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Unintelligent   Listen
adjective
Unintelligent  adj.  See intelligent.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unintelligent" Quotes from Famous Books



... O king, has become blind to the truth, like that of a foolish and unintelligent reciter of the Veda in consequence of his repeated recitation of those scriptures. If censuring the duties of kings thou wouldst lead a life of idleness, then, O bull of Bharata's race, this destruction of the Dhartarashtras was perfectly uncalled for. Are forgiveness and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... &c. Oh, how little are those wiseacre generals, the conceited and swaggering West Pointers; oh, how very little, if at all are they aware of the inexhaustible ingenuity and resources, the marvelous skill and power of such intelligent masses as those of which they are the unintelligent, the unsympathising and the ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... rag-picker, or some humble person so little separated from the life hereafter that to push a trifle closer does not spell much peril, can be seen hooking up rags and whatnots from the piles of Peking offal. If you speak to him he gives an unintelligent pu chih tao—"I do not know"—and moves boorishly on. As my old Chinese writer said a week ago, Peking has never been in such a state of topsy-turvydom since the robber who unseated the Ming dynasty rushed in two and a ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... far as reason and logic are concerned, man can not attain to any knowledge of the first principles and causes of the universe, and, consequently, can not determine whether the first principle or principles be intelligent or unintelligent, personal or impersonal, finite or infinite, one or many righteous or ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... and envious rivals—not realists—insisted that once Severne had deliberately gotten very drunk on Bowery whiskey in order that he might describe the sensations of one of his minor characters in such a condition. Certain it is, he soon gained the reputation among the unintelligent of being a crazy individual, who paid people remarkably well to do strange and meaningless things for him. He was always ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... personal character were not enough to prove her blameless of so vile a charge nothing else was worth trying—well, it was the attitude of conscious innocence, no doubt, but it was certainly above the heads of a conscientious, but particularly unintelligent jury!" ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... pupils. There were many difficulties and much unintelligent opposition in the beginning, but wonderful success attended General Pratt's administration. For many years Carlisle has enrolled about 1,200 pupils each year, keeping almost half of them on farms ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... that a dramatist of modern France could have gone back into the past for such a theme. It was the desire to seem original, of course, to be different from other writers—an affectation of na•vetŽ, quite out of keeping with the spirit of the hour—unintelligent as well as uninteresting. (You see Olga didn't believe in the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... the Giant. "But it is the flesh of unintelligent creatures. I have not yet shed the blood of any being that can talk with ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer

... 373 et seq. This last opinion by no means stands alone. Thus it is asserted by the Committee of Fourteen in their Report on The Social Evil in New York City (1910, p. xxxiv) that "some laws exist to-day because an unintelligent, cowardly public puts unenforceable statutes on the book, being content ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... all equally unbearable to me, the friendly, sarcastic generosity of the world that spared me and acted as though forgiving me a sin, where I felt virtue beyond its comprehension; and the condemnation of Elsje, to which I was now most painfully sensitive, though it went out from this same unintelligent herd. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... hall, a soldier would arouse and turn his body to a new position, the experience of his sleep having taught him of uneven and objectionable places upon the ground under him. Or, perhaps, he would lift himself to a sitting posture, blink at the fire for an unintelligent moment, throw a swift glance at his prostrate companion, and then cuddle down again with ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... having made inquiries concerning this soldier, learned that he was a good fellow, and not unintelligent. On the next promotion he was made sub-lieutenant. It is impossible to give an idea of the effect of such occurrences on the army. They were a constant subject of conversation with the soldiers, and stimulated them inexpressibly. The one who ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... fostered by the Fenians and Sinn Feiners who lurk serpent-like in our midst, is one which cannot too soon be eradicated; for the cultural identity and moral unity of the States and the Empire make such sources of unintelligent prejudice increasingly nauseous and detrimental. We may add that the textbook treatment of our War between the States is almost equally unfair, the Northern cause being ridiculously exalted above the brave and incredibly high-minded attitude of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... is difficult to disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob; that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never before had that unaccountable individual been the cause of so much gossip, he judged. No! Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character was he the object of a silly criticism and unintelligent envy for every vagabond and adventurer in the islands. Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort of scandal better ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... animals whose chests, galled by the breast-straps, show that they have not been broken to the saddle. Accustomed through life to ply in a state of semi-somnolence, between Cairo and the Citadel, they begin by proving how unintelligent want of education can make one of the most intelligent of beasts. They trip over every pebble, and are almost useless on rough and broken ground; they start and swerve at a man, a tree, a rock, a distant view or a glimpse of the sea; they will not ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... the little operating-room just above where they sat. They could hear it distinctly, above the drone of the wind and the throb of the engines and the quiet evening noises of the orderly ship—spitting and cluttering out into space. To the impatient man it was nothing more than the ripple of unintelligent and unrelated sounds. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... of a tear, some half-formed drop that was almost a tear, came to her eye as she thought of his fate. How foolish he had always been, how unintelligent, how deficient in all those qualities which recommend men to women! But the very memory of his deficiencies created something like a tenderness in his favor. Hugh was disagreeable, nay, hateful, by reason of the power which he possessed; whereas Archie was not ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... be," he said to himself, "that I shall have to take it to an asylum, but I shall let it stay there only during the period of unintelligent howling. When it is old enough to understand that I am its master, then I shall take it in hand again. It is ridiculous to suppose that a human being cannot be as ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton

... counselor in the Parliament of Bretagne, took part in the Vendean wars as a captain under the name of Nantais, and as negotiator played a singular part at Quiberon. The Restoration rewarded the services of this unintelligent member of the petty nobility, whose Catholicism was more lukewarm than his love of monarchy. He became mayor of the second district of Paris, and division-chief in the Bureau of Finances, thanks to his kinship ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... governments and false religions, had not been extraordinary men, as if nine tenths of the calamities which have befallen the human race had any other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon unintelligent? Caesar and Napoleon—were they unintelligent? Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been associated with poor minds? No, with great minds, which, if the world was to be saved their devastation, needed to be reborn into a new spirit. The transforming gospel which ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... nature, and not enough with its capabilities; he always betrays a want of physical repose rather than want of moral harmony. His passionate sensuousness must be blamed when, to finish as quickly as possible that struggle in humanity which offends him, he prefers to carry man back to the unintelligent uniformity of his primitive condition, rather than see that struggle carried out in the intellectual harmony of perfect cultivation, when, rather than await the fulfilment of art he prefers not to let it begin; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... of that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely true—but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... problem of the foreign woman's vote. Many people fear that the granting of woman suffrage would greatly increase the unintelligent vote, because the foreign women would then have the franchise, and in our blind egotism we class our foreign people as ignorant people, if they do not know our ways and our language. They may know ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... for fear, came even to dealings with fear. He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering restraints it is man's duty to escape. Discretion, he declared, must remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but the discretion of an aristocrat is in his ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... at anything easily, and often I felt angry that he would waste so much of his strength in trying to teach people to do things in the right way. Very often it only ended in his producing actors who gave colorless, feeble and unintelligent imitations of him. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... the interior is in the most flamboyant Gothic which could be got for money. To be sure, there are rooms at Albany on which precious Siena marble and Mexican onyx are lavished, but these are used so as to produce mainly the effect of an unintelligent desire ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... appeals to me. I like the color and warmth and fervor of life; and people who drink red wine with their meals seem to me to be more cosmopolitan than those who do not. All this seems part of the pageant of life to me. I am not provincial, and I do not care to be made provincial by unintelligent ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... that the residue is political. You are following the popular avenue to polities, I suppose. Leave the 'Varsity very raw, knock about in an unintelligent way for three or four years on some frontier, then come home, go into the House, and pose as a specialist in foreign affairs. I should have thought you had too ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... able to answer it; presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know, and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely forgotten them. This might very well have happened in ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells

... of Cecil the real contenders for the vacant office of First Secretary of State—the highest office in the land—were not the wily Northampton and the relatively unintelligent Rochester, but the subtle Northampton and the quite as subtle, and perhaps more spacious-minded, Thomas Overbury. There was, it will be apprehended, a possible weakness on the Overbury side. The gemel-chain, like that of many links, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft material that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for the feelings that have wilted ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Carpenter appears to find at having, as it were, taken the taste of the amoeba's performance out of our mouth, by setting us about the less elaborate performance of the terebella, which he thinks we can call unintelligent and instinctive. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... is like all else, good—for a distance. The whole bally outfit of life is a matter of balance, maintained by war among the unintelligent bacilli and other primitives, and by will among men (goat feed for men, eh?) But do you get my ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... volume of sound, Bendigo, who had all this time been quietly seated on the platform, advanced, and began to speak in a simple, unaffected, but wholly unintelligent manner. He was decently dressed in a frock-coat, with black velveteen waistcoat buttoned over his broad chest. He was still, despite his threescore years, straight as a pole; and had a fine healthy looking face, that belied the fearful stories told by his friends ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... no fault to find in that matter." She said, "Oh, was that a lie? And how could I mention her one single fault, and she so good?—it would have been cruel." I said, "One ought always to lie when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but, your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the result of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to understand or tolerate these outbreaks. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... events. It was, none the less, impending, and to it Napoleon must be adjudged to have contributed in no unimportant measure. In the words of a recent writer, "the brutalities of Austria's white coats in the north, the unintelligent repression then characteristic of the house of Savoy, the petty spite of the duke of Modena, the mediaeval obscurantism of pope and cardinals in the middle of the peninsula, and the clownish excesses of Ferdinand in the south, could not blot out from the minds of the Italians the recollection ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... sentimental old lady of either sex, who 'can't see why we have to send our boys abroad,' comes into your vision, and you know they are too unintelligent (they usually are) to understand a serious essay, try to trap them into reading 'Christine.' If you succeed we know it will ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle

... spoke of children; how girls were more precocious than boys; though it would be wrong to deduce too much from Lucien's unintelligent face. In another year he would doubtless lose all his gawkiness and become quite a gallant. Finally, Madame Deberle resumed her embroidery, making perhaps two stitches in a minute. Helene, who was only happy when busy, begged permission ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... you must so conclude. I am sure this is a conclusion that men nowhere allow of. For if they did, they would not make bold, as everywhere they do to destroy ill-formed and mis-shaped productions. Ay, but these are MONSTERS. Let them be so: what will your drivelling, unintelligent, intractable changeling be? Shall a defect in the body make a monster; a defect in the mind (the far more noble, and, in the common phrase, the far more essential part) not? Shall the want of a nose, or a neck, make a monster, and put such issue out of the rank of men; ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... of doubtful value in the discipline of children, because it is so unintelligent; it is well called blind. Blind submission to authority in intellectual matters, on the part of either children or adults, is no less objectionable. It is not any person's mere assertion that makes a thing true, but evidence of some sort; and evidence is likewise usually ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... great measure the fault of artists themselves if they suffer from this partly unintelligent, but thoroughly well-intended patronage. If they seek to attract it by eccentricity, to deceive it by superficial qualities, or take advantage of it by thoughtless and facile production, they necessarily ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... I began having a garden I have had my troubles with the rocks, but the worst time came when, in a mood of enthusiastic and absolutely unintelligent optimism, I decided to have a bit of smooth grass in the middle of my garden. I wanted it very much. The place was too restless; you couldn't sit down anywhere. I felt that I had to have a clear green spot where I could take a chair and a book. I selected the ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... the height of folly to assume that there are no risks to the nation nor an absence of evil-doers wishing this nation harm. It would also be shortsighted to expect that potential adversaries are unintelligent and would not rely on superior knowledge of their environment and simplicity to overcome our current military and technical superiority much as the North Vietnamese did. In addition, as technology diffuses around, over, and under borders, our assumptions ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... creatures are to enjoy its benefits. Here also, as among the English latitude-men, the conviction grew that the essentials of a Christian belief must be few and simple and these such as plain men could understand and discuss; and here, as among the sober Dissenters at home, men looked askance on unintelligent ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... tradition which arose when by government was meant government by a class, when one man or a few exploited the rest in the name of the state, and when therefore it was of imperative importance to bring to bear upon those who were in power the brute and unintelligent weight of the mass. The whole democratic movement, though it assumed a positive intellectual form, was in fact negative in its aim and scope. It meant simply, we will not be exploited. But that end has now been attained. There is no fear now that government will be oppressive; ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... case was pigeonholed by the unintelligent care of M. le Juge d'Instruction Faure, the newspapers made efforts, at intervals, to fathom the mystery. One evening paper alone, which knew all the gossip of the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched: for the whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies, warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies. But many evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... his wife welcomed me warmly, and their rather unintelligent maid had just brought in the saddle of mutton—a great weakness of mine—when we heard a firm knock on the hall door. She returned to say that someone wanted to speak to Mr. Brown immediately. "Who is it?" I demanded. "I don't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various

... impossible for a man of sense not to perceive the fact. It is from this that we get the doctrine of punishment and salvation, either lasting through great ages after death, or eternal. This doctrine is a narrow and unintelligent mode of stating the fact in Nature that what a man sows that shall he reap. Swedenborg's great mind saw the fact so clearly that he hardened it into a finality in reference to this particular existence, his prejudices making it impossible for him to perceive the possibility of new ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... This unintelligent tangle is seen in Congress. Republican and Democratic Senators and Representatives, believing alike on broad measures affecting the whole Republic, find it hard to vote together because of the nominal difference of their party membership. When, sometimes, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... so-called Decorative Arts, which I have to speak about: it is only in latter times, and under the most intricate conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... jealousy reaches its end, and passes into revenge, Shakespeare tries to get back into Othello the captain again. Othello's first speech in the bedchamber is clear enough in all conscience, but it has been so mangled by unintelligent actors such as Salvini that it cries for explanation. Every one will remember how Salvini and others playing this part stole into the room like murderers, and then bellowed so that they would have waked the dead. And when the foolish mummers were criticised ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... of the intelligent and the unintelligent on the same subject. A Carracci embraced a kindred genius for what a Le Clerc or a Selden ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... instinctively desired family limitation. Usually this desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration toward freedom has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story, illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can be in relation ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... pleasures and pains. Laches replies that this universal courage is endurance. But courage is a good thing, and mere endurance may be hurtful and injurious. Therefore (3) the element of intelligence must be added. But then again unintelligent endurance may often be more courageous than the intelligent, the bad than the good. How is this contradiction to be solved? Socrates and Laches are not set 'to the Dorian mode' of words and actions; for their words are all confusion, ...
— Laches • Plato

... beings as objects of worship. Such was his condemnation of what he considered false gods. He was equally opposed to the idea that there is no God. "All things," he says, "are from God, and not from some spontaneous and unintelligent cause." "Now, that which is created," he adds, "must of necessity be created by some cause—but how can we find out the Father and maker of all this universe? If the world indeed be fair, and the artificer good, then He must have looked to that ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... happen in abandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,—because there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better. Towards the end this "press" was almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every phase in the production of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... quiver passed across the throng, as wind blows through the corn. Here and there men and women knelt, but for the most part they stood steadfast, motionless, staring in front of them. He looked at them and discovered that they had the faces of children—simple, trustful, unintelligent, unhumorous children,—and eyes, always kindlier than any he had ever seen in other human beings. They stood there gravely, with no signs of religious fervour, with no marks of impatience or weariness and also with no evidence of ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... dreamed of a relationship between university instruction and a liberal public culture which was not to be realised in his time. He was anything but complacent; had he been less intolerant in his hatred of unintelligent and indolent thought on the subjects that were near his heart, his way would have been ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.[1] Even if this selective agency had ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... 397 (Speech of Dubois-Crance in the Convention Floreal 16, year III.)—Archives Nationales, F.7, 31167. (Report by Rolin, Nivose 7, year II.) "The same complaints are heard against the civil Commissioners of the section, most of whom are unintelligent, not even ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... you were, Mr. Blenkinsopp,' the doctor answered blandly, with just the faintest tinge of unconscious satire, peering at his square unintelligent features as a fancier peers at the face of a bull-dog; 'I dare say you were now. After all, however clever a set of boys may be, one of them MUST be at the bottom of the form, in the nature of things, mustn't he? And ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,—and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did not bring home Schenckius ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... going," said the ardent bishop of Hippo, "to show you, by an example, the power of formulas. It deals, it is true, with a diabolical operation. But if it be established that formulas taught by the Devil have effect upon unintelligent animals or even on inanimate objects, how can we longer doubt that the effect of the sacramental formulas extends to the minds of beasts and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... and walked rather like a policeman also. Her hair was a rich raw sienna, and any man would have made love to her had she but carried an ear-trumpet. She is the "retiring Violet" of verse seven.[A] Millie Wyandotte was malicious and unintelligent; she looked well in white, but was too heavily built for my taste. I may add, as evidence of my impartiality, that she laid a table better than any woman I ever knew; in fact, she took first prize in a laying competition. Nettie Minorca was "black but comely," ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain

... inquiringly the cryptic significance of them appears; and that is often beautiful. Joan's soul looked out of her blue eyes now. Seen thoughtfully her beauty was refined and exalted to an exquisite perfection; but the unintelligent observer had simply pronounced her pale and thin. The event which first promised to destroy the new-spun gossamers of a religious faith and break them even on the day of their creation, in reality acted otherwise. For Joan, Joe's letter was like a window ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... be lost, I hurried with my note of introduction to Whitehall, was ushered through a succession of dingy offices into a small chamber, where I found, busily employed at an escrutoire, a young man of a heavy and yet not unintelligent countenance. He read my note, asked me whether I had ever been in Paris, from which he had just returned; uttered a sentence or two in the worst possible French, congratulated me on the fluency of my answer, rang his bell, and handed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... evolution of mankind. However, this subject requires, I believe, a much deeper treatment than the one it has hitherto received. In the history of mankind, individual self-assertion has often been, and continually is, something quite different from, and far larger and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of writers, goes for "individualism" and "self-assertion." N or have history-making individuals been limited to those whom historians have represented as heroes. My intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to discuss ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... it's unintelligent, but I do so enjoy being here away from the fevers of war. War is getting tedious, and the summer is all ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... principal, but he did not venture to remonstrate with his pearl of a Wilhelmine. His was the most ingenious unintelligent tenderness in the world. A good man, but a stupid one! 'What will become of them when I am gone?' he said, as he lay dying; and when he was left alone for a moment with Wirth, his old man-servant, he struggled for breath to bid him take care of his mistress ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac

... good deal of contempt. While it was true that orders had to be obeyed, there was no reason, Harry felt, why the lieutenant should not have shown some discretion. An officer of the regular army would have done so, he felt. But this man looked unintelligent and stupid. Harry felt that he might safely reply on his appearance. And he was right. The officer found himself in a quandary at once. His men were mounted on cycles; Harry was on foot. And Harry saw that he didn't quite know what ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston

... in any way ill at ease, but I felt a terrible inclination to laugh. The whole affair seemed to me a little ludicrous. There was nothing in the appearance of these men or the surroundings in the least impressive. They had the air of being unintelligent middle-class tradesmen of peaceable disposition, who had just dined to their fullest capacity, and were enjoying a comfortable smoke together. They eyed me amicably, and several of them nodded ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... mass of unsolved problems.—The outcome of all these researches is a growing mass of unsolved problems. It has not been established whether males are more easily fatigued than females; whether the intelligent are more subject to fatigue than the unintelligent. With regard to the individual type, Tissie's conclusion seems to be the most noteworthy: "Each individual becomes fatigued or not according to his degree of will." In connection with the seasons it appears that fatigue increases from the first to the last day of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... quick-witted; since his sole considerable military achievement, his not very lengthy march to Paris in '70 and '71, the conditions of modern warfare have been almost completely revolutionized and in a direction that subordinates the massed fighting of unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of individualized soldiers. And, on the other hand, since those years of disaster, the Frenchman has learned the lesson of humility; he is prepared now sombrely for a sombre struggle; his is the gravity that precedes astonishing victories. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... amuseur, whether they did or did not extend their battery to the other notion (common then in England, if not in France) that he was an amuser whose amusements were pernicious. These efforts were perhaps not entirely ineffectual: let us hope that actual reading, by not unintelligent or prejudiced readers, had more ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... specimens of the class of "handy-men" from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent, strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... of the most generous of human impulses under the pressure of selfish terror; because the Spaniards abandoned themselves to a dark fiend of religious fanaticism; because they were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they cultivated barren pride and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... minimum, and until the character, style, and traditions of the various song forms are well within your grasp. No matter how beautiful may be the voice, or how well placed, no amount of enthusiasm or temperament can atone for a meaningless or unintelligent treatment of the intellectual, emotional, and musical characteristics of the song ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... we got to the fags' room,' said Vaughan, pointing the toasting-fork at the Babe by way of emphasis, 'there was the Mutual standing in the middle of the room gassing away with an expression on his face a cross between a village idiot and an unintelligent fried egg. And all round him was a seething mass of fags, half of them playing soccer with a top-hat and the other half cheering wildly whenever the Mutual opened ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse

... and are more under the dominion of the priest. This is not likely to be altered yet awhile, for, under the present system of education and bringing up, the female portion of the community is not only not intellectual, but may even be described as being unintelligent. They are slovenly, and cannot be described as good housewives. They are pleasure-loving and garrulous, though this latter trait is not, I suppose, a specially national characteristic. They do much hard work, especially in the fields. In the classes above (if ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... an electric candle like the footman's. Its rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and last an animal. With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated, looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought. Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret thought ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... watch over himself when he undertakes to teach a dog. The dog takes after the master. Show me your dog and I'll tell you what you are. The criminal has a dog who is a rogue. The burglar's dog is a thief; the country yokel has a stupid, unintelligent dog. A kind, thoughtful ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot

... well as those connected with his calling. "Well," he said, "what you wants is a nice pretty little cow, not a great big beast as'll stand a-looking and a-staring at you all day long." The vicar followed his advice, avoided the stony regard of an unintelligent animal, and purchased a charming little tender-eyed Brittany, which was quite an ornament ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... that their heavy imagination bungled clumsily in the effort. They filled it, then, with a heterogeneous mass of foliage, fruit and flowers, trained occasionally to make a bower for a woman, a stand for a warrior, but all out of scale, never keeping to any standard, and lost absolutely in unintelligent confusion. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... authors fully equal to its original construction, its subsequent development, and its continued maintenance. Even if it be not inconceivable, notwithstanding that the chances to the contrary be many times infinity to one, that the mere restlessness of some utterly unintelligent force may have fabricated all material structures, and imparted to all their movements certain orderly successions, it is still manifestly impossible for unintelligence to have brought forth intelligence—for the speculative, critical, carping spirit of man to have been generated ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... than they were, and in England the general deodorisation of the theatre has not been unfelt in opera; but even without the unworthy motives which too often drew the bucks and the dandies of a past day to the opera-house, the influence of the unintelligent part of the audience upon the performers is far from good in an artistic sense. It is this which fosters that mental condition with which all who are acquainted with the operatic world are only too familiar. Now, just as in the days when Marcello wrote his Teatro alla moda, there is scarcely ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... distinguished; for example, we often find a theatrical treatment combined with academic work; and throughout are to be seen traces of eclecticism—that is to say, of the habit of imitating or reproducing, often in an unintelligent manner, the devices and even the style of earlier art. It does not follow that no great works of art were made in the Hellenistic age; the fine traditions of the fifth and fourth centuries were not easily lost. But the inspiration of the subject, so far as ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... in a letter that he wrote there on Aug. 4, 1777. 'I shall inquire,' he says, 'about the harvest when I come into a region where anything necessary to life is understood.' Piozzi Letters, i. 349. At Lichfield he reached that region. 'My barber, a man not unintelligent, speaks magnificently of the harvest;' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... were just as homeless, friendless, just as much in need of food and sleep, and in their eyes was the same look of fear and horror. Bernhardi tells his countrymen that war is glorious, heroic, and for a nation an economic necessity. Instead, it is stupid, unintelligent. It creates nothing; ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis

... conception of Socialism is very remote in spirit, however it may agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one finds among the British ruling and administrative class. That seems to me to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the obvious wants and distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling for the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be hardened to endure the life led by the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... tired of hearing us praise Mr. Peyton's things?" she asked, dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. "Unintelligent admiration must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost as learned ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... constant attention by the medical corps to prevent an outbreak of typhoid, dysentery, and the ordinary train of nearly fatal diseases which are common to large military camps, and which are almost inevitable when dealing with an unorganized and unintelligent mob. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... the foetus are constructed in the darkness of the womb. The human germ, notwithstanding its unconsciousness and its simplicity of structure, develops a body that is complex and capable of a considerable degree of consciousness; though itself unintelligent, it produces prodigies of intelligence in this body; here, consequently, the effect would be greatly superior to the cause, which is absurd. Outside of the body and the germ is a supreme Intelligence which ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... Mother Waterhouse told, or the jurors and the judges neglected the first principles of common sense and failed to inquire about the facts.[6] The questions asked by the queen's attorney reveal hardly more than an unintelligent curiosity to know the rest of the story. He shows just one saving glint of skepticism. He offered to release Mother Waterhouse if she would materialize ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... form the figure; and, surely, the objects which Fancy thinks it right to personify, are not always "inanimate." I have elsewhere defined the thing as follows: "Personification is a figure by which, in imagination, we ascribe intelligence and personality to unintelligent beings or abstract ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... that is drawn in fact between 'blue ribbon' jurors and general jurors is often of such a character as to destroy the representative nature of the 'blue ribbon' panel. There is no constitutional right to a jury drawn from a group of uneducated and unintelligent persons. Nor is there any right to a jury chosen solely from those at the lower end of the economic and social scale. But there is a constitutional right to a jury drawn from a group which represents a cross-section of the community. And a cross-section of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... a safe should have been provided; that the paymaster had the right to rely upon the fidelity and efficiency of the escort, and that the two men furnished him as an escort were unintelligent and negligent; that they should have been armed with guns instead of pistols, and that the instructions given to the escort by the paymaster were sufficient to acquit him of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... papers. He taught himself mathematics and languages, even Hebrew, and ultimately became a schoolmaster at Lewes. In his thorough adherence to learning Dudeney was the completest contrast to John Kimber of Chailey, a wealthy farmer with a consuming but unintelligent love of books, who was once, says Horsfield, seen bringing home Macklin's Bible, a costly work in six volumes in a sack laid across the back of a cart horse. According to the excellent habit of the old Sussex farmers, Mr. Kimber's body was borne ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... with it, all of which may be summed up in the term "superior man," which seems simple enough, but which may be decomposed into a series of complex characters. The superior man differs from the man of genius, who may be unintelligent enough, and from the man of talent, who is often a mere specialist, in an ability to form general ideas about everything. If this power of generalizing is not combined with equal creative power, the superior man remains a critic. But if he possesses ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... honest fellow, besides, all my hasty plan of escape hung now upon the faith retained, that the half-open cuddy door had direct communication with the provisions stored below. Surely they could never be loaded and unloaded by means of the distant hatch-ladder. So dull and unintelligent in the dim light appeared the face of the fellow opposite, as we strained forward beneath the weight of the chest, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... miles an hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out wide open, thereby producing a racket like a machine-gun, which, though it gave warning of our approach when we were still a mile away, made ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell

... treasures of these tombs,—though only the few which, by comparative insignificance or fortunate accident, have escaped the unintelligent ravage of Roman or of Goth,—are like the scale or bone of Agassiz's saurian; and a necklace of Scarabaei alternated with the little pendent fantasies in gold, which we may see in the Campana collection, is the fragment from which we build Etruria, taking a little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... with you will remain before your eyes. Lay them not from your hands until you are in unity with your selves. Neither let, oh, let not yourselves be made supine by reliance upon others or upon anything whatsoever that lies outside yourselves, nor yet through the unintelligent belief of our time that the epochs of history are made by the agency of some unknown power without any aid from man. These addresses have never wearied in impressing upon you that absolutely nothing can help you but yourselves, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... preponderance of moist air in the constitution of brutes, he inferred that they are like the insane, incapable of thought, for thickness of the air impedes respiration, and therefore quick apprehension. From the fact that plants have no cavities wherein to receive the air, and are altogether unintelligent, he was led to the principle that the thinking power of man arises from the flowing of that substance throughout the body in the blood. He also explained the superior intelligence of men from their breathing a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to whosoever reechoed his cry, "We are of the sea!" and fought with brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-sufficient, instead of being thrust into the background by unintelligent machinery, as Jack is to-day. So it always is—"man only is ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... used to say that only unintelligent people woke up feeling really well. If he was right I must have been in a singularly brilliant mood when I ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... I had. Now I shall have to go back to work again until the next one is able to take care of me." The man was only thirty-three and had hoped to retire from work at least during the winters. No foreman cared to have him in a factory, untrained and unintelligent as he was. It was much easier for his bright, English-speaking little girl to get a chance to paste labels on a box than for him to secure an opportunity to carry pig iron. The effect on the child was ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... different kind of religious worship and instruction. The preaching which appeals to the Anglo-Saxon race appears cold and unmeaning to the warm-blooded Negro; the preaching which arouses in him a real religious fervor appears to his cold-blooded neighbor imaginative, passionate, unintelligent. To attempt to force the two races into a fellowship distasteful to both, to attempt to require the two to listen to the same type of sermon and join in the same forms of worship, is a "reform against nature." Even if the erection and maintenance of two churches where one ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various

... wickedness, malice, covetousness, vice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil dispositions, whisperers, [1:30]evil speakers, haters of God, injurious, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, [1:31]unintelligent, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful, [1:32]who knowing the ordinance of God, that those who do such things deserve death, not only do the same, but have pleasure ...
— The New Testament • Various

... direction. These molecules were subject to gravity and endowed with properties or forces. One combination of molecules gave rise to unorganized matter, another to life, another to mind; and from the various combinations, guided by unintelligent physical laws, all the wonderful organisms of plants and animals have arisen. To these combinations also all the phenomena of life, instinct, and intelligence in the world are to be referred. This theory has been adopted in our day by a large ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... altogether so spent with utter weariness, that the only thing to do was to tumble into bed, and books were out of the question. He was being "hardened," as his father called it, but not in a desirable way; for while his body remained slender and weak as ever, his mind became daily more stupid and unintelligent. ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton

... the fact, he did not renew it. Thirdly, the philosophy of Eliphas Levi is in direct contrast to Manichaean doctrine; it cannot be explained by dualism, but must be explained by its opposite, namely, triplicity in unity. He shows that "the unintelligent disciples of Zoroaster have divided the duad without referring it to unity, thus separating the pillars of the temple, and seeking to halve God" (Dogme, p. 129, 2nd edition). Is that a Manichaean doctrine? Again: "If you conceive the Absolute as two, you must immediately ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... retracing my steps, I was conscious of the inexhaustible richness of the world through which I had come; a thousand voices had spoken to me, and a thousand sights of wonder moved before me; I was awake to the universe which most of us see only in broken and unintelligent dreams. Through all this realm of truth and poetry men have passed and repassed these many years, I said to myself; and I began to wonder how many of those now long asleep really saw or heard this great glad world of sun and summer! I began slowly to retrace ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... never still. Here, he realized, was where he had lost connection, where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability—were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power to make quick decisions and the inability ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... human influence, and any operation which can be effected by Nature, for man interferes intelligently. Reduced to its elements, this argument implies that an effect produced with trouble by an intelligent agent must, a fortiori, be more troublesome, if not impossible, to an unintelligent agent. Even putting aside the question whether Nature, acting as she does according to definite and invariable laws, can be rightly called an unintelligent agent, such a position as this is wholly untenable. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley



Words linked to "Unintelligent" :   headless, retarded, intelligence, intelligent, brainless



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