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More "Obstructive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the old man's shoulder, but Sagan shook it off—'then, Captain Colendorp, he must go—to make room for another who can better fill his place! Just as Wallenloup must go to give room to another and less obstructive chief.' ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... There is perhaps the distinction to be made that "the perpetuation of the national Culture" lends a readier countenance to gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the rules ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... laborious, learned, accurate, elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Duerer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Edward Percy Whipple, in which this veteran and appreciative critic of the eminent English writer's works points out that, "In addition to the practical life that men and women lead, constantly vexed as it is by obstructive facts, there is an interior life which they imagine, in which facts smoothly give way to sentiments, ideas, and aspirations. Dickens has, in short, discovered and colonized one of the waste districts of 'Imagination,' ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... Christopher Sterling's type that made the chief difficulty. There were few of this literal interpretation and heroic texture. The real difficulty was created by men of a very different character and in much greater numbers, sincere in varying degrees, but deliberately, passionately and unscrupulously obstructive, bent on baulking the national will and making anything like reasonable treatment of them impossible. It would require saints, not men, to deal without occasional lapses from strict equity with such infuriating folk. Mr. BEGBIE'S book is unfair in its emphasis, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... sulkiness and eccentricity and occasional indecency are just what one would expect from a Sub-Consciousness, whose thoughts have no central I to keep them in order. (Compare Goethe's explanation of the obscenities of Ophelia.) Sometimes, too, there are Obstructive Associations, which account for its inability to make up its want of mind; and as there are usually several persons at table, the result is complicated by their separate Sub-Consciousnesses. In brief, table-turning is a method of interrogating ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... are finished, I shall be happy to see you; as I tell but the truth, you will not suspect me of evasion. I am furnishing the house more for you than myself, and I shall establish you in it before I sail for India, which I expect to do in March, if nothing particularly obstructive occurs. I am now fitting up the green drawing-room; the red for a bed-room, and the rooms over as sleeping-rooms. They will be soon ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... round it, but were forced to enter the town by a circuitous route and find, to their chagrin, Mr. Tippett's premises completely gutted. For three days all our traffic entered and left the town perforce by the north side; but two years after, on the completion of the railway line to Troy, these obstructive gatehouses were removed, to give passage to ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Brentham was almost his introduction into refined society. He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle; but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendor, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive defendants, who impeded, by their want of skill, the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate. How different the surrounding scene! A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... least this negative merit, that, by the express substitution of the appearance for the actual image, needless entanglement in the material is avoided. Weight and bulk are not indeed annihilated, but they are no longer of primary importance, and thus less obstructive. The work gains precisely in what it gives up. By the flat omission of depth infinite depth is acquired,—by the ignoring of size the expression of size becomes possible; a mountain, for instance, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... Arbuthnot, while she wistfully mothered the obstructive Scrap at tea, felt too that she had had a curious day. Like Mrs. Fisher's, it had been active, but, unlike Mrs. Fisher's, only active in mind. Her body had been quite still; her mind had not been still at all, it had been excessively active. For years she had ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... is first urged for specialized work, there always is opposition. The outgoing generation remembers the opposition to specialized training for law, medicine, and engineering, to say nothing of farming, school teaching and business. But in spite of obstructive and retarding objections, specialized types of training for specialized types of work have grown in number and favor, and today we are being shown convincingly that nations which have declined to set up the fundamental types of special training find themselves able to make effective ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... that Englishmen and Irishmen, Conservatives and Radicals, should be agreed as to the meaning of the new Fundamental Law. When, in short, a constitution for the country is being drawn up, no discussion which is rational can be obstructive. If a week or a fortnight of parliamentary time is expended in defining the meaning of the supreme authority of Parliament, or in deciding whether the Irish delegacy is or is not to be retained at Westminster, not a moment too much is devoted to points of such transcendent importance. ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... The reality struck Helga. She was much interested, and Hardy saw that she understood and entered into everything. There was nothing to suggest or to alter in Macdonald's plans, and Hardy at once arranged for their execution. The Danish bailiff was at first obstructive, but Hardy's quiet, decisive manner changed the position, and gradually it dawned upon him that the place would be greatly improved, and that the residence of an English family for part of the year at ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... it was only the obstructive presence of the numerous tables and chairs that saved the two lads from that first wild rush. With all the agility of youth they sprang back to the corner where they had taken their meal, put their backs against the wall for safety's sake, and drawing ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the land was a ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... involving the technical training of the engineer. To permit the so-called "man in the street" to say whether he shall or shall not permit the carrying out of some important piece of civic hygiene is to introduce a principle subversive of all system and obstructive of all progress in the science of public health. It is absurd that in a case like this the pronouncements of the judges are to be submitted to the criticisms of the jury. England has already had one or two pretty severe lessons through allowing such places as Gloucester and Leicester to exercise ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... through life, accepting everybody's help, and adopting everybody's opinions. A more hopeless person, in a spiritual point of view, I have never met with—there is absolutely, in this perplexing case, no obstructive material to work upon. Aunt Ablewhite would listen to the Grand Lama of Thibet exactly as she listens to Me, and would reflect his views quite as readily as she reflects mine. She found the furnished house at Brighton ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... supported as they mostly are by fanciful analogies, facts misunderstood or misstated, and illustrations selected without discrimination or applicability. Theories do sometimes conduce to the discovery of truth, but are often obstructive; occupy the mind, like theological controversy, without advancing science; and are viewed with the same aversion by the philosopher that the political abstractions tendered to the multitude by the demagogue are ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... dare say, by any of the old romantic methods of a convent or disinheritance; but she is an invalid; she wants to keep her daughter with her, and she avails with the girl's conscience by being simply dependent and obstructive. The young people have carried their engagement through, and now such hope as they have is fixed upon her finally yielding in the matter of their marriage, though Glendenning was obliged to confess that there was no sign of her doing ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... resulted in Roman Catholic emancipation, and here, too, the Utilitarians might be anticipating a complete triumph of their principles. The existing disqualifications, indeed, were upheld by little but the purely obstructive sentiment. When the duke of York swore that 'so help him God!' he would oppose the change to the last, he summed up the whole 'argument' against it. Canning and Huskisson here represented the policy not only of Pitt, but of Castlereagh. The Whigs, indeed, might claim ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to Bertha's anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods, brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... I imagine that when I occur to Camilla's mind, it is as the obstructive old hag, who once stood in her way; and so, without any formed designs, whatever she says of me is coloured by ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a discreditable chapter of English history that ought to have been closed for ever; I ask you to give us a verdict of Not Guilty, to send us back to our homes and to stamp your brand of disapprobation on this prosecution, which is degrading religion by associating it with all that is penal, obstructive, and loathsome; I ask you to let us go away from here free men, and so make it impossible that there ever should again be a prosecution for blasphemy; I ask you to have your names inscribed in history as the last jury that decided for ever ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... was dispatched at this session gave little opportunity for any form of debate except that which was absolutely necessary in the explanation of measures. Active interest in the House centred around the obstructive and disloyal course of Mr. Vallandigham of Ohio and Mr. Burnett of Kentucky. Still greater interest attached to the course of Mr. Breckinridge in the Senate. He had returned to Washington under a cloud of suspicion. He was thoroughly distrusted by the Union men ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... niece. Mr. Gibson had been at the house that very morning, and Dorothy had given herself airs. At least, so Miss Stanbury thought. And during the last three or four days, whenever Mr. Gibson's name had been mentioned, Dorothy had become silent, glum, and almost obstructive. Miss Stanbury had been at the trouble of explaining that she was specially anxious to have that little matter of the engagement settled at once. She knew that she was going to behave with great generosity;—that she was going to sacrifice, not her money only, of which she did not think much, but ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... nowadays, in describing and proposing a name for what they call 'a new species,' use that term to signify what was meant by it twenty or thirty years ago; that is, an originally distinct creation, maintaining its primitive distinction by obstructive generative peculiarities. The proposer of the new species now intends to state no more than he actually knows; as, for example, that the differences on which he founds the specific character are constant in individuals of both sexes, so far as observation has reached; and ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... still wider prevalence of an excessive drinking which falls short of actual drunkenness, is a frightful evil in the national life; and what is commonly known as the "Liquor Interest" plays a sinister part as an organized obstructive force standing in the way of needed reforms. The number of public-houses and drinking- bars in English towns and villages is monstrously out of proportion to any reasonable needs of the population: and it must be more than ordinarily difficult for brewers and publicans, ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable, contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known. Here is the growing point of reality, the fons emanationis of truth and worth and being, evidencing its power not as ...
— Progress and History • Various
... IN THE OBSTRUCTIVE VARIETY of dysmenorrhea, some organic impediment hinders the exit of the menstrual blood from the uterus, which, consequently, becomes distended and painful. The pain may be constant, but is most acute when ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... considerable space to its description, dividing the disease into two forms: the inflammatory, such as may follow venereal primary sores or operations on the penis, not excepting circumcision; and the obstructive variety, such as may follow embolism or any mechanical obstruction, either purposely or accidentally applied. Of the latter he gives a number of quoted instances; he only admits seeing one case, that of an aged man in the Pennsylvania Hospital, in whom the disease was caused ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of travel, of jurisprudence, of torture and punishment, of social ranks, of the relation of the individual to the state, of the state to the family, and of religion to the family, were more or less defective and unsuited to the new civilization. Before this new movement all obstructive ideas, however, sanctioned by antiquity, have had to give way. The Japanese of to-day look, as it were, upon a new earth and a new heaven. Those of forty years ago would be amazed, not only at the enormous changes in the externals, life and government, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... compromises of political life were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of the House of Lords—these were the matters to which I put my hand; I was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself always in opposition ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... importance, is an immense progress toward the goal of improvement. Principles, well founded and of real value, once understood, will eventually make their way. With all the errors of society, and the wrong-headed stubbornness and selfishness of humanity, with the immense obstructive power of established interests, the haughty despotism of old opinions, and the petrified rigidity of social customs, the solvent energy of truth nevertheless will penetrate every part of the imposing fabric, and gradually ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... diplomacy, and slaughter and bloodshed were relegated to the executioner. Incredible as it seems, it is said that from his windows this king could look out upon an avenue of gibbets upon which hung the bodies of his enemies. The humorous spirit in which he disposed of obstructive nobles is illustrated by a note to an unsuspecting victim. "Fair cousin, come and give us your advice. We have need of so wise a head as yours." And in the morning the fair cousin's wise head was in a basket filled ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the storm, has now been succeeded by the more natural darkness of night, the trackers, for this day, cannot proceed further, were they ever so eager. Besides, there is another bar to their continuing; one still more directly obstructive, even forbidding their exit from the cave. This, the arroyo, which now in full flood fills the ravine up to the cliff's base, there leaving no path for either man or horse. That by which they approached is covered beyond fording depth, with a current so swift ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... the misfortune to come under his sweeping denunciations, because they are inconsistent with his ideal of a peasant Empire, but he recognises amongst them degrees of depravity. Some are simply obstructive, whilst others are actively prejudicial to the public welfare. Among these latter a special object of aversion is Prince S——, because he not only possesses very large estates, but at the same time has aristocratic pretensions, and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... tendency of writers upon this period is thus to exalt the man with a great national policy in his head though with a sword in his hand, at the expense of him who, never so honestly, dinned the populace with his high-sounding pleas for an obstructive course. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... supply, and the city has not received a sufficient supply of negroes, and certainly not so many as smaller industrial towns, although the railroads and a few of the industrial concerns of the locality have had labor agents in the South. Yet, in spite of the difficulties because of the obstructive tactics adopted in certain southern communities to prevent the negro exodus, they have nevertheless succeeded in bringing several thousand negroes into this district. "One company, for instance," says Epstein, "which imported about a thousand men within ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive whom ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... hopelessness. There were no stars in the darkness that brooded over her heart after the sun went down. As she lay with clenched hands, counting the ten thousand woolly sheep whose agility in overleaping an obstructive wall is for some mysterious reason assumed to be soporific in its influence, she was conscious of a sort of terror of the thoughts lurking in ambush, ready to spring out upon her if she were off her guard for an instant. It was useless to tell herself that she was no poorer than ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... majority was ignored. There is much truth in the charge, for Andros was self-willed, imperious, and impatient of discussion. On the other hand the Puritan leaders inordinately loved controversy and debate. If Andros was peremptory, the Puritan councillors were obstructive. ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... Parliamentary fight of a generation began to take form in the House of Commons. The Conservatives, led by Mr. Balfour, put up an obstructive fight to every line and almost every word of the finance bill which was founded on the Budget. Departmental duties all day, the onward fight with his finance measure throughout the night and often the early hours of the morning, became the routine of Lloyd George's life. I have ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses. Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted—indeed ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... which, to judge by the criticisms levelled against its exceptions and safeguards, will be about as effective as its predecessor, was read a third time. So was the Health Insurance Bill, but not until a few Independent Liberals, led by Captain WEDGWOOD BENN, had been rebuked for their obstructive tactics by Mr. MYERS and Mr. NEIL MACLEAN of the Labour Party. As the small hours grew larger this split in the Progressive ranks developed into a yawning chasm, and the Government got a third Bill passed before the weary House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... to anybody now in Soissons or Laon to make the journey to Paris, as people did a hundred and fifty years ago, to drink the water of the Seine, as being 'the best in the world, and a specific against burning fevers and obstructive ailments.' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... importunate for impeachment, the business element of the country at large was tiring of it and its depressing effect upon the commercial activities. Even Senators and Congressmen were being moved to a sense of the obstructive and somewhat ridiculous phases the impeachment movement was beginning to take on—and not a few of those who in its earlier stages had honestly favored the movement, inside as well as outside the membership of both Houses of Congress, had begun to realize the actual nature ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... coroner, standing a trifle back of her chair, shook his head at the obstructive juryman, and asked her in a commonplace voice what the hogs had to do ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... time he wished to go outside it took him half an hour to dig his way out. On account of this periodic influx, the vestibule doorway to the workroom was moved to the other end of the wall, where the invading snow had farther to travel and was consequently less obstructive. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... He was changed even more than he himself suspected; he had stepped, without faltering, into his birthright, and was spending money, intellectually, as lavishly as a young heir who has just won an obstructive lawsuit. Roderick's glance and voice were the same, doubtless, as when they enlivened the summer dusk on Cecilia's veranda, but in his person, generally, there was an indefinable expression of experience rapidly ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... consequence was the grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but obstructive; that ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Arnold, who is much in favour of founding an academy, which is not only to judge of original works but of the criticisms of others upon them, states the matter very fairly. He says, "So far as routine and authority tend to embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius; and, to this extent, to the human spirit's general advance. But then this evil is so much compensated by the propagation on a large scale of the mental aptitudes and demands, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... not abandoned the arbitrary principles of his family, even in his worst adversity. His interference with the discussions on Poyning's Law, and the Inns of Court bill, had shocked some of his most devoted adherents. But he proceeded from obstructive to active despotism. He doubled, by his mere proclamation, the enormous subsidy of 20,000 pounds monthly voted him by the Houses. He established, by the same authority, a bank, and decreed in his own name a bank restriction act. He debased the coinage, and established a fixed scale of prices ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... and even the principal when it was due. So they elected a Populist legislature and passed a law providing that a mortgagee could not foreclose his mortgage under two years. They did this by stay laws and by requiring an obstructive procedure in collection of debts. As a result, capital fled the state as men would flee yellow fever. When there was no money at all left in the state and they found that they couldn't get any, they began to recognize the benefit in money loaned on mortgages. Their next ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... were frequently ill-organised; that there was much waste of labour and consequently of money in their establishments; that the Treasury had not risen to the occasion during the War, and the Committee had regretfully come to the conclusion that the War Office had been adopting a deliberately obstructive attitude." Mr. Runciman on the same occasion stated that "lax expenditure and loose control over distribution of public money went far beyond the immediate departments concerned. It went down into every factory, and the general effect was a scale of ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... tells its own story. I have done my best to prevent your being bothered, but for various reasons which will occur to you I did not like to appear too obstructive, and I was asked to write to you. The strong feeling of my colleagues (and my own I must say also) is that we ought to have your opinions in our minutes. At the same time there is a no less strong desire to trouble ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... iron hand was still pressing his forehead, the new law quietly flowed into his consciousness, like a smooth-running stream of clean water which had hitherto been dammed by his obstructive will. The ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Ireland, which movement was started in the "seventies," was gaining ground, and every election returned to the House more members pledged to its support. Those who were bent upon obtaining Home Rule at any cost used obstructive means against other legislation to gain their object, but as yet the movement was confined to the members who had been elected ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the enthusiasm and intelligence of individuals have set on foot. The mere checking of the obstruction of the individual will not suffice; other aldermen will arise—equally ignorant, equally talkative, equally obstructive. And until the race is relegated to its proper function, bimetallism and sewage, the incidents I have described ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... until within recent years a charming old building called The Cottage—one of those picturesque but obstructive details in which our ancestors delighted. Behind the Congregational Chapel there is an old hall, used as a lecture-hall, which was originally a chapel, and which is said by Faulkner to be the oldest place of worship in Hammersmith. It was built by the Presbyterians. The first authentic ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the half-educated is more obstructive to science than the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he. "If Lord John Roxton ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... best, To head a little nearer south by west. And this they feel: the ship came too near wreck, In the long quarrel for the quarter-deck, Now when she glides serenely on her way,— The shallows past where dread explosives lay,— The stiff obstructive's churlish game to try Let sleeping dogs and still torpedoes lie! And so I give you all the Ship of State; Freedom's last venture is her priceless freight; God speed her, keep her, bless her, while she steers Amid the breakers of unsounded years; Lead her through danger's paths ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I improved on my obstructive tactics. When the Elsinore was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could swing her bow off. Then, when she had paid off till the wind was abeam, by reversing the wheel ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... leaves them free to develop in their own way, but does not say what that way shall be. On the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number of geographic features, and encompasses them by obstructive boundaries, is of immense historical importance; because this restriction leads to the concentration of the national powers, to the more thorough utilization of natural advantages, both racial and geographical, and thereby to the growth ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the violin when my mother was either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for "looking ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... giving time for a survey of the field of motives, neither is action "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" to such an extent that it becomes impossible. The evidence is all considered and each motive fully weighed. But this once done, decision follows. No dilatory and obstructive tactics are allowed. The fleeting impulse is not enough to persuade to action, neither is action unduly delayed after the ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... nothing remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober- Ingenieurs decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... my immediate predecessor (Mr. Randall) decided, in principle, the point involved here. On February 24, 1877, after an obstructive motion had been made, the following language was used, as found in the Record of ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... forbidden by our physicians to such men as are inclined to this malady, as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, dates, &c. honey and sugar. [1376] Some except honey; to those that are cold, it may be tolerable, but [1377] Dulcia se in bilem vertunt, (sweets turn into bile,) they are obstructive. Crato therefore forbids all spice, in a consultation of his, for a melancholy schoolmaster, Omnia aromatica et quicquid sanguinem adurit: so doth Fernelius, consil. 45. Guianerius, tract 15. cap. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shamefully little compared with the wonderful Jesuits. Moreover, while the French in general made the Indian feel he was at all events a fellow human being, the average British colonist simply looked on him as so much vermin, to be destroyed together with the obstructive wilds that harboured him. ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... vehicles or foot-passengers; a court-yard diverging from a steep, a slippery, and a winding street connecting Tower Street with the Middlesex shore of the Thames; stood the place of business of Wilding & Co., Wine Merchants. Probably as a jocose acknowledgment of the obstructive character of this main approach, the point nearest to its base at which one could take the river (if so inodorously minded) bore the appellation Break-Neck-Stairs. The court-yard itself had likewise been descriptively entitled in old ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... very early reader of the Travels sensed the possibility of Swift's use of certain portions of his narrative to vent disappointment at his failure to receive the church preferment he thought he deserved and to carry on his personal vendetta against obstructive bishops like the "crazy Prelate" Sharpe, Archbishop of York, one of the detestable and "dull Divines" pilloried in the autobiographical poem "The Author Upon ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... particularly transparent, though enough so to show us that the bottom is very much weedgrown; and I was told that the weed is an American production, brought to England with importations of timber, and now threatening to choke up the Thames and other English rivers. I wonder it does not try its obstructive powers upon the Merrimack, the Connecticut, or the Hudson,—not to speak of the St. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... galloped, but mile after mile they kept to the track, just in front of our engine, which whistled piercingly and let off steam as though in frantic anger. Presently we slowed down almost to a walking pace, for we had no wish to spill the blood or crush the bones of even obstructive horses. But as we slowed our pace they provokingly slackened theirs, and when once more we put on steam they did the same. So in sheer desperation our guard dismounted and ran himself completely out ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... capitalists had cared at all about the humane aspect of the matter, they could have taken a much less demoralizing method in getting rid of the obstructive surplus. They could have periodically made a bonfire of it as a burnt sacrifice to the god Profit, or, if they preferred, it might have been carried out in scows ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... two very discreditable bills which would have been made positively infamous if it had not been for the active opposition of a few friends of liberty. One of these bills was designed to add to the stringency of the present obstructive medical law; the other was designed to assist the labors of Anthony Comstock in interrupting the circulation of popular physiological literature, under ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... Irish party were beginning to apply and develop that use of Parliamentary forms for obstructive purposes which had been first systematically attempted by the "Colonels" in opposition to Mr. Cardwell's Bill for abolishing purchase in the Army, and Liberals were a little scandalized by their allies. In the close of July Sir John Lubbock, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the mechanism of the body be cleansed and freed from obstructive and destructive materials, but the injured parts must be repaired, morbid growths and abnormal formations dissolved and eliminated and lesions in the bony ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... always there to be helped, but that he is not there to be anointed always, implying that you should never lose a chance of being happy when there is so much misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of conventionality when it is uncomfortable or obstructive; and outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of it. He is apt to accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy. Like the late Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a department of sin, and on curing a lame man, says "Thy sins are forgiven" instead of "Arise and walk," subsequently ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... plain that there was an organization of crooks and that a strong bond of understanding existed between them. Now, inasmuch as the eye of suspicion had been turned away from them, now that a herring had been dragged across the trail, their obstructive tactics ended and they, too, became noisy in their clamor ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... faculties, for I opened the port-side locker, reached down, and grasped a sticky body, which turned out to be a pot of varnish. Recoiling wretchedly, I tried the opposite one, combating the embarrassing heel of the boat and the obstructive edges of the centre-board case. A medley of damp tins of varied sizes showed in the gloom, exuding a mouldy odour. Faded legends on dissolving paper, like the remnants of old posters on a disused hoarding, spoke of soups, curries, beefs, potted meats, and other ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... that there is something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by the disastrous ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... gaining power. The advent of Constitutional Government will depend entirely upon the progress of the colony; but at present it is far from being desirable, the elected members of the Council being distinctly the obstructive party, while the Governor and the Imperially appointed officials are the only persons who look beyond the squatting interest to that of ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... his repartees seem neat: 1. To Lord Noodle, or Lord Doodle, which was it? objecting haughtily, "And suppose a cow should get in the way of your engine, sir?" he replied, "Why, then it would be bad—for the coow." The objector had overrated the obstructive power ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... a protestantism in social usages. Forms that have ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive—whether political, religious, or other—have ever to be swept away; and eventually are so swept away in all cases. Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand. A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have been for ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... cloak for self- righteousness and, if worse can be, worse. But tut! Laotse will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere. With him these precious things are simply absences that come to be when obstructive presences are thrown off. No sanctimoniousness for the little Old Man in the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... not as great as they are, few people with intestinal putrefactive diseases, from cholera infantum in babyhood to proctitis in old age, would get well, for most of the treatment for one and all of these diseases is obstructive rather than conservative ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... absolutely harmless by another. Somewhere between lies the truth. If any human being has actually been bitten by a heloderma, the event has either escaped notice or has been so hedged about with obstructive legend as to have forfeited scientific credence. But the saurian itself has been studied and dissected, and its venom has been analyzed. The venom is related to snake poison, but is neither crotaline nor elapine. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... be known with the sense-organs; as e.g. any action which, in the case of the apprehension of a species or of one's own face, causes connexion between the organ of sight and an individual of the species, or a looking-glass. Or it would be such as to remove some obstructive impurity in the mind of the knowing person; of this kind is the action of calmness and self- restraint with reference to scripture which is the means of apprehending the highest reality. Moreover, even if it were admitted that consciousness may be ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... forward the clever and industrious; but in his active superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and more of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who this is an idea not spoken of in the sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband's table, and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that the cause must come before the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... I said of this paragon that she made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her amazing personality. Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to her house and make them discontented. It was the work of half-an-hour. Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out. But the dreadful fact remained that, let your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... invention, in which the same result was stated to be attained more effectively by blowing the mercury spray through the triturated material by means of a steam jet. I had already encountered a difficulty, since found so obstructive by experimentalists in the same direction, that is, the getting of the mercury back into its liquid metallic form. This difficulty I am now convinced can be largely obviated by my own device of using a very weak solution of sulphuric ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... things, would inspire I know not what of terror. He would be like a mad Malay running a muck, dagger in hand. If the person who in a deliberative assembly speaks of another person as his venerable friend, were to speak of him there as he did half an hour before in private, as an obstructive old idiot, how people would start! It would be like the bare bones of the skeleton showing through the fair covering of flesh ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... watching Anthony, who showed evidences of having been considerably excited by the explosion, though Tubby could not tell whether it was fear that influenced the man, or an overmastering desire to join the army, and engage in some of this obstructive work himself. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... (2) The obstructive conscience, that has become set and will not suffer change. Here we can put all the earnest "stand-patters," who resist innovation of every sort. Slaves of the particular standards that they happen to have grown up in, unable ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... according as it moves with evolution or against it.[35] Only in one sense, then, is it fatal; it cannot be destroyed save by an opposing force of the same momentum. For instance, in order to annihilate an obstructive force, created in the past, the soul must expend an amount of energy that is equal and opposite to that force; it meanwhile cannot devote itself to any other work, thus causing, in one sense, a useless production of energy; in other words, evolution will suffer ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of the boarders became so obstructive to the men spied upon that the Biscayan and Don Telmo served notice on the landlady of their removal. Dona Casiana's desolation, when she learned of their decision, was exceedingly great; several times she had to resort ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Duerer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... to the provocation of a constitutional crisis, which might easily arise if the people chose to declare war on the motion of a magistrate without waiting for the advice of the fathers; while the obstructive minority may have been alarmed by the distant vision of a trial before the Assembly or before a commission of inquiry composed of judges taken from the angry Equites. The senate took the lead in a formal declaration of war; Numidia was named as one of the provinces which were ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... mark. A flash of lightning out of a storm-cloud seems instantly to transform the whole passive universe into a terrible living power. This slow, opaque, indifferent matter about us and above us, going its silent or noisy round of mechanical and chemical change, ponderable, insensate, obstructive, slumbering in the rocks, quietly active in the soil, gently rustling in the trees, sweetly purling in the brooks, slowly, invisibly building and shaping our bodies—how could we ever dream that it held in leash such a terrible, ubiquitous, spectacular thing as this of the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... early perceived that to obtain the desired end, every particular must be studied and provided for, so that all elements of enduring success should be united, and all obstructive elements removed. I felt that no effort, care, or thought would be too great if it would only produce the desired results, by securing health, beauty, intelligence, and long life in man, to the utmost ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... and there was no moving you! There was some obscurity about this saying; but no doubt its esoteric meaning was, that once you accounted for anything by direct Divine interposition, you stood committed to a controversial attitude which would render you an obstructive to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the inner part of Sulla's house. The next thing was a meeting of the senate on the 14th. Clodius stayed at home: Marcellinus[408] was splendid: all were keen. Metellus[409] talked the business out by an obstructive speech, aided by Appius, and also, by Hercules! by your friend on whose firmness you wrote me such a wonderfully true letter! Sestius[410] was fuming. Afterwards the fellow vows vengeance on the city if his election is stopped. Marcellinus's resolution having been exposed for public perusal ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... came on deck was a study. It was alight with excitement; yet between the eyes two deep wrinkles of puzzlement quivered. Such a face the mathematician bends above his paper when some obstructive factor arises between him ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining and shipping is in the national interests—for international interests—rather than for the creation of that particularly passive, obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-being of the ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... oaths are obstructive and useless superstitions. No recruit will hesitate to pledge his word of honour to fight to the death for his country or for a cause with which he sympathizes; and that is all we require. There ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... weak monarchy. Lack of natural boundaries made national defense difficult. Civil war between the two peoples who composed the state and foreign war with the neighboring Germans worked havoc and distress. An obstructive parliament of great lords rendered effective administration impossible. The nobles possessed the property and controlled politics; in their hands the king gradually became a puppet. Poland seemed committed ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... he proceeded, "that the sincere friendship with which you still regard him would prevent any encouragement to continue an attachment, unhappily now hopeless and obstructive to his prospects." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... start as though intending to sweep past the log on which the three scouts were perched, Felix, waiting for some such move, paddled vigorously to head them off. This series of obstructive tactics, coupled with the demonstration made by the other boys, served to keep the hounds in check for a ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... had been able to gather from the butler, who had immediately repaired to Daphne's room for instructions, and was labouring under great excitement, my sister's orders had been but grudgingly obeyed. Mrs. Chapel had been ill-tempered and obstructive, and had made no attempt to disguise her suspicion of the chef. The latter had consequently determined to be as nasty as the circumstances allowed, had eyed her preparations for dinner with a marked contempt, and had communed visibly and audibly with himself in a manner which it was impossible ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... the Vale of Evesham is exceedingly hard, and in the town and some villages was formerly much contaminated. After great opposition from obstructive ratepayers, a splendid supply was obtained from the Cotswolds above Broadway, about six miles away, of much softer and really pure spring water. It comes in pipes by gravitation, so there is no expense of pumping; ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice, survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, institution, all so obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an old world, with the open and disengaged ground of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... members. In the profession of government, as in other professions, the sole idea of the majority is to do what they have been taught; and it requires a popular government to enable the conceptions of the man of original genius among them to prevail over the obstructive spirit of trained mediocrity. Only in a popular government (setting apart the accident of a highly intelligent despot) could Sir Rowland Hill have been victorious over the Post-office. A popular government installed him in the ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... insecurity of Miss Quincey's position better than Rhoda, who was fathoms deep in the confidence of the Head. She happened to know that Miss Cursiter was only waiting for an opportunity like this to rid herself for ever of the little obstructive. She knew too that once they had ceased to fill their particular notch in it, the world had no further use for people like Miss Quincey; that she, Rhoda Vivian, belonged to the new race whose eternal ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... and created much interest. But the discovery of a mining-country, some three hundred miles long, once immensely wealthy, and ready to become wealthy once more, is not likely to be accepted by every one. Jealous and obstructive officials "did not think much of it." Rivals opposed it with even less ceremony. A mild "ring" in Egypt attempted in vain to run the Hamamat and Dar-For mines (Chap. III.) against Midian. Consequently ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... to be anointed always, implying that you should never lose a chance of being happy when there is so much misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of conventionality when it is uncomfortable or obstructive; and outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of it. He is apt to accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy. Like the late Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a department of sin, and on curing a lame man, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... behind and around him is spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable, contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known. Here is the growing point of reality, the fons emanationis of truth and worth and being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of bulk, but in the enhancing ...
— Progress and History • Various
... must the mechanism of the body be cleansed and freed from obstructive and destructive materials, but the injured parts must be repaired, morbid growths and abnormal formations dissolved and eliminated and lesions in the bony ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... ill-organised; that there was much waste of labour and consequently of money in their establishments; that the Treasury had not risen to the occasion during the War, and the Committee had regretfully come to the conclusion that the War Office had been adopting a deliberately obstructive attitude." Mr. Runciman on the same occasion stated that "lax expenditure and loose control over distribution of public money went far beyond the immediate departments concerned. It went down into every factory, and the general effect was a scale of national extravagance ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... that is not being called on. It is such an enjoyment to sit through the courses with this prospect like a ten-pound weight on your digestive organs! If it were ever possible to refuse anything in this world, except by the concurrence of the three branches of government—the executive, the obstructive, and the destructive, I believe they are called—I should hope that we might some time have our speeches first, so that we could eat our dinner without fear ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... merits of the Cape scheme, I heard different views expressed. Nobody seemed opposed in principle to the division of the Legislature into two houses, but many condemned the existing Council as being usually composed of second-rate men, and apt to be obstructive in its tendencies. Some thought the Council was a useful part of the scheme of government, because it interposed delay in legislation and gave time for reflection and further debate. One point came out pretty clearly. No difficulty is deemed to arise from ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... polity was required to combat the theological; but now it has served its destructive purpose, and tends to become obstructive, for, having destroyed the old, it will not permit the new. Its chief dogma has always been liberty of conscience with the liberty of press and speech which that implies; but liberty of conscience really means little ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... ventured to name the Valley of Waterfalls, on account of the vast number of small but exquisitely beautiful falls seen there.' A narrow lane with high hedges leads round the shoulder of the hill to the steep little valley, where the Tavy jostles against obstructive boulders, and a high, narrow, unstable-looking bridge of tarred timber (sometimes called a 'clam' bridge) crosses the stream. Climbing up on the farther side, the road soon reaches the village of Mary Tavy. In reference to these villages a very old joke ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... internal improvement policy, the misfortunes of the Civil War and the extravagance of the Reconstruction period. It was in line with the general effort to readjust the economic and social policies of the entire country. It appealed to the people for the reason that unlike radicalism it was not obstructive of "democratic advance" in that it did not alienate the western section of the state through its attitude towards the Negro. Native in its origin, the democracy of the party was primarily intended for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... governing or senatorial aristocracy we find men of a great variety of character, from the old-fashioned nobilis, exclusive in society and obstructive in politics, to the man of individual genius and literary ability, whether of blue blood like Caesar, or like Cicero the scion of a municipal family which has never gained or sought political distinction. But for the purposes of this chapter we may discern and discuss two main types ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... earth that he has great difficulty in getting away from these souls. He succeeds by making promises to execute their desires—comparing his difficulty of advancing to the trouble a winner at dice experiences when bystanders crowd about him in obstructive congratulations and make his way impracticable until he gives some of his winnings to this one, ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... Such seems to be the probable fate of Japan, and its consummation is little more than a question of time. When all is accomplished, whether the civilising process will make them as a people wiser, better, or happier, is a problem of more doubtful solution. One thing is quite certain, that the obstructive principle which tends to the rejection of all Western innovations and proselytism as abominations, is much too active and vigorous in the Japanese mind to leave a hope that there will not be violent and obstinate resistance; and this inevitably leading to corresponding violence in the assault, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... "that the sincere friendship with which you still regard him would prevent any encouragement to continue an attachment, unhappily now hopeless and obstructive to his prospects." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Bill is of itself of utility, when it is of the greatest importance that Englishmen and Irishmen, Conservatives and Radicals, should be agreed as to the meaning of the new Fundamental Law. When, in short, a constitution for the country is being drawn up, no discussion which is rational can be obstructive. If a week or a fortnight of parliamentary time is expended in defining the meaning of the supreme authority of Parliament, or in deciding whether the Irish delegacy is or is not to be retained at Westminster, not a moment too much ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... of education, of travel, of jurisprudence, of torture and punishment, of social ranks, of the relation of the individual to the state, of the state to the family, and of religion to the family, were more or less defective and unsuited to the new civilization. Before this new movement all obstructive ideas, however, sanctioned by antiquity, have had to give way. The Japanese of to-day look, as it were, upon a new earth and a new heaven. Those of forty years ago would be amazed, not only at the enormous changes in the externals, life and government, but also at the transformation ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... who insisted on the payment of interest and even the principal when it was due. So they elected a Populist legislature and passed a law providing that a mortgagee could not foreclose his mortgage under two years. They did this by stay laws and by requiring an obstructive procedure in collection of debts. As a result, capital fled the state as men would flee yellow fever. When there was no money at all left in the state and they found that they couldn't get any, they began to recognize the benefit in money loaned on mortgages. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... well therefore be that, in the degree of permeability of matter by the Ether, when we can calculate it, will be found the explanation of what we call Gravitation between two masses; they are each shielding the other from Ether pressure, in its own direction, with an obstructive force equal to its mass. The reason why the earth appears to attract us, is that it is shielding us from a certain amount of pressure in its direction; and we know that we are also apparently attracting every ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... as he came on deck was a study. It was alight with excitement; yet between the eyes two deep wrinkles of puzzlement quivered. Such a face the mathematician bends above his paper when some obstructive factor arises between ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Now then, young Obstructive, still playing the sentry, Where nobody wants you to watch or mount guard? Are you to rule everyone's exit and entry? Clear out, my young friend, or with you 'twill go hard. Yon Portuguese Tappertit, turn it up, do! D'ye think I'll be stopped by a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... for Ireland, which movement was started in the "seventies," was gaining ground, and every election returned to the House more members pledged to its support. Those who were bent upon obtaining Home Rule at any cost used obstructive means against other legislation to gain their object, but as yet the movement was confined to the members who had been elected by ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... a start as though intending to sweep past the log on which the three scouts were perched, Felix, waiting for some such move, paddled vigorously to head them off. This series of obstructive tactics, coupled with the demonstration made by the other boys, served to keep the hounds in check for a certain length ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... "drawn from ye quick." We see the Molesworths and Cantilupes of the day parading the Park; we watch Brougham fretting at a hearing in the Lords, or Peel holding forth to the Commons (where the Irish members are already obstructive); we squeeze in at the Haymarket to listen to Jenny Lind, or we run down the river to Greenwich Fair, and visit "Mr. Richardson, his show." Many years after, in the "Bird's Eye Views of Society," which appeared in the early numbers of the "Cornhill Magazine," Mr. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... effectually screened by water from external attack, it is screened in a way that permits its normal political development to go on internally without those manifold military hinderances that have ordinarily been so obstructive in the history of civilization. Hence we not only see why, after the Norman Conquest had operated to increase its unity and its strength, England enjoyed a far greater amount of security and was far more peaceful ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... begin (For Rome, I've heard historians say, Was only partly finished in A day) In men of sentiments sublime 'Tis possible we yet may trace The influence of mellowing Time And PLACE:— O who can tell? Ere Labour rouse Its ever-multiplying hordes To mend or end th' obstructive House Of Lords, And bid aristocrats begone, And their hereditary pelf Bestow with generous hand upon Itself— Why, Mr. George,—his threats forgot Which Earls and Viscounts cowering hear,— Himself may be, as like as not, ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... spiritual growth. It takes a full-grown mind to reach it. It takes a full-grown heart to feel it. The unity is always waiting at the top. Religious progress is like the ascent of a hill from various sides. Below there is division, obstructive underbrush, perplexity; but as the top is neared there is ever a closer approach of man to man; and at the summit there is the same view for all, and that view is a view all round. The climbers attain to the measure of the stature of Christ, and they attain ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... society. He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle; but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendor, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive defendants, who impeded, by their want of skill, the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate. How different the surrounding scene! A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to sovereigns, who had given ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... and the coroner, standing a trifle back of her chair, shook his head at the obstructive juryman, and asked her in a commonplace voice what the hogs had to ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... for the transfer of freight from Greenville to Bay Ridge will relieve the inner waters of the harbor of a large volume of obstructive car-float traffic. There appears to be no reason why this traffic should not be eventually conducted through tunnels under the outer harbor, should future transportation conditions justify the enormous cost ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... which makes us very ready to believe what it is on other grounds convenient to us to believe. Nobody attributes to pure malevolence the heartiness with which the great corporation of lawyers, for example, resist the removal of superfluous and obstructive forms in their practice; they have come to look on such forms as indispensable safeguards. Hence powerful teachers and preachers of all kinds have been spontaneously inclined to suppose a necessity, which had no real existence, of preserving as much as ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Dixon assured her the gardener who was also the groom was sleeping in the house, and the horse was in the stable. She had only to wake Mrs. Dixon—he showed her where and how. In the dark corridor, amid all its obstructive lumber, these two people who had never seen each other before, man and woman, took anxious counsel for the help of an unconscious third, a complete stranger to both ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Huggins-series of hydrogen-lines imprinted themselves on the plate.[611] Meanwhile M. Deslandres was enabled, by fitting quartz lenses to his spectroscope, and substituting a reflecting for a refracting telescope, to get rid of the obstructive action of glass upon the shorter light-waves, and thus to widen the scope of his inquiry into the peculiarities of those derived from prominences.[612] As the result, not only all the nine white-star lines were photographed from a brilliant sun-flame, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... you to give us a verdict of Not Guilty, to send us back to our homes and to stamp your brand of disapprobation on this prosecution, which is degrading religion by associating it with all that is penal, obstructive, and loathsome; I ask you to let us go away from here free men, and so make it impossible that there ever should again be a prosecution for blasphemy; I ask you to have your names inscribed in history as the last jury that decided for ever that great and grand ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... There was some obscurity about this saying; but no doubt its esoteric meaning was, that once you accounted for anything by direct Divine interposition, you stood committed to a controversial attitude which would render you an obstructive to liberal thought. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... they sat, commanded a comprehensive view of the crops of Lisconnel, its potatoes and oats, green and gold, meshed in their grey stone fences, and flecked with obstructive boulders and laboured cairns. In the middle of the Ryans' neighbouring field there is a block of quartzite, as big as a small turf-stack, which gleamed exceedingly white from amongst the deep muffling greenery of the potato-plants. ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... exhibited there, and created much interest. But the discovery of a mining-country, some three hundred miles long, once immensely wealthy, and ready to become wealthy once more, is not likely to be accepted by every one. Jealous and obstructive officials "did not think much of it." Rivals opposed it with even less ceremony. A mild "ring" in Egypt attempted in vain to run the Hamamat and Dar-For mines (Chap. III.) against Midian. Consequently the local Press was dosed ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... ship-owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting upon high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining and shipping is in the national interests—for international interests—rather than for the creation of that particularly passive, obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-being of the common ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... apt to excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice, survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, institution, all so obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an old world, with the open and disengaged ground of the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the chief difficulty. There were few of this literal interpretation and heroic texture. The real difficulty was created by men of a very different character and in much greater numbers, sincere in varying degrees, but deliberately, passionately and unscrupulously obstructive, bent on baulking the national will and making anything like reasonable treatment of them impossible. It would require saints, not men, to deal without occasional lapses from strict equity with such infuriating folk. Mr. BEGBIE'S book is unfair in its emphasis, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all lands,—here is the church militant in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... as we had been able to gather from the butler, who had immediately repaired to Daphne's room for instructions, and was labouring under great excitement, my sister's orders had been but grudgingly obeyed. Mrs. Chapel had been ill-tempered and obstructive, and had made no attempt to disguise her suspicion of the chef. The latter had consequently determined to be as nasty as the circumstances allowed, had eyed her preparations for dinner with a marked contempt, and had communed visibly and audibly with himself in a manner which it was impossible ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... admit, there were in that world a great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses. Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted—indeed (as his famous and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... idea of the League of Free Nations has secure possession of the British mind. There is quite naturally a sustained opposition to it in all the fastnesses of aggressive imperialism. Such papers as the Times and the Morning Post remain hostile and obstructive to the expression of international ideas. Most of our elder statesmen seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing during the years of wildest change the world has ever known. But in the general mind of the British peoples the movement ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... record where the mist hath been. Boots it to us if Shakspeare erred like man? Why idly question that most mystic life? Eno' the giver in his gifts to scan; To bless the sheaves with which thy fields are rife, Nor, blundering, guess through what obstructive clay The glorious corn-seed struggled ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... against," was [Ch] mound-fang; "to hinder" was [Ch] woman-fang. This last example may seem a little strange until we remember that man must have played the principal part in the development of writing, and that from the masculine point of view there is something essentially obstructive and unmanageable in woman's nature. It may be remarked, by the way, that the element "woman" is often the determinative in characters that stand for unamiable qualities, e.g. [Ch][Ch] "jealous," [Ch][Ch] "treacherous," [Ch] "false" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... one set of partisans, and absolutely harmless by another. Somewhere between lies the truth. If any human being has actually been bitten by a heloderma, the event has either escaped notice or has been so hedged about with obstructive legend as to have forfeited scientific credence. But the saurian itself has been studied and dissected, and its venom has been analyzed. The venom is related to snake poison, but is neither crotaline nor elapine. From animal experiments it is thought ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... irrespective of partners. He had been waiting long to hear her speak, and when at length her voice did reach his ears, it was the revelation of a strange matter to find how great a thing that small event had become to him. He knew the old utterance—rapid but not frequent, an obstructive thought causing sometimes a sudden halt in the midst of a stream of words. But the features by which a cool observer would have singled her out from others in his memory when asking himself what she was like, was a peculiar ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... sufficient supply of negroes, and certainly not so many as smaller industrial towns, although the railroads and a few of the industrial concerns of the locality have had labor agents in the South. Yet, in spite of the difficulties because of the obstructive tactics adopted in certain southern communities to prevent the negro exodus, they have nevertheless succeeded in bringing several thousand negroes into this district. "One company, for instance," says Epstein, ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... known with the sense-organs; as e.g. any action which, in the case of the apprehension of a species or of one's own face, causes connexion between the organ of sight and an individual of the species, or a looking-glass. Or it would be such as to remove some obstructive impurity in the mind of the knowing person; of this kind is the action of calmness and self- restraint with reference to scripture which is the means of apprehending the highest reality. Moreover, even if ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... and slaughter and bloodshed were relegated to the executioner. Incredible as it seems, it is said that from his windows this king could look out upon an avenue of gibbets upon which hung the bodies of his enemies. The humorous spirit in which he disposed of obstructive nobles is illustrated by a note to an unsuspecting victim. "Fair cousin, come and give us your advice. We have need of so wise a head as yours." And in the morning the fair cousin's wise head was in a basket ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... his life, as well as by his obstructive buildings in the Palais-Royal, the Duke of Orleans had lost favor with the public; his protest and his banishment restored him at once to his popularity. The Parliament piled remonstrance upon remonstrance, every day more and more haughty in form as well as in substance. Dipping ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... over and yielding under the horses' feet. Beyond these plains, the country changed for the worse, and became sandy and scrubby. On the 16th of May he encountered a new description of scrub that grew in a very obstructive manner, and is now known as Stuart's ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... been known to do anything for herself. She has gone through life, accepting everybody's help, and adopting everybody's opinions. A more hopeless person, in a spiritual point of view, I have never met with—there is absolutely, in this perplexing case, no obstructive material to work upon. Aunt Ablewhite would listen to the Grand Lama of Thibet exactly as she listens to Me, and would reflect his views quite as readily as she reflects mine. She found the furnished house at Brighton by stopping at an hotel in London, composing ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... strife between good forces and evil forces. The good men must enlist on the side of the good forces. This religion especially approved all the economic virtues, and productive efforts, like the clearing of waste land, or other labor to increase favorable conditions and to overcome harmful or obstructive influences, were religious, and were counted as help ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... But, on the whole, this movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broad and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... our physicians to such men as are inclined to this malady, as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, dates, &c. honey and sugar. [1376] Some except honey; to those that are cold, it may be tolerable, but [1377] Dulcia se in bilem vertunt, (sweets turn into bile,) they are obstructive. Crato therefore forbids all spice, in a consultation of his, for a melancholy schoolmaster, Omnia aromatica et quicquid sanguinem adurit: so doth Fernelius, consil. 45. Guianerius, tract 15. cap. 2. Mercurialis, cons. 189. To these ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... millennium, among the most active forces in human nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive, an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of "cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted, elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... man of the world. Honour to human worth, in whatever form we find it! This man was true to his friends, true to his convictions,—and true without effort, as the magnet is to the north. He was ever found on the right side; helpful to it, not obstructive of it, in all ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... Legislature passed two very discreditable bills which would have been made positively infamous if it had not been for the active opposition of a few friends of liberty. One of these bills was designed to add to the stringency of the present obstructive medical law; the other was designed to assist the labors of Anthony Comstock in interrupting the circulation of popular physiological literature, under pretence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... up. She is very civil; but when I hint that Armine has study and health to consider, I see that in her eyes I am the worldly obstructive mother who serves as ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the Woman question. What he wanted was to emancipate the female mind from the yoke of superstition and of priestcraft. Time enough to talk about giving women votes when they were no longer the slaves of an obstructive religion. There were good things in the lecture, but, on the whole, it was flabby—flabby. A man who would discourse on this topic must be courageous; he must dare to shock and give offence. Now, if ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... a man who had gained and lost in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters, and, when I led him on, of the men also. The masters had been selfish and obstructive; the men selfish, silly, and light-headed. He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had been present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into question the wisdom ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... begin scheming around to direct my interests, aspirations, and efforts into some other channel from where I want them, as though, out of his own great wisdom, he knew much better than I what a blind man could do. If you want to learn just how small the imagination of mankind is and how obstructive to progress is their fool good-heartedness, go among them as a capable mind with a physical handicap. You'll size them up, yourself included, as the most blindly wall-butting set of blundering organisms that ever felt their way through ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... the normal rate in 1-foot Bray jets, growths of carbon soon appear, but do not obstruct the orifices during 100 hours' use; if, however, the gas-supply is checked till the flame becomes thick, the growths appear more quickly, and become obstructive after some 60 hours' burning. On the assumption that acetylene begins to polymerise at a temperature of 100 deg. C., Gaud calculates that polymerisation cannot cause blocking of the burners unless the speed of the passing gas is so far reduced that the burner is only ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... it went, and in this more favourable atmosphere, the buds are unfolding, and I am learning more and more of the love and wisdom which I always dimly saw and appreciated. It is the attitude of mind which is all-important, and my attitude, though critical, was never obstructive, ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... which are elected by L10 householders, which is yearly gaining power. The advent of Constitutional Government will depend entirely upon the progress of the colony; but at present it is far from being desirable, the elected members of the Council being distinctly the obstructive party, while the Governor and the Imperially appointed officials are the only persons who look beyond the squatting interest to that of the colony as ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Madison from Philadelphia. Madison, aided by Edward Carrington and young Henry Lee, the famous leader of light horse, succeeded in every division in carrying the vote of Virginia in favour of the Constitution and against the obstructive measures of the elder Lee. The objection was first raised that the new Constitution would put an end to the Continental Congress, and that in recommending it to the states for consideration Congress would be virtually asking them to terminate its own existence. Was it right ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... authority as a system of cosmogony being discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of the obvious meaning of its writer. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To knowledge its value has been negative, leading, in rougher ages than ours, to physical, and even in our own' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... lends a readier countenance to gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the rules of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... going, and left them— then I say, If his machine interfered with his answering the prayer of a single child, he would sweep it from him—not to bring back chaos, but to make room for his child. But order is divine, and cannot be obstructive to its own higher ends; it must subserve them. Order, free order, neither chaos, nor law unpossessed and senseless, is the home of Thought. If you say There can be but one perfect way, I answer, Yet the perfect way to bring a thing so far, to a certain crisis, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... notion of psychology as the Morphology and DEVELOPMENT-DOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER, as I conceive of it. The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced, and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding, and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator, it has "the heart" against it even a doctrine of the reciprocal ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have the misfortune to come under his sweeping denunciations, because they are inconsistent with his ideal of a peasant Empire, but he recognises amongst them degrees of depravity. Some are simply obstructive, whilst others are actively prejudicial to the public welfare. Among these latter a special object of aversion is Prince S——, because he not only possesses very large estates, but at the same time has aristocratic ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the granting of the Magna Charta, thus firmly of the liberties of England has been accomplished by bitter and fierce struggles; the obstructive forces were strong, but yielded in the end to the onward sweep of liberty directed by the aggressive spirit of intelligence, manhood, and humanity. At the end of the sixteenth century this much had been gained for freedom. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... over before a bitter drop rose in the Imperial cup. Barbarians from beyond the sea came forward to claim the right of personal interview with the sovereign of all under Heaven. The story of the first audience is still fresh in our memories; the trivial difficulties introduced by obstructive statesmen at every stage of the proceedings, questions of etiquette and precedence raised at every turn, until finally the kotow was triumphantly rejected and five bows substituted in its stead. Every one saw the curt paragraph in the Peking Gazette, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... slavery into the territories, but the "providence of God imposed upon it far larger duties." The Republican party gave "honest, wise, safe, liberal, progressive American counsel" and the Democrats "unwise, unsafe, illiberal, obstructive, un-American counsel." He remembered the Republican nominating convention of 1880 as a scene of "indescribable sublimity," comparable in "grandeur and impressiveness to the mighty torrent ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... usual obstructive person in the train who required to be logically convinced first of the necessity for disturbing himself; he put his head angrily out of a window near Mark's: 'Here, guard!' he shouted importantly; 'what's all this? ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... worship of God. (e) But the grosser, who place men's traditions above them. (f) And they greatest of all, who put bitter for sweet, and darkness for light. All these things we must shun and avoid, as things absolutely obstructive to good works. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in the Vale of Evesham is exceedingly hard, and in the town and some villages was formerly much contaminated. After great opposition from obstructive ratepayers, a splendid supply was obtained from the Cotswolds above Broadway, about six miles away, of much softer and really pure spring water. It comes in pipes by gravitation, so there is no ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... force ten years before, although a decided improvement on the old state of affairs, did not produce universal satisfaction.[3] The constitution of the legislative council was complained of, and it was described as an obstructive body which disregarded the wishes of the people. Bills of the utmost importance, which had been passed by large majorities in the House of Assembly, and which were demanded by the people, were frequently rejected by the council without being ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—that either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we too ossified and became obstructive in ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive whom he ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the Gulf of Pechihli. Keshen had gained a breathing space by procrastination in the north, and he resorted to the same tactics at Canton. Days expanded into weeks, and at last orders were issued for an advance up the Canton River, as it had become evident that the Chinese were not only bent on an obstructive policy, but were making energetic efforts to assemble a large army. On January 7, 1841, orders were consequently issued for an immediate attack on the Bogue forts, which had been placed in a state of defense, and which were manned by large numbers of Chinese. Fortunately for us, the Chinese ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... thick end, by a row of deer's horns. A single long horn is fastened in the centre, the chief use of which is to stick it in the earth when the club is rested. Only a few races of upper and lower Ucayali and the Sensis use this formidable weapon, which is very inconvenient and obstructive in passing through thick forests. The macana, or wooden sword, is made of strong chunta. The color of this wood is a deep blackish brown; it is very hard and heavy, and is always used for implements which require great durability and strength. The macana is about four feet long, one ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... always ready to criticise, and it was so much the easier for him that he had not the least bent towards self-criticism. For the latter supposes some degree of truth in the inward parts, and that is obstructive to the indulgence of the former tendency. As to himself, he would be hand and glove at a moment's notice with any man who looked a gentleman, and made himself agreeable; nor whatever he might find him to be, was ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Despite wide territories and a succession of able rulers, Poland was a weak monarchy. Lack of natural boundaries made national defense difficult. Civil war between the two peoples who composed the state and foreign war with the neighboring Germans worked havoc and distress. An obstructive parliament of great lords rendered effective administration impossible. The nobles possessed the property and controlled politics; in their hands the king gradually became a puppet. Poland seemed committed to feudal society and feudal government at the very time when ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... long as youth keeps its head it will be the better for the successive hurdles which obstructive age, or even middle-age, puts in its path. A few stumbles will teach it care ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... seriously bent on doing as much as possible for the recovery of the Palatinate. Just at that time Richelieu had stepped into power, and he expressly directed the policy of France to the destruction of the position which the Spaniards had occupied on the Middle Rhine. In spite of the obstructive efforts of a party which had both ecclesiastical and political objects in view, he concluded the arrangements for the marriage of the Princess to the Prince of Wales without any delay, even without waiting for the last word ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Duerer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... is just possible for things to be arranged so that all parties may be happy in their way without much hubbub. Mind, it is not I who have willed it so. I am, and I am forced to be, passive. But I will not be obstructive." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... about quarter size, was completed when my attention was called to an American invention, in which the same result was stated to be attained more effectively by blowing the mercury spray through the triturated material by means of a steam jet. I had already encountered a difficulty, since found so obstructive by experimentalists in the same direction, that is, the getting of the mercury back into its liquid metallic form. This difficulty I am now convinced can be largely obviated by my own device of using a very weak solution of sulphuric acid (it can hardly ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... parsonage. The reality struck Helga. She was much interested, and Hardy saw that she understood and entered into everything. There was nothing to suggest or to alter in Macdonald's plans, and Hardy at once arranged for their execution. The Danish bailiff was at first obstructive, but Hardy's quiet, decisive manner changed the position, and gradually it dawned upon him that the place would be greatly improved, and that the residence of an English family for part of the year at ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... cases in which a pulmotor would be used, such as apnea from electric shocks, etc. For obstructive dyspnea and asphyxia, tracheotomy is the procedure of choice, and the skillful tracheotomist would be justified in preferring tracheotomy for the other class of cases, insufflating the oxygen and amyl nitrite through the tracheotomic ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Rosamond's anger; but I imagine that when I occur to Camilla's mind, it is as the obstructive old hag, who once stood in her way; and so, without any formed designs, whatever she says of me ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nor Tips was very visible at the distance of three yards, owing to a dense fog which prevailed. It was one of those white, luminous, dry fogs which are not at all depressing to the spirits, though obstructive to the eyes, and which are generally, if not ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... to ride 150 miles. He knew that there were suspicions abroad in the Transvaal concerning him, but he expected to get through to Johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. But a telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut. It spread the news of his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the Boer farmers were riding hard from every direction to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... charge us with a wish to be wise above what is written, we merely reply: There are unwritten revelations which are nevertheless true. Besides, we are not sure that at least an intimation of other races than those of the earth is not already on record. Not to prove any position, but to check obstructive criticism, we refer to the divine who is said to have witnessed in magnificent apocalypse some closing scenes of the human drama. If he also heard in sublime oratorio a prelude of this widely extended glory, our vision may not be a "baseless fabric." ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... with all the eloquence and buoyancy at his command for freedom and tolerance, it remained a fact that he regarded liberalism as nothing more than a newspaper term, a means of keeping men busy who were too indolent to think for themselves, and a source of obstructive annoyance to the openly hated but secretly ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the Zimmerman note was published, President Wilson asked Congress to authorize the arming of American merchant ships for their own defense. A small minority in Congress by their obstructive tactics prevented the passage of the desired resolution before Congress expired on March 4. On March 12 the President announced that this country had determined to place an armed guard on all United States ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... perceived that to obtain the desired end, every particular must be studied and provided for, so that all elements of enduring success should be united, and all obstructive elements removed. I felt that no effort, care, or thought would be too great if it would only produce the desired results, by securing health, beauty, intelligence, and long life in man, to the utmost extent that ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
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