"Theorist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more progressive in appearance, than encouragement of labor and of industry? There is no democrat who does not consider it one of the finest attributes of power, no utopian theorist who does not place it in the front rank as a means of organizing happiness. Now, government is by nature so incapable of directing labor that every reward bestowed by it is a veritable larceny from the common treasury. M. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... this story conclude that Benezet was a mere theorist or pamphleteer. He ever translated into action what he professed to believe. Knowing that the enlightenment of the blacks would not only benefit them directly but would also disprove the mad theories as to the impossibility of their mental ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... themselves closely to one another, the democrat spent his time trying to devise more perfect units of voting, in the hope that somehow he would, as Mr. Cole says, "get the mechanism right, and adjust it as far as possible to men's social wills." But while the democratic theorist was busy at this, he was far away from the actual interests of human nature. He was absorbed by one interest: self-government. Mankind was interested in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in sights and sounds and in not being bored. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... idyllic dream, the humanitarian hope, whose germs lay beneath their passion for destruction. And, like Barthes, he also flew into a passion with Mege, who since entering the Chamber had become, said he, a mere rhetorician and theorist, dreaming of dictatorship. Meantime Janzen, still erect, his face frigid and his lips curling ironically, listened to all three of them, and vented a few trenchant words to express his own Anarchist faith; the uselessness of drawing distinctions, and the necessity of destroying ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... crisp, bold, short name, which begins with a letter that abruptly cuts both eye and ear, quite fits the painter's personality, fits his art. He is often ironic. Some fanciful theorist has said that the letters Z and K are important factors in the career of the men who possess them in their names. Camille Saint-Saens has spoken of Franz Liszt and his lucky letter. It is a very pretty idea, especially when one stakes ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... him!" cried the rival theorist joyfully. He was mistaken: the smoke cleared, and there was the pirate captain leaning wounded against the mainmast with a Yankee bullet in his shoulder, and his crew uttering yells of dismay and vengeance. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... delegation is commissioned to represent the great cause of Democracy and to offer you as its militant and triumphant leader a scholar, not a charlatan; a statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains, without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not a defamer of characters ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... west of us, at Little Missouri, are now being made happy by the presence among them of that rare bird, a political reformer. By his enemies he is called a dude, an aristocrat, a theorist, an upstart, and the rest, but it would seem, after all, that Mr. Roosevelt has something in him, or he would never have succeeded in stirring up the politicians of the Empire State. Mr. Roosevelt finds, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... saw it wasn't there and I searched everywhere. I saw it with my own eyes," said Tootsie incoherently, and between rage and tears she repeated her account in a manner to be completely unintelligible. Mr. Bedelle was a theorist afflicted with indigestion. He carefully selected his diet with due regard for starch values and never ate a raw tomato without first carefully removing the seeds. He was likewise particularly careful never to sit down to a process of digestion in an agitated mood. His irritation ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... some future day—when, I don't know. Ellis, I imagine, would soon turn aside from the spectacle in disgust. I do not think he admits it as his creed that "the proper study of mankind is man"—at least not the artificial man of cities. In some points I consider Ellis somewhat of a theorist: now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of mine, but certainly it often travels a different road. I should ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... act, I must submit to the inconvenience by which it is attended, rather than expose the country to evils of greater magnitude." Let it be remembered, Sir, that these are not the sentiments of a theorist, nor the fancies of speculation; but the operative opinions of the first minister of England, acknowledged to be one of the ablest and most practical ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the breadth and liberality of enlightened opinions, the prophetic instinct, and the force of character to make things go his way, without drifting into success by a fortunate turn in tide and wind. He was not a mere day-dreamer, a theorist, a philosopher, a scholar, although he possessed the gifts of each. He was, rather, a man of action—self-willed, self-reliant, independent—as ambitious as Burr without his slippery ways, and as determined as Hamilton with all his ability to criticise an opponent. Clinton relied not ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... monastic rule as far as his duties allow. He will pray, study the Scriptures, define dogmas, refute heresies. At the same time, he means to neglect nothing of his material work. He has mouths to feed, property to look after, law-cases to examine. He will labour at all that. For this mystic and theorist it ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Henry George's book and its literary style are so insistent that it has been studied closely by economists of note in every country on the globe. Its argument has never been answered, and those who have sought to combat it have rested their case on the assertion that Henry George was a theorist and a dreamer, and so far as practical affairs were concerned was a failure. With equal logic we might brand the Christian religion as a failure because its founder was not a personal success, either in his social status or as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... English jails had been settled months before in a conference between Livingstone and the Premier, although feeling was cold and almost hostile between the two governments. Lord Constantine described the position with the accuracy of a theorist in despair. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the world would not have had so rapid and general an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination? The real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... "sensual caterwauling," might well have given the singer pause in striking the sympathetic catgut of his lyre: perhaps the strings were metallic; but no matter. The reproach had a justice in it that must have stung, and made the lyrist wish to be an atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that very moment science had, as it were, caught the bread out of fiction's mouth, and usurped the highest functions of imagination. In almost every direction of its recent advance it had made believe that such and such a thing was so, and then proceeded to prove it. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... a high order, some think them too high, and complain that he is too much of a cloud-traveller, and when he descends from these aerial flights and cloudy thrones, they are unwilling to admit that he can be practical. If Mr. Burritt should prove as good a statesman as a theorist, he would be an exception to most who belong to the aerial school. As a writer he stands deservedly high. In his "Sparks from the Anvil," and "Voice from the Forge," are to be found as fine pieces as have been produced by any writer of the day. ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... has betrayed his neighbor, the just person has oppressed him. This is the fruitful moment, apparently so sterile, in which character may spring and flower anew; but the mood of abject humility in which the theorist of his own character is plunged and struggles for his lost self- respect is full of deceit for others. It cannot last: it may end in disowning and retrieving the error, or it may end in justifying it, and building it into the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... submit that a prima facie case for woman's right to vote has already been made out. To declare that a voice in the government is the right of all, and then give it to less than half, and that to the fraction to which the theorist himself happens to belong, is to renounce ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... speaks (p. 185) of "the saner political theorist, who holds that in secular matters it is better to walk by sight than by faith." He allows that a theorist of this kind, as regards popularly elected chambers, "will be satisfied that experience has ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... accidentally developed the attributes of vegetable life; a further accident leads another cell to initiate the line of invertebrates; another that of fishes, let us say; another of mammals: the number varying according to the views of the theorist on phylogeny. Let us not forget that the cell or cells which accidentally acquired the attributes of life, had accidentally to shape themselves from dead materials into something of a character ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... mentioned one of Buffon's contemporaries and countrymen; one who was the first true field geologist, an observer rather than a compiler or theorist. This was Jean E. Guettard (1715-1786). He published, says Sir Archibald Geikie, in his valuable work, The Founders of Geology, about two hundred papers on a wide range of scientific subjects, besides half a dozen quarto volumes of his observations, together with many excellent plates. Geikie also ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... phenomena are consistent with one great law of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some dreaming and visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently unjust for the lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we know of no other way, according to the frame, the constitution, and the organs which God has ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... taken almost at random from a hundred such in Boswell's incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible future life of brutes, quoting some possible authority from the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... using the same arguments over works almost exactly similar. Olivier, who usually took a lively share in these disputes, being quick in repartee and clever in disconcerting attacks, besides having a reputation as an ingenious theorist of which he was proud, tried to urge himself to take an active part in the debates, but the things he said interested him no more than those he heard, and he longed to go away, to listen no more, to understand no more, knowing beforehand as he did all that anyone could say on those ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... them must for the nonce become a theorist, and argue from the known to the unknown; and, first, the practical man will turn—secretly perhaps, but wisely—to the invaluable experiments and laws laid down so clearly by the late Mr. Froude. Although primarily designed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... to launch this car is subsequently given: 'It becomes necessary,' says the theorist, 'that I should give directions how it may be launched upon the air, which may be done by various means; perhaps the following method may be found to answer as well as any: Fix a poll upright in the earth, about twenty feet in height, with two open collars to admit another poll to slide upwards ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... learned to distinguish what they saw, and to describe, in known terms, those natural appearances, a theorist must have generalised only from his proper observation. This has been my case. When I first conceived my theory, few naturalists could write intelligibly upon the subject; but that is long ago, and things ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... that Utopian dreamer, that theorist, that innovator, that economist; that Stultomaniac. We shall all be undone if the stoppages of the road are not equalized, weighed, and balanced between Fooltown and Babytown. There would be greater difficulty in going than in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... plotting and rule without bloodshed if that can be done. But it can't be! Unless Pertinax is man enough to strike the blow that shall restore the ancient liberties, then he is better dead before he tries to play the savior! We have a tyrant now. Shall we exchange him for a weak-kneed theorist?" ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... his costume. A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of inanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It requires time and labour. You must remain behind while your companions march on. Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. Once he had stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion; and the ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... in the text; but in the clear intellect of this man of genius a vast number of intervening difficulties started up, and in a copious note the numerous exceptions show that the assumed theory requires no other refutation than what the theorist has himself so abundantly and so judiciously supplied. There is something ludicrous in the result of a theory of genius which would place HOBBES and ERASMUS, those timid and learned recluses, to open a campaign with the military invention ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... have fallen in love. I have grown feverish with desire, gone mad with dumb yearning. I have felt my intellect lose dominion, and learned that I was only a garmented beast, for all the many inventions very like the other beasts ungarmented. Nay, I am no cold-blooded theorist, no thick-hided dogmatist; nor am I a chastely simple young man mooning in virginal innocence. My generalisations have been tempered in the heats of passion, and what I know ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make good his title in the consent of the people." In the debate which followed his argument ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... ass he was. A sort of eugenical crank, who talked about the City Beautiful where everybody would lead regenerated lives like a flock of prize sheep. Everything sanitary and soulful; nothing but pure men and pure women. An addle-headed theorist, he was, till a woman got hold of him—one of the other kind, you know—and gave him something practical to think about. That's what will happen to you, Phipps. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... mountebank pretence, that miracles can be performed by the turning of a straw, or the dictatorial anathematizing tone, which calls down vengeance upon those who do not follow to an iota the injunctions of a theorist, we may simply observe, that parents would save themselves a great deal of trouble, and their children some pain, if they would pay some attention to their early education. The temper acquires habits ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Luke" has the further title, "Who was the father of Christ?" He calls "not absolutely indefensible" the opinion of the anonymous German author of the "Natural History of Jesus of Nazareth," that Joseph of Arimathaea was the father of Jesus Christ. He mentions that "a more recent anonymous theorist, with greater plausibility, imagines that the acolytes employed in the Temple of Jerusalem were called by the names of angels, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, accordingly as they were stationed behind, beside, or before, the mercy-seat; and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly—"You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... her such an eclat that it is almost unapproachable. He then digresses a little to glorify her brother, her husband, and Chapelain, the famous author of La Pucelle, who had the good fortune to be a friend of the Scuderys, as well as, like them, a strong "Heroic" theorist. After which he comes to that personal inventory which has been referred to, decides that her beauty is of a celestial splendour, and, in fact, a ray of Divinity itself; goes into raptures, not merely over her ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... between what 'exists' and what is absolutely non-existent. On the contrary, it is usually a judgment of value. We may say that the 'haunted' house is real and the 'ghost' is not; but as an hallucination the ghost is real enough. Utopia is unreal for the politician, but exists as an ideal for the theorist. The Platonist treats our physical world of sight and touch, which we think the most real of all, as a mere illusion compared to the 'Ideas' of his metaphysical world. The thinker who declares he wants to know all about 'reality' does not mean that he wishes to investigate everything which in ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... the tactile sense (sense of touch) is wholly negligible. To this I can only reply that the experience of the artist and the teacher is always more reliable, more susceptible to finer appreciations of artistic values than that of the pure theorist, who views his problems through material rather than spiritual eyes. Every observing pianist is familiar with the remarkable influence upon the nerves of the voice-making apparatus that any emotion makes. Is it not reasonable ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... people.... Bacon's own philosophy was, like all philosophy, a theory; it was the theory of the inventive mind. Bacon has not made any great discoveries himself. He was less inventive than Leibnitz, the German metaphysician. If to make discoveries be practical philosophy, Bacon was a mere theorist, and his philosophy nothing but the theory of practical philosophy.... How far the spirit of theory reached in Bacon may be seen in his own works. He did not want to fetter theory, but to renew and to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... uncompleted arch or turret, in whose circling wall was never a ragged breach, that theory I should know but to avoid: such gaps are the eternal windows through which the dawn shall look in. A complete theory is a vault of stone around the theorist—whose very being yet ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Athelard, the countryman of Saewulf and Willibald, is still more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (c. 1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... edge of the crowd. She spoke shortly. "It's because so many of you men spend your time telling each other why, 'stead of hustling to see that it ain't!" He is a fair representative of the class-consciousness, class-hatred type. Again he is represented by the theorist constitutionally and chronically too lazy to do honest and constructive work either physically or mentally. Again by the one who has the big-head affliction. Or again by the one afflicted with a species of insanity or criminality manifesting of late under the name of Bolshevism—a ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... book is thoroughly interesting, and his point of view is very different from that of the closest theorist.''- ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... the French Government about a commercial treaty on the principles of free trade. Poulett Thomson, who has been at Paris some time, has originated it, and Althorp selected George Villiers for the purpose, but has added to him as a colleague Dr. Bowring, who has in fact been selected by Thomson, a theorist, and a jobber, deeply implicated in the 'Greek Fire,' and a Benthamite. He was the subject of a cutting ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... something which the mere logician can never deduce, and that mysterious something is the explanation of his transformed life. He was a doubter, a falterer, a failure; he has become a believer, a fighter, a conqueror. You miss his significance completely when you take him for a theorist. The theorist propounds a view to which he must convert the world; the philosopher has a rule of life to immediately put into practice. His spirit flashes with a swiftness that can be encircled by no theory. It is his glory to have over and above ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... equal to the task,—her will-power was sapped at its root, and every day she allowed herself to become more and more pliantly the prey of Dr. Brayle, who, with a subconscious feeling that I knew him to be a mere medical charlatan, had naturally warned her against me as an imaginative theorist without any foundation of belief in my own theories. I therefore shut myself within a fortress of reserve, and declined to discuss any point of either religion or science with those for whom the one was a farce and the other mere materialism. At all times when we were together I kept the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,' and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Muller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... self-subsistence, without which Protestantism sinks into personal anarchy. The class of weak, dependent characters, that cannot stand alone in the struggle of life, are unprovided for in the modern system of the world. The cooperative theorist tries to take them up. But somehow or other he is usually a man with whom, by a strange fatality, cooperation is impossible; intent on uniting all men, yet himself not agreeing with any; with individuality so intense and exclusive, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... "practical" farmer is a theorist. He first believes that the virgin soil is inexhaustible, even though cropped continuously. Later he clings to the popular theory that the rotation of crops will maintain the productive capacity of the land; and it is safe to say that a large majority of the ...
— The Farm That Won't Wear Out • Cyril G. Hopkins
... universal knowledge on a new basis.—In fact, the fame of Comenius was increased by Hartlib's little indiscretion. In Sweden especially there was an anxiety to have the benefit of the counsels of so eminent a theorist in the business of education. In 1638 the Swedish Government, at the head of which, during the minority of Queen Christina, was the Chancellor Oxenstiern, invited Comenius to Sweden, that he might preside over a Commission for the revision and reform of the schools ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... be as wrong as the mechanical theorist, among our death-watches; and, probably, the only death-watch who would be right would be the one who should maintain that the sole thing death-watches could be sure about was the nature of the clock-works and the way they move; and that the purpose ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... turns to good account the information derivable from their experience; whilst the farmer, on the other side, has ceased to speak in contemptuous terms of mere "book learning." It is to this happy combination of the theorist with the practical man that the recent remarkable advance in agriculture is chiefly due; and to it we may confidently look for improvement in the economic production of meat and butter, and for the enlargement of our knowledge of the relative value ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... leaves speculation lagging far behind; the improvement once conceived is in operation by such time as the opposing theorist has satisfactorily demonstrated its impracticability; and the dream of to-day is the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... others, he has a large share of experience. He certainly ought to understand the British constitution better than I do. He has studied it in the fundamental part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the bear." Often have his candles ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... they receive from the animals themselves. A very pretty, and a very plausible arrangement of stabling, and feeding, and all the etceteras of a barn establishment, may be thus got up by an ingenious theorist at the fireside, which will work to a charm, as he dilates upon its good qualities, untried; but, when subjected to experiment will be utterly worthless for practical use. All this we, in our practice, have gone through; and after ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... that this wretched object was in his way a romantic figure or that his life had in it those elements of pity and terror which the theorist tells us are necessary to ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... generally unsought) at everybody's disposal. To round the position off neatly, it would be necessary to picture him as a total failure in the practical side of all the subjects in which he was so brilliant a theorist. Strangely enough, however, this was not the case. There were few better bats in the School than Pringle. Norris on his day was more stylish, and Marriott not infrequently made more runs, but ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... head, Klarnood continued: "Marnark was the son and right-hand associate of old Mirzark of Bashad, the Statisticalist Party leader. Sirzob of Abo was their propaganda director. And Yirzol of Narva was their leading socio-economic theorist, and their candidate for Executive Chairman. In six minutes, with one knife thrust and two shots, you did the Statisticalist Party an injury second only to that done them by the young lady in whose name you were fighting. In two weeks, there will be a planet-wide general election. As ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... more famous theorist, who is not generally known to have been an Ohioan, was Delia Bacon, who first maintained that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written, by Sir Francis Bacon. She was born in Portage County at Tallmadge, where her ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... published at Barcelona in the year 1832; it consists of ninety- three very small and scantily furnished pages. Its chief, we might say its only merit, is the style, which is fluent and easy. The writer is a theorist, and sacrifices truth and probability to the shrine of one idea, and that one of the most absurd that ever entered the head of an individual. He endeavours to persuade his readers that the Gitanos are the descendants ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... deeply, as the years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on the course of music. It may be that many a musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because of Schoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theorist of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils," independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be considered ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... acceptance of the nebular hypothesis that compel many of the most thorough scientists of the day to withhold their assent to its entirety. The latest, and one of the most competent writers on the subject, Professor Newcomb, who is a mathematical astronomer, and not an easy theorist, evolving the system of the universe from the depth of his own consciousness, says: "Should any one be sceptical as to the sufficiency of these laws to account for the present state of things, science can furnish no evidence ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... are a fisherman as well as a romantic theorist!" I said, rather rudely. "How I wish I were as versatile! Come, Margot, we must be going now. The carriage ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... ("Encyclopaedia Americana," vol. ii.) who considers that the question of teleology, or of purpose in nature, is not really touched by the special principle of natural selection, nor by the general doctrine of evolution. The mechanical theorist may, consistently with these doctrines, maintain that every event takes place without a purpose; while the teleologist, or believer in purpose, may no less consistently maintain that the more orderly and uniform we find the succession ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... true poetry, English-speaking Americans will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them. But Mary Austin's primary importance is not as a theorist. Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She is a translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody can write facts about a country," she said. She infuses fact with understanding ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... place in the development of oil proceedings that wrought ruin in the hopes of many an ardent operator. In the Oil Creek region, some of the smaller wells having been exhausted, resort was had to deeper boring. One hopeful theorist imagined that if the desirable fluid came from a very great depth, it might be good policy to seek it in a stratum still nearer its rocky home. So down he penetrated, regardless of the 'fine show' of oil that presented itself ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... that Moncada knew far more than he did about monetary questions, and among his friends he admitted it; but he gave them to understand that Caesar was only a theorist, incapable of ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... but is also quite fond of conversing on general music; with which subject he is very familiar, and is ever interesting and instructive in discoursing upon the advantages and pleasures to be enjoyed by its study. Indeed, at such times one is in doubt whether to admire him most as a performer or as a theorist; for as the latter he is remarkably proficient, and in treatment delightfully eloquent. As may be inferred from the foregoing, Mr. Lewis is in his manners extremely affable and easy. He charms his ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... writing. It is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments—it was done in the age of Racine and in the age of Pope—but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light" and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most happily ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner of ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... we find a note, which does not bear reference to anything that occurred at this time. Men, in the midst of their hard earnest toil, perceive great truths with a sharpness of outline and a depth of conviction which is denied to the mere idle theorist: he says:—] ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... he who brings order out of disorder; who first organizes and then administers the government of his own country; and having made a nation, seeks to reconcile the national interests with those of Europe and of mankind. He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while the head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged to descend to the world, he is not of the world. His thoughts are fixed ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... of practice and of facts, uncontrolled by principles and wise in ancestral experience, replied: "We must not listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this Utopian, this political economist, this friend to N*w Y*rk. We would be entirely ruined if the embarrassments of the road were not carefully weighed and exactly equalized between N*w Y*rk and M*ntr**l. There would be more difficulty in going than in coming; in exportation than ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... is anywhere the least infidelity in the statement of an author's meaning, it is in the denial that Marsilius, the imperial theorist, and the creator with Ockam of the Ghibelline philosophy that has ruled the world, was a friend of religious liberty. Marsilius assuredly was not a Whig. Quite as much as any Guelph, he desired to concentrate power, not to limit ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... just then, in readings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interest seemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certain older minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theorist satisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, for instance, might satisfy the curiosity of the healthy. It was a tradition—a constant tradition—that daring thought of his; an echo, or haunting recurrent voice of the human soul itself, and as such sealed with natural ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay—the danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution—here is tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not do. The lady of the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a ruler and the doctrine of anarchy there is no necessary connection. The philosophic anarchist simply believes anarchy is to be the final result of progress and evolution, just as the communist believes that communism will be the outcome; neither theorist would see the slightest advantage in trying to hasten the slow but sure progress of events by deeds of violence; in fact, both theorists would regret such deeds as certain to prove reactionary and retard the march ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... of no capacity, as everyone is now compelled to admit; but let that pass, I say nothing of that. A visionary, a theorist, an unbalanced mind, with whom affairs seemed to succeed as long as he had luck on his side. And there's no use, don't you see, sir, in attempting to work on our sympathies and excite our commiseration by telling us that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist of a future generation, as evidence that the subjects of the Khedive and those of the King of Dahomey were but "one people," or that the Peruvians and the Patagonians belonged to the same ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual understanding between the Crown and its subjects on which all government, save a sheer despotism, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... The theorist continued, with perfect composure, "I don't undertake to account for it with any precision. How can I? Perhaps there is Moorish blood in your family, and here it has revived; you look incredulous, but there are plenty of examples, ay, and stronger than this: every child that is born resembles ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... no politician, no learned ethnologist, no sage theorist. I simply try to describe what I have seen, and hope to enlist the attention and interest of my readers, in my reminiscences of sport and labour, in the villages and jungles on the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... B.C.), the most illustrious astronomer of antiquity, who did much to raise astronomy to the position of a true science, and who has also left behind him ample evidence of his genius 'as a mathematician, an observer, and a theorist.' We are indebted to him for the earliest star catalogue, in which he included 1,081 stars. He discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes, and determined the motions of the Sun and Moon, and also the length of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... parts of the vocal organs whose movements can be readily seen and felt. These are the lips, tongue, palate, and larynx. Garcia's Memoire, already cited, is mainly a record of observations of this kind. Nearly every vocal theorist since that time has also paid some attention to this phase of ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... never reduced to the painful necessity of punishing, or even of pardoning, his personal enemies. During his government of twenty-five years, the penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety. Severe to himself, indulgent to others, chaste, frugal, abstemious, the philosophic Marcus would not have disdained the artless virtues of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But the great majority of these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had been already despoiled; and besides, to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It requires time. You must remain behind while your companions march on. And Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. They arose from a point of honour, and also a little from dread. Once he stepped aside he ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... efficacy of that plan, was directing the whole business of the war. With Pfuel was Wolzogen, who expressed Pfuel's thoughts in a more comprehensible way than Pfuel himself (who was a harsh, bookish theorist, self-confident to the point of despising everyone else) was able ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... theorist, with the idea of offences that else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that, having no temptation, small or great, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of its web. Those of you who have had much to do with ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of those which were instinctively brought home to the primitive Roman. What we respect or admire, he disliked or regarded with jealous dread. The parts of jurisprudence which he looked upon with affection were exactly those which a modern theorist leaves out of consideration as accidental and transitory; the solemn gestures of the mancipation; the nicely adjusted questions and answers of the verbal contract; the endless formalities of pleading and procedure. The Jus Gentium was merely ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... supposed; and that we probably take simple varieties for distinct species. His discoveries will, I suppose, leave traces strongly marked enough in the history of science. But Mr. Darwin is not merely an observer; he is a theorist, dominated evidently by a disposition to systematize. Now minds of this character, which render, no doubt, signal services to the sciences of observation, are all like Pyrrhus, who, gazing on Andromache as he ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... plan; if it be dangerous to execute, I am no mere theorist who would leave to another the prospect of perishing in carrying it out, but am ready to sacrifice my life as an example to the world in doing so. If I do not reach the shores of Asia by sea, it will be because the Atlantic ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... for man, and that, consequently, any one thrown into deep water will swim by instinct. Experiments of this sort result badly, the victim clutching frantically at any support, and sometimes dragging down with him the theorist who is administering this drastic sort of education. In short, the instinctive response of a man to being in deep water is the same as in other cases of sudden withdrawal of solid support; it consists in clinging and is attended ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... pleasures can only be bought at an excessive cost of pain. Other theories are contrivances for avoiding the appeal 'to any external standard'; and in substance, therefore, they make the opinion of the individual theorist an ultimate and sufficient reason. Adam Smith by his doctrine of 'sympathy' makes the sentiment of approval itself the ultimate standard. My feeling echoes yours, and reciprocally; each cannot derive authority from the other. Another man (Hutcheson) invents a thing made on purpose to tell him ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the highest race of man, occupying a range of climate adapted to its requirements. The Essay here is scientifically correct, and agrees with the ablest writers on necessity. A German philosopher renowned alike for rigid analysis and transcendent abilities as a successful theorist, observes, "When I contemplate all things as a whole, I perceive one nature one force : when I regard them as individuals, many forces which develop themselves according to their inward laws, and pass through all the forms of which they are capable, and all the objects in nature are but those ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... "Courage! I shall not fall till I have found Truth, and I hold you fast!" rings like the call of trumpets. This is that Lavalle whom the world, immersed in speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect—the Lavalle whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... that the proletariat had no right to take power until it was ready for it. In a bourgeois revolution like this.... the seizure of power by the masses means the tragic end of the Revolution.... Trotzky, as a Social Democratic theorist, is himself opposed to what he is now advocating...." ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... of course, my good or bad fortune to be assailed from week to week, whether I write or not.... I am no theorist. I advocate no change in the Constitution of the Province. I have never written a paragraph the principles of which could not be carried out in accordance with the letter and spirit of the established Constitution. I desire nothing more than the free and impartial administration of that Constitution ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer. The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial tolerant man, whose geniality of demeanour towards others is a kind of quit-rent paid for his own moral laxity, regards him as a Pharisee. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... realize something of the absurdity of the argument for a separate reviewing body to preserve efficiency and honesty in the city government. The people should be the reviewing body of their government. Its organization should be so simple, yet so complete, that every citizen from the educated theorist to the humblest day laborer, can review its facts with ease and understanding. This is the kind of government the commission form supplies. Why don't the gentlemen come forward with an organization equally as ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... study should be upset by the production of a pencil sketch, and he called for the removal of Mr. Justice DARLING from the Bench. Art criticism was not a mere matter of caprice, as people were now pretending, but an exact science. If a qualified man, not only a theorist but a practical craftsman, after years of preparation, stated that a picture was by such and such a painter, it was by him. The mere fact that someone named OZIAS HUMPHRY had made a small sketch resembling a large oil painting proved ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... the value of hypothesis as the inspiration of inquiry. We find an example in his letter to Bates, Nov. 22, 1860: "I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist, and I fully expect to find your observations most valuable." ("More Letters", I. page 176.) Darwin's letter refers to many problems upon which Bates had theorised and observed, but as regards Mimicry itself the hypothesis was thought out after the return of the letter ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... held very firmly an abstract and reasoned theory of the State, could define and defend it with extraordinary lucidity and logic, and avowedly guided his public conduct by its light, there has been too much tendency to regard him as a mere theorist, a sort of Girondia, noble in speculation and rhetoric, but unequal to practical affairs and insufficiently alive to concrete realities. He is often contrasted unfavourably with Hamilton in this respect: and yet ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... even of a doubt as to the age of man. Supposing a Creator, he assumed that "he created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it, fit for the preservation of the beings he placed on it." Theorist as he was himself, he had little patience with the other theorists who were already beginning to discover in the structure of the earth the evidence of successive geological eras. The different strata of rocks and their inclination ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... (1611-1677).—Political theorist, s. of Sir Sapcotes H., was b. at Upton, Northamptonshire, and ed. at Oxf., where he was a pupil of Chillingworth. After leaving the university he travelled on the Continent, visiting, among other places, The Hague and Venice, where he imbibed republican principles. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Such things were told and believed, that those who had never yet been attended by George Yolland believed him a wild and destructive theorist. Miss Avice Stympson asked Miss Woolmer how she could sleep in her bed when she knew he was in the town, and the most astonishing stories of his practice were current, of which I think the mildest was, that he had ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... business like any other," he said. "Haviland is doing the injury to himself and me that a theorist in business always does. He ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... feelings of Captain Vane and his young relatives on finding themselves sweeping at such a magnificent rate over the great Polar basin?—that mysterious sea, which some believe to be a sea of thick-ribbed ice, and others suppose to be no sea at all, but dry land covered with eternal snows. One theorist even goes the length of saying that the region immediately around the Pole is absolutely nothing at all!—only empty space caused by the whirling of the earth,—a space which extends through its ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... passive and resigned voters, who discussed the editorial on the street corners and in the stores. The next week there was another editorial, personal and local in its application, and thereby it became evident that the new proprietor of the "Herald" was a theorist who believed, in general, that a politician's honor should not be merely of that middling healthy species known as "honor amongst politicians"; and, in particular, that Rodney McCune should not receive the nomination ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... life forced him to apply this natural tendency to the practical affairs of commerce. But nature herself had given him with this aptitude for mathematics another quality which must eventually, one would suppose, have saved him from the unfruitful fate of a theorist—he was a man of rare imagination. And so this mathematician, who was also a poet, brought a unique mind to the affairs of commerce and there scored a success which attracted attention ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... merely political.... So accommodating and flexible is the human mind, so "practical" may it become through dealing with men and affairs, that in listening to Judge Bering I was able to ignore the little anomalies such a situation might have suggested to the theorist, to the mere student of the institutions of democracy. The friendly glasses of rye and water Mr. Bering had taken in Monahan's saloon, the cases he had "arranged" for the firm of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon were forgotten. Forgotten, too, when Theodore ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch—the man who is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... something far less impressive, a political theorist instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander ...
— Milton • John Bailey |
