Camp" (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple, like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to them in landscape sentiment. In France it is generally assumed that to devote one's self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being called landscapists. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... exclaimed the Caterpillar, "you jest with my inferiority—now you are cruel as well as foolish. Go away! I will ask your advice ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... precedents, and ever alert to novel combinations of ideas. Give a race this and it will guide it to civilization as surely as the needle directs the ship to its haven. It is here that ideographic writing reveals its fatal inferiority. It is forever specifying, materializing, dealing in minutiae. In the Egyptian symbolic alphabet there is a figure for a virgin, another for a married woman, for a widow without offspring, for a widow ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the very heart of Virginia life; and, although I cannot arrogate to it any claims for superiority over other conditions of society, among people of the same class in life, yet, at least, I will not allow an inferiority. As variety is the spice of society, I will show them, that here are many men of ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... humanists of their age. As distinguished from the idealism of the prophets, they are realists who look at life in a somewhat utilitarian way. With the prophets, however, they are at one in regarding the inferiority of ceremonial to obedience and sincerity. God is the ruler of the world, and man's task is to live in obedience to Him. What God requires is correct outward behaviour, self-restraint, and consideration ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... disposed to be always pressing them on the attention of the world. An outrage may certainly be done those social rights which have been established by common consent, and then it may be proper to resent it; but beware betraying a consciousness of your own inferiority, by letting every one see you are jealous of your station. 'Now, kiss me; here is the money to pay for your finery this evening, and let me see you as happy to receive Mrs. Jewett from Albion Place, as you would be ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... her sister's "extreme" views, the sight of the dreadful people that they brought about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that "the good old families" would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... to say you have not read such and such a book. Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority. Do not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... difficult to give money without hurting the recipient. It is as difficult to receive it without embarrassment and sense of inferiority. Paul here shows us how he could handle a delicate subject with a feminine fineness of instinct and a noble self-respect joined with warmest gratitude. He carries the weight of obligation, is profuse in his ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of flour are governed by the United States laws. Bleaching is permitted only when it does not reduce the quality or strength nor conceal any damage or inferiority. Such flour must be plainly labeled to show ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... animal kingdom, beginning as it does with the simplest forms and ending with man. Perhaps, however, he temporarily adopts the prevailing method of beginning with the highest forms in order to bring out clearly the successive steps in inferiority or degradation presented in descending ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... them to grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians, says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture of anything like religious feeling or fear, but merely whim, expediency, anger, or indolence." Sometimes the general idea of woman's inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading missionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... army moves north; Flying Corps shifted to St. Omer. No. 6 Squadron arrives. Strategic reconnaissance. Long-distance flights. The battle of Ypres. Union Jack marking abolished. Photography and wireless. Earlier methods of ranging. Their inferiority. Fighting quality of British aeroplanes; German prisoners' evidence. The losses of Ypres. Withdrawal of German troops observed from the air. Sympathy of Flying Corps for the infantry. The ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... per cent less valuable. Hence the Cape de Verd salt is constantly imported, and is mixed with that from these salinas. The purity of the Patagonian salt, or absence from it of those other saline bodies found in all sea-water, is the only assignable cause for this inferiority: a conclusion which no one, I think, would have suspected, but which is supported by the fact lately ascertained, that those salts answer best for preserving cheese which contain most of the deliquescent chlorides. (4/3. Report of the Agricultural Chemistry Association ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... afternoon the two ladies went out rowing on the river, and Mrs. Easterfield was astonished at Olive's proficiency with the oar. She had thought herself a good oarswoman, but she was nothing to Olive. She good-naturedly acknowledged her inferiority, however. How could she expect to compete with a navy girl? ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... "I have often thought that the unquestionable inferiority of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent defect in the German mind."—The Philosophy ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... certain advantage, for Lincoln found the difficulty which candid minds still find in applying the principle of equality to races of unequal strength. Douglas plainly declared that ours is a white man's government. Lincoln admitted such an inferiority in negroes as would forever prevent the two races from living together on terms of perfect social and political equality, and if there must be inequality he was in favor of his own race having the superior place. He could only ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... family, allied to the Queen my mother. When the day of interment arrived, four of my gentlemen were appointed bearers, one of whom was named La Boessiere. This man had entertained a secret passion for her, which he never durst declare on account of the inferiority of his family and station. He was now destined to bear the remains of her, dead, for whom he had long been dying, and was now as near dying for her loss as he had before been for her love. The melancholy procession was marching slowly, along, when it was met by the Marquis de Varenbon, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... have no analogue in letters, but are the output of a mind and temper of singular originality. To the honest Tory, sworn to admire and unable to comprehend, they must seem inexplicable as abnormal. To the professional Radical they are so many proofs of innate inferiority: for they are full of pretentiousness and affectation; they teem with examples of all manner of vices, from false English to an immoral delight in dukes; they prove their maker a trickster and a charlatan in every page. To them, however, whose first care is for rare work, the ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... depends on the state of the market, and the price realized is often as low as a shilling per hundred weight. The majority of the population of Cornwall is engaged directly or indirectly in the fisheries, and considering the inferiority of most of the country for agriculture and the extensive coast line with its numerous harbors, it is not strange that so many of the natives should follow this life. In earlier days, smuggling and wrecking constituted the occupation ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... cannot derogate from the value of reason without using reason. You cannot put reason into an inferior category, when compared with will or instinct or emotion, without using reason itself to prove such an inferiority. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... face the educated working men,) his opinions did matter to himself. The good man laboured under the delusion, common enough, of choosing his favourite weapons from his weakest faculty; and the very inferiority of his intellect prevented him from seeing where his true strength lay. He would argue; he would try and convert me from scepticism by what seemed to him reasoning, the common figure of which was, what logicians, I believe, call begging the question; and the common method, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... they practise it; for the accustomed gymnastic exercises seem never yet to have been rendered attractive to them, on any large scale, and with any permanency. Girls, no doubt, learn as readily as boys to row, to skate, and to swim,—any muscular inferiority being perhaps counterbalanced in swimming by their greater physical buoyancy, in skating by their dancing-school experience, and in rowing by their music-lessons enabling them more promptly to fall into regular time,—though ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... mind-to-mind, then in a closer way even than Ashe. The talent which tied her to the dolphins had in turn been a bond with the Foanna. Ashe and Karara could enter that circle, but not Ross Murdock. Along with his new separation from Ashe came that feeling of inferiority to bite on, and the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... a machine is simple so is it strong in its action—so in proportion that a machine is complex, it becomes weak; and if we analyse a woman's mind, we shall find that her inferiority arises from the simple fact, that there are so many wheels within wheels working in it, so many compensating balances (if we may use the term, and we use it to her honour), that although usually more right-minded than man, her strength of action is ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... Mrs. Austen never swore, he replied, 'Now, Betty, why do you pull me up for nothing? that's neither here nor there; you know very well that's only my way of telling the story.' Attention has lately been called by a celebrated writer to the inferiority of the clergy to the laity of England two centuries ago. The charge no doubt is true, if the rural clergy are to be compared with that higher section of country gentlemen who went into parliament, and mixed in London society, and took the lead in their several ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... with the latter that we are concerned. This, coming as it does from a desire of an imitator to assert his equality with the one imitated, implies the recognition of superiority of the latter, and the acknowledgment of inferiority of the former. Conservatism, in the sense we have been using the term, defies any recognition and acknowledgment of this sort; therefore it defies imitation. In other words, a man does not imitate what he dislikes or scorns, and since conservatism is aversion to, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... perceptions acute, their invention ready; they were tolerant, affable, humane; but of courage and sincerity they were almost utterly destitute. Every rude centurion consoled himself for his intellectual inferiority, by remarking that knowledge and taste seemed only to make men atheists, cowards, and slaves. The distinction long continued to be strongly marked, and furnished an admirable subject for the fierce sarcasms ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Right apprehension once produced then there is deliverance from covetous desire, for a false estimate of excellency produces a covetous desire to excel, whilst a false view of demerit produces anger and regret; but the idea of excelling and also of inferiority (in the sense of demerit) both destroyed, the desire to excel and also anger (on account of inferiority) are destroyed. Anger! how it changes the comely face, how it destroys the loveliness of beauty! ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... the opinions above given, no reproach for Abraham Lincoln, nor for any of the distinguished members of his Cabinet, is intended or implied. Inferiority to Salmon P. Chase was not a disgrace. Physically he rose above all his official associates, which was no discredit to them, and in much the same way he towered intellectually and administratively. His was the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... very uncleanly in his personal habits and domestic customs, but is always willing to be taught habits of cleanliness, and is even anxious to change his mode of living when brought to realise its inferiority or repulsiveness. He recognises the white man to be his superior, and his inclination is ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... obtaining it, must have made his life miserable. If the magnificent conception of the poet's Prometheus could be lowered to any thing so trivial as a disappointed politician of the eighteenth century, its burlesque might be amply shown in a mind helplessly struggling against a sense of its own inferiority, gnawed by envy at the success of better men, and with only sufficient intellectual sensibility remaining to have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... inferiority in weight of the Ceylon tusks, as compared with those of the elephant of India, it would, I think, be precipitate to draw the inference that the size of the former was uniformly and naturally less than that of the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... hearth, as well as in the public house, they might be seen taking their jug of ale together; the farmer having a latent sense of capital, and of weight in parish affairs, which sustained him under his conspicuous inferiority in conversation. Martin Poyser was not a frequenter of public houses, but he liked a friendly chat over his own home-brewed; and though it was pleasant to lay down the law to a stupid neighbour who had no notion how to make the best of his farm, it was also an agreeable variety to learn ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... rest their claims on the contention that culture ought to be sacrificed to utility. Those men of science who respect culture, when they associate with men learned in the classics, are apt to admit, not merely politely, but sincerely, a certain inferiority on their side, compensated doubtless by the services which science renders to humanity, but none the less real. And so long as this attitude exists among men of science, it tends to verify itself: the intrinsically valuable aspects of science ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... The inferiority of the East, in matters of this kind, may be justly and satisfactorily inferred from the fact that in Philadelphia, lately, they attempted to execute their dogs with carbonic acid gas. When the box or tub was opened, the irrepressible spirits ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... disproportion in the military service of the nation be thereby diminished?—a disproportion that will be, as it has been, readily borne, as between the original States, because it arises out of their compact of Union, but which may become a badge of inferiority, if required for the protection of those who, being free to choose, persist in the establishment of maxims, the inevitable effect of which will deprive them of the power to contribute to the common defence, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the same manner, in fixing the proportions of quantity or number, and might at one view observe a superiority or inferiority betwixt any numbers, or figures; especially where the difference is very great and remarkable. As to equality or any exact proportion, we can only guess at it from a single consideration; except in very ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who deems himself justified when he substitutes excellences of another kind for those which are unattainable by him; and endeavors occasionally to surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... theoretically probable, though practically it holds good. The saying that "like begets like" has in fact arisen from the perfect confidence felt by breeders, that a superior or inferior animal will generally reproduce its kind; but this very superiority or inferiority shows that the individual in question has ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... in this collection. Many of them lack that unity of design, that close connection of the moral with the narrative, that wise choice in the introduction of the animals, which constitute the charm and excellency of true Aesopian fable. This inferiority of some to others is sufficiently accounted for in the history of the origin and descent of these fables. The great bulk of them are not the immediate work of Aesop. Many are obtained from ancient authors prior to the time in which he lived. Thus, the fable of the "Hawk and ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for having a black face than to sneer ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... religious, the advent of the new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of her own a social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and ideals. In the Indian social system, caste and the social inferiority of women stand opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of the sexes that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In the sphere of politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian mind, is the antithesis of the life of a ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Johnston and the Confederate government regarding the numerical force of his army, he naturally emphasized his inferiority to Sherman in numbers as an explanation of his cautious defensive tactics and his retreating movements. The introduction into the Southern returns of a column of "effectives" as distinguished from the number ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... pretty little girl, which was a source of much sorrow of heart to her; and she was a distinctly clever little girl, of which she was utterly unconscious, it being an integral part of Miss Farringdon's system of education to imbue the young with an overpowering sense of their own inferiority and unworthiness. During the first decade of her existence Elisabeth used frequently and earnestly to pray that her hair might become golden and her eyes brown; but as on this score the heavens remained as brass, and her ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... good sermon?" I continued, still suffering from the delusion that I was graciously overlooking their obvious inferiority ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... favorites ain't always winners. And sometimes, though not often, he'll try to hold back a good man through jealousy. When I see symptoms of a foreman's being jealous of a man under him, that fellow doesn't need any further recommendation to me. A man's never jealous of inferiority. ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... already in sight. Key felt he had achieved nothing. Except for information that was hopeless, he had come to no nearer understanding of the beautiful girl beside him, and his future appeared as vague as before; and, above all, he was conscious of an inferiority of character and purpose to this simple creature, who had obeyed him so submissively. Had he acted wisely? Would it not have been better if he had followed her own ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... into two classes, the Greater Prophets and the Lesser Prophets. They are so called, not from any superiority or inferiority, but from the ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style, those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a facade of surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the nave ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Accustomed to the curt word and to servile obedience they had no understanding for a woman who asserted herself in positive terms of personality. To them a "he-woman" who "wore pants" and admitted no sex inferiority was at best a "hussy without shame." If such a woman chanced also to be beautiful beyond comparison with her less favored sisters, the conclusion was inescapable. They could read in her self-claimed emancipation ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... "bond community", of an earlier race held together down to the Middle Ages in districts in which conquest had left them and to which they were restricted. Beyond that restriction, exclusion from the clan and its power, some peculiarities of dialect, dress, and manners, and a tradition of inferiority such as still exists in certain parishes, they were not molested, provided they paid tribute, which may have ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... admired him. I was young, but I congratulated myself on being admitted into the society of these great men. It seems as if it were yesterday, though it is many years ago; and now in your presence my inferiority does not humiliate me. I wish to be the younger ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to have been genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be easy of investigation. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves their inferiority is not the effect merely ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... not merely a fence but a patriot, and she would have accounted a thousand pounds well lost, if she did but compass the discomfiture of a Parliament-man. Indeed, if Jonathan, the thief-catcher, limped painfully after his magnificent example, Jonathan the man and the sportsman confessed a pitiful inferiority to the valiant Moll. Thus she avenged her sex by distancing the most illustrious of her rivals; and if he pleads for his credit a taste for theology, hers is the chuckle of contemptuous superiority. She died a patriot, ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... contrasting love with other things that men in those days thought much of. I shall not attempt to go over those things in detail. Their inferiority is ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... The sons took precedence of the daughters when both were the offspring of a brother and sister born of the same parents, and when, consequently, they were of equal rank; but, on the other hand, the sons forfeited this equality when there was any inferiority in origin on the maternal side, and their prospect of succession to the throne diminished in proportion to their mother's remoteness from the line of Ra. In the latter case all their sisters, born of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... two portions; in one of these the Magyars were to rule, in the other the Germans; in either section the Slav races—the Serbs and Croatians, the Czechs, Poles and Slovenes—were to be placed in a position of political inferiority.[6] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the symbol of sovereignty in Europe. We learn from Gregory of Tours, that, among the successors of Clovis, it was the exclusive privilege of the royal family to have their hair long and curled. The nobles, equal to kings in power, would not shew any inferiority in this respect, and wore not only their hair, but their beards of an enormous length. This fashion lasted, with but slight changes, till the time of Louis the Debonnaire; but his successors, up to Hugh Capet, wore their hair short, by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... intended they should have the best there is in the world; that the good and the beautiful things of life were not designed for them, but were reserved for those especially favored by fortune. They have grown up under this conviction of their inferiority, and of course they will be inferior until they claim superiority as their birthright. A vast number of men and women who are really capable of doing great things, do small things, live mediocre lives, because they do not expect or demand enough of themselves. They do ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... remember that / these Poems on various subjects, which he reads at one time and under / the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and / prompted by very different feelings; and therefore that the supposed / inferiority of one Poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper / of mind, in which he ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... make up by confession, the confessor feels mean and disgraced; or if both confess and forgive, both feel humbled; since forgiveness implies inferiority and pity; from which whatever is manly and womanly shrinks. Still even this is better than ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... souls and reasoning minds, we should not be permitted to hold them as slaves. Their degradation proves their inferiority." ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the question makes for a feeling of family solidarity and loyalty no less profound than that between other parents and children. Everything must be done to prevent feelings of inferiority from growing out of the adoptive relationship: the children must never be reminded of the fact of adoption, the parents must not expect more gratitude from them than they would from offspring of their own, and they ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... as important as the male, and the possessor thereof under just as great need of power in the organization and management of society and the government of society as man; and if there be a difference, she, by reason of her average physical inferiority, is really protected, and ought to be protected, by a superior mental and moral fitness to give direction to the course of society and the policy of the state. If, then, there be a distinction between the souls of human beings resulting from sex, I claim that, by the report of the minority ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... 5. The inferiority of the 'Neutral Text' is demonstrated by the overwhelming weight of evidence which is marshalled against it on passages under dispute. This glaring contrast is increased by the disagreement among themselves ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... other, it was not so much dislike he felt, as an uneasy sentiment of inferiority. However well he himself had got on in the world, he yet grudged the reputation of a man whom he had remembered a wayward, inexperienced boy: he did not love to hear any one praise Maltravers. He fancied, too, that this feeling was reciprocal, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a life of ease and enjoyment without falling under a real inferiority, provided they do not allow the mind to be degraded or sunk in sloth, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Francisco there were some seventy men, including invalids; and the number varied little at the other military centres, Rezanov inferred, although there was a natural effort to impress the foreigner with the casual inferiority of the armed force within his ken. Cattle and horses increased so rapidly that every few years there was a wholesale slaughter, although the agricultural yield was enormous. What the Missions were unable to manufacture was ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... what is very natural to man—that the possession of rare abilities is really calculated to excite over-weening pride, disgusting in both men and women—in what a state of inferiority must the female faculties have rusted when such a small portion of knowledge as those women attained, who have sneeringly been termed learned women, could be singular? Sufficiently so to puff up the possessor, and excite envy in her contemporaries, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, and preoccupation with sexual desires and imaginings. The arbitrary and pernicious dictum of total continence probably also explains the mental inequality of the sexes. Thus Freud believes that the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression. Having thus suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, Puritanism, on the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... clinging to the keel for twenty minutes, but no assistance could be rendered. Now, both of these were considered good lifeboats, but they were not self-righting. Numerous cases might be cited to prove the inferiority of the non-self-righting boats, but one more will suffice. In February 1858 the Southwold boat—a large sailing boat, esteemed one of the finest in the kingdom, but not self-righting—went out for exercise, and was running before a heavy surf with all sail ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... by your words." And Constance looked at me reproachfully. "She was, on the contrary, quiet, subdued, and womanly. I called to see her, with the manner of one who had about her no consciousness of inferiority; and she returned the call, without a sign that I could regard ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... of far higher causes. The exercise of principle, the generous force of purified emotions, cheerful desire, and willing industry, are the parents of real greatness. If we look through the various departments of public and of intellectual action, we shall find the mark of inferiority upon every thing which has sprung from ennui. In philosophy, it might produce the follies of Cynic oddity, but not the sublime lessons of Pythagoras or Socrates. In poetry, it may produce effusions from persons of quality, devoid of wit, but ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... it I seemed to experience a sense of inferiority—which was absurd and monstrous, considering what ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... him; but little Sue was different. She always seemed to him the concentrated essence of her mother's soul, and when unhappy days came, he never looked in her radiant, searching eyes without a consciousness of inferiority. The little creature had loved her jolly, handsome, careless father at first, even though she feared him; but of late she had grown shy, silent, and timid, for his indifference chilled her and she flung herself upon her mother's love with an ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... cordial. He remembered me as a man of literary taste superior to his own and harbored resentment, and although he made no opposition to my taking passage with him I could see that his acquiescence was due rather to his muscular inferiority than to the circumstance that I was damp and taking cold. Merely acknowledging his presence with a nod as I climbed abroad, I seated myself and inquired if he would care to hear the concluding stanzas of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... money and troops from the Bourbons, the sun of liberty would be set for ever. Lafayette exerted his influence with M. de Vergennes, the French minister on this occasion. He furnished Laurens with a letter to him, in which he stated, that with a naval inferiority it was impossible to continue the war; that the resources of the country, great as they were, would be ineffectual unless money were sent; that the last campaign had been conducted without a single dollar; and that all that credit, persuasion, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... horse back to its haunches, and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the warrant of his inferiority. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was complete—and, by God, admirable! —within itself. No one, practically, would agree with him, and here, in the fact that no one ever could know, his ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... filial duty, he condescends to come once a week to his mother's house, is entitled to say whatever he pleases, and should on no account be contradicted by any one. Lucy no doubt had a lover,—an authorised lover; but perhaps that fact could not be taken as more than a balancing weight against the inferiority of her position as a governess. Lady Fawn was of course obliged to take her son's part, and would scold Lucy. Lucy must be scolded very seriously. But it would be a thing so desirable if Lucy could be induced to accept her scolding and have done with it, and not to make matters worse ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... while efficient batting is unknown except in the college arena, the professionals ignoring team-work batting practice in nearly every club. Hence the superiority fielding has attained over the batting. Go on any amateur field and watch a game in progress, and you can readily see the inferiority in fielding exhibited in comparison with that shown on the professional fields. It is not so in the batting, however. The reason is that amateurs have not the time to devote to the practice required to excel in fielding; but they can bat out three-baggers and home-runs as easily as the ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... of his life's pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn. Previously he had been Wedderburn's superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of positive inferiority. He fancied he found justifications for his position in Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last—moved, curiously enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his dishonesty—he went to Professor Bindon, and made a clean breast ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... been a Christian Martyr, she would have preferred to be torn asunder with one jerk, rather than submit to the thumbkin. Not an eye but looked askance at her; on every face was painted a reminder of her moral inferiority; and even newcomers among the boarders soon learnt, without always knowing what her crime had been, that Laura Rambotham ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the enemy. This was done, on the whole, satisfactorily, and after some successful skirmishing on the part of the Americans, the two armies on the 5th of September found themselves within eight or ten miles of each other. Washington now determined to risk a battle in the field, despite his inferiority in every way. He accordingly issued a stirring proclamation to the soldiers, and then fell back behind the Brandywine, to a strong position, and prepared to contest the passage of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... we have to compare the handicraft of the decoration entitled "Summer" with that of Francis the First meeting Marie de Medicis; we have to compare the handicraft of the Sower and the Angelus with that of "Le Bon Bock" and "L'enfant a Pepee"; and the moment we institute such comparison does not the inferiority of Chavannes' and Millet's handicraft become visible even to the least initiated in the art of painting, and is not the conclusion forced upon us that however Manet may be judged inferior to Millet as a poet, as a painter he is easily his superior? And as Millet's and Chavannes' ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... policy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Roman municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours. But of this there is no certainty to build upon. All that can be affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria. It was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... you for, Dora," said Lady Earle, kindly. "My son has told us of the acquaintance between you. I am come to say it must cease. I do not wish to hurt or wound you. Your own sense must tell you that you can never be received by Lord Earle and myself as our daughter. We will not speak of your inferiority in birth and position. You are not my son's equal in refinement or education; he would soon discover that, and ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... them for their physical inferiority, nor for their lack of ability and grit. To expect them to exhibit great qualities would be absurd. They are what they are, and a wise country would ponder the causes that lead to such decadent manhood. During my prison lectures ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... difficulties I have to overcome in making a few tolerable verses. A happy combination by nature, an irrepressible and fruitful intellect, made you a great poet without any effort of your own. I feel and acknowledge the inferiority of my talent. I swim about in the ocean of poetry with my life-preserver under my arm. I do not write as well as I think. My ideas are stronger than my expressions; and in this embarrassment, I am often content if my verses are as little indifferent as possible, and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... inferiority and Pomp's superior ability seemed so rooted that Mrs. Frost finally gave up her persuasions. Meanwhile, as Chloe is in good health and has abundance of work, she has no difficulty in earning a comfortable subsistence for herself and Pomp. As ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... little information. The contempt which they express for elegant literature is evidently the contempt of ignorance. We apprehend that many of them are persons who, having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher who assures them that the studies which they have neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into their mouths, lends them an old number of the Westminster Review, and in a month transforms them into philosophers. Mingled with these smatterers, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the "inferiority complex" which spurs a man forward to outdo himself. But Babe Durgon and I didn't go into these matters as we trudged along through the dark on our way to do battle "over the line." At the foot of ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... a peace is made between them — at which time the one sueing for peace makes by far the larger payment, the other payment being mere form. This transaction, as it occurs in Bontoc, is a recognition of submission and of inferiority, and is, as well, a guarantee of a certain amount of protection. However, such payments are not made at all regularly and do not stand as true tributes, though in time they might grow to ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... are comprised in almost every species; and must get rid of the idea that chance determines which shall live and which die. For, although in many individual cases death may be due to chance rather than to any inferiority in those which die first, yet we cannot possibly believe that this can be the case on the large scale on which nature works. A plant, for instance, cannot be increased unless there are suitable vacant places its seeds can grow in, or stations where it can overcome other less vigorous and ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Batteries and a few French were left on the Italian Front. By the defeat of Caporetto she lost a great quantity of guns and stores and practically the whole of her Second Army, while half of Venetia fell into the hands of the enemy, and remained in his possession for a year. The inferiority of the Italian Army to its enemies, both in numbers and in ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much better than learning,—by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the arts or sciences,—his company is pleasing to all who know him. I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... great deal in the Talmud about washing the hands, in addition to what is said in the treatise Yadaim, which is entirely devoted to the subject. But this topic is subordinate to another, namely, the alleged inferiority of the precepts of the Bible to the prescriptions of the Rabbis, of which the punctilious rules regulative of hand washing form only a small fraction. This is illustrated by an anecdote from the Talmudic leaflet entitled Callah, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... serious defects of Norman-French literature, but only to point out two facts which impress the student, namely, that Anglo-Saxon literature was at one time enormously superior to the French, and that the latter, with its evident inferiority, absolutely replaced the former. "The fact is too often ignored," says Professor Schofield,[45] "that before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any which the Normans or French could boast at that ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long |
