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Impotence   /ˈɪmpətəns/   Listen
Impotence

noun
1.
The quality of lacking strength or power; being weak and feeble.  Synonyms: impotency, powerlessness.
2.
An inability (usually of the male animal) to copulate.  Synonym: impotency.



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"Impotence" Quotes from Famous Books



... days is mostly impotence! Lust and passion and love and marriage! Why do our dull insular minds mix up these four entirely separate notions? And how can we jump with such goat-like agility from one circle of thought into another without ever noticing the change in ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... after opposing him at every turn, suddenly beckon him up the street and into his cabin just as Chatwourth and his gang came down? And why, if he was innocent of any share in the plot, did Diffenderfer refuse to testify to the facts? Denver ground his teeth at the thought of his own impotence, shut up there like a dog in the pound. He was helpless, and ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... loose and negligent, The sight on't wou'd beget a warm desire In Souls, whom Impotence and Age had chill'd. —This must ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... becoming daily more difficult, and I soon passed from utter impotence to a state of inexplicable agitation. Every morning I arose with fine resolutions and grand projects of work; only to go to bed that night without having accomplished anything. I spent hours leaning on my balcony, or wandering through the network ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... from me. I felt it with an impotence of despair that was benumbing. Yet I could not speak of it, for at first I could hardly tell if she knew of what was taking place. Indeed, at this moment, in thinking it over, I do not believe that for some time she had any definite cognisance of the fact that ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... equally intolerable to British subjects." Chatham next drew a startling yet not unfaithful picture of the army of General Gage, which he represented as placed in a dangerous position, as being penned up and pining in inglorious inactivity, and as being alike an army of impotence and contempt, as well as of irritation and vexation. He then proceeded to declare that activity would be even worse than this inglorious inactivity, and that the first drop of blood shed in this civil and unnatural ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... knew we had been telegraphing him since our arrest and my impotence made me speechless with rage. Douglas took advantage of my condition ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce

... but the innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... Dyson came slowly towards him. There was something in his appearance which terrified Masters. He raised his fist to strike the door. He was a fighting man, but he felt a sudden sense of impotence. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... to cases closely analogous with those just {136} given, but different, inasmuch as individual plants alone of the species are self-impotent. This self-impotence does not depend on the pollen or ovules being in a state unfit for fertilisation, for both have been found effective in union with other plants of the same or of a distinct species. The fact of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... that risk, and is not caught. Try not to become impatient with me! Anger is impotence! Explanations that do not explain are part and parcel of all religions and most sciences; therefore why lose your temper? Your friend is free to come and go, but must take his chance of being caught. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... felt all that a man may be supposed to feel, who had but too much reason to think himself betrayed, as well as disappointed. He hastened to Bath, where he found a still more furious lover, Mr. Mathews, inquiring at the house every particular of the affair, and almost avowing, in the impotence of his rage, the unprincipled design which this summary step had frustrated. In the course of their conversation, Charles Sheridan let fall some unguarded expressions of anger against his brother, which this gentleman, who seems to have been eminently qualified for ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... anger and heightened by the sense of their own inferiority, are always characterized by impotence. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... possible danger of unmerited destitution. And although large economic organizations will continue, as they are bound to do, there will be a diffusion of power which will take away the sense of individual impotence from which men and women ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell

... were things impossible for Count Simon of Sagan to endure. Never before had he been twitted with impotence and failure. He could not survive so utter a defeat. A man to bear these things must be less thorough than the Count. He was too fierce, too imperious, to bear so great a reverse. If he must be put to shame before the world, if even a paltry captain of the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... towards it ought to be infused by the circumstances attendant on the trust. It ought to be environed with dignity, authority, and consideration, and it ought to lead to glory. The office of execution is an office of exertion. It is not from impotence we are to expect the tasks of power. What sort of person is a king to command executory service, who has no means whatsoever to reward it:—not in a permanent office; not in a grant of land; no, not in a pension of fifty ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the husband was invariably maintained, to deliver his name and family from the disgrace of adultery: the list of mortal sins, either male or female, was curtailed and enlarged by successive regulations, and the obstacles of incurable impotence, long absence, and monastic profession were allowed to rescind the matrimonial obligation. Whoever transgressed the permission of the law was subject to various and heavy penalties. The woman was stripped of her wealth and ornaments, without excepting ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... nervous system was writhing with the feeling of impotence. Mechanically, unresisting now, he followed his enemy down the main staircase of the chateau and out through the wide open gates. He could not bring himself to believe that he had been so completely foiled, that this impudent adventurer ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... living present. Walt Whitman stood forth as an innovator into such realms, where the rigor of conditions demanded an abstract compliance with rules which were based on absolute truths, and where a swerving from them was evidence of impotence. His unconventional forms, the rhymeless rhythm of his verses, which, in appearance, resembled more a careless prosody than a delicately attuned poesy,—this alone was enough to provoke, at first, an incredulous smile, even among ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various

... extent of their nautical abilities: long may they remain in their present state." The last sentence reveals his intuitive appreciation of the fact that the Spain of that day could in no true sense be the ally of Great Britain; for, at the moment he penned the wish, the impotence or defection of their allies would leave the British fleet actually inferior to the enemy in those waters. He never forgot these impressions, nor the bungling efforts of the Spaniards to form a line of battle. Up to the end of his life the prospect of a Spanish war involved ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... Transport and Alacrity. Sir Walter Rawleigh was quoted in a Letter (of a very ingenious Correspondent of mine) on this Subject. That Author, who had lived in Courts, Camps, travelled through many Countries, and seen many Men under several Climates, and of as various Complections, speaks of our Impotence to resist the Wiles of Women, in very severe Terms. His words ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... fancy I do?" cried Rufin. "Man, I am terrified to find what goes on in the world. And I thought I knew life!" With a gesture of hopelessness and impotence he turned on his ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... early nineteenth century came the stirring of a people long crushed into impotence. The mother country was in the throes of a great war against the foreign invader. Deserted and abandoned by its Spanish sovereign, and ruled, where it was ruled at all by civilians, by a body of self-elected revolutionary doctrinaires, the colonists of the various Viceroyalties of America ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... is how the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... affirm that our idea of the Infinite First Cause is grounded on an intuitional or subjective faith, necessitated by an "impotence of thought"—that is, by a mental inability to conceive an absolute limitation or an infinite illimitation, an absolute commencement or an infinite non-commencement. Both contradictory opposites are equally incomprehensible and inconceivable ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... his name the satisfactory credit of 564l. 11s. 7d. One advantage which the good attorney derived from his double account with the rival institutions was, that whenever convenient he could throw one of these certificates of destitution and impotence sadly under the eyes of a client in want of ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... it does not diminish grief, alters its character. At first we stretch out our hands in very blindness of heart, as if trying to draw back again those whom we have lost. But, after a season, when the impotence of such efforts has become too sensibly felt, finding that they will not come back to us, a strange fascination arises which yearns after some mode of going to them. There is a gulf fixed which childhood ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... fides." There is no doubt that this signifies that he was induced, by the serene aspect of the waters, to venture on the treacherous sea, which having suddenly become troubled, the boy, in mortal fear, and in his impotence to still the tempest, has lost his head, his hope, and the power of his arm. But let us ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... said Mr. Macey, pausing, and smiling in pity at the impotence of his hearer's imagination—"why, I was all of a tremble: it was as if I'd been a coat pulled by the two tails, like; for I couldn't stop the parson, I couldn't take upon me to do that; and yet I said to myself, I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast married, 'cause the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... cut off, and he escaped with all his guns and his losses were comparatively slight. His burghers were, as usual after a lost battle, demoralized and disheartened for the time being, but not, as was thought by the British Army, scared by their reverses into abject impotence. From the time of the occupation of Bloemfontein guerilla had been gradually taking the place of organized warfare, of which Bergendal was the last act, and which the burghers saw that they could not hope to wage successfully. The ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... fullest and sanest there. Fearful consequences follow any corrupting or abusing or perverting of sex. The poet stands in the garden of the world naked and not ashamed. It is a great comfort that he could do it in this age of hectic lust and Swinburnian impotence,—that he could do it and not be ridiculous. To have done it without offense would have been proof that he had failed utterly. Let us be shocked; it is a wholesome shock, like the douse of the sea, or the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... His wrists, tied behind him, gave him great pain; and since his ankles were also fastened and the end of the rope drawn taut and attached to that binding his wrists, he was rendered absolutely helpless. For one of his fiery temperament this physical impotence was maddening, and because his own handkerchief had been tied tightly around his head so as to secure between his teeth a wooden stopper of considerable size which possessed an unpleasant chemical taste and smell, even speech ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... account of its enmity to image-worship, while the Muscovites carry their adoration of images to idolatry. Finally, whether from superstition or rivalry of interests, they have forbidden them their country: the Jews were obliged to put up with their contempt, which their impotence repaid with hatred; but they detested our pillage still more. Enemies of all, spies to both armies, they sold one to the other from resentment or fear, according to occasion, and because there is nothing that ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... in such moments offered a terrible image of helpless impotence; the paleness of death would overspread his features, his back was as if it were broken, and he lost his control over every limb. His eyes only continued to move, and now and then a shudder shook his frame. His people ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... askance if they happen to meet with a true man in music. They pretend to be shocked, as though they had come across something improper. The spirit of their shyness, which originally served to conceal their own impotence, now attempts the defamation of other people's potency. Defamatory insinuations and calumny find ready acceptance with the representatives of German Philistinism, and appear to be at home in that mean and paltry state of things ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... of the table as his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing. "Circumstances have arisen—circumstances beyond my control," he said and paused, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... old words to the old tune. She sang them with a new power and sweetness. It touched the listeners in that rose-scented church and revealed to them the meaning of the old hymn. The dependence upon a divine guide, the utter impotence of mortal strength, breathed so persuasively in the second verse that many who heard Phoebe sing it mentally ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... footsteps upon the road above him—footsteps that sounded familiar. Clouds had drifted across the sky and darkened it, but he had heard that tread too often to mistake it now when every nerve was strung to its highest tension. A cold sweat broke out upon him in the impotence of his wrath. ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... ropes, binding my hands cruelly behind my back, and swathing my legs till not a muscle could move. My pistols hung idle, and the ropes drove the hafts into my flesh. This is the end, thought I, and I did not even grieve at my impotence. My courage now was of the passive kind, not to act but to endure. Always I kept telling myself that I must be brave, for Ringan had praised my courage, and I had a conviction that nothing that man could do would shake me. Thanks ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... that he has paid his laborers, that he owes them nothing more, that he has nothing to gain by putting himself at the service of others, while his own occupations claim his attention,—he refuses, I say, to aid others in getting a foothold, as he was aided in getting his own; and when, in the impotence of their isolation, these poor laborers are compelled to sell their birthright, he—this ungrateful proprietor, this knavish upstart—stands ready to put the finishing touch to their deprivation and their ruin. And you think ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... that had been stunned to impotence by his violence—stirred within her at his words and awoke. Yet it was scarcely of her own volition that she ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... woman. To be sure, they understood Greek plays a great deal better than she did; but she was penetrated with the liveliest impatience of their dulness all the same. Mrs Morgan, however, like most people who are in advance of their age, felt her utter impotence against that blank wall of dull resistance. She could not make them see into the heart of things as she did. She had to wait until they had attacked the question in the orthodox way of siege, and made gradual entrance by dint of hard ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... autocratic government, so I predict that the most potent contribution towards bringing about Christian union will come not from the recognized leaders of the Churches, but from the soldiers on active service who have been impressed with the impotence of the existing system to bring about that condition which represents the ideal of Christianity, and the answer to our Lord's prayer, 'that all may be ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss

... immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?" His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... account of that appearance we call the world," he wrote in Nature, "that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On the other hand, our evidence ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... harass'd him with strife, And deadly airs his strength did undermine. Then from his Abbey fades The sound beloved of his victorious breath; And light's fair nursling stupor first invades, And next the crowning impotence of death. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... indefatigably against this feeling of impotence and resignation. They infused a kind of passion into their work: a priest, when he despairs, struggles all the more fiercely. The fundamental policy of the Church is to march straight forward; even ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... gentleman of note In Rome, Maecenas,[20] somewhere wrote:— "Make me the poorest wretch that begs, Sore, hungry, crippled, clothed in rags, In hopeless impotence of arms and legs; Provided, after all, you give The one sweet liberty to live: I'll ask of Death no greater favour Than just ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... had been Jean Jacques' lot of late years, but the final revelation of his own impotence was overwhelming. When he began to stir about among his affairs, he was faced by the fact that the law stood in his way. He realized with inward horror his shattered egotism and natural vanity; he saw that he might just as well be in jail; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... all that he could for them, but perhaps it was not enough. He felt his weakness, his helpless impotence. They would slip away from him and be lost—perhaps forever. Already his sick heart saw them charmed, bewildered, poisoned, perishing in ways where his ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... rich must labor to possess their own, To feel their great abundance; and request Their humble friends to help them to be blest; To see their treasures, hear their glory told, And aid the wretched impotence of gold. But some, great souls! and touch'd with warmth divine, Give gold a price, and teach its beams to shine. All hoarded treasures they repute a load; Nor think their wealth their own, till well bestow'd. Grand reservoirs of public happiness, Through secret streams diffusively they ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... state of things now commemorated. Ryland's fervour increased—his eyes lighted up—his voice assumed the tone of passion. There was one man, he continued, who wished to alter all this, and bring us back to our days of impotence and contention:—one man, who would dare arrogate the honour which was due to all who claimed England as their birthplace, and set his name and style above the name and style of his country. I saw ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... shuddering, and he knew why: they shuddered at sight of what was behind him. He had never divined before that strange things hid themselves from men under pretence of being snow-clad mounds or swaying trees; but now they came slipping out from their harmless covers to follow him, and mock at his impotence to make a kindred Thing resolve to truer form. He knew the air behind him was thronged; he heard the hum of innumerable murmurings together; but his eyes could never catch them, they were too swift and nimble. Yet he knew they were there, because, on a backward glance, he saw the snow mounds ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... at work every minute and second of its life, are the subtle ones of molecular chemistry and atomic energetics. We know that such mental qualities as irritability and stupidity, fatigability, and the power to recover quickly or slowly from fatigue, sexual potency and impotence, apathy and enthusiasm are endocrine qualities. We know also that the thyroid dominant tends to be irritable and excitable, the pituitary deficient to be placid and gentle, the adrenal dominant to be assertive ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... a long and crushing reply to Job, gradually merges into fine descriptive but irrelevant poetry, and then suddenly calls for a rejoinder. The hero, humbled to the dust, exclaims[48] that he is vile and conscious of his impotence, and will lay his hand upon his mouth and open his lips no more. Here the matter should end, for Job has confessed himself vanquished. But no, Jahveh, instead of being touched by this meek avowal and self-humiliation, must needs address the human worm as if he had turned against ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon

... and sour disdain; Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile Obscenity should find, 530 Tho' wit and art conspire to move your mind; But Dulness with Obscenity must prove As shameful sure as Impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure wealth and ease Sprung the rank weed, and thriv'd with large increase: 535 When love was all an easy Monarch's care; Seldom at council, never in a war: Jilts rul'd the state, and statesmen farces writ; Nay wits had pensions, and young Lords had ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... guardian. There was not a single link missing in the chain of evidence which showed that a crime was in contemplation. Then, who was that butcher-like man whom Ezra was taking down with him? Tom could have torn his hair as he thought of his present impotence and of his folly in losing ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... these men behind the scenes, most of whom are quite unknown to fame. The creation of infant Emperors, allowed to bear the Imperial name in their infancy and youth, but compelled to abdicate on reaching manhood, was a common device for maintaining nominal Imperialism with actual impotence. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... history, started a revolt to replace the "Empire" by a republic. Though he failed in his object, two of Iturbide's generals joined the insurgents in demanding a restoration of the Congress—an act which, as the hapless "Emperor" perceived, would amount to his dethronement. Realizing his impotence, Iturbide summoned the Congress and announced his abdication. But instead of recognizing this procedure, that body declared his accession itself null and void; it agreed, however, to grant him a pension if he would leave the country and reside ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... of the bed. She had a long, strong, thin arm and it darted beneath and clutched. But it was not long enough to attain the corner where the kicking and screaming was going on. Her temper became fury before her impotence and her hideous realization of being made ridiculous by this baby of six. Two floors below the afterglow of the little dinner was going on. Suppose even far echoes of the screams should be heard and make her more ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... unforeseen, coming we know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy on our necks. Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe. Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realise their impotence: we have time and strength to do what we must, never what we will. Men go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools! Will all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves, enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous children, the impotence of personal abuse? Why seek to lay upon the head of this Cabinet officer or that, this Senator or that, the responsibility of temporary military defeats, when we are no more able to command and prevent reverses than are they? Or if in our superior wisdom we deem ourselves to be the better able ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the countenance of the physician while he examined the case in its new presentation. Much as he tried to control the expression of his face, he found it impossible. He felt too deeply concerned, and was too conscious of the frequent impotence of medicine, when administered with the ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur

... Euphrasia too! How will her gentle nature bear the shock Of a dear father, thus in ling'ring pangs A prey to famine, like the veriest wretch Whom the hard hand of misery hath grip'd! In vain she'll rave, with impotence of sorrow; Perhaps, provoke her fate: Greece arms in vain, All's ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy

... eternal Godhead of the Son of Man: denied that He is essentially very and eternal God. This fundamental heresy found itself hopelessly confuted by the whole tenor of the Gospel, which nevertheless it assailed with restless ingenuity: and many are the traces alike of its impotence and of its malice which have survived to our own times. It is a memorable circumstance that it is precisely those very texts which relate either to the eternal generation of the Son,—to His Incarnation,—or to the circumstances of His Nativity,—which have suffered most severely, and retain ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... if France is, I will not say to be regenerated, but to have fair play among the nations of Europe, I add one or two items to the programme. France must be saved from Paris, not by subterranean barracks and trains, the impotence of which we see to-day with a general in command of the military force, but by conceding to France its proportionate share of the power now monopolised by Paris. All this system of centralisation, equally tyrannical and corrupt, must be eradicated. Talk of examples from America, of which ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... leaders were particularly distressed by this form of discrimination, which, considering the armed forces' persistent declaration of impotence in the matter, seemed destined to remain a permanent condition of service life. "These problems involve factors which are not directly under the control of the Department of Defense," Assistant Secretary for Manpower Carlisle ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... They marred much by their interference; but they showed a splendid confidence in their own intuitions, a proud assertion of their own taste, which is the greatest evidence of aesthetic sincerity. On the contrary, our own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology are the symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned and less just, we might be more efficient. If our appreciation were less general, it might be more real, and if we trained our imagination into exclusiveness, it might ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... undue superiority, I do not think we shall succeed. There is enough common sense among our people to mitigate against any such misfortune, and we have only to recall the general election of 1905-6, when every morning paper in London, except the Daily News, was against us, to realise the impotence ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith

... Priam Farll, opulent though he was and illustrious, had sunk to a tragic impotence. He could do nothing for himself; and he could do nothing for Leek, because Leek refused both brandy and sandwiches, and the larder consisted solely of brandy and sandwiches. The man lay upstairs there, comatose, still, silent, waiting for the doctor who had promised to pay an evening ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... aggressions and extorted treaty concessions, Western nations boldly discussed the dismemberment of China as certain to come, and authors and journalists disputed as to which country should possess the richest parts of the Empire whose impotence to defend itself was taken for granted. Chinese ministers in Europe and America reported these discussions to their superiors in Peking. The English papers in China republished some of the articles and added many effective ones of their own, so that speedily all ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... Cicero have made us so well acquainted, there is no sufficient ground for asserting that Caesar was concerned in it.[194] That he was greatly concerned in the treatment of the conspirators there is no doubt. He had probably learned to appreciate the rage, the madness, the impotence of Catiline at then propel worth. He too, I think, must have looked upon Cicero as a meddling, over-virtuous busybody; as did even Pompey when he returned from the East. What practical use could there be in such a man at such a time—in one who ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... that lay between them made him keenly alive to the evil construction which might be placed upon her having fled from home on the same boat which carried him. He realized, with a profound feeling of impotence, that if they were lost together he should be forever unable to explain or to dispel the suspicion to which her presence might give rise; he felt with keen bitterness how useless would be all his cleverness, and his heart swelled with rage at the thought that ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... considered how I should work during the afternoon; at night I lay awake thinking of what I might do to attain a better result. But my efforts availed me nothing; it was like one who, falling, stretches his arms for help and grasps the yielding air. How terrible are the languors and yearnings of impotence! how wearing! what an aching void they leave in the heart! And all this I suffered until the burden ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... let loose upon Parnell. Not all at once did the question of his continued leadership arise. He had led his people, with an incomparable skill and intrepidity, not unequally matched with the genius of Gladstone himself, from a position of impotence and contempt to the supreme point where success was within their reach. A General Election, big with the fate of Ireland, was not far off. Was the matchless leader who had led his people so far and so well to disappear and to leave his country the prey of warring factions—he who had ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... perceive that neither the impotence of age nor the affliction of blindness, could turn aside the murdering fangs of these Babylonish monsters. The first of these unfortunates was of the parish of Barking, aged sixty-eight, a painter and a cripple. The ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... said the prince, "who have no rivals? We are in a place where impotence precludes malice, and where all envy is ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... (according to von Brning), 'would probably be back soon'; but how soon? Beyond Norderney lay Memmert. How to probe its secret? The ardour it had roused in me was giving way to a mortifying sense of impotence. The sight of the Kormoran, with her crew preparing for sea, was a pointed comment on my diplomacy, and most of all on my ridiculous survey of the dykes. When all was said and done we were protgs of von Brning, and dogged ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... stood at the window. The moon was coming up behind the trees, a great red moon just past the full, misshapen and lopsided, that seemed to be laughing at them. He stamped his foot in angry impotence. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... along with those of an early and simple state of society. Read the English Parliamentary reports, on the condition of the manufacturing operatives, and the children employed in factories. And such is the impotence of man to remedy the evils which the condition of his existence has imposed on him, that it is much to be doubted whether the attempts by legislation to improve their situation, will not aggravate its evils. They resort to this excessive labor as ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... that what ain't cowards here are thieves,'" roared the Cap'n, beside himself, ashamed, enraged at his impotence before this boastful fool and his grim bulwark. His impulse was to cast caution to the winds and rush upon Luce. But reflection told him that, in this flush of his childish resentment and new prominence, Luce was capable of anything. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... of the alternating figures in a Swiss weather vane the King of England had swung out into the open, pointing triumphantly to fair weather over his head, while Louis was forced back into solitary impotence. He seemed singularly isolated. His English friends were gone, his nobles were again forming a hostile camp around Charles of France, now Duke of Guienne, who had forgotten his late protestations of fraternal devotion, and there were many indications that the Anglo-Burgundian ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... conscious of danger from the mental activity of their subjects to be desirous of repressing it, the position itself is a repression. Endeavour is even more effectually restrained by the certainty of its impotence than by any positive discouragement. Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help and self-government there is a natural incompatibility. This is more or less complete according as the ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... rattled and wheezed, and her speed sharply slackened, but he did not notice it. His mind fastened on the stark fact of his impotence like a key in a lock: his heart leapt up to meet it. He turned slowly ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... a preventative against the aggression of another, a permanent and natural neighbour. Instead of developing strength to protect ourselves against those near whom we are permanently placed, a feeling of incurable impotence has been generated. Two strong and brave nations can live side by side, strengthening each other through enforcing constant vigilance, and maintain in full vigour each its own national strength, unity, patriotism and resources. If a nation wishes to be respected by its neighbours it has ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... Silius, if the name Of crime so touch thee, with what impotence Wilt thou endure ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... the great minister in such a monarchy, is scarcely less curious to contemplate. The sagacious counsellor, the long-experienced governor, who has for years wielded the powers of the state, may be reduced to obscurity and impotence by a word—a word of puerile passion, kindled perhaps by a silly intrigue. A great ruler is displaced at the caprice of a dotard. When Count Laski entered the presence of the king, he was in reality the governor of Poland; Europe acknowledged him amongst the controllers and directors ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... of failure discredited the government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great factions ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... They suggested no changes themselves, and endeavoured without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by King and by Parliament. They had every reason to fear both Henry and the Commons. They were conscious that the Church had lost its hold upon the nation. Its impotence was due in part to its own corruption, in part to the fact that thriving commercial and industrial classes, like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are as a rule impatient of religious or at least sacerdotal ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... strange sensation of impotence. She felt as if her child were drifting from her. Was it her fault, or was it no one's, and inevitable? Had Vere been able to divine certain feelings in her, the mother, obscure pains of the soul that had travelled to mind ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration of impotence, the hate of the mediocre—that is perhaps one of the most indulgent definitions of Diabolism,' says Huysmans, somewhere in the book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with the others of that series ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... The World smiles to me. Everything. Man. Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything smiles to me." (The Complete Whitmanite) (2) "From the frowning tower of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... describe. It was the era of the deluge: the water-flood had burst upon Europe; and there was nothing, no institution of State or Church, no philosophy, no religion then extant that could stem the rush of the torrent. Never was the effeteness of ancient systems, the impotence of the old idealism, more conspicuous. In the midst of this wreckage the problem of reconstruction had to be faced. Immanuel Kant did face it, and his object was to provide against the recurrence of atheisms and anarchies, to make godlessness and revolutions ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... him of all certainty. It not infrequently left decision floundering. The mountains leapt at him with a rush from every side, confusing direction and reducing even instinct to something like impotence. With familiarity, however, his trained mind adapted itself. Then the rush went on with ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... the battle went in Southey's favour. "The words of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of Israel," and Byron was reduced to silence. A challenge (sent through Kinnaird, but not delivered) was but a confession of impotence. There was, however, in Southey's letter to the Courier just one sentence too many. Before he concluded he had given "one word of advice to Lord Byron"—"When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him. He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... that the Fates had sent him one warning and, angered at his refusal to accept it, had determined to drive home the lesson of his own impotence. For when he arrived at his chambers he found a ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various

... and relentings. The vigor of his will is due to his poverty of feeling and conscience. He is a brilliant and efficient criminal because he is shorn of the noblest attributes of man. Put, if you could, Macbeth's heart and imagination into him, and his will would be smitten with impotence, and his wit be turned to wailing. The intellect of Macbeth is richer and grander than Richard's, yet Richard is relatively a more intellectual character; for the intellect of Macbeth is rooted in his moral nature, and is secondary in our thoughts to the contending ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... little industries were collected about the skirts of the great church, the universal centre of life—has something grimly comic in it, worthy of an Edinburgh mob. Guthrie's booth must have been at the west end, facing the Tolbooth, and the impotence of the authorities, thus compelled to look on while the apprentices and young men in their leather aprons, armed with the long spears which were kept ready in all the shops for immediate use, broke ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... Make one with Thy Essential! Leave me room On that Divan which leaves no Room for Two; Lest, like the Simple Kurd of whom they tell, I grow perplext, Oh God! 'twixt "I" and "Thou;" If I—this Dignity and Wisdom whence? If Thou—then what this abject Impotence? ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... into the town with an air of finality, for he had determined to go back to England. He could not have analysed his impressions; he could not have accounted for his sense of impotence and defeat, but so it was. He had come across the personality of Madame Danterre, and he thereupon left her in possession of the field. But at the same time, before leaving Florence, he gave largely of the sinews of war to that able spy, the Italian ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... invisible sculptor's chisel, carved sudden deep lines in her face as fitting accompaniments to the deepening malice of her thoughts, they all rose from the luncheon table and went their several ways in their several moods of disconcerted confusion, impotence and vexation, in search of fresh means to gain new and unexpected ends. Roxmouth, reluctantly yielding to the earnest persuasions of Longford, walked with him into the village of St. Rest, and made enquiries at the post-office ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... meanwhile, when she met Giovanni, she began to treat him with haughty coldness. But Giovanni smiled, and seemed well satisfied that she should at last give over what was to him very like a persecution. Her anger grew hotter from its very impotence. The world ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... country on a level with civilized people—for instance, our neighbor, Japan, which in the short space of twenty years has reached a point where she has no reason to envy any one, her strength and ascendency being shown in the last war with China. I see the impotence of the Spanish Government to contend with certain elements which oppose constant obstacles to the progress of the country itself and whose destructive influence has been one of the causes of the uprising of the masses, and as the great and powerful North American nation has offered ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... great superfluous efforts.. "The intellect," as Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of impotence." ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was pleasure had been shared—these were the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of which the race is flowing perpetually changes; no two generations are alike. Whether ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... never tasted of the cup of sorrow; and no man who has not suffered hardships is temperate in enjoying ease. Wilt thou, who shouldst have been a pillar of courage, show a sign of a palsied spirit? Born of a brave sire, wilt thou display utter impotence? Wilt thou fall so far from thy ancestors as to turn softer than women? Hast thou not yet begun thy prime, and art thou already taken with weariness of life? Whoever set such an example before? Shall the grandson of a famous man, and the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults, but merits. There is no book perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and impotence—that created all backworlds; and the short madness of happiness, which only the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... who have escaped that death-in-life existence, from which Laura Bridgman was rescued, can realize how isolated, how shrouded in darkness, how cramped by its own impotence is a soul without thought or faith or hope. Words are powerless to describe the desolation of that prison-house, or the joy of the soul that is delivered out of its captivity. When we compare the needs and helplessness of the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... impotence of that question! Are there not beings who seem, indeed, to lack the great essential for salvation—a soul to be saved? ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... useful work in the Church. The fine gold has become dim, through the fretting cares or the surging excitements of life. It is awful when such is the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... is the indissoluble marriage bond, how fatal the results of feminine weakness, how great the dangers arising from selfish interests when indulged without restraint. May a society which is based solely on the power of wealth shudder as it sees the impotence of the law in dealing with the workings of a system which deifies success, and pardons every means of attaining it. May it return to the Catholic religion, for the purification of its masses through the inspiration of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... obligation would be born into you. What is this pretended affection for your mother worth if you are unwilling to conserve, make safe, her future, in case I die?" All that his father said was logical, just; but it only brought him a renewed sense of his impotence before very old and implacable ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... October, 1652, Louis the Fourteenth and Anne of Austria, and to share the joy of their victory over the Fronde, for he was the true achiever of it. It was he who, by retiring so opportunely, by leaving the Fronde to itself, had allowed it to exhibit at its entire ease its fury and impotence; it was he who, from the depth of his exile, disquieted by the success of Chateauneuf, had collected troops, rallied round him experienced generals, raised the banner of the monarchy, and from one vantage ground to another ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... unchanged. It is a matter of demonstration that if the civil service were put on the same footing as in England and other European countries, the machinery by which parties are now governed, not led, public spirit stifled, not animated, legislation misdirected or reduced to impotence, and "politics" and "politician" made by-words of reproach and objects of contempt, must decay and perish. We are not setting up any ideal state of things as the result, but only such as shall show a conformity between our political life and our social ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... triumphs, not by the slaughter of a few brigades, by defence without counterstroke, by victories without pursuit, that a Power of such strength and vitality could be compelled to confess her impotence. Whether some overwhelming disaster, a Jena or a Waterloo, followed by instant invasion, would have subdued her stubborn spirit is problematical. Rome survived Cannae, Scotland Flodden, and France Sedan. But in some such crowning mercy ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... coldness. That it was due to something within him and not outside himself was clear to him. He frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being moved by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his casual existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings. From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... Thou canst not end in this. It would reduce All human creatures to disloyalty Against the nobleness of their own nature. 'Twill justify the vulgar misbelief, Which holdeth nothing noble in free will, And trusts itself to impotence alone, Made powerful only in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... from their day's work that Oliver Jordan usually drove off at this time of the day; it brought home to him too keenly the many times when he himself had ridden back by the side of Lew Hervey from a day of galloping in the wind; it crushed him with a sense of the impotence into which his life had fallen. Indeed, unless some vital change came, her father must soon mourn himself into a grave. For the first time Marianne clearly perceived this. Oliver Jordan was wasting for grief over his lost freedom ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... As if seeing his impotence, the hunter suddenly ceases speech, again setting himself to listen. Hamersley, without heeding him, is already in ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... adversary is not ready instantaneously to parry the blow. But if the methods {31} be various, the aim is always to produce the same moral effect upon the enemy—terror—by creating in him at the swift apparition of unexpected and incontestably powerful means, the sentiment of impotence, the conviction that he cannot conquer—that is to say, that he is conquered. And this supreme blow of unexpected vigour need not be directed upon the whole of the enemy's army. For an army is an animate and organised being, a collection ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous

... contrast in these two clauses more pointed and emphatic in the original than in our Bible, between man's impotence and God's power in the face of the fact of sin. The words of the first clause might be translated, with perhaps a little increase of vividness, 'iniquities are too strong for me'; and the 'Thou' of the next clause is emphatically expressed in the original, 'as for our transgressions' (which we cannot ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... with any one save his mother. Always, when he was about to reduce her to impotence, she fell on him thus and rolled him in the dust. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... fling into the conflict; but they had not strengthened her character, and she could not stand the strain of prolonged argument. Sooner or later she would abandon everything, exhausted, and beaten into impotence. She could bear more, endure more, than Jenny; she could bear much, so that the story of her life might be read as one long scene of endurance of things which Jenny would have struggled madly to overcome or to escape. But having ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... which Joseph still retained his rooms. Ivan knew his way well enough; but he stood in the empty hall before the closed door for some seconds before he could bring himself to knock, so strong was his feeling of impotence, his dread of intruding into these two, alien lives. At length, stifling his thoughts, he hastily clacked the brass knocker ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... the impotence of the private member. He had, as we have seen, been elected to Parliament by South Salford in 1906 as a Liberal. In Parliament he proposed a measure for the publication of the names of subscribers to the Party Funds. Naturally enough the proposal ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... spent a century in impotence, watching a fluffy, pink figure that swayed over a bottomless space and moved forward a hair's breadth each year. I made no sound during this interval. In fact, I do not remember drawing a really satisfactory breath from the time I left the hotel-roof, until I lifted a soft, faint-scented, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... beneath the sun, She longed to look her last upon, beside The sea, which somehow tempts the life in us To come trip over its white waste of waves, And try escape from earth, and fleet as free. Behind the body, I suppose there bends Old Pheres in his hoary impotence; And women-wailers in a corner crouch * * * * * Close, each to other, agonising all, As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy, To two contending opposite. There strains The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match, —Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like The envenomed substance that ...
— Evangelists of Art - Picture-Sermons for Children • James Patrick

... inequalities, that is to say a man more intelligent, more active, more courageous, more skilful than his neighbours. It cannot destroy these inequalities, for they are natural, but it can neutralise them, strike them with impotence by excluding them from the employments under its control. Democracy is thus led quite naturally, irresistibly one may say, to exclude the competent precisely because they are competent, or if the phrase pleases better and as the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... colonial development and upon the political and commercial development of the Far East. Here again, the central fact to remember is that we may, indeed, that we must, defeat Germany or perish in the attempt, but that a nation of 65 million inhabitants cannot be effaced or permanently reduced to impotence. After the war the two nations will have to live peaceably side by side once more, and repair so far as possible the wreckage to which this gigantic struggle has reduced their political, social, and commercial intercourse. Any peace settlement will be good only so far as it avoids placing ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... left, gained the Heights two miles beyond the enemy. The men from Chippawa marched in and joined him. The line of attack was formed, with the Indians spread out on the flanks and curving forward. The British in Queenston, seeing the utter impotence of the Americans who refused to cross over, turned their fire against the Heights; and the invaders at once realized that their position had now ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood



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